A quick scour of the web has thrown up some interesting reading on that topic. I never realised bacteriophages were used in medicine at all. Seems like the West's just forgotten about them. Thanks.
Now can we be a bit more careful with it this time? No attempts to coat the planet in a thin layer of the stuff, please. The loss of the best weapons against disease we've ever found is not a fair price to pay for cheaper meat. Hopefully we've learned that lesson, although every time I see a doctor prescribe antibiotics just to get someone out of their surgery, I despair a little.
Yeah, they probably thought the bacteria would never come up with an answer to penicillin either.
They've been around an awfully long time, and there's a reason for that: nothing's beaten them yet. Our attempt at suppressing them has been thwarted in just a few decades - not even a blink of an eye on a biological timescale.
I wouldn't be crowing about having the little blighters licked just yet.
I'm reading that and wondering why on earth the whole team didn't just down tools and walk out. Even if they're not unionised, if they all acted together there's no way EA could have sacked the lot of them without flushing the product down the shitter. They'd have been forced to negotiate and these poor bastards might have got themselves some reasonable working hours.
The police generally can't carry guns. And the whole reason why they neither have them nor want them is because that would give them powers that ordinary people don't have. There are armed response units which are called out for firearms-related incidents, but these guys spend most of their days sitting around doing nothing.
And of course, ordinary people can have guns if they want them. It's just strictly controlled.
Fear of the police? Not yet. Just the other day I read this in the Guardian:
"On the canal bridge just behind Kings Cross, a policeman took a huge snowball full in the face and - I couldn't quite believe this was happening - giggled delightedly (it must have really hurt). His three colleagues gathered snowballs and pelted the mob of school boys and girls, quite sensibly avoiding head shots (think of the lawsuits). But they were outnumbered and outgunned. And anyway, they were easy targets, these coppers in their fluorescent jackets. And the school children, those alleged dysfunctional products of our greed-obsessed, low-serotonin, broken-homed, intolerably lardy, TV-ruined society, were in a snowy wonderland where there was no school, no rules and nothing to worry about. I've never seen London secondary school kids look filled to the brim with such girlish glee. "See if you can knock his helmet off," I yelled at one girl (which probably made me an accessory to something but I don't care: the delirium is infectious) and she pitched a curve ball that would have hit had the copper not ducked."
Now, while I, like any right-thinking British citizen, am extremely worried about our government's incessant control-freakery, there is a huge amount of goodwill towards the police in this country, who for the most part have a history of being decent and even-handed. This is because they're an implement of the people, not of the state, and have always been operationally independent from the judiciary and the government. From time to time certain factions of society have their run-ins with them, but by and large they're seen as being "on our side". Sadly this is being steadily eroded by the current government, and at this rate it won't be long before people turn on them completely.
Yeah, but in practice, it's not that simple. For example, my now-fairly-old Samsung Z5 plays both MP3s and Ogg Vorbis. At first it didn't do gapless at all, but later firmware revisions added it. However, their definition of "gapless" doesn't really tally with mine, because there most certainly are gaps with both formats - and the gaps when playing MP3s are actually smaller.
I know as well as you do that in principle it should be the other way round, but it isn't.
Most reasonable people would acknowledge that it's going to take awhile to close down Gitmo. Many of the people held there are simply too dangerous to let go. Many of the others who aren't have no where to go -- their home countries won't accept them. It should be obvious that you can't just close the facility down and give everybody there a bus ticket home. Obama has committed himself to ending torture and finding a safe way to closing down Gitmo. What more do you want?
Call me a woolly-minded old liberal, but they could always, y'know, try them, and either bang them up legitimately or let them go as appropriate.
The old guy in your local bar. You'd be in there regularly, and there he'd be, holding forth at anybody who'd give him the time of day. You'd make for the other side of the bar, grateful that he'd collared some wet-behind-the-ears Johnny-come-lately rather than yourself, because you'd been there enough times before. He'd be chuntering on in the background and you'd pay him little heed.
And then one day you come into the bar and he isn't there, and you hear he'd passed away, and you realise that you'd miss the old bastard. Because people like that add colour to the world, and what is this life without characters to enrich it, whether you actually like them or not?
That was Roland for me - I'd come here and I'd see an article submitted by him and there'd be some generally good-natured muttering about his modus operandi. Some people clearly didn't like him, but the truth is I couldn't tell you who any of those people are. But if you asked me to name five people who post on Slashdot, he'd be one of them.
So by that measure alone, I for one will miss him, and I think Slashdot will be the poorer for his passing.
Here's to Roland, and to making a difference in any way you can.
Actually Limerick's at least as much of a poverty-stricken dump as many places in Poland, and stuff like this will only make it worse.
Ireland has seen a lot of development and increased prosperity over the last while, but things like this show how transient that can be if you're too dependent on outside sugardaddies providing that prosperity. It's easy come, easy go for the organisations providing the jobs - if somebody else turns up with a bigger development grant and a workforce with lower wages, moving won't cost them a thought.
The trick is to take the inward investment and use it to build up your skills base so that ultimately you can stand on your own two feet, but that's a whole lot easier said than done. Places like Taiwan have done it rather beautifully, and Estonia, financial troubles apart, seems to be on the right track, but it's tough.
Nothing whatsoever stopping the people in Limerick following their jobs to Lodz. It's all within the EU, if you can work in one country, you can work in any.
In fact, it would be kind of interesting to see the boot on the other foot, with Ireland having seen a massive influx of Poles since their accession to the EU (who are now increasingly going back because it's not so worth their while any more).
This is exactly how it's supposed to work - rich countries bringing the poorer ones up so they can trade and compete on an equal footing. Ireland benefited from it, now it's Poland's turn, and people in Ireland or anywhere else within the EU are free to go there and seek work.
1) It's Microsoft. Frequently, left hand and right hand are barely acquainted. And in this case, they've probably deliberately been kept apart.
2) Like a magician, they're making a big show to distract you, so you don't notice what they're up to with their other hand.
3) They have to be SEEN to be doing the right thing, even if they're not. And they wouldn't be alone in this, there's a lot of ot about. Can somebody remind me of the fairly well-known American band whose album got leaked before release to torrent sites last year, causing takedown notices aplenty, only for it to transpire that the person who leaked it was their manager?
Yeah, they do this. They don't really mind the rampant piracy in developing countries because people couldn't afford the genuine article anyway, and they're playing the long game, hoping to get you hooked on their stuff, so they can make money out of you later. Even if you didn't pay for their stuff, if you're using it you're not using the other guy's.
So in this case, people downloading 7 is fine by them because hell, at least it's not Linux, and they've probably already bought a copy of Vista or XP anyway.
See also Adobe not really minding broke students pirating their Creative Suite software because they know that when they graduate they'll expect their workplace to cough up a pretty penny for it.
I have to say I've no idea what all the fuss is about with that game. It's just like every single other bog-standard mindless FPS since Wolfenstein. People get excited about the four-player co-op, but Gauntlet had that in 1985 - and did it better because the four characters had different strengths and weaknesses, whereas everybody's equal in L4D.
I just found it monotonous - "shit, here's a horde of zombies, kill kill kill, walk on a bit, shit, more zombies, kill kill kill". And tactically there's nothing to it - once you've worked out how to deal with a particular type of enemy (which you'll manage within minutes of starting to play because they're pretty dumb) that's it - seen one, seen 'em all.
Call me fussy, but after the thick end of 20 years of this type of game being around, I expect a bit more advancement than just prettier graphics.
Does Egypt count as the Middle East for you? Lots of churches in Egypt. Not just the native Coptic ones either, I've seen Catholic, Presbyterian, all sorts. Nobody seems to give them any grief.
I'm from Northern Ireland, and we have a name for this kind of "debate" (which isn't so much a debate as two implacably opposed parties talking at each other and not listening.
We call it "whataboutery". It's incredibly tedious and unhelpful. Please stop it, all of you.
Those Armadillo tyres are REALLY hard-riding, I find. They feel like solid tyres. And when you're on a road bike you'll take every scrap of additional comfort you can get.
Unless I'm very much mistaken cyclists are entitled to use those roads just the same as everybody else, and other road users need to adapt to accommodate them. I cycle on roads like that all the time (I'm in the UK), and drivers just have to work around me, passing when an opportunity presents itself. 99.9% of drivers do so courteously and leave me plenty of room as they go past. You get the odd idiot who comes right up your backside or nearly runs you off the road, but they're very much the exception, and I doubt they're doing it on purpose anyway.
My advice to you would be to get out and do it and let them worry about you. Anyway, five miles will only take you 15 minutes if you get the head down...
Yeah, unfortunately car dependency is pretty much designed into a lot of American towns. I'm sure you've all heard this many times before from us Europeans, but you really make doing anything other than driving difficult. I've been in places where it doesn't seem to have occurred to planners that anybody would want to walk from a shop to the one next door, because they haven't provided any footpaths, so you have to walk along the road, which is a pretty hairy undertaking in the middle of a snowy winter.
The sprawl thing's just depressing. We're not perfect here in the UK, we've got plenty of horrible out-of-town shopping strips too. But we're not entirely beholden to them like large parts of the US seem to be. I don't know how you'd set about putting that right, but it's not going to be as simple as providing more public transport, because these places just weren't designed to accommodate it.
Unless recumbent bikes are massively more efficient than conventional designs, that sounds optimistic. I do a fair amount of cycling and I can personally attest that averaging 30km/h on a good road bike is pretty hard work, and to raise that average speed by another 10km/h is extremely tough and requires a very high level of fitness as well as a nifty bike.
And I don't know what your commute's like, but my 35km ride into work (in central London) is a mixture of open roads and urban shuffling and I can't get my time down below an hour and a half. Maybe if I took crazy liberties with traffic lights I could get a few minutes off that, but I quite like being alive, thanks very much.
As for parking problems, I often struggle for space on the bike racks at work, and have more than once found that someone's accidentally buckled one of my wheels when getting their bike out of the rack. These unexpected expenses can get kinda pricey. And punctures are a real bore. You'll be getting a lot of them.
So yeah, bikes are great and all, but be realistic in your expectations.
Slashdot Mirror
A quick scour of the web has thrown up some interesting reading on that topic. I never realised bacteriophages were used in medicine at all. Seems like the West's just forgotten about them. Thanks.
Now can we be a bit more careful with it this time? No attempts to coat the planet in a thin layer of the stuff, please. The loss of the best weapons against disease we've ever found is not a fair price to pay for cheaper meat. Hopefully we've learned that lesson, although every time I see a doctor prescribe antibiotics just to get someone out of their surgery, I despair a little.
Yeah, they probably thought the bacteria would never come up with an answer to penicillin either.
They've been around an awfully long time, and there's a reason for that: nothing's beaten them yet. Our attempt at suppressing them has been thwarted in just a few decades - not even a blink of an eye on a biological timescale.
I wouldn't be crowing about having the little blighters licked just yet.
I'm reading that and wondering why on earth the whole team didn't just down tools and walk out. Even if they're not unionised, if they all acted together there's no way EA could have sacked the lot of them without flushing the product down the shitter. They'd have been forced to negotiate and these poor bastards might have got themselves some reasonable working hours.
The police generally can't carry guns. And the whole reason why they neither have them nor want them is because that would give them powers that ordinary people don't have. There are armed response units which are called out for firearms-related incidents, but these guys spend most of their days sitting around doing nothing.
And of course, ordinary people can have guns if they want them. It's just strictly controlled.
Fear of the police? Not yet. Just the other day I read this in the Guardian:
"On the canal bridge just behind Kings Cross, a policeman took a huge snowball full in the face and - I couldn't quite believe this was happening - giggled delightedly (it must have really hurt). His three colleagues gathered snowballs and pelted the mob of school boys and girls, quite sensibly avoiding head shots (think of the lawsuits). But they were outnumbered and outgunned. And anyway, they were easy targets, these coppers in their fluorescent jackets. And the school children, those alleged dysfunctional products of our greed-obsessed, low-serotonin, broken-homed, intolerably lardy, TV-ruined society, were in a snowy wonderland where there was no school, no rules and nothing to worry about. I've never seen London secondary school kids look filled to the brim with such girlish glee. "See if you can knock his helmet off," I yelled at one girl (which probably made me an accessory to something but I don't care: the delirium is infectious) and she pitched a curve ball that would have hit had the copper not ducked."
Now, while I, like any right-thinking British citizen, am extremely worried about our government's incessant control-freakery, there is a huge amount of goodwill towards the police in this country, who for the most part have a history of being decent and even-handed. This is because they're an implement of the people, not of the state, and have always been operationally independent from the judiciary and the government. From time to time certain factions of society have their run-ins with them, but by and large they're seen as being "on our side". Sadly this is being steadily eroded by the current government, and at this rate it won't be long before people turn on them completely.
Yeah, but in practice, it's not that simple. For example, my now-fairly-old Samsung Z5 plays both MP3s and Ogg Vorbis. At first it didn't do gapless at all, but later firmware revisions added it. However, their definition of "gapless" doesn't really tally with mine, because there most certainly are gaps with both formats - and the gaps when playing MP3s are actually smaller.
I know as well as you do that in principle it should be the other way round, but it isn't.
Most reasonable people would acknowledge that it's going to take awhile to close down Gitmo. Many of the people held there are simply too dangerous to let go. Many of the others who aren't have no where to go -- their home countries won't accept them. It should be obvious that you can't just close the facility down and give everybody there a bus ticket home. Obama has committed himself to ending torture and finding a safe way to closing down Gitmo. What more do you want?
Call me a woolly-minded old liberal, but they could always, y'know, try them, and either bang them up legitimately or let them go as appropriate.
The old guy in your local bar. You'd be in there regularly, and there he'd be, holding forth at anybody who'd give him the time of day. You'd make for the other side of the bar, grateful that he'd collared some wet-behind-the-ears Johnny-come-lately rather than yourself, because you'd been there enough times before. He'd be chuntering on in the background and you'd pay him little heed.
And then one day you come into the bar and he isn't there, and you hear he'd passed away, and you realise that you'd miss the old bastard. Because people like that add colour to the world, and what is this life without characters to enrich it, whether you actually like them or not?
That was Roland for me - I'd come here and I'd see an article submitted by him and there'd be some generally good-natured muttering about his modus operandi. Some people clearly didn't like him, but the truth is I couldn't tell you who any of those people are. But if you asked me to name five people who post on Slashdot, he'd be one of them.
So by that measure alone, I for one will miss him, and I think Slashdot will be the poorer for his passing.
Here's to Roland, and to making a difference in any way you can.
And what's more, about 400 of the workforce ARE Polish...
Actually Limerick's at least as much of a poverty-stricken dump as many places in Poland, and stuff like this will only make it worse.
Ireland has seen a lot of development and increased prosperity over the last while, but things like this show how transient that can be if you're too dependent on outside sugardaddies providing that prosperity. It's easy come, easy go for the organisations providing the jobs - if somebody else turns up with a bigger development grant and a workforce with lower wages, moving won't cost them a thought.
The trick is to take the inward investment and use it to build up your skills base so that ultimately you can stand on your own two feet, but that's a whole lot easier said than done. Places like Taiwan have done it rather beautifully, and Estonia, financial troubles apart, seems to be on the right track, but it's tough.
Nothing whatsoever stopping the people in Limerick following their jobs to Lodz. It's all within the EU, if you can work in one country, you can work in any.
In fact, it would be kind of interesting to see the boot on the other foot, with Ireland having seen a massive influx of Poles since their accession to the EU (who are now increasingly going back because it's not so worth their while any more).
This is exactly how it's supposed to work - rich countries bringing the poorer ones up so they can trade and compete on an equal footing. Ireland benefited from it, now it's Poland's turn, and people in Ireland or anywhere else within the EU are free to go there and seek work.
Ah yes. Buckcherry. Someone linked to it above.
1) It's Microsoft. Frequently, left hand and right hand are barely acquainted. And in this case, they've probably deliberately been kept apart.
2) Like a magician, they're making a big show to distract you, so you don't notice what they're up to with their other hand.
3) They have to be SEEN to be doing the right thing, even if they're not. And they wouldn't be alone in this, there's a lot of ot about. Can somebody remind me of the fairly well-known American band whose album got leaked before release to torrent sites last year, causing takedown notices aplenty, only for it to transpire that the person who leaked it was their manager?
Yeah, they do this. They don't really mind the rampant piracy in developing countries because people couldn't afford the genuine article anyway, and they're playing the long game, hoping to get you hooked on their stuff, so they can make money out of you later. Even if you didn't pay for their stuff, if you're using it you're not using the other guy's.
So in this case, people downloading 7 is fine by them because hell, at least it's not Linux, and they've probably already bought a copy of Vista or XP anyway.
See also Adobe not really minding broke students pirating their Creative Suite software because they know that when they graduate they'll expect their workplace to cough up a pretty penny for it.
I have to say I've no idea what all the fuss is about with that game. It's just like every single other bog-standard mindless FPS since Wolfenstein. People get excited about the four-player co-op, but Gauntlet had that in 1985 - and did it better because the four characters had different strengths and weaknesses, whereas everybody's equal in L4D.
I just found it monotonous - "shit, here's a horde of zombies, kill kill kill, walk on a bit, shit, more zombies, kill kill kill". And tactically there's nothing to it - once you've worked out how to deal with a particular type of enemy (which you'll manage within minutes of starting to play because they're pretty dumb) that's it - seen one, seen 'em all.
Call me fussy, but after the thick end of 20 years of this type of game being around, I expect a bit more advancement than just prettier graphics.
Does Egypt count as the Middle East for you? Lots of churches in Egypt. Not just the native Coptic ones either, I've seen Catholic, Presbyterian, all sorts. Nobody seems to give them any grief.
I'm from Northern Ireland, and we have a name for this kind of "debate" (which isn't so much a debate as two implacably opposed parties talking at each other and not listening.
We call it "whataboutery". It's incredibly tedious and unhelpful. Please stop it, all of you.
Those Armadillo tyres are REALLY hard-riding, I find. They feel like solid tyres. And when you're on a road bike you'll take every scrap of additional comfort you can get.
I'd generally do it in one day, out the next. It's good triathlon training :)
That's all right, if everybody moves closer together you'll have even more room if you stay out in the boonies...
Unless I'm very much mistaken cyclists are entitled to use those roads just the same as everybody else, and other road users need to adapt to accommodate them. I cycle on roads like that all the time (I'm in the UK), and drivers just have to work around me, passing when an opportunity presents itself. 99.9% of drivers do so courteously and leave me plenty of room as they go past. You get the odd idiot who comes right up your backside or nearly runs you off the road, but they're very much the exception, and I doubt they're doing it on purpose anyway.
My advice to you would be to get out and do it and let them worry about you. Anyway, five miles will only take you 15 minutes if you get the head down...
Yeah, unfortunately car dependency is pretty much designed into a lot of American towns. I'm sure you've all heard this many times before from us Europeans, but you really make doing anything other than driving difficult. I've been in places where it doesn't seem to have occurred to planners that anybody would want to walk from a shop to the one next door, because they haven't provided any footpaths, so you have to walk along the road, which is a pretty hairy undertaking in the middle of a snowy winter.
The sprawl thing's just depressing. We're not perfect here in the UK, we've got plenty of horrible out-of-town shopping strips too. But we're not entirely beholden to them like large parts of the US seem to be. I don't know how you'd set about putting that right, but it's not going to be as simple as providing more public transport, because these places just weren't designed to accommodate it.
Unless recumbent bikes are massively more efficient than conventional designs, that sounds optimistic. I do a fair amount of cycling and I can personally attest that averaging 30km/h on a good road bike is pretty hard work, and to raise that average speed by another 10km/h is extremely tough and requires a very high level of fitness as well as a nifty bike.
And I don't know what your commute's like, but my 35km ride into work (in central London) is a mixture of open roads and urban shuffling and I can't get my time down below an hour and a half. Maybe if I took crazy liberties with traffic lights I could get a few minutes off that, but I quite like being alive, thanks very much.
As for parking problems, I often struggle for space on the bike racks at work, and have more than once found that someone's accidentally buckled one of my wheels when getting their bike out of the rack. These unexpected expenses can get kinda pricey. And punctures are a real bore. You'll be getting a lot of them.
So yeah, bikes are great and all, but be realistic in your expectations.
How IS Norfolk this time of year?