It's all about funding. If one establishment can make an unsubstantiated claim that attracts publicity and therefore money, then why not. It's not as if their scientific credibility (cough, cold-fusion) will be questioned. If so long as they don't say it's certain that they'll produce a given result, they can always claim "well, if we'd had more money..."
They've already signed up and completed most of their first year of study. Why do you feel the need to inspire them now? Surely they were inspired when they joined the course - or is this to remedy a dull & turgid year of academia?
You'd be better off with projects that consolidated on what you've taught them during the year. The description on the website sounds very patronising and appears to be more like something to keep them entertained while the exams are on.
(A better idea would be to have the student propose their own projects.)
They've had these for cars for a long time. It triangulates the bullet's path from two or three sensors mounted on the body, so the driver can tell where the shots are coming from and take avoiding action.
I guess the novel part of this is to buld a taser into the mechanism - though, I would expect most politicians would prefer to take a bullet than to crap themselves in public as a result of the shocks they receive.
Everyone with an opinion is able to wade in and represent it as fact (yes, including this one). The fundemental problem with the whole idea of asking question in a forum is that it's very hard to tell the bullshit from the pearls, as every spotty-faced 13 year-old looks exactly the same as an industry icon (except the real talent is far too busy performing paid-for work to bother posting for free).
Even taking the posts that get voted up is dodgy, as people tend to vote up things they agree with rather than replies which are correct, or relevant, or useful. You'd probably be far better taking this questionj to a specialist website / security forum, than posting on a general site like/.
Oh, and if you do go to a specialist site, be specific about exactly what software, versions, platforms etc. you are using, if you want targeted answers.
Have a way to restore the site quickly, reliably and with the minimum of fuss.
Apart from speeding the recovery in case of a breaking/defacement it will also assist you if your hosting service goes bust, stops serving or you find someone else who's better / cheaper / has more facilities.
I'm not saying you shouldn't apply sensible security precautions, but don't treat them as if they'll make your sites impregnable. The ability to quickly restore a site means you don't have to go around checking each link on every page to see if it's been messed with.
Come on, I've also been to the UK a number of times and I have to call you on this statement.
OK, here's an excerpt from the Financial Times magazine, Jan 10, 2009. It's from an article where a reporter accompanies two PCSOs (one 18, the other 24 - just think of all the weeks of experience these two must be able to draw on) on their evening "beat" in London. They're talking about photography by individuals:...We talk about how Whittern and Eastoe sometimes see potential terror suspects taking photos of buildings as part of "hostile reconnaissance". I ask how they know who is a potential terrorist and who is not. They talk in terms of assessing behaviour - such as whether the individual tries to hide his or her camera...
Whittern says there's no harm in asking someone a few questions about what they're taking photographs of and why, to gauge whether there are grounds for concern. Depending on the results, a person's personal details could be passed on to Special Branch by a police officer.... I ask Whittern if he is concerned that this approach risks making the area feel unnerving, especially to it's many foreign visitors. He says he respects people's privacy but is "more concerned about the safety of the City".
So, we're all potential terrorist suspects now and it appears we should all be treated like that.
Yup, I've been to iron-curtain countries (when there was still a "proper" iron curtain). Most citizens were wary of the police and would scatter whenever they showed up, even if they had done nothing wrong themselves. Otherwise they would keep their noses clean and do whatever they could to keep out of the way of the law. Foreigners (like me) were basically told to do the same - be calm & courteous, offer documents and ID whenever approached and otherwise keep out of their way. Oh, yes: don't go around photographing official buildings or people - you'll get arrested.
This is exactly the same position that law-abiding UK citizens face every day, in their own country. If that isn't a measure of a police (run) state, then I can't say what is. Taking extreme examples of a failed state (e.g. Zimbabwe) as an example does not represent the everyday situation.
We're there already guys. It just crept up on us, slowly, and no-one noticed.
If the plan is to see how many baddies go to "suspect" countries (obviously with nefarious intent - not simply because they might have family there, or like traveling), then it's easily negated by traveling to a "friendly" country and booking onwards from there.
As usual with govt. hare-brained schemes, this will track the millions of holidaymakers and completely miss any people who have half an interest in concealing their true intentions. Meantime, we are all tracked, tested, tagged, followed and surveilled to an even greater extent. All this does is add to the general sense of oppression in the country, and adds to the sheer volume of innocous data collected - while leaving those with both the motivation and the organisation free to carry on as they wish, safe int he knowledge that the "intelligence" services are snowed under in an avalanche of useless data.
as it's not economically viable to prospect for new sources unless and until the existing supplies are nearing their end of life.
Who would pay for an exploration team to go around, looking for new sources of a material that was already abundant? Answer: no-one. As a consequence, a lot of "rare" minerals only have a known source that will last a couple of decades - or less. Until they become scare and the price rises, there's no profit in spending money looking for new reserves.
In the 70's the big scare was that there was only 15 years worth of (known) oil reserves left. Hey, we didn't run out. When the price went up, that incentivised people to go out and find new sources.
Same when I was doing electronics design in the early 80's - there was a scare that we'd run out of tantalum (for capacitors).
Scares aren't new and tend to have a way of working themselves out. Even if one metal did become to prices - i.e. scarce, no doubt processes will be invented to use a different material.
>...how far ahead our mobile infrastructure is in the UK...
When you say "ahead" presumably you mean in marketing terms: such as being able to charge huge amounts of money for a pathetically slow data connection with a miniscule monthly download limit?
If that's progress, gimme a landline (or even cable) connection any day.
Businesses aren't democracies. Anyone who has ever worked for / in one will know that within the first 5 minutes of walking into the office. They're there to make money - that's all. If you don't do what you're told to, you're out. Which is actually how it is for a visitor to any democratic country, so there are similarities after all.
Spam persists because a tiny (absolutely, infinitesimally small) proportion of the recipients actually respond to it. Whether that's due to stupidity, greed (oooh - I might get something for nothing), boredom, accident or simply curiosity (hmm, I've never replied to SPAM before, I wonder what happens).
The costs of sending it are so low, that it is still worthwhile, providing there's one idiot in a million who takes the bait.
How do you cure this people problem? I don't know. Even if you spend you whole life telling children not to put dirt in their mouths, some still will. You'll never get rid of spam until all the dirt-eaters and spam-responders get a dose of common sense, and that'll never happen.
If the testing cycle is foreshortened, will the professional buyers steer clear, until the quality of the release is proven?
or is this O/S only meant for "ordinary people" who have neither the ability to discern quality product, nor the option of choosing anything else (linux aside, but that's a different topic)
They love to present the EU as the creator of "loony rules" and regulations. Then they twist the actual statements to suit their own biases. This content is fed to a gullible and ill-informed public to stir up the rabble.
What's worse is when other lazy journalists pick up on the headlines and make further embellishments, without checking any of the source material. Even when these stories are categorically denied, the lasting impression - from the "drip, drip" effect is to produce an anti-EU sentiment, which suits a few (usually foreign) media owners, to further their own goals.
In the end, we get the media we deserve - but boy, do we pay for it!
The common mistake is to assume that any show which is set in the future, or involves technology is automatically SF - and (an even worse mistake) is that it will appeal to SF fans.
BSG has nothing to do with science - fictional or otherwise. The characters still wear spectacles and use telephone handsets!
Mostly, it's a study about how individuals respond to various fictional situations - and in that case all it tells us is that they respond in many and varied ways: all of which are well known and not particularly profound.
The one aspect that *is* interesting is the way the cylons are turning out to be just as human as the, errr.... humans are. However, that only takes about 30 minutes to explore - not 4 series.
When the new version started I watched BSG. However, I quickly found it lacking in pace and couldn't form any connection with the characters. As a consequence I stopped watching. It's hard to consider the moral questions posed by a programme when it's too dull to watch.
I watched the last ep. of the previous part and though for all the world it was "planet of the apes" again. I still couldn't form an emotional bond to any of the characters.
As a sucker for punishment, I watched the restart episode (last night inthe UK) and still felt it spent far too long on close-up shots of people looking confused - especially the guy with the eyepatch.
So far as moral questiosn go, all I can say is GO CYLONS They're far more interesting that the human (if that's what they turn out to be) characters int he show.
Data which is overwritten an arbitrarily large number of times can still be recovered provided that the new data isn't written to the same location as the original data (for magnetic media
Surely if the (same) locations aren't written by the subsequent writes, then the data hasn't been overwritten?
Maybe this whole myth/rule is based on a mis-reading of the original article - it wouldn't be the first time that commonsense has been over-ruled by a foreful individual who doesn't actually know wheat he/she is talking about.
Remember all the problems you had with the O/S on that disk? all the time you wasted trying to debug it?
What better end for it than to finally get your own back in a way that it can't possibly throw up any more problems with - unless of course a splinter flies up and catches you in the eye.
In business, where time is monkey, the time needed to reformat a drive - and then verify that it *has* actually been wiped is far too long, especially for big drives. far better to just crush them and be sure none of your secrets could escape.
So they wait until they find someone doing something illegal[1]. They offer to allow them to atone (financially, of course) for their "crimes". They then share the proceeds with the very ISP which allowed them to perform these acts in the first place.
Apart from the highly dubious moral position, this sounds like either a protection racket or entrapment, or both.
[1] although it won't ever get to court - they'll hope people will just roll over and pay up. So the legality of this "sting" won't ever be tested.
.. meaning doesn't make us as much money as we'd like.
The only people who's opinions I respect in the music business are the artists and recording professionals. All the rest are spongers and leeches. If digital music connects the people who create music directly to the people who want to listen and pay them, then that's great. If it means that the business goes back to it's roots as a cottage industry and puts all the fat-cats out of work, then even better.
The text seems to be trying to measure if people like violent games, because of their violent content. That looks to me to be a dumb question to ask (unless of course you're simply trying to justify adding violence to video games). I would suggest that only a psychopath would say they were attracted to a game because of it's violent content.
The people who dislike violence (not just in games, but in general media) say that being surrounded by it in TV programmes, films, games, and a lot of other aspects of modern life, makes people more prone to acting violently themselves and to being more inured by violent acts in everyday life. Merely adding or removing a few violent scenes from a single game won't make one jot of difference to this. Plus, given the coarseness of measurements available to social experiments, any change in behaviour won't be measurable - leading to the conclusion that adding violence makes no difference to people's behaviour.
However, removing the violent content from all our media might, just, start to come up with the sort of result that common sense tells us is obvious (i.e. that we are affected by what we see, hear and experience - how else would advertising work?). Now, if this study actually believed in it's own results, it should be possible to remove all the violence without affecting the players' enjoyment - which raises the question, why then have it in the first place?
It sounds like this guy just did a simple install of electricity generation - without looking at the big picture. If he'd done that, he'd have found that spending a proportion of his outlay on solar water heating would've been more economical and had more environmental benefits.
Instead of generating electricity to power an inverter to run the electric water heater (and possibly household heating) he should have harvested how water into a heatbank. That would be more efficient as there are fewer conversions in the process. I'm surprised that he didn't do more thorough research, or than the suppliers didn't offer a more complete solution
unless you live in the very darkest regions, utterly devoid of streetlighting.
I really wish people wouldn't talk up comets. They almost never live up to the hype - partly because the commentators are either hopelessly optimistic or over-enthusiastic. Then when the "average" person sticks their head out at night - hoping to see something spectacular, they are gravely disappointed.
This kind of thing damages the scientific credibility as a whole and turns people off the idea of beleiving scientists: "remember that comet they told us about - what a bust that was, I guess name of global catastrophe is the same - waste of time".
Slashdot Mirror
It's all about funding. If one establishment can make an unsubstantiated claim that attracts publicity and therefore money, then why not. It's not as if their scientific credibility (cough, cold-fusion) will be questioned. If so long as they don't say it's certain that they'll produce a given result, they can always claim "well, if we'd had more money ..."
You'd be better off with projects that consolidated on what you've taught them during the year. The description on the website sounds very patronising and appears to be more like something to keep them entertained while the exams are on.
(A better idea would be to have the student propose their own projects.)
I guess the novel part of this is to buld a taser into the mechanism - though, I would expect most politicians would prefer to take a bullet than to crap themselves in public as a result of the shocks they receive.
Even taking the posts that get voted up is dodgy, as people tend to vote up things they agree with rather than replies which are correct, or relevant, or useful. You'd probably be far better taking this questionj to a specialist website / security forum, than posting on a general site like /.
Oh, and if you do go to a specialist site, be specific about exactly what software, versions, platforms etc. you are using, if you want targeted answers.
Apart from speeding the recovery in case of a breaking/defacement it will also assist you if your hosting service goes bust, stops serving or you find someone else who's better / cheaper / has more facilities.
I'm not saying you shouldn't apply sensible security precautions, but don't treat them as if they'll make your sites impregnable. The ability to quickly restore a site means you don't have to go around checking each link on every page to see if it's been messed with.
Come on, I've also been to the UK a number of times and I have to call you on this statement.
OK, here's an excerpt from the Financial Times magazine, Jan 10, 2009. It's from an article where a reporter accompanies two PCSOs (one 18, the other 24 - just think of all the weeks of experience these two must be able to draw on) on their evening "beat" in London. They're talking about photography by individuals: ...We talk about how Whittern and Eastoe sometimes see potential terror suspects taking photos of buildings as part of "hostile reconnaissance". I ask how they know who is a potential terrorist and who is not. They talk in terms of assessing behaviour - such as whether the individual tries to hide his or her camera ...
Whittern says there's no harm in asking someone a few questions about what they're taking photographs of and why, to gauge whether there are grounds for concern. Depending on the results, a person's personal details could be passed on to Special Branch by a police officer. ... I ask Whittern if he is concerned that this approach risks making the area feel unnerving, especially to it's many foreign visitors. He says he respects people's privacy but is "more concerned about the safety of the City".
So, we're all potential terrorist suspects now and it appears we should all be treated like that.
This is exactly the same position that law-abiding UK citizens face every day, in their own country. If that isn't a measure of a police (run) state, then I can't say what is. Taking extreme examples of a failed state (e.g. Zimbabwe) as an example does not represent the everyday situation.
We're there already guys. It just crept up on us, slowly, and no-one noticed.
If the plan is to see how many baddies go to "suspect" countries (obviously with nefarious intent - not simply because they might have family there, or like traveling), then it's easily negated by traveling to a "friendly" country and booking onwards from there. As usual with govt. hare-brained schemes, this will track the millions of holidaymakers and completely miss any people who have half an interest in concealing their true intentions. Meantime, we are all tracked, tested, tagged, followed and surveilled to an even greater extent. All this does is add to the general sense of oppression in the country, and adds to the sheer volume of innocous data collected - while leaving those with both the motivation and the organisation free to carry on as they wish, safe int he knowledge that the "intelligence" services are snowed under in an avalanche of useless data.
Who would pay for an exploration team to go around, looking for new sources of a material that was already abundant? Answer: no-one. As a consequence, a lot of "rare" minerals only have a known source that will last a couple of decades - or less. Until they become scare and the price rises, there's no profit in spending money looking for new reserves.
In the 70's the big scare was that there was only 15 years worth of (known) oil reserves left. Hey, we didn't run out. When the price went up, that incentivised people to go out and find new sources.
Same when I was doing electronics design in the early 80's - there was a scare that we'd run out of tantalum (for capacitors).
Scares aren't new and tend to have a way of working themselves out. Even if one metal did become to prices - i.e. scarce, no doubt processes will be invented to use a different material.
When you say "ahead" presumably you mean in marketing terms: such as being able to charge huge amounts of money for a pathetically slow data connection with a miniscule monthly download limit?
If that's progress, gimme a landline (or even cable) connection any day.
Businesses aren't democracies. Anyone who has ever worked for / in one will know that within the first 5 minutes of walking into the office. They're there to make money - that's all. If you don't do what you're told to, you're out. Which is actually how it is for a visitor to any democratic country, so there are similarities after all.
My guess is that it'll be pulled faster than the pay-rise of the person who made him/her look an idiot by instigating it, in the first place.
No.
Spam persists because a tiny (absolutely, infinitesimally small) proportion of the recipients actually respond to it. Whether that's due to stupidity, greed (oooh - I might get something for nothing), boredom, accident or simply curiosity (hmm, I've never replied to SPAM before, I wonder what happens).
The costs of sending it are so low, that it is still worthwhile, providing there's one idiot in a million who takes the bait.
How do you cure this people problem? I don't know. Even if you spend you whole life telling children not to put dirt in their mouths, some still will. You'll never get rid of spam until all the dirt-eaters and spam-responders get a dose of common sense, and that'll never happen.
or is this O/S only meant for "ordinary people" who have neither the ability to discern quality product, nor the option of choosing anything else (linux aside, but that's a different topic)
What's worse is when other lazy journalists pick up on the headlines and make further embellishments, without checking any of the source material. Even when these stories are categorically denied, the lasting impression - from the "drip, drip" effect is to produce an anti-EU sentiment, which suits a few (usually foreign) media owners, to further their own goals.
In the end, we get the media we deserve - but boy, do we pay for it!
BSG has nothing to do with science - fictional or otherwise. The characters still wear spectacles and use telephone handsets!
Mostly, it's a study about how individuals respond to various fictional situations - and in that case all it tells us is that they respond in many and varied ways: all of which are well known and not particularly profound.
The one aspect that *is* interesting is the way the cylons are turning out to be just as human as the, errr.... humans are. However, that only takes about 30 minutes to explore - not 4 series.
I watched the last ep. of the previous part and though for all the world it was "planet of the apes" again. I still couldn't form an emotional bond to any of the characters.
As a sucker for punishment, I watched the restart episode (last night inthe UK) and still felt it spent far too long on close-up shots of people looking confused - especially the guy with the eyepatch.
So far as moral questiosn go, all I can say is GO CYLONS They're far more interesting that the human (if that's what they turn out to be) characters int he show.
Data which is overwritten an arbitrarily large number of times can still be recovered provided that the new data isn't written to the same location as the original data (for magnetic media
Surely if the (same) locations aren't written by the subsequent writes, then the data hasn't been overwritten?
Maybe this whole myth/rule is based on a mis-reading of the original article - it wouldn't be the first time that commonsense has been over-ruled by a foreful individual who doesn't actually know wheat he/she is talking about.
Remember all the problems you had with the O/S on that disk? all the time you wasted trying to debug it?
What better end for it than to finally get your own back in a way that it can't possibly throw up any more problems with - unless of course a splinter flies up and catches you in the eye.
In business, where time is monkey, the time needed to reformat a drive - and then verify that it *has* actually been wiped is far too long, especially for big drives. far better to just crush them and be sure none of your secrets could escape.
Apart from the highly dubious moral position, this sounds like either a protection racket or entrapment, or both.
[1] although it won't ever get to court - they'll hope people will just roll over and pay up. So the legality of this "sting" won't ever be tested.
I'm taking your own advice on this one and letting it slide.
The only people who's opinions I respect in the music business are the artists and recording professionals. All the rest are spongers and leeches. If digital music connects the people who create music directly to the people who want to listen and pay them, then that's great. If it means that the business goes back to it's roots as a cottage industry and puts all the fat-cats out of work, then even better.
The people who dislike violence (not just in games, but in general media) say that being surrounded by it in TV programmes, films, games, and a lot of other aspects of modern life, makes people more prone to acting violently themselves and to being more inured by violent acts in everyday life. Merely adding or removing a few violent scenes from a single game won't make one jot of difference to this. Plus, given the coarseness of measurements available to social experiments, any change in behaviour won't be measurable - leading to the conclusion that adding violence makes no difference to people's behaviour.
However, removing the violent content from all our media might, just, start to come up with the sort of result that common sense tells us is obvious (i.e. that we are affected by what we see, hear and experience - how else would advertising work?). Now, if this study actually believed in it's own results, it should be possible to remove all the violence without affecting the players' enjoyment - which raises the question, why then have it in the first place?
Instead of generating electricity to power an inverter to run the electric water heater (and possibly household heating) he should have harvested how water into a heatbank. That would be more efficient as there are fewer conversions in the process. I'm surprised that he didn't do more thorough research, or than the suppliers didn't offer a more complete solution
I really wish people wouldn't talk up comets. They almost never live up to the hype - partly because the commentators are either hopelessly optimistic or over-enthusiastic. Then when the "average" person sticks their head out at night - hoping to see something spectacular, they are gravely disappointed.
This kind of thing damages the scientific credibility as a whole and turns people off the idea of beleiving scientists: "remember that comet they told us about - what a bust that was, I guess name of global catastrophe is the same - waste of time".