Anybody else thinks the BBC has a strange idea of political debate?
Well, the corporation is supposed to providea balanced coverage of different points of view, which many people probably would find a strange idea in the context of political debate.
But juxtaposing "could help improve political debate" with a picture of a demonstrator attacking a policeman sounds more like the customary addition of irony, whether it improves the story or not. I sometimes wonder whether budding journalists or presenters at the Beeb have to take some sort of entrance examination to demonstrate they can do this.
<>slashdot>It's not yet been determined whether this is a result of unusual weather patterns or whether the ozone layer is recovering.</slashdot>
Actually, the CNN article quotes Long at MOAA as saying that the change is the result of unusual weather patterns but that it is too soon to say whether the ozone layer is recovering. Slight difference in meaning there.
Used to be that BMWs were pretty cool machines (both the cars and the bikes). These days the company seem to be pandering more and more to the boy-racer brigade. That's their business, and they know it best, I suppose. What really hurts is knowing that the boy-racer brigade can afford to buy BMWs.
-- "My other car is also a Porsche" (Bumper sticker reported in the Hitchhiker tri5ogy).
Scientists have found that it takes less than two hours to use sugar-water rewards to condition a hive of honeybees to eschew flowers and instead hunt for 2,4-dinitrotoluene, or DNT, a residue in TNT and other explosives, in concentrations as tiny as a few thousandths of a part per trillion.
The downside is that you have to be very careful when you're processing the honey they produce....
Karma: Overated: mostly due to - oh, WTF, who cares any more?
The speculation is on the basis of finding two chemicals which don't typically persist for long in each others presence, Hydrogen Sulphide and Sulphur Dioxide. BBC news has a summary.
-- "Now my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."- JBS Haldane.
Re:No parity, interesting complementarity
on
Parity Code And DNA
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· Score: 2
As the previous poster pointed out, there isn't any parity to speak of in DNA. I have no idea why they're trying to make the comparison.
Possibly because IT concepts are now so familiar (especially to people involved in scientific research) so that they come to mind readily when you're looking for an analogy? We also see the operations of the brain being compared with the workings of a computer from time to time in popular-science articles: 80 years ago or so the comparison was with telephone exchanges. (I recall this treatment from some children's encyclopedias inherited from my parents that I've still got in store somewhere, they were dated mid-1920's IIRC. Fascinating to see how the world was viewed back then.)
See subject. A useful 'heads up' post for folks like myself who tend to assume that Linux will follow the general Un*x-family behaviours we're familiar with from the commercially-sold variants.
And yes, I would of course;) check this assumption if I were to do some significant implementation for the Linux platform.
Interesting article, not least for the information that Charlie is involved in the merchandising side of the operation - not that it's a particularly big earner, but it's an indication that the original founding Stones like to keep things in the family, so to speak.
Just one point: the article didn't mention it, but the Stones (and the Beatles, and The Who, and Bob Dylan, and... ) hit the top in the mid to late '60s when the trailing edge of the post-WW2 baby-boom had reached adolesence, which hasn't harmed the longevity of the respective brands... Keith Richards once remarked apropos his love for R&B, that people tend to remain attached to the music that was popular at the time of their first significant interpersonal relationship.
Well, he may have put it a little more pithily than that, but you get the idea.
Caveat: I am not a rocket scientist, nor an architect of safety-critical systems, just someone who has put in a lot of time over the years on low-level code where reliability and performance (in that order) were essentials.
It strikes me that this is exactly the sort of project where you don't want to attempt to construct an ambitious, all-singing, all-dancing, state of the art, eighth wonder of the world. This misses the point about what is actually needed. Instead, you go for something as simple and straightforward as you can design which will have the capacity to do the job and continue doing the job for the forseeable future. It needs to be simple so that you can analyse its behaviour and failure modes with a high degree of confidence. You can push the sexy bells and whistles out to helper boxes, but the core systems must 'just work'. And technology that's far enough behind the bleeding edge for its characteristics to be well understood is definitely a Good Thing in these situations.
Remember the old engineering rule of thumb: "when in doubt, make it stout, out of things you know about".
FWIW, the research is at Zurich's ETH (one of the country's 2 technical universities - the other is in Lausanne - with a long record of work in IT (Wirth, of Pascal, Modula, and Oberon fame presided there for many years)). Ikea has several stores in Switzerland, with the largest just a few miles along a motorway near Zurich, and their cheap & cheerful flatpack products are undoubtedly pretty popular with people of research-student age. I imagine that when the researchers were looking for something that was easily-obtainable, cheap, robust, and of the right sort of size and complexity for their research, flat-pack furniture was an obvious choice. (Being able to put some of your research materials to practical use at home later would be a useful bonus, of course;)
It may just possibly be relevant that one of the other big furniture retailers in the Zurich area has been running a series of ads on local TV for several months promoting its full service offering: short vignettes showing young couples manhandling heavy furniture up narrow stairways, or failing to find the right bolt to fix a shelf the other is holding up, etc, with tag lines like "XYZ Furniture: we deliver it, too" or "we assemble it, too". (I believe that even the local Ikea stores are now offering delivery and installation services, though I doubt that many customers take them up on it.)
Research aside, I would have thought that adequately labelling the components of the furniture should be enough: eg stencil an "A" on tab-A and next to the slot-B that it must fit into in a place that won't be visible when everything is put together.
Put removable numbered stickers on the parts showing the order that you should deal with them, matching up with the numbered diagrams in the assembly instructions. Maybe even print some brief textual instructions to supplement the pictures. It's unlikely that many slashdot readers are likely to have trouble assembling the products, but before consigning the assembly-challenged to the ranks of the terminally stupid, please bear in mind that not everyone has the same ability to visualise the construction in advance, even with the help of step by step pictures, and this is, I think, the main factor in how easy or difficult people find it to work with these products.
KARMA: Shaky (mainly affected by a missing nut in the assembly kit)
Google gives some references for tartic which suggest the term finds use in connection with fermenting alcoholic drinks. Presumably it's the same as tartaric - IIRC one of Louis Pasteur's earliest pieces of research to catch public attention was done under contract from some vintners and involved the mirror-image isomers of the compound or one of its derivatives.
... threatening to use the DMCA where it doesn't apply.
The Slashdot headline was sensationalist and misleading. I can't see how ITC/Afga could argue that the DMCA should even apply here.
You can see that, and I can see that, but can ITC/Agfa's lawyers see that?
(Quite possibly yes, but they're not paid to interpret the law in a reasonable manner: they're paid to find interpretations that favour their paymasters and which they reckon have a plausible chance of either standing up in court or which will at least risk sufficient expense and inconvenience to fight that the target will settle out of court. Outside legal circles, this sort of activity is called 'blackmail' and is generally held in low esteem. In some jurisdictions, it is (gasp!) even a criminal offense.)
Then it talks about marketing them [DRM-enforcing PCs] to COLLEGE STUDENTS. Think about that... the college students are the ones most opposed to DRM technologies!
<flamebait> Sounds like a good way to get the underachieving, lazy, waiting for daddy's job, dishonest, thieving, substance-abusing, parasitic growths amongst the generally upright and ethical student population to knuckle down and start studying for a change. </flamebait>
But then, if pigs could fly, we'd need much stronger umbrellas.
The UK plug design is plastic along the length of the blade, and only the end is metal. By the time you see the metal tip of the blades, the circuit is already broken.
FWIW, this is a comparatively recent refinement. For most of the time the UK's oblong-pin design has been in existence (from late 1950s, perhaps?) the connectors on the plugs you could buy were solid metal, and there are naturally still a lot of them around - indeed I suspect the change started to come in only with the trend towards selling electric goods with cables that had moulded-on connectors.
The headline of the Register story was "CAA mulls ban on laptops which don't exist"; its first sentence says "Laptops may be banned..." (my emphasis).
It's a story picked up from the London-based Times, which apparently quotes the UK's Civial Aviation Authority as saying "more research is needed".
Throwing a few keywords at Google found this article in Aviation Week's online pages from June 17 amongst other stories. From this, it appears that the unexpected effects occured at much higher usage levels than would be typical in consumer devices and only under some usage scenarios. While it does sound as though the interaction between this new source of interference and aircraft electronics needs more investigation, gleeful/. extrapolations to hand-held open-spark transmitters appear unwarranted.
Relax. The sky isn't falling yet.
'We built in all the feistiness of R2D2'
on
An R2 Of Your Own
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· Score: 1
I imagine they're not in either of your minds at the moment, but 4 years is a long time, and minds change with them.
On a less contentious topic, I've met a few people who worked several hours away from home at the end of a modest international airline journey, arriving mid-morning Monday and leaving lunchtime Friday, over periods of years. Admittedly, you need a really secure partnership to do that for any length of time, but it seemed to work OK for them (kids in these cases were either absent or had already left the nest).
Like someone else commented, 4 years is a long time in the IT business. Using it to generalise your skillset so you can pick up short-term assignments nearer where your peripatetic wife will be located.
That fact that corporate databases can sometimes reach 1 terrabyte to me is truly astounding.
Duplication (intentional and otherwise), retention of historical data, audit trails, large swathes of binary and character zeros and blank space: after a while, the odd few tens of MB here and there start adding up to real numbers. (It's nothing new: 15 years or so ago some database admin people I used to work with made a similar comment about databases of the order of a few GB in size.)
At any rate, such databases serve as a useful reminder of the difference between raw data and usable information.
Karma: Insufferable (mostly affected by never posting in opposition to the/. hive mind)
Yes indeed. When a series of "reorganisations" (the modern corporation's equivalent of shamanic rituals to cast out evil spirits) have failed to do the trick, the high priests of the seventh floor corner offices frequently resort to stronger magic, changing the name of something in the apparent belief that this will somehow change its true underlying nature.
The other use of this technique is for diversion and camouflage; a classic example occured after a graphite-moderated, air-cooled(!) nuclear reactor at Windscale in the UK caught fire in 1957 and released a significant amount of radioactive pollution. The site was subsequently renamed Sellafield.
Looks as though the folks at Caldera may be using the "Sellafield solution".
Target Wireless of Fort Lee, N.J., joined by advertising industry groups and a Republican campaign committee, argued that current campaign disclosure rules would require political advertisers to use up too much of the limited amount of text -- 160 characters total -- available for individual SMS messages.
While I can believe that the wording that is currently legally mandated for identifying the originator of a political advertisement may be too long for practical use in an SMS message, dropping the requirement for identification altogether seems a perverse response. The requirement was presumably enacted because political communications were deemed sufficiently significant that it should be possible to hold their senders to account, and for their receivers to be able to take the senders' views into account when evaluating the messages (all rather undermined by the practice of setting up arm's-length action groups to peddle messages, but that's a different issue).
Better would be to retain the requirement that the originator be readily identifiable but allow more flexibility in the form that this takes: "Sent from http://www........org/", for example, would still leave enough room in the message to be usable. (The originator phone number shown with the message isn't adequate identification, IMHO, because it puts too much onus on the receiver expend time and money to track the originator down, though it should be a requirement that the number is a genuine toll-free one operated by the message originator and manned at the time the messages are sent...)
Quite why any candidate or organisation would want to use this medium in a country where many of the recipients will have to pay to receive the message is left as an exercise for the reader.
There's an info page on the message to the universe here.
Bach has 3 pieces on the record, compared to 2 by Beethoven and 1 each by Mozart, Stravinsky, Chuck Berry, and Blind Willie Johnson. I'd say the selectors did a pretty good job as far as the classical western genres are concerned.
(2 by Beethoven is over-representation? Possibly, but one is from one of the sublime late string quartets.)
I sympathise. The thing I find most iritating, though, is the certainty that most of the slashbots who join in the collective moaning whenever these issues are aired will do absolutely nothing to try to put them on the real world's political agenda (though given the unimpressive prevailing standards of writing and argument on display, this might actually be a good thing).
DRM et al are real-world issues. Get off your butts and spread the word.
Back when I was studying physics at university, a friend did something very smart, if not particularly ethical. He'd screwed up royally with a particular lab assignment which was known to carry a large part of the marks for that year's lab work. He doctored the results (not so easy at the time, this was before scientific calculators were affordable on a typical student budget, and when you used the university computer you submitted programs on decks of punched cards with a turnround time of half an hour if you were lucky for each compile/ run/ swear/ correct & resubmit cycle). But he doctored them well: they still looked pretty poor, but they were consistently poor, and matched his plausible excuse of (genuine) eyesight limitations. He got a B.
Last I heard he was somewhere in senior management at a large multinational, so I guess he took the appropriate lesson from that experience.
Slashdot Mirror
But juxtaposing "could help improve political debate" with a picture of a demonstrator attacking a policeman sounds more like the customary addition of irony, whether it improves the story or not. I sometimes wonder whether budding journalists or presenters at the Beeb have to take some sort of entrance examination to demonstrate they can do this.
Used to be that BMWs were pretty cool machines (both the cars and the bikes). These days the company seem to be pandering more and more to the boy-racer brigade. That's their business, and they know it best, I suppose. What really hurts is knowing that the boy-racer brigade can afford to buy BMWs.
--
"My other car is also a Porsche" (Bumper sticker reported in the Hitchhiker tri5ogy).
Karma: Overated: mostly due to - oh, WTF, who cares any more?
The speculation is on the basis of finding two chemicals which don't typically persist for long in each others presence, Hydrogen Sulphide and Sulphur Dioxide. BBC news has a summary.
--
"Now my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."- JBS Haldane.
Karma: SSW, force 2, good.
See subject. A useful 'heads up' post for folks like myself who tend to assume that Linux will follow the general Un*x-family behaviours we're familiar with from the commercially-sold variants.
;) check this assumption if I were to do some significant implementation for the Linux platform.
And yes, I would of course
Interesting article, not least for the information that Charlie is involved in the merchandising side of the operation - not that it's a particularly big earner, but it's an indication that the original founding Stones like to keep things in the family, so to speak.
Just one point: the article didn't mention it, but the Stones (and the Beatles, and The Who, and Bob Dylan, and... ) hit the top in the mid to late '60s when the trailing edge of the post-WW2 baby-boom had reached adolesence, which hasn't harmed the longevity of the respective brands... Keith Richards once remarked apropos his love for R&B, that people tend to remain attached to the music that was popular at the time of their first significant interpersonal relationship.
Well, he may have put it a little more pithily than that, but you get the idea.
It strikes me that this is exactly the sort of project where you don't want to attempt to construct an ambitious, all-singing, all-dancing, state of the art, eighth wonder of the world. This misses the point about what is actually needed. Instead, you go for something as simple and straightforward as you can design which will have the capacity to do the job and continue doing the job for the forseeable future. It needs to be simple so that you can analyse its behaviour and failure modes with a high degree of confidence. You can push the sexy bells and whistles out to helper boxes, but the core systems must 'just work'. And technology that's far enough behind the bleeding edge for its characteristics to be well understood is definitely a Good Thing in these situations.
Remember the old engineering rule of thumb: "when in doubt, make it stout, out of things you know about".
It may just possibly be relevant that one of the other big furniture retailers in the Zurich area has been running a series of ads on local TV for several months promoting its full service offering: short vignettes showing young couples manhandling heavy furniture up narrow stairways, or failing to find the right bolt to fix a shelf the other is holding up, etc, with tag lines like "XYZ Furniture: we deliver it, too" or "we assemble it, too". (I believe that even the local Ikea stores are now offering delivery and installation services, though I doubt that many customers take them up on it.)
Research aside, I would have thought that adequately labelling the components of the furniture should be enough: eg stencil an "A" on tab-A and next to the slot-B that it must fit into in a place that won't be visible when everything is put together. Put removable numbered stickers on the parts showing the order that you should deal with them, matching up with the numbered diagrams in the assembly instructions. Maybe even print some brief textual instructions to supplement the pictures. It's unlikely that many slashdot readers are likely to have trouble assembling the products, but before consigning the assembly-challenged to the ranks of the terminally stupid, please bear in mind that not everyone has the same ability to visualise the construction in advance, even with the help of step by step pictures, and this is, I think, the main factor in how easy or difficult people find it to work with these products.
KARMA: Shaky (mainly affected by a missing nut in the assembly kit)
Google gives some references for tartic which suggest the term finds use in connection with fermenting alcoholic drinks. Presumably it's the same as tartaric - IIRC one of Louis Pasteur's earliest pieces of research to catch public attention was done under contract from some vintners and involved the mirror-image isomers of the compound or one of its derivatives.
KARMA: Unimpeachable (mostly affected by kowtowing to the /. hive mind)
(Quite possibly yes, but they're not paid to interpret the law in a reasonable manner: they're paid to find interpretations that favour their paymasters and which they reckon have a plausible chance of either standing up in court or which will at least risk sufficient expense and inconvenience to fight that the target will settle out of court. Outside legal circles, this sort of activity is called 'blackmail' and is generally held in low esteem. In some jurisdictions, it is (gasp!) even a criminal offense.)
Sounds like a good way to get the underachieving, lazy, waiting for daddy's job, dishonest, thieving, substance-abusing, parasitic growths amongst the generally upright and ethical student population to knuckle down and start studying for a change.
</flamebait>
But then, if pigs could fly, we'd need much stronger umbrellas.
Karma:Chameleon (sometimes very affected indeed)
It's a story picked up from the London-based Times, which apparently quotes the UK's Civial Aviation Authority as saying "more research is needed".
Throwing a few keywords at Google found this article in Aviation Week's online pages from June 17 amongst other stories. From this, it appears that the unexpected effects occured at much higher usage levels than would be typical in consumer devices and only under some usage scenarios. While it does sound as though the interaction between this new source of interference and aircraft electronics needs more investigation, gleeful /. extrapolations to hand-held open-spark transmitters appear unwarranted.
Relax. The sky isn't falling yet.
I imagine they're not in either of your minds at the moment, but 4 years is a long time, and minds change with them.
On a less contentious topic, I've met a few people who worked several hours away from home at the end of a modest international airline journey, arriving mid-morning Monday and leaving lunchtime Friday, over periods of years. Admittedly, you need a really secure partnership to do that for any length of time, but it seemed to work OK for them (kids in these cases were either absent or had already left the nest).
Like someone else commented, 4 years is a long time in the IT business. Using it to generalise your skillset so you can pick up short-term assignments nearer where your peripatetic wife will be located.
At any rate, such databases serve as a useful reminder of the difference between raw data and usable information.
Karma: Insufferable (mostly affected by never posting in opposition to the /. hive mind)
The other use of this technique is for diversion and camouflage; a classic example occured after a graphite-moderated, air-cooled(!) nuclear reactor at Windscale in the UK caught fire in 1957 and released a significant amount of radioactive pollution. The site was subsequently renamed Sellafield.
Looks as though the folks at Caldera may be using the "Sellafield solution".
Better would be to retain the requirement that the originator be readily identifiable but allow more flexibility in the form that this takes: "Sent from http://www........org/", for example, would still leave enough room in the message to be usable. (The originator phone number shown with the message isn't adequate identification, IMHO, because it puts too much onus on the receiver expend time and money to track the originator down, though it should be a requirement that the number is a genuine toll-free one operated by the message originator and manned at the time the messages are sent...)
Quite why any candidate or organisation would want to use this medium in a country where many of the recipients will have to pay to receive the message is left as an exercise for the reader.
There's an info page on the message to the universe here.
Bach has 3 pieces on the record, compared to 2 by Beethoven and 1 each by Mozart, Stravinsky, Chuck Berry, and Blind Willie Johnson. I'd say the selectors did a pretty good job as far as the classical western genres are concerned.
(2 by Beethoven is over-representation? Possibly, but one is from one of the sublime late string quartets.)
I sympathise. The thing I find most iritating, though, is the certainty that most of the slashbots who join in the collective moaning whenever these issues are aired will do absolutely nothing to try to put them on the real world's political agenda (though given the unimpressive prevailing standards of writing and argument on display, this might actually be a good thing).
DRM et al are real-world issues. Get off your butts and spread the word.
Last I heard he was somewhere in senior management at a large multinational, so I guess he took the appropriate lesson from that experience.