I have a relative who does European legal work for a certain Redmond based company. On behalf of him and corporate lawyers elsewhere, I hope Microsoft never gives in in this case. Mortgages, pension funds, property development, private school fees, skiing holidays, yachts and private aircraft all depend on Redmond fighting this case to the last ditch and beyond. To all the naysayers who think that Microsoft should just cave in before a load of Europeans (led by someone called Nellie, btw) I say: Think of the poor lawyers! Think of their children!
In the UK there used to be a strange little three wheeled car called a Reliant Robin (cue jokes about bad teeth etc.). A friend of mine had a Jaguar which gave endless trouble, so eventually he decided to replace it with a VW Golf. He went down the VW dealer and asked what the Jaguar would get in part exchange. When he was told, he got mildly excited and told the dealer that was about what he would expect for a Reliant Robin.
The dealer looked it up in his Glass's Guide and said "No, Reliant Robin, same age, same miles, I could give you £20 more."
That's medium speed in the marine engine world. If you're really the kind of person who gets off on the noise made by a hot little box with dinky little pistons doing a few hundred horsepower, you really need to experience the engine room of a small motor ship. After a few minutes spent in the presence of several thousand horsepower doing their stuff, you'll realise that any car is really just another form of transport, and pretty far down the pecking order at that.
(a) how many of us wear glasses all the time? If I had to wear one set of glasses all the time life would be very difficult indeed - varifocals are not the answer, (b)The algorithms in current DSP based hearing aids work fine for most people. In my case, Program A: noise rejection, Program b: full range Program c: mobile phone pickup. I find that most people over about 40 have difficulty picking out speech in some situations where I don't.
That Satan created the visible world? That's Manichaeanism. Which is a schismatic religion. To avoid that, you have to posit that God created all those things to lead us astray right down to putting just the right amount of radionucleides in the rocks to make it look as though unstable nuclei had been fissioning for billions of years. Which means that God tells lies. Which is a major heresy.
So either we should be burning the Dover school board at the stake for Manichaenism or for denying the truthfulness of God. A Catch-22 as good as the one Novell has used to entangle SCO.
I never thought I would be living in the days when it's the Catholic Church that asserts that the Big Bang theory and evolution by natural selection are part of God's great plan, and the Protestant descendants of the Protestants who emigrated to avoid persecution by backward Catholics have become the reactionaries. Jay Gould must be spinning in his grave so fast it's distorting space time.
For windshields, this just seems to be all over defrosting from the inside by a fast pulse, a fast version of what Ford have been doing for years. You still have to remove the ice mechanically before it refreezes, otherwise the sheet will just stay in place and, as the article says, bond even more tightly than before (I've noticed this with Ford windshields - if you don't complete the melt cycle for some reason, you can get very firmly bonded ice.) Plus, what's the world indium supply like? And what is the chance of cracking the windshiled due to thermal shock? Heating the outside to 2 degrees C while the inside is at -10 doesn't sound terribly smart.
So I suspect that to commercialise this a lot of research will be needed. Changes to windshield composition and design. Changes to wiper design. Uprated batteries. It might actually be cheaper to fit one of those nice Kenlowe or Eberspacher heaters with mobile phone control so you can simply start the car heating ten minutes before you leave the house or the office. After all, no matter how well the pulse technology works, at the end of it you are sitting in a freezing cold car, even if you can now see through the windshield.
The (largely self-taught) Indian mathematician Ramanujan was "discovered" almost accidentally as a result of his writing a letter to G F Hardy, at Cambridge, and in one of the few environments where his talents could be recognised.
A lot of people on Slashdot are degree-obsessed; at an early age they have bought into the idea that everybody who does not have a formal academic education to at least PhD level is necessarily unable to contribute anything to research. (This is not just the chip on my shoulder talking, but as someone with a degree from Fen Poly who has recruited a fair number of graduates over the years, I know it takes far more than a degree or two to make a scientist, mathematician or even a developer. Curiosity, persistence, the ability to see connections are all important.) Although this Wiki may well fail, it might just bring to light a few more Ramanujans. The world does not consist solely of North Americans, and there are doubtless plenty of educated people in other cultures who do not have access to the networks that bring some people to the fore while others, equally well endowed, may never get an opportunity.
Huxley's world is where we are going. Caste genetically determined, with low caste individuals basically living in herds so the upper castes have something to look down on, and for those who don't like it, the drug soma. Which has basically the characteristics Nutt describes.
I'm going to say this: Nutt's drug would send civilisation down the tubes faster than you can imagine. Why? Because at the moment anybody who is at the bottom of the heap will often try to forget their misery with drugs. The drugs cause vast social damage and cost, encouraging crime. As a result, society is aware of the problems and has to take steps to address them - often unsuccessfully because neocons and "libertarians" (sociopaths) will attribute any cause to social problems other than ones that might require them to change their behavior. But even just locking up two million people costs them tax dollars.
Now imagine a drug as described. Fine for well adjusted middle and upper class individuals. But the poor and the maltreated will take it to forget their problems, and because there won't be any resulting social costs they will just be forgotten about. Right up until the infrastructure stops working. Or the rich start dying of the diseases being spread around by the poor drug users who don't care.
Marx described religion as the opiate of the masses, i.e. it was used to keep them quiet and obedient. This drug really would be the opiate of the masses. The problem is that most of us identify with the rulers not the masses (especially when we are young and think life is easy.) But, in reality, most of us fall into the classes decribes by Marx as the "masses." Bear that in mind.
And indeed here in the UK we have the Institution of Analysts and Programmers on one side, and the BCS on the other. (I'm an MIAP and that means more to me than my degree from a certain East Anglian University - because one gets you a job based on what you have achieved and the other gets you a job from snobbery.)
My own distinction? An experienced analyst/programmer is equivalent to an architect, a CS (and a graduate is not a computer scientist but may in time become one) is equivalent to a structural engineer. They are both needed and their skills are on the same level, but they do different parts of the system. I accept that the computer scientists can design a robust filing system, networking protocol etc.; I design the application that needs the capabilities to work.
I'm writing this on an Acer Aspire 1501 running Ubuntu 5.10. It isn't a Macbook; it has just over 1G of RAM, and a 1400*1050 screen. Which is supported. Sound is supported. Fan works. Processor speed control works. Wireless networking took all of 10 minutes to set up including downloading the driver, getting ndiswrapper and running the client (mind you I do have 10Mbit/s download speeds...). Power management works; battery life panel works; no problems connecting to home or work network. I installed VMWare Server Beta and installed a basic XP on it (basically so I can run the packagers that produce Windows installers for our programs.) I suspect I will shortly remove the Windows image and just run anything Windows I need on a convenient server using VNC, because none of the Windows stuff needs much user interaction.
Why did I do this terrible thing? Because despite a clean reinstall, NetBeans kept crashing, it was not coming properly out of hibernate and yes, dear, I tried it with a new hard disk as well as the old one. I am guessing we have a "Windows updater" issue here. Given that the Macbooks are 32 bit only, and I like to keep laptops for some time, I suspect my next one will have AMD on the processor and Ubuntu as the primary OS. I supported SuSE till they sold out to Novell, which I still think was a long term mistake, but I've grown to appreciate Gnome. Though I do have a VMWare SuSE image to hand somewhere.
It isn't as pretty as OS X but it makes really efficient use of screen real estate and I can get my work done. And the time I spent configuring it, in total, was no more than I spent last time I reinstalled OS X and downloaded all the updaters a couple of times. Really.
Yes, there is some truth in what you say, but 2006 turns out to be the year in which I decided that Linux was ready for the desktop.
Which was that it could never happen in the UK: Big Brother wouldn't be able to watch you because the CCTV cameras would be broken, and the Civil Service would be unable to organise a whole cage of rats.
Don't blame the politicians: I believe Mr, Blair still has to get his wife to type his emails. He wouldn't know a supercomputer from a Gameboy. Blame the Civil Service, who make damned sure that no scientists or engineers ever reach the top level and show up the incompetence of the Oxford Greats graduates you find there. Which is why people like Kelly were managed into the ground by their inferiors and sacrificed to protect the careers of (deleted)s like Hoon.
Building security into an operating system cannot be bundling, because security is an essential part of OS design (well, for proper Oses it is, anyway.)
However, there is a more interesting issue with things like virus signatures and so on (emerging threats.) IANAL but I do wonder if, assuming that continuous updates are required to identify new forms of phishing, Trojans etc., MS might be required by the EU to open its API so that updates could be bought from different suppliers, on exactly the same basis that you can buy tires and exhausts from sources other than the car maker.
I very much suspect the problem is not the em waves at all, but the sounds and the flickering lights they cause. Flicker can cause epileptic seizures in some people. Why substitute an ill-understood source of physiological effects for well understood ones?
I worked with powerful em wave generators for years with no ill effects I could ever detect, but there were no lower frequencies that can affect sound or light (no AM transmitter modulation, for instance.)
The connection with the computer industry is that Alan Turing had a grant from the Royal Society to build an analog system (using gears no less) to investigate the zeroes of the Riemann Zeta Function.
Nowhere in the article did I find out what they were threatening chaos with. To be credible, such a threat requires a means. How are they going to threaten chaos? Do they know it's address? Will they send out Maxwell's Demons to reduce the chaos to order?
Ah, apparently they're threatening to cause chaos. Just another headline to annoy syntax Nazis.
What I would _really_ like is a converted Dutch barge with a riverside mooring that included a field big enough to grow my own rapeseed for bioDiesel. Practically complete independence, low maintenance, enough power for reasonable electronics from the generator, solar cells and wind generator, and when the harvest is in and you get tired of the neighbors, you can simply go somewhere else and take your small but comfortable apartment with you.
Now, if only Kashmir could solve its political problems...
"What a bunch of BS, BTW. "Harm." People have free will and control their own actions."
Your evidence for which is what, precisely? Philosophers (and, more recently, psychologists, neuroscientists etc.) have been arguing for a long time about whether there is such a thing as free will. The existence of drug addicts, alcoholics, psychopaths, Tourettes and Asperger's Syndrome suggests that for many people "free will" is severely circumscribed. I don't know whether this is an appropriate area for government intervention, but I do know that the issue is not nearly as clear cut as you seem to think.
Were hauled from side to side of fields by engines which could be moved slowly along the edges, so the field was threshed in a raster pattern. The prime movers, being cast and wrought iron steam engines, were to heavy to roll back and forwards across the fields.
Not strictly on topic perhaps, but goes to show that there is nothing much new under the sun.
Still, the whole thing reminds me of the Australian attempts to build robot sheep shearers, a brilliant idea if you don't mind cleaning the blood off the wall afterwards. With all the ineducable people in our society with nothing to do but take drugs and steal to pay for them (estimated 280 000 in the UK, how many in the US I dread to think), I would have thought (just as Huxley did in Brave New World) that the real answer is to pay adequately for farm laboring jobs so we have something for the less intelligent in society to do. What we paid for in food we would get back in reduced taxes and insurance premiums.
I hadn't thought of it like that. I have to admit, I believe a lot of the fundamentalists to be quite insincere, rather than ignorant and afraid. They are not opposing science because they are fearful; they are opposing it because they get paid money by rich, ignorant people to do it. In the same way, here in the UK, we have "right wing philosophers" who put up arguments that are dismissed or ignored by real philosophers, who despise them, but they do it because they get paid by rich people who want to see their way of life defended. They are able enough to know their arguments are poor, but they does very nicely out of it. The trial of Sokrates seems to have been political in this way.
Unfortunately a number of people in the 21st century seem determined to return to the 17th., when everything was simpler and you could be as ignorant as you liked and still be an opinion former. However, I fail to understand the reference to Plato. Plato's cave is not about geology, and it is certainly not about self-willed ignorance. The part of Plato you are thinking of is the trial of Sokrates where he is accused of corrupting youth by casting doubt in the reality of the gods. The modern analogy is a book by Doris Lessing, about a society which has developed to the point that no-one is allowed to look upwards, in case they notice the mountains.
I have an extensive education in theology. I think I have a reasonable understanding of the mythologies of the Near East. I know something of the evolution of Judaism. I know Church history reasonably well. I make a harmless posting about a parallel between Near Eastern mythologies and an event being studied by scientists, and the paradoxical light it sheds on things like Intelligent Design - without mocking ID. And I get modded flamebait. Who are the mods nowadays, and when can the DOD develop the bunker buster to zap them in their parents' basements?
Should take a leaf from the British MP who suggested that the answer to email spam was to require everybody to have their zip code as part of their email address.
Apparently believe that the rain is the Sky father-god inseminating the mother Earth. If so, this is just another example of religious fundamentalists with agenda trying to distort science. Hang on a moment...
Try learning enough French to read French technical review sites. You will find they are far more probing and critical than US ones. The same goes for their dead tree magazines.
However, the French do have laws that protect personal privacy. Also, EU countries have signed up to the UN Declaration on Human Rights - unlike the US - and that carries implications that there will be laws against one section of the community stirring up hatred against another. If that is curtailment of freedom of speech, I think most people would support it.
I am always suspicious of the people who try to extend the notion of freedom of speech to include the publication of actual lies.
William the Bastard of Normandy says "Democracy will never work. Cooperating groups of smallholders never get anywhere until large feudal landlords take over."
Capitalism: the replacement of elected government by government by unelected multinational corporations in the name of freedom.
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I have a relative who does European legal work for a certain Redmond based company. On behalf of him and corporate lawyers elsewhere, I hope Microsoft never gives in in this case. Mortgages, pension funds, property development, private school fees, skiing holidays, yachts and private aircraft all depend on Redmond fighting this case to the last ditch and beyond. To all the naysayers who think that Microsoft should just cave in before a load of Europeans (led by someone called Nellie, btw) I say: Think of the poor lawyers! Think of their children!
The dealer looked it up in his Glass's Guide and said "No, Reliant Robin, same age, same miles, I could give you £20 more."
That's medium speed in the marine engine world. If you're really the kind of person who gets off on the noise made by a hot little box with dinky little pistons doing a few hundred horsepower, you really need to experience the engine room of a small motor ship. After a few minutes spent in the presence of several thousand horsepower doing their stuff, you'll realise that any car is really just another form of transport, and pretty far down the pecking order at that.
(a) how many of us wear glasses all the time? If I had to wear one set of glasses all the time life would be very difficult indeed - varifocals are not the answer,
(b)The algorithms in current DSP based hearing aids work fine for most people. In my case, Program A: noise rejection, Program b: full range Program c: mobile phone pickup. I find that most people over about 40 have difficulty picking out speech in some situations where I don't.
So either we should be burning the Dover school board at the stake for Manichaenism or for denying the truthfulness of God. A Catch-22 as good as the one Novell has used to entangle SCO.
I never thought I would be living in the days when it's the Catholic Church that asserts that the Big Bang theory and evolution by natural selection are part of God's great plan, and the Protestant descendants of the Protestants who emigrated to avoid persecution by backward Catholics have become the reactionaries. Jay Gould must be spinning in his grave so fast it's distorting space time.
So I suspect that to commercialise this a lot of research will be needed. Changes to windshield composition and design. Changes to wiper design. Uprated batteries. It might actually be cheaper to fit one of those nice Kenlowe or Eberspacher heaters with mobile phone control so you can simply start the car heating ten minutes before you leave the house or the office. After all, no matter how well the pulse technology works, at the end of it you are sitting in a freezing cold car, even if you can now see through the windshield.
A lot of people on Slashdot are degree-obsessed; at an early age they have bought into the idea that everybody who does not have a formal academic education to at least PhD level is necessarily unable to contribute anything to research. (This is not just the chip on my shoulder talking, but as someone with a degree from Fen Poly who has recruited a fair number of graduates over the years, I know it takes far more than a degree or two to make a scientist, mathematician or even a developer. Curiosity, persistence, the ability to see connections are all important.) Although this Wiki may well fail, it might just bring to light a few more Ramanujans. The world does not consist solely of North Americans, and there are doubtless plenty of educated people in other cultures who do not have access to the networks that bring some people to the fore while others, equally well endowed, may never get an opportunity.
I'm going to say this: Nutt's drug would send civilisation down the tubes faster than you can imagine. Why? Because at the moment anybody who is at the bottom of the heap will often try to forget their misery with drugs. The drugs cause vast social damage and cost, encouraging crime. As a result, society is aware of the problems and has to take steps to address them - often unsuccessfully because neocons and "libertarians" (sociopaths) will attribute any cause to social problems other than ones that might require them to change their behavior. But even just locking up two million people costs them tax dollars.
Now imagine a drug as described. Fine for well adjusted middle and upper class individuals. But the poor and the maltreated will take it to forget their problems, and because there won't be any resulting social costs they will just be forgotten about. Right up until the infrastructure stops working. Or the rich start dying of the diseases being spread around by the poor drug users who don't care.
Marx described religion as the opiate of the masses, i.e. it was used to keep them quiet and obedient. This drug really would be the opiate of the masses. The problem is that most of us identify with the rulers not the masses (especially when we are young and think life is easy.) But, in reality, most of us fall into the classes decribes by Marx as the "masses." Bear that in mind.
My own distinction? An experienced analyst/programmer is equivalent to an architect, a CS (and a graduate is not a computer scientist but may in time become one) is equivalent to a structural engineer. They are both needed and their skills are on the same level, but they do different parts of the system. I accept that the computer scientists can design a robust filing system, networking protocol etc.; I design the application that needs the capabilities to work.
Why did I do this terrible thing? Because despite a clean reinstall, NetBeans kept crashing, it was not coming properly out of hibernate and yes, dear, I tried it with a new hard disk as well as the old one. I am guessing we have a "Windows updater" issue here. Given that the Macbooks are 32 bit only, and I like to keep laptops for some time, I suspect my next one will have AMD on the processor and Ubuntu as the primary OS. I supported SuSE till they sold out to Novell, which I still think was a long term mistake, but I've grown to appreciate Gnome. Though I do have a VMWare SuSE image to hand somewhere.
It isn't as pretty as OS X but it makes really efficient use of screen real estate and I can get my work done. And the time I spent configuring it, in total, was no more than I spent last time I reinstalled OS X and downloaded all the updaters a couple of times. Really.
Yes, there is some truth in what you say, but 2006 turns out to be the year in which I decided that Linux was ready for the desktop.
Don't blame the politicians: I believe Mr, Blair still has to get his wife to type his emails. He wouldn't know a supercomputer from a Gameboy. Blame the Civil Service, who make damned sure that no scientists or engineers ever reach the top level and show up the incompetence of the Oxford Greats graduates you find there. Which is why people like Kelly were managed into the ground by their inferiors and sacrificed to protect the careers of (deleted)s like Hoon.
However, there is a more interesting issue with things like virus signatures and so on (emerging threats.) IANAL but I do wonder if, assuming that continuous updates are required to identify new forms of phishing, Trojans etc., MS might be required by the EU to open its API so that updates could be bought from different suppliers, on exactly the same basis that you can buy tires and exhausts from sources other than the car maker.
I very much suspect the problem is not the em waves at all, but the sounds and the flickering lights they cause. Flicker can cause epileptic seizures in some people. Why substitute an ill-understood source of physiological effects for well understood ones?
I worked with powerful em wave generators for years with no ill effects I could ever detect, but there were no lower frequencies that can affect sound or light (no AM transmitter modulation, for instance.)
The connection with the computer industry is that Alan Turing had a grant from the Royal Society to build an analog system (using gears no less) to investigate the zeroes of the Riemann Zeta Function.
Ah, apparently they're threatening to cause chaos. Just another headline to annoy syntax Nazis.
Now, if only Kashmir could solve its political problems...
Your evidence for which is what, precisely? Philosophers (and, more recently, psychologists, neuroscientists etc.) have been arguing for a long time about whether there is such a thing as free will. The existence of drug addicts, alcoholics, psychopaths, Tourettes and Asperger's Syndrome suggests that for many people "free will" is severely circumscribed. I don't know whether this is an appropriate area for government intervention, but I do know that the issue is not nearly as clear cut as you seem to think.
Not strictly on topic perhaps, but goes to show that there is nothing much new under the sun.
Still, the whole thing reminds me of the Australian attempts to build robot sheep shearers, a brilliant idea if you don't mind cleaning the blood off the wall afterwards. With all the ineducable people in our society with nothing to do but take drugs and steal to pay for them (estimated 280 000 in the UK, how many in the US I dread to think), I would have thought (just as Huxley did in Brave New World) that the real answer is to pay adequately for farm laboring jobs so we have something for the less intelligent in society to do. What we paid for in food we would get back in reduced taxes and insurance premiums.
I hadn't thought of it like that. I have to admit, I believe a lot of the fundamentalists to be quite insincere, rather than ignorant and afraid. They are not opposing science because they are fearful; they are opposing it because they get paid money by rich, ignorant people to do it. In the same way, here in the UK, we have "right wing philosophers" who put up arguments that are dismissed or ignored by real philosophers, who despise them, but they do it because they get paid by rich people who want to see their way of life defended. They are able enough to know their arguments are poor, but they does very nicely out of it. The trial of Sokrates seems to have been political in this way.
Unfortunately a number of people in the 21st century seem determined to return to the 17th., when everything was simpler and you could be as ignorant as you liked and still be an opinion former. However, I fail to understand the reference to Plato. Plato's cave is not about geology, and it is certainly not about self-willed ignorance. The part of Plato you are thinking of is the trial of Sokrates where he is accused of corrupting youth by casting doubt in the reality of the gods. The modern analogy is a book by Doris Lessing, about a society which has developed to the point that no-one is allowed to look upwards, in case they notice the mountains.
I have an extensive education in theology. I think I have a reasonable understanding of the mythologies of the Near East. I know something of the evolution of Judaism. I know Church history reasonably well. I make a harmless posting about a parallel between Near Eastern mythologies and an event being studied by scientists, and the paradoxical light it sheds on things like Intelligent Design - without mocking ID. And I get modded flamebait. Who are the mods nowadays, and when can the DOD develop the bunker buster to zap them in their parents' basements?
Should take a leaf from the British MP who suggested that the answer to email spam was to require everybody to have their zip code as part of their email address.
Apparently believe that the rain is the Sky father-god inseminating the mother Earth. If so, this is just another example of religious fundamentalists with agenda trying to distort science. Hang on a moment...
However, the French do have laws that protect personal privacy. Also, EU countries have signed up to the UN Declaration on Human Rights - unlike the US - and that carries implications that there will be laws against one section of the community stirring up hatred against another. If that is curtailment of freedom of speech, I think most people would support it.
I am always suspicious of the people who try to extend the notion of freedom of speech to include the publication of actual lies.
Capitalism: the replacement of elected government by government by unelected multinational corporations in the name of freedom.