In DNA, looks like everything is a file. DNA doesn't have any pretty icons and we don't know how to read the metadata - if it exists - to identify the boundaries of an element and its function. Nor do we know if, within "file" elements - organised sequences of code - there are internal sequences using a different encoding. Is this surprising?
The only thing that gives me huge pleasure in this (sorry) is that I find Richard Dawkins overbearing, overclaiming, and pompous. It's nice to know that his approach to genetics (believing the "gene" is a highly conserved element) is now so hugely out of date. When his book, the Selfish Gene, came out the title peed me off because it suggested, to the general public, that a gene could have intention. Now it's becoming clear that the genetic system is more like a general purpose filing system than a magnetic tape. And we're still at the level of trying to understand it by reading the pattern of 1s and 0s (well, 0-3s in fact) off the disc because we really don't understand how it's organised.
Now, how do we boot an organism and then switch to Runlevel 5 so we get the graphical interface?
Well, I was in fact trying to make a sarcastic point about the way the NeoCons might actually view the Middle East - let's be clear, I am NOT anti-Israel whatever I may think about Olmert, Netanyahu etc. Unlike some people, I think I can distinguish between the varied Jewish populations around the world, the Israeli people (also very varied), and their politicians. But in fact Israel does have nukes, and you can imagine scenarios in which it would be convenient for the Pentagon to have a hard-to-attack platform in the eastern Mediterranean. If I had been thinking more clearly I might have written "missile carrier".
The issue was about what constitutes victory in a conflict, and whether an apparent failure in Iraq might actually achieve a strategic goal of protecting Israel.
I was talking specifically about US strategic objectives. As I pointed out further down, the people who make wars rarely regard the preservation of democracy as a strategic objective. From the POV of the Pentagon, Israel is presumably a missile platform. If it suited US objectives for Israel to become a one-party State, because (say) that was the only way they could get Israel to allow an all-out attack on Syria from its territory, would democratic considerations stop them? I think not.
The really interesting question is whether the overall interests of the Israeli people and the Jewish world as a whole are really well served by the current relationship with the US. I realise the whole Middle East is now so poisoned that disentanglement may be well nigh impossible. But you will be aware that the outgoing UN representative in the Middle East has had leaked his remarks on how the US pressure is not helping the resolution of Middle East problems. I cannot help but think that overall it would be better if the EU could guarantee the security of Israel and negotiate with the other regional powers. Otherwise, I suspect that my own children will be the last generation of our family to spend summers on a kibbutz.
This is Slashdot, we are geeks, please can we correctly distinguish between forecasting and statistical analysis? Forecasting is an activity in which you develop mathematical models to describe a system based on the analysis of existing systems, e.g. if I find there is a -0.7 correlation between the global mean temperature and the estimated number of pirates in the Caribbean, that is analysis of an existing system using statistics, but I would not build a mathematical model of global warming based on that without applying a great deal of non-statistical input.
That said, I find this very unconvincing. And why? Because it is actually very hard to measure the outcome of a conflict, especially when the actual strategic objective of the conflict may be a state secret on the side of the aggressor. Put simply, we do not really know, in the case of Iraq, what the real objective of the US Government is. Is it:
To stabilise Iraq with a government that will be a more reliable client of the US than Saddam was?
To destabilise Iraq and the Middle East to prevent power accumulations that threaten the US regional aircraft carrier, USS Israel?
To maintain high oil prices by creating instability, enriching the Bush family and their clients?
To keep up pressure on other states by showing that the US will intervene and create anarchy if it wishes (The old "remember what happened to XXX country?" "There is no XXX country." "Exactly, that's what you need to remember")
My point is that for any desired outcome other than the first, the US Government would be achieving its strategic objectives. The fact that these objectives might be objectionable to the majority of the US population is irrelevant; for most of history, wars have been fought by military elites without reference to the interests of the majority of the population. In exactly this way, Vietnam can actually be seen as a victory for the US if the strategic objective was to stop the expansion of Communism. Personally I don't believe in the domino theory, but if you do you can argue that the example of Vietnam stopped other regional states from going Communist.
In the past, wars usually ended when one side ran out of resources, whether provisioning, human, strategic or geographical. The constraint on warmongers in democratic societies is that society can ultimately strangle the resources of its internal warmongers without, necessarily, killing anybody. It is also possible for democratic societies to change the playing field so that strategic objectives change or become irrelevant. (e.g. by doing so much business with other countries that it becomes impossible to pursue strategic objectives without doing more harm to yourself - which you could say is happening with the US and China.)
Under first to file in the UK you submit a low-cost provisional application the moment you have the idea. Now you can go and discuss it with VCs etc. and you have established your priority. Only if it then looks like a worthwhile invention, or when you have the funding, do you have to pay the full application costs. What's more, if you decide not to file, the provisional application then lapses to prior art so nobody can come along afterwards and patent it.
The US system has now changed, but under the old system Startup LLC had to keep detailed lab notebooks and probably have them witnessed by an attorney in the US, while in the UK they just had to write up the idea and submit a provisional application. Which is better for a small company?
The US system originated when the US had terrible communications and was designed to deal with the small inventor who had been making something for years in Outer Fencepost, Wyoming, and then Bad Company, NY came along with the railroad and copied his idea. Nowadays, this is not an issue.
I didn't say I wanted any such thing. I said it was up to the courts to decide whether or not an offence had been committed, and, if not, whether legislators might decide to legislate for the future. Your rant has absolutely nothing to do with my post.
BTW, I believe it is illegal for US companies to trade with Cuba, for reasons supposedly associated with human rights violations. This shows that the US has in the past created laws directed against cooperation with another, specified government. So, not only is your rant off-topic, but you appear ignorant of your own country's legislation. Unless you are, in fact, a Chinese sock puppet.
Yahoo on the face of it did something that was morally wrong. Law is not something that is fixed and unchanging, it evolves, and the Internet being so new, the laws affecting it are likely to be inadequate and out of date.
Laws arise because it becomes clear that something is morally or practically wrong. First, it is necessary to show that no existing law fits the bill; which means the courts have to investigate. Then legislators, under various forms of pressure, are supposed to legislate.
"Not doing anything legally wrong" is the argument of the crook throughout the ages when they've been caught doing something that offends a lot of people. At the moment BAe in the UK is arguing that redirecting large Saudi funds to a member of the ruling family as part of an arms deal is not legally wrong. The fact that the British government tried to suppress the police investigation suggests that My. Blair, at least, is not so sure.
So the answer to your question is, we don't know yet. It is for the courts to decide. And, if they decide it is legal, then it's up to the legislators of the US to decide whether now is the time to stand up for the Founding Fathers, or time to bury them a bit deeper.
there was no constant rate time measurement and certainly not to the resolution of minutes. As I recall, hours were of variable length depending on the seasons, and would be measured by at best sundials and at worst things like water clocks or candles. The Romans really weren't that interested in accurate time measurement, since the applications for it did not exist. So (and better scholars will I am sure correct me) I guess the time would be "about the VIIth hour"
How many real IT administrators do you have? I'm guessing it's between 0 and 1/aleph-null.
What you probably have is a load of ignorant MCSEs. They have worked through the manuals, they have done the multiple choice tests, but they don't really have a clue outside the point and click. Why am I doing this? I don't know, you just have to. If you don't, security demons come and eat your soul. Or something. The fix for any problem? Upgrade. I guess we can't do that in XP, have to wait for Vista. No, I don't know how to do that in Word, I guess you can't, you have to wait for Office 2007. Meanwhile, I don't have to learn anything new, I can just go home at 5 and kick the kids.
This is the way of the world. As soon as you try to democratise a new technology, the skill levels of the early adopters are diluted because there just are not that many really able people about. And the dilution itself reduces expectations. If all the plumbers you meet are incompetent, you don't expect a competent plumber. And if you yourself know nothing about plumbing, you won't be surprised when the plumber takes five hours to swap out a central heating pump.
In my time I have come across "mechanical engineers" who didn't know you had to supply and remove the energy stored in rotating objects, "electrical engineers" who were capable of using the earth wire to short out a toroidal transformer and not understand why the wire melted, an "industrial chemist" who thought if you diluted an acid spill with plenty of water the sewage company wouldn't notice, an "environmental systems engineer" who thought that it was safe to fill a large plastic tank with a hydrogen/air mixture (he didn't know how the Van der Graaf generator works. It was a _big_ bang). These people were probably the average level of their occupations, and simply were not capable of independent thought. Your IT staff are at that level. As with this school district, you need someone with the support of the management and some real drive to push the thing through, and persuade these people that it's worth learning new skills because they create new opportunities. But they have to be pushed and jollied along, because otherwise they will lapse into sloth. And when they have the new skills - they will plateau again.
Classical Latin is a dead language. Latin evolved, as languages do, into French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian. Even the Teutonic dialect that became English absorbed an awful lot of Latin.
It is proper to postulate that the Latin Language survives in the dialect of those of the English whose scholastic studies were at a superior or elevated level and whose aspirations were to achieve professional competence and status. Indeed Latin usage survives even among plumbers and electricians. Need I go on? In fact, Business English uses a mind-boggling array of pseudo-Latin terminology, probably because this makes it easier to translate into Romance languages. It is much harder to translate sentences made largely of the Teutonic root words.
The miserable gits dissing Harvard really need to get a life and discover the world of cross-cultural word play. It's infinitely wider and more interesting than, say, white "rappers" trying to sound black.
Remember when _we_ were the home of freedom and democracy and _they_ were the evil empire who banned photos of anything that could be a military target?
The UK is just as bad. We refuse to extradite a Russian oligarch to Russia to stand trial on numerous serious charges ranging from fraud to terrorism, then complain when the Russians won't extradite a Russian to us to stand trial for murder. But of course we are the good guys.
Because you don't get metamoderated so you don't lose Karma - brave little fellow aren't you? So what did you object to? The suggestion that the US and Israel keep trying approaches that don't work terribly well? Or the suggestion that Larry Niven's sociology is two dimensional?
I guess the former. Because in fact the "overrated" mod is exactly what I complain of in the current US neocon thinking. It isn't engagement - e.g. responding with your thought out objections - but aiming an anonymous projectile from a hidden location.
So I guess you are a socially dysfunctional gun nut anonymous coward. Now you can bravely use another mod point to mod this "overrated".
A PhD doesn't actually guarantee a good imagination or even a sense of proportion. It shows you can study a small area of a specialist subject in depth for several years. This is a very valuable trait, and with the complexity of modern science PhDs are very necessary. But it is not a trait associated with wide, multivariate speculative thinking, and finding links between things. You could argue that the singlemindedness needed for a PhD suggests a lack of sense of proportion.
The science fiction writers mentioned are all a bit "cult". I like Niven's work, but his science is three dimensional and his sociology is two dimensional. The sort of person I would be looking to to advise the DHS would be more like Umberto Eco (read _Il pendolo di Foucault_/_Foucault's Pendulum_ to see what I mean.) Eco is a genuine polymath who has thought long and hard about cults, society in general, and the way different societies represent their beliefs.
My own belief is that to win a war against terrorists you need psychology and sociology as your core disciplines. This is what the US and Israel simply do not understand, because they have a gun mentality (i.e. project power remotely at an enemy) rather than a net mentality (catch your enemy and make him do what you want.). Northern Ireland is a battle that was won largely by psychology: getting the IRA to believe that it was infested with traitors, so it turned on itself, while persuading the leaders that democracy offered them better opportunities for status and respect than being seen as having gunmen at their command. Psychology is not, in fact, the soft option, nor is sociology.
The US, and Israel, do not seem to have grasped that the only way to stop chaotic, uneducated young men from behaving in an extremist way is to provide opportunities for the people who can possibly control them. Israel believes it can ultimately destroy all Palestinians, so sees no need to offer them a way out which makes renouncing violence attractive. The US believes it can win the "War on terror", so sees no need to create ways in which the controllers of the fundamentalists can get attention and status that exceeds what they get now in their tribal societies. That's a strategy for the long haul, but while the US refuses to be bound by treaties and, for instance, recognise the ICC, it is walking away from frameworks that could be made to enhance security.
Meanwhile, every time Bin Laden reads about another Homeland Security cock-up, or the cost of the Iraq war, he can convince himself that, even without actually killing Americans, he is damaging their economy, their prestige, and their political influence around the world. He is, in fact, largely succeeding through psychological warfare, which is in itself a good advertisement for its success rate.
In my (admittedly limited) experience drug addicts get into it because they are bored and life is insufficiently interesting. I have wondered if litigation junkies are addicted to their own adrenaline. Just like cocaine, being in a lawsuit makes them feel powerful and in control and they don't notice the outgoings until it's too late.
Unfortunately, well, if you were a lawyer and a determined litigant with deep pockets came along and made it clear money was no object, would you tell him he had no case or would you tell him that it would take a lot of work to get his case ready for hearing, then phone Sunseeker and ask them to send round the latest brochure?
You failed to mention that all stress testing increases the probability of failure. To a considerable extent, you can only design in robustness and quality and hope. It used to depress me quite a lot (when I was involved in such things) that many American companies (and others, I hasten to add) just fundamentally did not get ISO 9000 and statistical process control, which is quite different from post-production testing. As a German engineer once remarked to me, (some years ago) "Rolls-Royce cars do not have quality. BMW does not have quality. They just throw away everything that is defective. Toyota has quality. They aim to eliminate defects."
Old guys like me may remember when National Semiconductor was, if I recall rightly, fined for faking test records in the same year they won an award for the reliability in the field of their military products. Or the discovery in the early 90s that volume produced Japanese semiconductors were far more reliable than many JAN devices. There is just no substitute for having to manufacture in volume in a competitive world.
In semiconductors, the downside is that things that produce higher reliability like thicker oxide and bigger anti-static diodes also slow down clocks. You would think that, for a really reliable disk array, you would a less than state of the art system running conservatively. I guess that this is a case where having a great deal of practical and experimental experience is the best recipe for success, and perhaps this is where SAN manufacturers shine.
I once had the misfortune to work for a company where the CEO was a litigious [noun censored]. This is not good when you are (in my case) Company Secretary. Basically he used to put together a convincing sounding scenario of what he claimed had happened, consult a lawyer, be told we had a good chance of winning. The lawyer would then ask me, as CS, to submit the documents in the case and I would have to tell him that they said something different or did not exist. The lawyer would then tell the CEO to forget it, and the CEO would vow never to work with that bent lawyer again, especially when the bill arrived. This happened with increasing frequency after he actually won a case which, in fact, was really the other side's fault and was clear cut. The one thing he never for one moment considered was that he might be wrong.
The simple fact is, and I take no credit for saying it because any CS would have done the same, without intervention he would have bankrupted to company and not cared, because all he was interested in was having his own way.
I've since learned it is not an uncommon personality type. I think it has much in common with compulsive gambling and drug addiction.
Not, of course, that I would for one microsecond suggest that it has any bearing on this case, except to demonstrate that you cannot assume that losing cases and paying costs will deter litigious people.
and are objecting to points already covered. I think this is a good idea, though it would need support from the developers to keep the repositories working, and they would object because removing the need to navigate to the sites will remove having to work through the requests for help and funding. Now if you could fix that - so that as you install xxx.msi, a request and info page opens in a pane, that might be a good feature.
It's a stealth feature. Get people installing applications that way, because then the Linux desktop will be more familiar.
Something really is needed. I keep coming across people who really need no more than Wordpad who are buying Office because they think they have to. I recently came across a guy who has bought Office 2007 and writes nothing but letters and the odd email. He thought that somehow saving his letter to Auntie Flo in Office 2007 format (docx) was "better" than saving it in Office 2000.doc, right up to the point she couldn't open it as an email attachment and he had to "downgrade" his document. Microsoft is exploiting numskulls like that. (I'm only jealous of course - I'd love a list of 100 or so gullible people with money but, as I'm not a corporation with deep pockets, I might get into trouble.)
These people don't know OOo exists, and even if they did would never be able to find it. But a simple little packager that has a "Top picks" with something like "Open Office 2 - for all your home office needs" and a "click here to install" button - well, at least we'd be trying.
We're really sorry about the climate change thing. Still, we never did want to go to Bangladesh and, let's face it, that big lagoon where London used to be is quite attractive.
We don't suppose you can spare some rice and some oil, by any chance? Only the desert now stretches from the West Coast to Chicago and we have a bit of a food problem. And the Canadians have built a big fence along the border and won't let us in as none of us want to mow their lawns or harvest their oranges.
We can offer plenty of stuff in exchange. How about some strategic nuclear missiles? Or some fighter aircraft? We've got plenty of them. Unfortunately, turns out they don't work too well if you want to invade another country and make people grow food for you.
Most of us aren't too worried about these things. We really aren't too excited about what consenting adults get up to in private (well, unless we are the adults, and it's us that are getting up to it). This morning on my way to a meeting in Bath, UK, I walked up the main shopping street and Ann Summers is right there, along with M&S and Top Shop. After all, unlike those trailer sites you have in the US, they don't actually sell sex, just facilitate it. Which is what Victoria's Secret is supposed to be doing.
On the other hand, try looking for a gun shop on a UK high street, outside small towns with large farming communities and shops selling a few shotguns. It will take some time. I'm really not aware of any weird students who have gone out and murdered people with vibrators, though I guess somebody will try it some day. So exactly in what sense are sex toys "harder core"?
The rot actually started when UK solicitors (a kind of lawyer) lost their monopoly on house conveyancing, i.e. buying and selling houses. This was their main source of easy income. As a result they started looking for additional income and have gradually been going down the path of the US with ambulance chasing, no win no fee etc.
The US model was rooted in a very different society. In the UK, the lawyers are behaving like US lawyers, challenging everything, while in general the magistrates and the judges have been more tolerant than they would be in the US. This has caused low level criminals to believe that they can always get off, and leads to the need to have several police involved in even the most minor cases because lawyers will challenge the evidence of a single policeman. In the past they would not, and, while this led to the occasional miscarriage of justice, it did mean that the integrity of the police was very important because bad evidence by one would taint all police.
The headcams are basically a way of circumventing challenges from bad lawyers. As such they are not evidence of a surveillance society, they are evidence of a society where the justice system has been tilted too far in favour of criminals.
Many years ago as a student we went round a Government research lab. (it was probably this experience that got me into science rather than law, another thing to blame the Government for. However). They had been experimenting with filled plastics using, I believe, things like boron nitride and carbon fibres as filler, which they were making in a machine called the Bran Tub (why, is left as an exercise for the reader.)
They were then moulding the plastics into various objects using an injection moulding machine, and the machine supplier had given them a number of free moulds including a mixing bowl, a toy airplane, things like that. They had also been experimenting trying to make very high molecular weight polythene.
Anyway, when we left they gave us some samples, explaining that the process was very unreliable and some things came out well while others were a total failure. So we tested a couple of those bowls to destruction. I was amazed at how strong they were - in the end it took a pickaxe to go through one. I can well believe that a suitably filled polyethylene in a reliable process could stop bullets.
As a side issue, as well as Tupperware, long chain polyethylene is generally regarded as the best, and safest thing, for Diesel fuel tanks.
You are using some definition of censorship that I do not understand. Tobacco, drugs and prostitution are not small evils. They cost society a huge amount of money - in police, medical and social welfare costs - as a result of their effects. If I want to run a shop front - which is what Google's paid for advertising basically is - and decide I do not want to promote things with heavy adverse effects on society, that is my right as a citizen. It would be censorship - i.e. enforcement of a particular moral attitude by the State - if I was forced to advertise these things contrary to my own beliefs. It is not as if these people cannot go elsewhere or, if they really think that they have a right to a public platform, to buy their own search engine and see how much traffic it gets.
However, we agree on one point. Slavery is a great evil, whether it is women trapped into prostitution, forced labour of Chinese prisoners, indentured farm work organised by criminal gangs with the tacit consent of the government in the UK (and I expect in the US), or peasants forced by warlords to grow drugs to finance their gangs. I suspect that once the US economy goes into recession, avoidance of which seems increasingly unlikely, there will be sudden demands to control outsourcing to cheap labor areas. At which point Google may come under pressure to stop those advertisements. That will be censorship.
I changed my sig today [on-topic]
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How Bad Can Wi-fi Be?
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· Score: 3, Informative
After re-reading Richard Feynman's lecture on Cargo Cult Science. With its demolition of "experiments" without controls, and how people kept on doing pointless lab rat experiments after the methodology was debunked, it's a sad saga - which is just as true today after so much "progress".
Unfortunately, in the UK at least, the number of scientifically trained journalists can probably be counted on one of Ben Goldacre's fingers.
Interesting that none of the phone mast posts seem to have remembered the inverse square law - sorry if you did and I missed you - which mean that radiation levels at the ground are a tiny fraction of what you get from the phone. And that nobody has mentioned all the radiation we used to get from TV and radio sets. As I recall, the radiation you get from an old tube superhet set (from the IF) is much more intense than the radiation from WiFi. It is lower frequency, but then the skin effect is less, and as anybody who ever played about with NMR will recall, VHF does things to organic molecules.
We'd better take action now. Let's get rid of all that nasty radioactivity - oops, Madam, there goes your granite kitchen work surfaces and your low-sodium salt. And all the radiation sources beginning with the most intense. So we've now turned off the Sun, mobile phones, radio, TV, electrical generating. We can't use coal (have you looked at what you get in the ash). So we can just sit in the dark and freeze.
As for the leukaemia cases - I have long believed that a far more convincing explanation is exposure to farm chemicals, pesticides, and the new virus and bacterial strains resulting from population movement. It is possible that farming overspray with chemicals which have been subsequently banned is a more probable cause of leukaemia clusters than, say, living near a rural electrical supply line. In the UK, and probably in the US too, the parts of Government which deal with farming tend to be extremely secretive and their decisions are often hard to understand. To my mind, they are far more likely to suppress information about such things than the relatively open parts of Government which deal with non-farming health and safety.
2. A sponge-like structure between the inner and outer walls of the tube
3. Means to introduce liquid under pressure into the sponge-like structure, and other means for removing the liquid
4. A means to attach the said tubular structure to the lower abdomen of a male human being
5. A means to connect the plumbing system described in Claim 3 to the interior plumbing of the human being
6. Means to cause the tubular structure to oscillate and expand on demand.
It will be appreciated by those skilled in the art that this invention will be of inestimable use to chief executive officers wishing to lay claim to exclusive access of their products to various markets.
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing that gives me huge pleasure in this (sorry) is that I find Richard Dawkins overbearing, overclaiming, and pompous. It's nice to know that his approach to genetics (believing the "gene" is a highly conserved element) is now so hugely out of date. When his book, the Selfish Gene, came out the title peed me off because it suggested, to the general public, that a gene could have intention. Now it's becoming clear that the genetic system is more like a general purpose filing system than a magnetic tape. And we're still at the level of trying to understand it by reading the pattern of 1s and 0s (well, 0-3s in fact) off the disc because we really don't understand how it's organised.
Now, how do we boot an organism and then switch to Runlevel 5 so we get the graphical interface?
The issue was about what constitutes victory in a conflict, and whether an apparent failure in Iraq might actually achieve a strategic goal of protecting Israel.
The really interesting question is whether the overall interests of the Israeli people and the Jewish world as a whole are really well served by the current relationship with the US. I realise the whole Middle East is now so poisoned that disentanglement may be well nigh impossible. But you will be aware that the outgoing UN representative in the Middle East has had leaked his remarks on how the US pressure is not helping the resolution of Middle East problems. I cannot help but think that overall it would be better if the EU could guarantee the security of Israel and negotiate with the other regional powers. Otherwise, I suspect that my own children will be the last generation of our family to spend summers on a kibbutz.
That said, I find this very unconvincing. And why? Because it is actually very hard to measure the outcome of a conflict, especially when the actual strategic objective of the conflict may be a state secret on the side of the aggressor. Put simply, we do not really know, in the case of Iraq, what the real objective of the US Government is. Is it:
- To stabilise Iraq with a government that will be a more reliable client of the US than Saddam was?
- To destabilise Iraq and the Middle East to prevent power accumulations that threaten the US regional aircraft carrier, USS Israel?
- To maintain high oil prices by creating instability, enriching the Bush family and their clients?
- To keep up pressure on other states by showing that the US will intervene and create anarchy if it wishes (The old "remember what happened to XXX country?" "There is no XXX country." "Exactly, that's what you need to remember")
My point is that for any desired outcome other than the first, the US Government would be achieving its strategic objectives. The fact that these objectives might be objectionable to the majority of the US population is irrelevant; for most of history, wars have been fought by military elites without reference to the interests of the majority of the population. In exactly this way, Vietnam can actually be seen as a victory for the US if the strategic objective was to stop the expansion of Communism. Personally I don't believe in the domino theory, but if you do you can argue that the example of Vietnam stopped other regional states from going Communist.In the past, wars usually ended when one side ran out of resources, whether provisioning, human, strategic or geographical. The constraint on warmongers in democratic societies is that society can ultimately strangle the resources of its internal warmongers without, necessarily, killing anybody. It is also possible for democratic societies to change the playing field so that strategic objectives change or become irrelevant. (e.g. by doing so much business with other countries that it becomes impossible to pursue strategic objectives without doing more harm to yourself - which you could say is happening with the US and China.)
The US system has now changed, but under the old system Startup LLC had to keep detailed lab notebooks and probably have them witnessed by an attorney in the US, while in the UK they just had to write up the idea and submit a provisional application. Which is better for a small company?
The US system originated when the US had terrible communications and was designed to deal with the small inventor who had been making something for years in Outer Fencepost, Wyoming, and then Bad Company, NY came along with the railroad and copied his idea. Nowadays, this is not an issue.
BTW, I believe it is illegal for US companies to trade with Cuba, for reasons supposedly associated with human rights violations. This shows that the US has in the past created laws directed against cooperation with another, specified government. So, not only is your rant off-topic, but you appear ignorant of your own country's legislation. Unless you are, in fact, a Chinese sock puppet.
Laws arise because it becomes clear that something is morally or practically wrong. First, it is necessary to show that no existing law fits the bill; which means the courts have to investigate. Then legislators, under various forms of pressure, are supposed to legislate.
"Not doing anything legally wrong" is the argument of the crook throughout the ages when they've been caught doing something that offends a lot of people. At the moment BAe in the UK is arguing that redirecting large Saudi funds to a member of the ruling family as part of an arms deal is not legally wrong. The fact that the British government tried to suppress the police investigation suggests that My. Blair, at least, is not so sure.
So the answer to your question is, we don't know yet. It is for the courts to decide. And, if they decide it is legal, then it's up to the legislators of the US to decide whether now is the time to stand up for the Founding Fathers, or time to bury them a bit deeper.
there was no constant rate time measurement and certainly not to the resolution of minutes. As I recall, hours were of variable length depending on the seasons, and would be measured by at best sundials and at worst things like water clocks or candles. The Romans really weren't that interested in accurate time measurement, since the applications for it did not exist. So (and better scholars will I am sure correct me) I guess the time would be "about the VIIth hour"
What you probably have is a load of ignorant MCSEs. They have worked through the manuals, they have done the multiple choice tests, but they don't really have a clue outside the point and click. Why am I doing this? I don't know, you just have to. If you don't, security demons come and eat your soul. Or something. The fix for any problem? Upgrade. I guess we can't do that in XP, have to wait for Vista. No, I don't know how to do that in Word, I guess you can't, you have to wait for Office 2007. Meanwhile, I don't have to learn anything new, I can just go home at 5 and kick the kids.
This is the way of the world. As soon as you try to democratise a new technology, the skill levels of the early adopters are diluted because there just are not that many really able people about. And the dilution itself reduces expectations. If all the plumbers you meet are incompetent, you don't expect a competent plumber. And if you yourself know nothing about plumbing, you won't be surprised when the plumber takes five hours to swap out a central heating pump.
In my time I have come across "mechanical engineers" who didn't know you had to supply and remove the energy stored in rotating objects, "electrical engineers" who were capable of using the earth wire to short out a toroidal transformer and not understand why the wire melted, an "industrial chemist" who thought if you diluted an acid spill with plenty of water the sewage company wouldn't notice, an "environmental systems engineer" who thought that it was safe to fill a large plastic tank with a hydrogen/air mixture (he didn't know how the Van der Graaf generator works. It was a _big_ bang). These people were probably the average level of their occupations, and simply were not capable of independent thought. Your IT staff are at that level. As with this school district, you need someone with the support of the management and some real drive to push the thing through, and persuade these people that it's worth learning new skills because they create new opportunities. But they have to be pushed and jollied along, because otherwise they will lapse into sloth. And when they have the new skills - they will plateau again.
It is proper to postulate that the Latin Language survives in the dialect of those of the English whose scholastic studies were at a superior or elevated level and whose aspirations were to achieve professional competence and status. Indeed Latin usage survives even among plumbers and electricians. Need I go on? In fact, Business English uses a mind-boggling array of pseudo-Latin terminology, probably because this makes it easier to translate into Romance languages. It is much harder to translate sentences made largely of the Teutonic root words.
The miserable gits dissing Harvard really need to get a life and discover the world of cross-cultural word play. It's infinitely wider and more interesting than, say, white "rappers" trying to sound black.
The UK is just as bad. We refuse to extradite a Russian oligarch to Russia to stand trial on numerous serious charges ranging from fraud to terrorism, then complain when the Russians won't extradite a Russian to us to stand trial for murder. But of course we are the good guys.
I guess the former. Because in fact the "overrated" mod is exactly what I complain of in the current US neocon thinking. It isn't engagement - e.g. responding with your thought out objections - but aiming an anonymous projectile from a hidden location.
So I guess you are a socially dysfunctional gun nut anonymous coward. Now you can bravely use another mod point to mod this "overrated".
The science fiction writers mentioned are all a bit "cult". I like Niven's work, but his science is three dimensional and his sociology is two dimensional. The sort of person I would be looking to to advise the DHS would be more like Umberto Eco (read _Il pendolo di Foucault_/_Foucault's Pendulum_ to see what I mean.) Eco is a genuine polymath who has thought long and hard about cults, society in general, and the way different societies represent their beliefs.
My own belief is that to win a war against terrorists you need psychology and sociology as your core disciplines. This is what the US and Israel simply do not understand, because they have a gun mentality (i.e. project power remotely at an enemy) rather than a net mentality (catch your enemy and make him do what you want.). Northern Ireland is a battle that was won largely by psychology: getting the IRA to believe that it was infested with traitors, so it turned on itself, while persuading the leaders that democracy offered them better opportunities for status and respect than being seen as having gunmen at their command. Psychology is not, in fact, the soft option, nor is sociology.
The US, and Israel, do not seem to have grasped that the only way to stop chaotic, uneducated young men from behaving in an extremist way is to provide opportunities for the people who can possibly control them. Israel believes it can ultimately destroy all Palestinians, so sees no need to offer them a way out which makes renouncing violence attractive. The US believes it can win the "War on terror", so sees no need to create ways in which the controllers of the fundamentalists can get attention and status that exceeds what they get now in their tribal societies. That's a strategy for the long haul, but while the US refuses to be bound by treaties and, for instance, recognise the ICC, it is walking away from frameworks that could be made to enhance security.
Meanwhile, every time Bin Laden reads about another Homeland Security cock-up, or the cost of the Iraq war, he can convince himself that, even without actually killing Americans, he is damaging their economy, their prestige, and their political influence around the world. He is, in fact, largely succeeding through psychological warfare, which is in itself a good advertisement for its success rate.
Unfortunately, well, if you were a lawyer and a determined litigant with deep pockets came along and made it clear money was no object, would you tell him he had no case or would you tell him that it would take a lot of work to get his case ready for hearing, then phone Sunseeker and ask them to send round the latest brochure?
Old guys like me may remember when National Semiconductor was, if I recall rightly, fined for faking test records in the same year they won an award for the reliability in the field of their military products. Or the discovery in the early 90s that volume produced Japanese semiconductors were far more reliable than many JAN devices. There is just no substitute for having to manufacture in volume in a competitive world.
In semiconductors, the downside is that things that produce higher reliability like thicker oxide and bigger anti-static diodes also slow down clocks. You would think that, for a really reliable disk array, you would a less than state of the art system running conservatively. I guess that this is a case where having a great deal of practical and experimental experience is the best recipe for success, and perhaps this is where SAN manufacturers shine.
I once had the misfortune to work for a company where the CEO was a litigious [noun censored]. This is not good when you are (in my case) Company Secretary. Basically he used to put together a convincing sounding scenario of what he claimed had happened, consult a lawyer, be told we had a good chance of winning. The lawyer would then ask me, as CS, to submit the documents in the case and I would have to tell him that they said something different or did not exist. The lawyer would then tell the CEO to forget it, and the CEO would vow never to work with that bent lawyer again, especially when the bill arrived. This happened with increasing frequency after he actually won a case which, in fact, was really the other side's fault and was clear cut. The one thing he never for one moment considered was that he might be wrong.
The simple fact is, and I take no credit for saying it because any CS would have done the same, without intervention he would have bankrupted to company and not cared, because all he was interested in was having his own way.
I've since learned it is not an uncommon personality type. I think it has much in common with compulsive gambling and drug addiction.
Not, of course, that I would for one microsecond suggest that it has any bearing on this case, except to demonstrate that you cannot assume that losing cases and paying costs will deter litigious people.
It's a stealth feature. Get people installing applications that way, because then the Linux desktop will be more familiar.
Something really is needed. I keep coming across people who really need no more than Wordpad who are buying Office because they think they have to. I recently came across a guy who has bought Office 2007 and writes nothing but letters and the odd email. He thought that somehow saving his letter to Auntie Flo in Office 2007 format (docx) was "better" than saving it in Office 2000 .doc, right up to the point she couldn't open it as an email attachment and he had to "downgrade" his document. Microsoft is exploiting numskulls like that. (I'm only jealous of course - I'd love a list of 100 or so gullible people with money but, as I'm not a corporation with deep pockets, I might get into trouble.)
These people don't know OOo exists, and even if they did would never be able to find it. But a simple little packager that has a "Top picks" with something like "Open Office 2 - for all your home office needs" and a "click here to install" button - well, at least we'd be trying.
We don't suppose you can spare some rice and some oil, by any chance? Only the desert now stretches from the West Coast to Chicago and we have a bit of a food problem. And the Canadians have built a big fence along the border and won't let us in as none of us want to mow their lawns or harvest their oranges.
We can offer plenty of stuff in exchange. How about some strategic nuclear missiles? Or some fighter aircraft? We've got plenty of them. Unfortunately, turns out they don't work too well if you want to invade another country and make people grow food for you.
On the other hand, try looking for a gun shop on a UK high street, outside small towns with large farming communities and shops selling a few shotguns. It will take some time. I'm really not aware of any weird students who have gone out and murdered people with vibrators, though I guess somebody will try it some day. So exactly in what sense are sex toys "harder core"?
The US model was rooted in a very different society. In the UK, the lawyers are behaving like US lawyers, challenging everything, while in general the magistrates and the judges have been more tolerant than they would be in the US. This has caused low level criminals to believe that they can always get off, and leads to the need to have several police involved in even the most minor cases because lawyers will challenge the evidence of a single policeman. In the past they would not, and, while this led to the occasional miscarriage of justice, it did mean that the integrity of the police was very important because bad evidence by one would taint all police.
The headcams are basically a way of circumventing challenges from bad lawyers. As such they are not evidence of a surveillance society, they are evidence of a society where the justice system has been tilted too far in favour of criminals.
They were then moulding the plastics into various objects using an injection moulding machine, and the machine supplier had given them a number of free moulds including a mixing bowl, a toy airplane, things like that. They had also been experimenting trying to make very high molecular weight polythene.
Anyway, when we left they gave us some samples, explaining that the process was very unreliable and some things came out well while others were a total failure. So we tested a couple of those bowls to destruction. I was amazed at how strong they were - in the end it took a pickaxe to go through one. I can well believe that a suitably filled polyethylene in a reliable process could stop bullets.
As a side issue, as well as Tupperware, long chain polyethylene is generally regarded as the best, and safest thing, for Diesel fuel tanks.
However, we agree on one point. Slavery is a great evil, whether it is women trapped into prostitution, forced labour of Chinese prisoners, indentured farm work organised by criminal gangs with the tacit consent of the government in the UK (and I expect in the US), or peasants forced by warlords to grow drugs to finance their gangs. I suspect that once the US economy goes into recession, avoidance of which seems increasingly unlikely, there will be sudden demands to control outsourcing to cheap labor areas. At which point Google may come under pressure to stop those advertisements. That will be censorship.
Unfortunately, in the UK at least, the number of scientifically trained journalists can probably be counted on one of Ben Goldacre's fingers.
Interesting that none of the phone mast posts seem to have remembered the inverse square law - sorry if you did and I missed you - which mean that radiation levels at the ground are a tiny fraction of what you get from the phone. And that nobody has mentioned all the radiation we used to get from TV and radio sets. As I recall, the radiation you get from an old tube superhet set (from the IF) is much more intense than the radiation from WiFi. It is lower frequency, but then the skin effect is less, and as anybody who ever played about with NMR will recall, VHF does things to organic molecules.
We'd better take action now. Let's get rid of all that nasty radioactivity - oops, Madam, there goes your granite kitchen work surfaces and your low-sodium salt. And all the radiation sources beginning with the most intense. So we've now turned off the Sun, mobile phones, radio, TV, electrical generating. We can't use coal (have you looked at what you get in the ash). So we can just sit in the dark and freeze.
As for the leukaemia cases - I have long believed that a far more convincing explanation is exposure to farm chemicals, pesticides, and the new virus and bacterial strains resulting from population movement. It is possible that farming overspray with chemicals which have been subsequently banned is a more probable cause of leukaemia clusters than, say, living near a rural electrical supply line. In the UK, and probably in the US too, the parts of Government which deal with farming tend to be extremely secretive and their decisions are often hard to understand. To my mind, they are far more likely to suppress information about such things than the relatively open parts of Government which deal with non-farming health and safety.
Who said Latin was a dead language? This quote from the FA suggests that either Latin is still in use at NASA, or someone is a pompous twit.
- 1. A tubular structure made of various proteins
- 2. A sponge-like structure between the inner and outer walls of the tube
- 3. Means to introduce liquid under pressure into the sponge-like structure, and other means for removing the liquid
- 4. A means to attach the said tubular structure to the lower abdomen of a male human being
- 5. A means to connect the plumbing system described in Claim 3 to the interior plumbing of the human being
- 6. Means to cause the tubular structure to oscillate and expand on demand.
It will be appreciated by those skilled in the art that this invention will be of inestimable use to chief executive officers wishing to lay claim to exclusive access of their products to various markets.