Applied in the Isle of Man (Ubuntu) and Germany (the home of StarOffice). Let alone the rest of the EU.
The implications for all this are interesting. Does Microsoft really want European software slowly to drift away from its link to the US? Because they are exposing more and more to European legislators that, in effect, they want to enforce a charge on European businesses based on US law that is not applicable in the EU. They already have done themselves no favours with the Competition Commission. Given that the Open Document format is now an international standard, the EU is quite free to use free software to implement it while the US might end up having to pay a Microsoft tax. That is an interesting possibility.
Many years ago at a seminar on patent and trademark law, I asked the lawyer who was acting as convenor what, in his view, the position would be if a manufacturer attempted to claim that only their patented technology was able to create an instance of something complying with an international standard which was embodied in European harmonisation. To which his reply was "You're just being a smartass." It looks like there could yet be a test case.
I am extremely sure. Although there is enough material in languages like Coptic to point to earlier Aramaic texts, and there are fragments in all sorts of languages, the most authoritative texts we have in the greatest detail are in Greek. Most educated catholic theologians will know NT Greek, only specialists will know any of the other languages in any detail at all. The Vulgate is a translation from Greek.
There is of course not just one Greek text and any modern edition of the NT has many comments and comparisons - I have two editions and they differ in many places as to which version to choose. But compared to the Dead Sea Scrolls or the later fragments that exist of the Testaments, the NT is remarkably homogeneous. As you would expect from people for whom the exact words are sacred. In arche estin ho Logos!
It isn't really an Atkinson cycle engine, just an ordinary crankshaft SI engine with asymmetric valve timing.
The European Mitsubishi Colt gets about the same real world MPG as the Prius. It has a 94BHP 3-cylinder advanced turbodiesel engine with no batteries to lug about, a Tiptronic gearbox, conventional steel construction and still gets 121g CO2 per mile. The dust to dust cost is far lower than a Prius because (a) steel needs less energy to make than aluminum and (b) it only needs a small lead acid starter battery. And it will cruise all day at 90+mph where legal.
The Prius is largely the consequence of the strange meteorology of Los Angeles, the Californian approach to emission control, and the Japanese coming late to advanced Diesel development.
I just find most of the comments on this thread so OTT that I wonder if/. has a special supply of overemotional kids in reserve for just such an occasion. Or just kids who hated their teachers and want revenge by proxy.
The disproportion between these responses and the reality of what happens every day to children in Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, China, various bits of the former Soviet Union, Burma...some US inner city areas...the list is almost endless...is just stunning.
I have news for you. As far as anyone knows, the human race hasn't evolved significantly since _we_ were the subject of predation. I rather think that even small children are actually quite well equipped, for the most part, to deal with a bit of irrational fear and panic. But some of the posters on this thread need to be battered over the head with the Diaries of Anne Frank until a clue makes inroads.
Meanwhile, in the UK, some riding schools have apparently closed down because of parents getting their children to join in the hope they will fall off a horse and the school can be sued. So no, this is not an anti-US rant. It's probably an anti-lawyer rant in disguise.
Disclaimer: my background is Episcopalian/Quaker. I'm not exactly pro-fundamentalists. But I have experienced exactly the same techniques from fundamentalists, home grown as well as US. Choose an enemy who thinks differently from you (e.g. Catholics, psychiatrists.) Demonise them. Stir up hate among your followers; everybody likes to have an "other" they can believe to be evil. When dealing with sceptics, always behave very calmly to show your emotional superiority. This convinces your followers that you are right. (It's also a good idea to point out minor factual inaccurancies or grammatical errors in the publications of your opponents, to prove to the sheep that you are intellectually superior as well.) In order to keep your sheep in line, make sure that they keep having to pass tests, like "testifying" to your born-againness. (Of course I wouldn't for one moment suggest that Scientology auditing is in any shape or form like fundamentalist conversion experiences or speaking in tongues.)
The difference is that most nutty Protestant sects do not become as large and rich as the Church of Scientology, and they also have to keep some sort of attachment to a nominally Christian approach. They also have the problem that their followers do tend to be socially mobile - the fact of going to Church shows they want to "better" themselves - and with social mobility comes exposure to more educated people who may guide them towards mainstream Christianity. Scientology, on the other hand, is not a bizarre offshoot of a mainstream religion and there is no central tendency for its followers to gravitate back to.
There is too with cults an interesting anti-intellectual tendency. If you want to make authoritative pronouncements in, say, the Catholic or Episcopalian churches, you are probably fluent in NT Greek and can read the NT in the original. Cults contain less educated people, so they will do things like take a particular English translation of the Bible as being authoritative and solve the problem that way. Extreme cults can get a following from rich people who do not want to invest the time and effort needed to become familiar with, say, the Bible or the Pali texts. You can join something like - oh, say Kabbalah - and say pretty well anything in public without looking ridiculous, while a Hollywood actor who tries to sound knowledgeable about the Bible had better know his or her stuff because there are so many well informed people listening. A religion that does not let its sacred texts get out too much is at an advantage in this respect.
As a part time student of religious sociology, it's a pity I won't be around in 50 years to see if Scientology, like Mormonism before it, is evolving into a mainstream religion and gradually losing its bizarre baggage.
You are in fact exactly the kind of person I complain of in another post on this thread. In fact, you have fallen into the lawyer fallacy (lawyers always think they can learn enough of a subject quickly, but that's because they usually only have to convince other lawyers.)
I had a case at work of just this a few weeks back. I had written a technical appraisal which would need to go to professional services people. I asked another staffer to look it over for readability and avoidance of engineering jargon. The result was that a number of technical terms went - which was good - but the rewrite introduced actual factual errors as a result, as well as a number of terms that were actually jargon of my colleague's speciality, but which he did not recognise as such. My mistake, but qualified technical writers are very hard to come by in our field.
I do use Wikipedia from time to time, but with great caution. Often I see errors I would like to fix. But I will not do so because I am not actually an expert in the field and I therefore think it would be wrong to risk fixing one error but perhaps introducing new ones.
Thank you for falling straight into it and proving my point (and the AC below missed it too). The "please correct me..." should have given it away. The point is this. You are clearly not a Greek reader. If you were, you would know that the Wikipedia article is not totally correct in that first line. The words "enkyklos paideia" (slashdot lameness avoided) in their Classical Greek meaning are NOT the same as the word "Encyclopedia", which is a modern invented word like "television" or "tyrannosaurus rex". The classical concept of "paideia" means somewhat different things to different users, such as Plato, and whether it means the proper means of bringing up the young and making them fit into society, or whether it means the aristocratic leadership of culture, depends on where, when and whom. (I chose to mistranslate it as "children" to see if a Greek speaker would point out my simple mistake, an easy one to make for a beginner in Greek.) The Wikipedia article on "Paideia" seems to me to be limited as to all three.
However, not having the background - you simply quoted Wikipedia to correct me, adding on a meaningless line "It is debatable if well-rounded means comprehensive or just general as opposed to specific." What was the point? You did not explain my mistake, you simply presented Wikipedia as if it was a fait accompli. That's how too many students nowadays work; they just regurgitate "facts" read on the Internet without understanding or analysis.
The Wikipedia article, in fact, looks as if it was cobbled together by somebody, certainly not produced by someone with a deep knowledge of the development of ideas of proper upbringing, how these changed during and after the Renaissance, and how the project reached its apogee in the Enlightenment and the Encyclopédie.
Whatever the faults of the Encyclopédie, Britannica and Americana, the principle that articles were written by the most authoritative experts of the day and then edited by people who understood presentation was a good one.
Literally means, I believe "surrounding children", meaning that it is supposed to represent a body of knowledge that can be used to give children an all-round education. Correct me if I am wrong on that.
The problem with Wikipedia and science seems to go deeper than that it is too technical (not pedantic as the writer suggests, but too technical.) I have come across several articles where the commonest meaning of the term under discussion is not even mentioned because the author thinks that a term from his (I am betting it is almost invariably a his, that isn't a failure to be inclusive) discipline is the only or original meaning of that term. That's because it is nowadays so easy to get a degree in science without any kind of general education. It is that production of overly narrowly focussed graduates that I think is the problem for Wikipedia.
Advertising my own university, Cambridge still insists on a fairly general foundation science course. This does not seem to disadvantage its graduates. Unfortunately corporatism doesn't want good generalists because they might threaten the scientifically ignorant business graduates that run companies. They want Taylorised science and engineering graduates who fit into a neat little hole. The outcome is sufficiently obvious, and the results can be seen in Wikipedia.
There are places where hydro will be cheapest, certainly, but in fact there is a hidden cost as with nuclear. This is the lost opportunity cost of the land that is flooded to create the reservoirs that are normally required. When the population was lower this was less important, but I believe that a number of smaller dams are being removed because, taking all opportunity costs into account (tourism from restored rivers, land reclaim, cost of desilting reservoirs to keep hydro working) the hydro power they produced was no longer economic.
Fortunately reclaim takes a relatively short time (10-40 years) compared to dealing with nuclear waste products.
Of course, if China had to meet Western environmental standards for their coal stations, the economic miracle would be suffering a hefty dose of atheism by now.
Operating costs of power plants vary, with large coal fuelled plants usually the cheapest and small gas powered plants the most expensive. So you run the baseload on coal and nuclear and switch in the more expensive plants as you need them. In the US in summer highest demand is during the day,so everything gets switched in and the rate is higher. At night you can run on baseload and the cost is lower. There is a lot more to it than that including the effects of energy dealing, but basically that's why solar power makes sense in Ca and Az - you need your power when the sun is shining. In N Europe where our demand is more balanced and the sun is at a lower angle, wind and wave make more sense because they run 24 hours per day (somewhere)
Don't you think that a large company should be able to accommodate more than one personality type among its managers?
BTW the jerk CEO managed to lose the Director of R&D, two other senior VPs, and the technological lead over the main competitor, before leaving after less than 2 years. My mistake was trying to explain to him why US designs could not be sold in the European market.
There is a TV program on in the UK at the moment called "The apprentice". You won't want to know the details except that it's like every other wannabe famous program, but the Simon Cowell role is played by someone called Alan Sugar. One thing the BBC doesn't tell you is that while it is true that Sugar once ran a (slightly downmarket) tech company, it went up and then as spectacularly down, and his present prosperity is based on his property development company. The BBC is promoting the idea that you have to be like that to be a successful businessman, but it is a moronic distortion of the truth.
I had one of those bosses. Only my idea wasn't just dumb fucking stupid, I took too long to tell it. (Well, he did have a degree in journalism, and you could see how that would fit you for CEO of a tech company.)
Only, being naive and not realising this was just challenge #101, I left, joined a small company which just grew and grew, then left after a difference of opinion with the CEO, then joined a startup which just grew and grew. Interestingly, our CEO is able to motivate people without a single swearword.
It's nice for Microsoft that it is so big and all, but (as Scott Adams notes somewhere, I think) all the really smart people prefer to live in Switzerland as compared to the US, i.e. to live somewhere where even politics is truly local and individualism is valued versus somewhere where the driving forces in society are completely out of your control and individualism is just having a different alignment of ballpoints in the pocket protector.
It must have been really exciting and creative to work for Microsoft - once. Perhaps some of the pent up anger in the founders, if it is reported accurately, is simply because, even for them, it's no fun anymore.
This is already at +5 so I can't mod it up, but here is some factual data. A friend of ours, a senior educator, has just returned from a fact finding trip in Australasia. One of the things he has learned is that in both Australia and New Zealand there are big problems with underperforming teachers. His daughter is a teacher, so is ours, and he has said that because of their specialist training in working with ethnic minorities, and because UK teacher training has now improved so much over the dire mess of the 70s and 80s, they would have excellent prospects in Australasia - provided of course that they could overcome the attitude of the Unions. Australia constantly complains of whinging Poms, but many of the whinging Trade Unionists are home grown.
This is not at all to suggest that all or a majority of their teachers are bad - Heaven knows we still have enough bad ones in this country too - just that it seems to be a well established problem of the English speaking countries. As is the syndrome of trying to shoot the messenger.
In the US you have endless proposals for blue sky research projects that "might" in 20 years or so lead to something that "might" have a military application. Didn't the DoD even spend money on psychics not so long ago?
Here we don't have big slush funds. (The Govt. can endlessly waste public money on hopeless IT projects, but that's different.) So University lecturers, especially ones from not terribly good universities (have you ever been to Norwich? Don't.), have to try and invent other ways to get funding. Since the Govt. is obsessed with finding terrorists before they manage to get the gunpowder under Parliament again, one way to get funding for a visual recognition project is to suggest it can be used for lipreading terrorists in shopping centres. Of course it won't work, but hopefully by then the guy will have written a few papers and moved a bit up the academic pecking order. And good luck to him. British Government policy with universities basically involves being nice to Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and UCL and stuff the rest. (No, I'm not bitter. My family has degress from 3 of the 4. But I do recognise that it's not a good or fair system)
If true it is extremely interesting (use as a precursor). You (future generations) are going to need ways of making things when even the coal runs out. However, given the toxicity problems of coal gas, it's hard to see why we would want to go back to using it as a fuel, unless the solar converter does not generate electricity as an intermediate step - which case it would make sense. Generate CO in the day, sotre excess, driver generator 24 hours. A way of generating timeshifted electricity with no need to move CO long distances make sense.
For my sins, I did theology at University the first time round. That's theology, not Bible study btw. I was taught by people who had been friends of C S Lewis, I've even read the _unabridged_ That Hideous Strength.
As a matter of fact I think Richard Dawkins is a complete prat, a leftover from the obsolete battles of the nineteenth century. I side with people like Jay Gould (RIP) and Robert Winston on all of this.
But I was writing about something special, the situation in the US where you have very backward, scientifically illiterate Protestant fundamentalists (who never seem to be able to read the Bible in the original, strangely) who have considerable power in Government and the media, and so scientists see themselves as being in conflict with them. Most US scientists do not work in institutions where they come into contact with modern religious thinkers, whereas they do watch television.
While on this somewhat off-topic explication, I'd like to add that I'm a fan of the Episcopalian Church, which to my mind is where the US ought to be. It's a tragedy that the Church of England is siding with the bonkers African bishops against the Episcopalians, instead of telling them to behave like civilised people or stop calling themselves Anglicans.
I'm sure I don't know as much about the history and sociology of religion as I ought to, but I don't think anything I have written would actually support the idea that I'm opposed to modern liberal Christianity.
As for my remarking on the view that fundamentalists can switch from one fundamentalism to another, this is a well known piece of religious sociology. Leaving Godwin and his law completely out of his, how about the studies that showed that in France and Italy post-WW2, Catholics moving to Communist areas frequently became Communists? There are various explanations that can be put forward, but one simple one is that people who become fundamentalists, or communists, or fascists, are people who are prone to accept the views put forward by authority figures rather than rebel against them. This isn't derogatory.
And I was being careless. It is indeed entirely possible that the blue + red reaction is needed to get enough energy, and that perhaps it is a derivative of an earlier blue-only process. The comment on the Register article is interesting - that there are more red photons in sunlight than other types. That means that the yield of a blue + red process could be higher than, say, a yellow + yellow process, because the higher incidence of red photons would make it more probable that the scond step would occur given the first.
However, your first comment appears to be made in ignorance of the recent discovery that there is more to it than that and that a kind of quantum channeling - which I don't pretend to understand - increases the chance that the blue-excited state will last long enough for the second step to have a good chance of occurring. The operative word was clever, not quantum.
As for your third point, you misrepresent what I said. Let's assume that a "2Y" process exists and works better than the "BR" process. How would an organism evolve to use it? Evolution is not like engineering development, where the decision may be taken to expend large amounts of effort on something that may not work. An organism which starts to develop a pathway that can use a single yellow photon will have nothing useful to do with it unless this meets a specific need that improves its fitness. Somehow we have to assume that a double process would emerge in a single step, along with all the other modifications to biochemical pathways that would need to exist around it. This is exceedingly improbable. Evolution does not, in fact, present any obvious mechanism for saltation. Hence the interest in research which explains how cetacean evolution resulted in flukes that beat up and down - because the growing tail worked alongside swimming legs and had to work in the same direction.
Actually, photosynthesis is a complex process involving not one but two photons and some clever quantum effects. You have it exactly the wrong way round. Plants are (usually) green because they have evolved a process which uses two frequency bands of light. Such a mechanism would not have evolved unless either:
The original form of photosynthesis resulted in a different metabolic pathway which used red or blue light and evolution took care of the rest
There were some conditions on the Earth at that time which meant that only red and blue light was available at the intensities required.
There are many possibilities why this might be so, including the nature of the media in which the first synthesising bacteria lived. I suspect the explanation when it is eventually found will be very interesting. However, it is by no means obvious that there is not a much simpler photosynthetic pathway using a single photon absorbtion, and it did not evolve simply because the conditions at the time - the predominant biochemistry of the bacteria and the wavelengths of light falling on them - were not suitable.
I belive that one reason is that scientists are still trying to defeat, with evidence and reason, the religious fundamentalists who believe we are the only "intelligent" life in the Universe, and on the only planet that supports life. On this argument, which I personally doubt, conclusive evidence that life existed elsewhere in the universe and could make itself known would cause the collapse of fundamentalist religions, to the enormous benefit of the rest of us.
I don't buy into it because (a) these people aren't rational and (b) taking away their religion could make them worse - they could easily be converted into Stalinists or extreme nationalists. But I am sure that this, as well as the desire to get budget for exploration, is one of the factors in the search for life on Mars, and in SETI.
Finally, looking for water is not irrelevant. Any practical life form is going to need a solvent and carrier for the various chemicals it needs to get from place to place internally. Water is unique because its strong hydrogen bonding gives it a wide liquid temperature range. Other small molecules which are good solvents also tend to have very low boiling points, meaning that the range of reactions that can take place in them is much more limited. Water has very unusual properties, in fact, that make it more probable that life would evolve on a planet with lots of liquid water than, say, one covered in methane or liquid carbon dioxide.
It's interesting how every new energy generating technology that doesn't actually work yet "could" be running in a 10 year time frame, but it never happens. I suspect the world was seduced by the fact that conventional nuclear energy did get up and running fairly quickly - because nobody knew about the dangers at that time, and because the principle of getting a load of radionucleides to get hot and boil a steam kettle wasn't exactly rocket science. Since then we've had fuel cells (over 50 years old and nowhere near large scale commercialisation, plus there may well not be enough catalyst in the world to make it feasible), wave power, bioethanol (fine until you want to power a first world economy) and hydrogen, which might come good in 30-40 years time. Peoppe have been taken in: Mercedes built (in Europe) a small car platform designed to accomodate either fuel cells or efficient batteries, but it's unlikely to happen in the platform's lifetime.
Even wind power, which has been around in rotary form for over 1000 years, is proving slower to adopt than expected. Wind power is very conventional technology, but scaling up is quite hard and taking a lot more than 10 years.
So here we have a process based on a rareish isotope of boron, which will require major engineering developments just in the delivery and manufacturing system alone, along with a novel method of extracting power which has never been used on a commercial scale. A bit different from piling fuel rods and boiling water.
Being practical, let's say three new technologies to be industrially scaled along with the infrastructure, regulatory and planning issues and call it at least 50 years to real commercialisation. It's unsurprising, given the need for real energy output contribution by, say, 2030, that this is not likely to get much funding.
As T S Eliot observed, the point about parody is that the closer it is to the original the better. In fact, Eliot argued that in order to produce a great parody you had to be able to write better than the original author. A good example is the brilliant parody of John Betjeman that starts "Here I sit, alone and sixty, bald and fat and full of sin..." which causes you to do a double take until you realise that no, it isn't Betjeman. Another good example is the famous literary competition set by the Spectator to write a parody of the start of a Graham Greene novel. Greene entered pseudonymously but didn't win. (And yes, I do have it in my collection.)
You are thinking of burlesque, which is much broader and coarser, in which something is exaggerated or misrepresented for comic effect. For instance, the alternative version of God Save the Queen that starts "God help our boring Queen" is burlesque.
However, your general point is just utterly and obviously wrong. Being inaccurate does not make anything funny, it just makes it irrelevant. There is indeed a form of comedy which consists of reversing everything (and which is presumably connected to the Saturnalia), of which an excellent example is the Onion's accounts clerk who writes about himself as if he was a black gang leader. It is a lot more than inaccuracy, it involves turning things completely upside down. In the case mentioned that would have to involve Gates and Jobs going off to find a few loose woman while their wives discussed operating systems. But otherwise, the principle of comedy is to present things as they are but with a twist. Mr. Bean is funny because he is an adult who not only behaves like a child but has all the worst stereotypical characteristics of the English. The French laugh at him because they recognise the English on holiday, not because he behaves in an un-English way.
Furthermore, I assume you are an American, because I expect, rightly or wrongly, that English people are more knowledgeable about humour, but also because you obviously think American law applies in the UK. It doesn't. The satirical programme "Have I got news for you" goes out a day late because it has to be carefully checked by lawyers. If (as was the case here) you name and identify a person on a programme and then publish defamatory content, you do not have any First Amendment rights because (a) we do not have a Constitution in written form and (b) therefore it has no amendments. If the defamation is inaccurate, be assured that doesn't help your case. And if it is accurate but has no bearing on your fitness to do your job, you may still be stuffed. There are many things wrong with the UK, but at least we have ways of dealing with the likes of Don Imus and Ann Coulter.
By executives and also by lawyers looking for libel or defamation. (IANAL but if I were Jobs and had it brought to my attention I'd certainly pay Carter-Ruck to send a nasty letter.) None of them seem to have noticed. If they had, they might just have had the wit to substitute Michael Dell for Jobs (Dell is a recognised brand in the UK), which would have been more accurate. Conclusion: BBC execs and lawyers don't actually know who Jobs is or what he is doing. Nor does Enfield or his scriptwriters. I bet you they know who Rupert Murdoch is. Or Richard Branson.
There was an extremely feeble sketch on a supposedly humorous BBC program last Friday (I won't dignify it by naming it) which purported to be Steve Jobs meeting Bill Gates. While their wives are removed by studs for extra-curricular activities, Jobs works Steve up to orgasm by describing the hardware of the next Mac.
Whoever at the BBC approved it obviously hasn't got a clue about what Jobs and Apple are about (or, probably, Gates). Wildly extrapolating, if a media company like the BBC seems to have few people who know what Apple is about nowadays, how far does the blindness extend? Right up until Jobs and Branson jointly attend the funeral of the conventional media industry, I guess.
When I read the headline I thought it meant that they had reproduced the first level programming as a flow chart using Post-it notes. Modern programmers won't remember this, but once upon a time you diagrammed the program logic before coding, rather than coding first and then using tools to produce the diagrams. Post-it note programming isn't a bad idea. You can create all the major code points on post-its, then join them up on a board, then rearrange the sequences for optimisation.
I just made myself feel so old, I need to go and chip a hand axe out of flint and kill myself.
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The implications for all this are interesting. Does Microsoft really want European software slowly to drift away from its link to the US? Because they are exposing more and more to European legislators that, in effect, they want to enforce a charge on European businesses based on US law that is not applicable in the EU. They already have done themselves no favours with the Competition Commission. Given that the Open Document format is now an international standard, the EU is quite free to use free software to implement it while the US might end up having to pay a Microsoft tax. That is an interesting possibility.
Many years ago at a seminar on patent and trademark law, I asked the lawyer who was acting as convenor what, in his view, the position would be if a manufacturer attempted to claim that only their patented technology was able to create an instance of something complying with an international standard which was embodied in European harmonisation. To which his reply was "You're just being a smartass." It looks like there could yet be a test case.
There is of course not just one Greek text and any modern edition of the NT has many comments and comparisons - I have two editions and they differ in many places as to which version to choose. But compared to the Dead Sea Scrolls or the later fragments that exist of the Testaments, the NT is remarkably homogeneous. As you would expect from people for whom the exact words are sacred. In arche estin ho Logos!
The European Mitsubishi Colt gets about the same real world MPG as the Prius. It has a 94BHP 3-cylinder advanced turbodiesel engine with no batteries to lug about, a Tiptronic gearbox, conventional steel construction and still gets 121g CO2 per mile. The dust to dust cost is far lower than a Prius because (a) steel needs less energy to make than aluminum and (b) it only needs a small lead acid starter battery. And it will cruise all day at 90+mph where legal.
The Prius is largely the consequence of the strange meteorology of Los Angeles, the Californian approach to emission control, and the Japanese coming late to advanced Diesel development.
The disproportion between these responses and the reality of what happens every day to children in Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, China, various bits of the former Soviet Union, Burma...some US inner city areas...the list is almost endless...is just stunning.
I have news for you. As far as anyone knows, the human race hasn't evolved significantly since _we_ were the subject of predation. I rather think that even small children are actually quite well equipped, for the most part, to deal with a bit of irrational fear and panic. But some of the posters on this thread need to be battered over the head with the Diaries of Anne Frank until a clue makes inroads.
Meanwhile, in the UK, some riding schools have apparently closed down because of parents getting their children to join in the hope they will fall off a horse and the school can be sued. So no, this is not an anti-US rant. It's probably an anti-lawyer rant in disguise.
The difference is that most nutty Protestant sects do not become as large and rich as the Church of Scientology, and they also have to keep some sort of attachment to a nominally Christian approach. They also have the problem that their followers do tend to be socially mobile - the fact of going to Church shows they want to "better" themselves - and with social mobility comes exposure to more educated people who may guide them towards mainstream Christianity. Scientology, on the other hand, is not a bizarre offshoot of a mainstream religion and there is no central tendency for its followers to gravitate back to.
There is too with cults an interesting anti-intellectual tendency. If you want to make authoritative pronouncements in, say, the Catholic or Episcopalian churches, you are probably fluent in NT Greek and can read the NT in the original. Cults contain less educated people, so they will do things like take a particular English translation of the Bible as being authoritative and solve the problem that way. Extreme cults can get a following from rich people who do not want to invest the time and effort needed to become familiar with, say, the Bible or the Pali texts. You can join something like - oh, say Kabbalah - and say pretty well anything in public without looking ridiculous, while a Hollywood actor who tries to sound knowledgeable about the Bible had better know his or her stuff because there are so many well informed people listening. A religion that does not let its sacred texts get out too much is at an advantage in this respect.
As a part time student of religious sociology, it's a pity I won't be around in 50 years to see if Scientology, like Mormonism before it, is evolving into a mainstream religion and gradually losing its bizarre baggage.
I had a case at work of just this a few weeks back. I had written a technical appraisal which would need to go to professional services people. I asked another staffer to look it over for readability and avoidance of engineering jargon. The result was that a number of technical terms went - which was good - but the rewrite introduced actual factual errors as a result, as well as a number of terms that were actually jargon of my colleague's speciality, but which he did not recognise as such. My mistake, but qualified technical writers are very hard to come by in our field.
I do use Wikipedia from time to time, but with great caution. Often I see errors I would like to fix. But I will not do so because I am not actually an expert in the field and I therefore think it would be wrong to risk fixing one error but perhaps introducing new ones.
However, not having the background - you simply quoted Wikipedia to correct me, adding on a meaningless line "It is debatable if well-rounded means comprehensive or just general as opposed to specific." What was the point? You did not explain my mistake, you simply presented Wikipedia as if it was a fait accompli. That's how too many students nowadays work; they just regurgitate "facts" read on the Internet without understanding or analysis.
The Wikipedia article, in fact, looks as if it was cobbled together by somebody, certainly not produced by someone with a deep knowledge of the development of ideas of proper upbringing, how these changed during and after the Renaissance, and how the project reached its apogee in the Enlightenment and the Encyclopédie.
Whatever the faults of the Encyclopédie, Britannica and Americana, the principle that articles were written by the most authoritative experts of the day and then edited by people who understood presentation was a good one.
The problem with Wikipedia and science seems to go deeper than that it is too technical (not pedantic as the writer suggests, but too technical.) I have come across several articles where the commonest meaning of the term under discussion is not even mentioned because the author thinks that a term from his (I am betting it is almost invariably a his, that isn't a failure to be inclusive) discipline is the only or original meaning of that term. That's because it is nowadays so easy to get a degree in science without any kind of general education. It is that production of overly narrowly focussed graduates that I think is the problem for Wikipedia.
Advertising my own university, Cambridge still insists on a fairly general foundation science course. This does not seem to disadvantage its graduates. Unfortunately corporatism doesn't want good generalists because they might threaten the scientifically ignorant business graduates that run companies. They want Taylorised science and engineering graduates who fit into a neat little hole. The outcome is sufficiently obvious, and the results can be seen in Wikipedia.
Fortunately reclaim takes a relatively short time (10-40 years) compared to dealing with nuclear waste products.
Of course, if China had to meet Western environmental standards for their coal stations, the economic miracle would be suffering a hefty dose of atheism by now.
Operating costs of power plants vary, with large coal fuelled plants usually the cheapest and small gas powered plants the most expensive. So you run the baseload on coal and nuclear and switch in the more expensive plants as you need them. In the US in summer highest demand is during the day,so everything gets switched in and the rate is higher. At night you can run on baseload and the cost is lower. There is a lot more to it than that including the effects of energy dealing, but basically that's why solar power makes sense in Ca and Az - you need your power when the sun is shining. In N Europe where our demand is more balanced and the sun is at a lower angle, wind and wave make more sense because they run 24 hours per day (somewhere)
BTW the jerk CEO managed to lose the Director of R&D, two other senior VPs, and the technological lead over the main competitor, before leaving after less than 2 years. My mistake was trying to explain to him why US designs could not be sold in the European market.
There is a TV program on in the UK at the moment called "The apprentice". You won't want to know the details except that it's like every other wannabe famous program, but the Simon Cowell role is played by someone called Alan Sugar. One thing the BBC doesn't tell you is that while it is true that Sugar once ran a (slightly downmarket) tech company, it went up and then as spectacularly down, and his present prosperity is based on his property development company. The BBC is promoting the idea that you have to be like that to be a successful businessman, but it is a moronic distortion of the truth.
Only, being naive and not realising this was just challenge #101, I left, joined a small company which just grew and grew, then left after a difference of opinion with the CEO, then joined a startup which just grew and grew. Interestingly, our CEO is able to motivate people without a single swearword.
It's nice for Microsoft that it is so big and all, but (as Scott Adams notes somewhere, I think) all the really smart people prefer to live in Switzerland as compared to the US, i.e. to live somewhere where even politics is truly local and individualism is valued versus somewhere where the driving forces in society are completely out of your control and individualism is just having a different alignment of ballpoints in the pocket protector.
It must have been really exciting and creative to work for Microsoft - once. Perhaps some of the pent up anger in the founders, if it is reported accurately, is simply because, even for them, it's no fun anymore.
This is not at all to suggest that all or a majority of their teachers are bad - Heaven knows we still have enough bad ones in this country too - just that it seems to be a well established problem of the English speaking countries. As is the syndrome of trying to shoot the messenger.
Here we don't have big slush funds. (The Govt. can endlessly waste public money on hopeless IT projects, but that's different.) So University lecturers, especially ones from not terribly good universities (have you ever been to Norwich? Don't.), have to try and invent other ways to get funding. Since the Govt. is obsessed with finding terrorists before they manage to get the gunpowder under Parliament again, one way to get funding for a visual recognition project is to suggest it can be used for lipreading terrorists in shopping centres. Of course it won't work, but hopefully by then the guy will have written a few papers and moved a bit up the academic pecking order. And good luck to him. British Government policy with universities basically involves being nice to Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and UCL and stuff the rest. (No, I'm not bitter. My family has degress from 3 of the 4. But I do recognise that it's not a good or fair system)
your post-visit care presumably involved being placed in a wooden box and having your relatives say nice things about you.
If true it is extremely interesting (use as a precursor). You (future generations) are going to need ways of making things when even the coal runs out. However, given the toxicity problems of coal gas, it's hard to see why we would want to go back to using it as a fuel, unless the solar converter does not generate electricity as an intermediate step - which case it would make sense. Generate CO in the day, sotre excess, driver generator 24 hours. A way of generating timeshifted electricity with no need to move CO long distances make sense.
As a matter of fact I think Richard Dawkins is a complete prat, a leftover from the obsolete battles of the nineteenth century. I side with people like Jay Gould (RIP) and Robert Winston on all of this.
But I was writing about something special, the situation in the US where you have very backward, scientifically illiterate Protestant fundamentalists (who never seem to be able to read the Bible in the original, strangely) who have considerable power in Government and the media, and so scientists see themselves as being in conflict with them. Most US scientists do not work in institutions where they come into contact with modern religious thinkers, whereas they do watch television.
While on this somewhat off-topic explication, I'd like to add that I'm a fan of the Episcopalian Church, which to my mind is where the US ought to be. It's a tragedy that the Church of England is siding with the bonkers African bishops against the Episcopalians, instead of telling them to behave like civilised people or stop calling themselves Anglicans.
I'm sure I don't know as much about the history and sociology of religion as I ought to, but I don't think anything I have written would actually support the idea that I'm opposed to modern liberal Christianity.
As for my remarking on the view that fundamentalists can switch from one fundamentalism to another, this is a well known piece of religious sociology. Leaving Godwin and his law completely out of his, how about the studies that showed that in France and Italy post-WW2, Catholics moving to Communist areas frequently became Communists? There are various explanations that can be put forward, but one simple one is that people who become fundamentalists, or communists, or fascists, are people who are prone to accept the views put forward by authority figures rather than rebel against them. This isn't derogatory.
However, your first comment appears to be made in ignorance of the recent discovery that there is more to it than that and that a kind of quantum channeling - which I don't pretend to understand - increases the chance that the blue-excited state will last long enough for the second step to have a good chance of occurring. The operative word was clever, not quantum.
As for your third point, you misrepresent what I said. Let's assume that a "2Y" process exists and works better than the "BR" process. How would an organism evolve to use it? Evolution is not like engineering development, where the decision may be taken to expend large amounts of effort on something that may not work. An organism which starts to develop a pathway that can use a single yellow photon will have nothing useful to do with it unless this meets a specific need that improves its fitness. Somehow we have to assume that a double process would emerge in a single step, along with all the other modifications to biochemical pathways that would need to exist around it. This is exceedingly improbable. Evolution does not, in fact, present any obvious mechanism for saltation. Hence the interest in research which explains how cetacean evolution resulted in flukes that beat up and down - because the growing tail worked alongside swimming legs and had to work in the same direction.
The original form of photosynthesis resulted in a different metabolic pathway which used red or blue light and evolution took care of the rest
There were some conditions on the Earth at that time which meant that only red and blue light was available at the intensities required.
There are many possibilities why this might be so, including the nature of the media in which the first synthesising bacteria lived. I suspect the explanation when it is eventually found will be very interesting. However, it is by no means obvious that there is not a much simpler photosynthetic pathway using a single photon absorbtion, and it did not evolve simply because the conditions at the time - the predominant biochemistry of the bacteria and the wavelengths of light falling on them - were not suitable.
I don't buy into it because (a) these people aren't rational and (b) taking away their religion could make them worse - they could easily be converted into Stalinists or extreme nationalists. But I am sure that this, as well as the desire to get budget for exploration, is one of the factors in the search for life on Mars, and in SETI.
Finally, looking for water is not irrelevant. Any practical life form is going to need a solvent and carrier for the various chemicals it needs to get from place to place internally. Water is unique because its strong hydrogen bonding gives it a wide liquid temperature range. Other small molecules which are good solvents also tend to have very low boiling points, meaning that the range of reactions that can take place in them is much more limited. Water has very unusual properties, in fact, that make it more probable that life would evolve on a planet with lots of liquid water than, say, one covered in methane or liquid carbon dioxide.
Even wind power, which has been around in rotary form for over 1000 years, is proving slower to adopt than expected. Wind power is very conventional technology, but scaling up is quite hard and taking a lot more than 10 years.
So here we have a process based on a rareish isotope of boron, which will require major engineering developments just in the delivery and manufacturing system alone, along with a novel method of extracting power which has never been used on a commercial scale. A bit different from piling fuel rods and boiling water.
Being practical, let's say three new technologies to be industrially scaled along with the infrastructure, regulatory and planning issues and call it at least 50 years to real commercialisation. It's unsurprising, given the need for real energy output contribution by, say, 2030, that this is not likely to get much funding.
You are thinking of burlesque, which is much broader and coarser, in which something is exaggerated or misrepresented for comic effect. For instance, the alternative version of God Save the Queen that starts "God help our boring Queen" is burlesque.
However, your general point is just utterly and obviously wrong. Being inaccurate does not make anything funny, it just makes it irrelevant. There is indeed a form of comedy which consists of reversing everything (and which is presumably connected to the Saturnalia), of which an excellent example is the Onion's accounts clerk who writes about himself as if he was a black gang leader. It is a lot more than inaccuracy, it involves turning things completely upside down. In the case mentioned that would have to involve Gates and Jobs going off to find a few loose woman while their wives discussed operating systems. But otherwise, the principle of comedy is to present things as they are but with a twist. Mr. Bean is funny because he is an adult who not only behaves like a child but has all the worst stereotypical characteristics of the English. The French laugh at him because they recognise the English on holiday, not because he behaves in an un-English way.
Furthermore, I assume you are an American, because I expect, rightly or wrongly, that English people are more knowledgeable about humour, but also because you obviously think American law applies in the UK. It doesn't. The satirical programme "Have I got news for you" goes out a day late because it has to be carefully checked by lawyers. If (as was the case here) you name and identify a person on a programme and then publish defamatory content, you do not have any First Amendment rights because (a) we do not have a Constitution in written form and (b) therefore it has no amendments. If the defamation is inaccurate, be assured that doesn't help your case. And if it is accurate but has no bearing on your fitness to do your job, you may still be stuffed. There are many things wrong with the UK, but at least we have ways of dealing with the likes of Don Imus and Ann Coulter.
By executives and also by lawyers looking for libel or defamation. (IANAL but if I were Jobs and had it brought to my attention I'd certainly pay Carter-Ruck to send a nasty letter.) None of them seem to have noticed. If they had, they might just have had the wit to substitute Michael Dell for Jobs (Dell is a recognised brand in the UK), which would have been more accurate. Conclusion: BBC execs and lawyers don't actually know who Jobs is or what he is doing. Nor does Enfield or his scriptwriters. I bet you they know who Rupert Murdoch is. Or Richard Branson.
Whoever at the BBC approved it obviously hasn't got a clue about what Jobs and Apple are about (or, probably, Gates). Wildly extrapolating, if a media company like the BBC seems to have few people who know what Apple is about nowadays, how far does the blindness extend? Right up until Jobs and Branson jointly attend the funeral of the conventional media industry, I guess.
I just made myself feel so old, I need to go and chip a hand axe out of flint and kill myself.