And that is a fact (sorry for the caps.) Anybody who knows any history of science knows that the people who actually discovered, first that the Earth was much older than the Bible suggested, then how prehistory could be deduced from the fossil record, and finally how evolution could work - were mostly not just Christians, they were ordained members of the Anglican church. Because in the 19th Century, when all this happened, you had to be in Holy Orders to hold down an academic job at Oxford or Cambridge.
What the Kansas case shows is in fact a tragedy - that the standard of education of some ministers of religion has gone backwards in the US till in some cases it is probably as poor as that of Islamic fundamentalists. As Jay Gould has observed, the Roman Catholic church is now relatively progressive compared to many Protestant churches in the US.
I suspect the situation is just as bad in the UK, but fortunately (except in Northern Ireland) the Prot fundies don't have nearly as much influence.
At least now the Archbishop of Canterbury has pulled back from the brink of supporting the African fundamentalists in the Anglican church.
A particular problem in the US is that anybody, just anybody, can set up as a minister of religion. You can't set up as an electrician or a psychiatrist without proper qualifications, but you can tell people what to believe and how to live their lives on very little knowledge indeed. That's what you get when you have separation of Chuch and State.
Meanwhile, in the UK, the Government keeps talking about training a generation of educated English speaking imams, which sounds like an excellent recipe for a long term solution to Islamic extremism.
I know I'm going to be ignored or down moderated, but can you lot think for one microsecond beyond your obsession with being allowed to watch anything at all that you want on your computers? There *is* a wider society out there and, no, I am not necessarily "thinking of the children".
An issue that the US needs to address is that it has created a huge rod for its own back by providing vast outpourings of violent content. "24" is a good example. It is quite amazingly good propaganda for Islamic fundamentalists, because it portrays extreme violence as being appropriate in dealing with any perceived threat. How can you tell fundamentalists that beheading hostages is wrong when it is clearly behaviour approved of so long as it is by Americans? How can you persuade Iraqis that the US army doesn't spend its time torturing them when they can pass around professionally made videos showing that this is exactly how Americans behave when they want something? I am quite sure that Al-Queda recruiting and training camps spend more time showing their gullible trainees mainstream American material than their own videos because they can use it to "prove" that the US will go to any lengths at all to get what it wants.
I think there is a case to be made that game producers should be required to document their content. It should not be necessary for reviewers to sit through games. Somewhere there are surely storyboards, scripts, and a system map. It should be possible to identify content against an agreed set of criteria and to identify risk areas ("Players can create anatomically detailed avatars."
Please note this is not censorship. It merely applies the same level of disclosure to a game as applies to a book. Hiding extremely violent content in difficult to access levels of a game is not an excuse for not documenting content, even if that documentation is necessarily restricted in circulation
The producers of a film and the publishers of a book make the entire content readily available for assessment. This has not prevented the circulation of either. I cannot see why the same standard of disclosure should not apply to games. I suspect that an issue in the response here is that some of the younger/. readers get kicks out of doing something which they think is a closed book to the adult world. I have news for them. Games are produced by corporations: you are not doing something counter-cultural, you are doing something that is ultimately for the benefit of midle aged suits. In the same way there is nothing rebellious about teenagers drinking whisky; you are just doing what the drink marketing people are trying to persuade you to do through carefully judged advertising.
What part of 'This finding leads to a promising potential to build ultrafast high-density nonvolatile memory, up to 100 gigahertz or into the terahertz range" and a prototype could be demonstrated "in the next two to three years".' reminds me of the Monty Python comment in a spoof ad that "up to" includes zero?
When a paper is as full of weasel words as this one, reach for your Dilbert collection.
This is a growing problem. Far too many terms are being introduced with uncertain pronunciation, and the initiators really should provide phonetics. (It's interesting that even the NATO/ITU alphabet needs phonetic explanation because it uses words like "Charlie" and "Whiskey")
Apart from Linux (Linnux? Leenux? Lie-nux?) there are the old saws of schoolteachers - words like periodate, unionised, benzoyl - and even simple looking words like "kilometre" - kilo-metre or kilom-eter?
This actually provides a credible explanation for the Senator's proposal. Care about a few library users inconvenienced by school kids using social sites? Library users probably don't vote Republican. Care about library users with time on their hands contributing to a Democrat candidate's blog? Yes indeed, Sir.
It seems to me that the ISPs should make a reasonable offer to comply with the RIAA's request. They should jointly decline to release any records that have not been and cannot be properly validated, for whatever reason. They would also charge the RIAA on a per-record basis, based on the reasonable time taken by suitably skilled people to go through hard copy print-out from logs.
After all, this is what top of the range direct mail houses do to ensure that their clients do not send the same letter to the same household under two different names, or that the new Porsche brochure is addressed to the father and not the 15-year-old son, so an equal standard should obviously apply to cases where a lawsuit might be involved. They could reasonably argue that a judge in a court does not have access to the necessary technical skills to make a proper judgement on correct identification, so it would be improper to release data that could not be fairly assessed by a court.
Assuming one dollar per record, the ISPs could be entirely funded by the "music industry" in short order.
First "bull", then "your post is rambling", why do I suspect you are not actually a naval historian? The point I was trying to make is that history is not as simple as you suppose.
I checked Nelson's blockade - in Rodger's book, btw - and it turns out that the blockade was continuous for two years not three. The fact it went on for so long seems to be that St Vincent, as a master of the close blockade, was prepared to push the envelope. This suggests that the situation was not normal. Rodger says, carefully, that the squadron was based on an anchorage in the Maddalena Islands, and that the blockade was maintained without interruption for two years. He says that Nelson was continually at sea. Given the existence of the anchorage, however, this is a rather different position from a Mars mission where there is no anchorage - the mission cannot be diverted or park in space - and there is no possibility of resupply.
If you had anything to back up your statements, why post as A/C?
I have the impression that you don't actually know anything about the reality of sailing ships, if you think that Nelson was continuously at sea for three years before Trafalgar. Hints - whaling ships, which did make long voyages without touching, did not have to support a complement of guns, gunners and crew sufficient to operate sail even under combat conditions. Blockades were conducted by flotilla or even fleets. And, BTW, sail power is actually not that unpredictable in the Atlantic.
I suggest you try visiting a few of the ports than have been blockaded, from the sea, consider the state of land communications at the time, (often almost nonexistent) and consider how with, a naval blockade a town would get in sufficient artillery munitions. A little practical experience will quickly show you that under 18th century conditions, things were not nearly as simple as you think.
Read N A M Roper, the leading historian of the Royal Navy. Rum, sodomy and the lash basically arrived when the Navy ceased to be run by professionals and was taken over by the aristocracy (who saw the opportunities for prize money for younger sons.) The aristocracy tried to run the Navy like the Army. The old all-professional Navy wasn't particularly averse to women on board, but disliked homosexuality because it might complicate working relationships, which had to stay good for people to stay alive. Given the relatively short voyages of those days, the opportunities for nookie were many. Even when blockading towns - perhaps especially when blockading towns - there were plenty of ladies of negotiable affection (or even laundrywomen) who were prepared to risk themselves in small boats for pecuniary advantage.
Very arguably indeed. The Economist has hijacked its title - it exists purely to promote a particular free market economics, and therefore you cannot expect any kind of reasoned debate on its pages. It's about as independent and academically respectable as the "Cato Foundation". It's likely that, taking the world as a whole, the majority of economists do not accept the baseline belief of "The Economist".
The website emphasises that the machine is remote and that it interfaces via a standard API. How are they going to demonstrate that it is the quantum computer doing the calculation and not a standard digital computer? (And, if the demo is for real, I hope they have figured this out.)
The problem is, it is a black box. You could hide all the real logic in the interface, you could even be connected to a different box entirely. It is hard to see how this demo proves that anything works.
It reminds me of a 1930s example of a "perpetual motion" IC engine that ran on water. The con-man showed it running in an hotel room in Chicago, connected to the hotel water faucet. The trick, of course, was that he knew enough about the hotel to know that the water faucet was fed via a vertical pipe from the basement pump, and that he could safely pump a certain amount of kerosene into the pipe backwards since it floated on water. The engine was running on the kerosene.
Now that lobbying is going to be regulated, the parties have to make money somehow. Buy shares in HDD manufacturers and network hardware providers and then regulate to send their sales through the roof - profit!
Apart from the fact that the US has the truly wonderful NIH (all you "Libertarian" opponents of state funded medicine out there really need to find out what the NIH does for you, and then think very hard), most European countries have state healthcare systems which have incentives to save money. The fallacy in your argument is that State systems do not want or need to make a profit, whereas they do want to reduce the cost of treatment. They have the simple option of paying for clinical trials knowing that later on they can simply pay a pharmaceutical company to make the drug - and if the likes of GSK or Merck decline, they can go to India or Brazil. Which the Western drug companies would just enjoy so much.
It's as if, after he was silenced by the Inquisition, the Medicis held an investigation. "So, Signore Galilei, you were improperly induced by the Inquisition to suppress the information that the Earth rotates around the Sun? Thus potentially allowing non-Catholic countries to gain important advances in science and technology while Catholic countries were held back?"
A genuinely free-market Republican administration would surely want the truth about climate change to be readily available so that the markets could respond appropriately and make capital and resources available for the inevitable re-shaping of society, rather than be associated by similarity of behaviour with the guys in funny skirts who inadvertently helped the Protestants take over the world.
The letter (and some of the resulting comments) remind me that there are dim lawyers, smart lawyers, and truly smart lawyers. Linden Labs can obviously afford truly smart lawyers.
Remember, a lawyer is paid to advise you on your legal interests. A merely smart lawyer knows what plays well in court. A truly smart lawyer knows that public opinion is also a court, and that the best interests of the client involve playing well there as well. The RIAA merely has smart lawyers; they are trying to spread compliance through fear but generate reams of bad press in the process. At the other end of the scale, I once heard of a case in which another US industry body was trying to prevent a foreign firm gaining a foothold by bending a number of rules. A truly smart firm of lawyers reviewed the evidence and sent out a single letter (which I have seen) which caused the sudden collapse of the opposition. It spelled out the evidence, the laws they believed had been broken, the action they could take, and the resulting publicity. My belief is that where there is a real case, this is usually what happens.
You forget (or just work for Microsoft.) How old are these kids? Let's assume the average is about 13. That means by the time they emerge into the world of work Office - assuming it still exists in that form, which is not a given - will be on Office 2012. If they were using Office in school, they would presumably not be on the latest release, so let's say they might be using Office 2008 or 2009 (and many schools will doubtless be still on 2007). So, they will have a learning curve.
Now, how much steeper is the learning curve from, say, Office 2009 to Office 2012 compared to OOo 4 (or whatever) to Office 2012? Probably not much. They will have learnt to do the same things - write badly formatted over-decorated documents that disobey the rules of typography (check), produce badly designed spreadsheets on which inputs and outputs are confused, with pointless background colors (check), produce content-free presentations that send people to sleep (check) and possibly learn to use a database front end that makes it hard to use the power of SQL while making it quite difficult to do clever queries (check). They are just going to heave to learn a new menuing interface. And that, compared to the general steepness of the school to work transition, is peanuts.
Responding to your sig, it's not that people are particularly stupid, it's that the world is getting more complicated faster than most people can keep up. Also technology is getting democratised. "Audiophilia" that you mention arises because the scientifically illiterate want to seem more capable and knowledgeable around audio equipment than they actually are, and there are more people than before who can afford this stuff. Once upon a time the average middle class joe could afford one hobby, so he became pretty knowledgeable about audio or photography or golf or malt whiskey or whatever it was. Now he can afford the equipment for just about everything but he does not have the brain power to learn them all in depth.
It's noticeable that the tossers who ten years or so ago believed that buying a Leica or a Contax would suddenly make them great photographers (but not, somehow, learning to print which is hard work) now get together and boast about their megapixel count, monitor size and Photoshop add ons, but the pictures are still crap. Understanding CCDs is about as difficult as understanding the different grain types of different halide films, and they haven't the interest to do that. When I realised I was never going to be a great photographer I bought myself a small, simple, and so far very reliable Pentax digital and stopped worrying. I find that ceasing to worry about CCD behaviour (I did a lot of work on CCD imaging some years ago) doesn't make my photos any worse. A bit of colour balance, a bit of saturation control, a bit of scaling and getting the right DPI for the printer - all the average person really needs.
Which should have either been ignored or moderated Troll - it was intended as a slightly provocative joke - some Scot obviously has no sense of humor.
The current British PM is a Scot. The current Home Secretary is a Scot. The next Prime Minister will most likely be a Scot. The Home Office is admittedly in chaos; we have severe prison overcrowding. The head of the Youth Offending division has just resigned and given an interview in which he complained of the criminalisation of the behaviour of young people and the drawing of excessive numbers of them into the criminal justice system, with no signs whatever that this was reducing crime or reforming the convicted. This guy is no bleeding heart liberal; he is the former head of the Probation Service with an excellent track record. Because he opposed the Government lock-them-up policy, he was told he had to re-apply for his own job. The present Government is attracting the opposition of the judges because it keeps passing new laws to create new crimes, regardless of whether existing ones are being applied. Of course a mess of new laws lengthens trials, increases the number of appeals, increases the cost of justice and creates confusion in the police, who are expected to understand them all, completely and immediately they are passed. My side swipe about Scots passing excessive legislation in England was based on a serious point about Government attitudes and policy.
When it was clear that the Government had lied over Iraq, I formally resigned my membership of the Labour Party. I learnt last week that a former leading party activist in our area - who had asked me not to leave - has now resigned in disgust.
Personally, as a very English - Home Counties, Cambridge graduate, working in IT - person, I feel I usually have far more in common with English people of Indian and West Indian extraction than the Scots, and I don't just mean cricket. Their whole cultural and philosophical tradition I find quite alien, more so than, say, the Dutch and the North Germans (and yes, I have read Hume as well as Trainspotting. But I do make an exception for that great genius Macaulay). Now that there is a separate Scottish parliament, there is a perfectly legitimate question to be asked as to why the Scots are allowed to legislate on social laws, education etc., when England cannot legislate for Scotland. Consider the hypocrisy of Scottish MPs who voted for university tuition fees in England while their fellow party members voted against them in Scotland. If it's flamebait to refer to this, then the level of what is allowed in political debate has sunk very low indeed.
Actually, the only disadvantage was that the assassin was not hugely competent. Carrying a gun attracts attention in the UK. The quantity of polonium was absolutely minute, and so long as it was inside at least a paper or plastic bag there would be no emitted radiation. You could carry around enough Po to kill a lot of people and it would be almost totally undetectable.
When you give it to somebody, it obligingly hides in the body so by the time it is identified, it's far too late to do anything. It is nearly a perfect poison.
The assassin seems not to have taken precautions to stop it spreading. Think about it. If it is intended to send a warning, why do something (spread radiation round London) that causes vast expense and will seriously annoy the UK Government? And if you want to try and put the blame of the Russian government, why do it in a way that causes people to say "Surely the real Russian security services are more competent than that?"
If Putin wanted to scare the oligarchs out of the UK - which would be understandable, especially if he's current shorting Foxtons, since his schtick is "You stole my country, I want it back" - demonstrating the ability to kill them anywhere without the slightest trace would be far more effective than leaving a trail everywhere.
Many of the places that have summer all year round have very high crime rates. I think there is a truth hiding here. In cold countries people tend to be more repressed and the legal system is less needed. In hot countries they are much less repressed and the laws become more repressive to try and keep things under control.
Also in cold climates people spend more time indoors thinking about things. In hot climates you need a big enough GNP to afford air conditioning.
This may or may not explain why England is often (as it is currently) ruled by the Scots, and when they get down South to London they spend all their time passing laws against English behaviour.
About the people who keep posting "The sun goes through dimmer cycles! So it can't be we are causing the global warming!"
Let's try this one. I have the fire going in the house. The weather gets warmer. My wife asks why I have the fire going. I say "The heat is nothing to do with the fire, it's caused by the weather getting warmer. There's nothing I can do about it"
Why is it so hard for these people to understand the idea that several factors can contribute to the same phenomenon, and if we don't want it to happen we should ameliorate the factors we can affect, not bitch about the ones we can't?
They surely can't ALL be PR flacks for Exxon posting?
Any very large real diamond will have flaws in its crystal structure which will cause it to shatter if hit in the right way. (The idea that you can hit a small diamond with a sledgehammer and it will bounce off is pure fantasy.) Oak is a truly remarkable composite material which, like all successful composites, has harder materials (quartz for instance) and soft materials in the matrix. It is a very strong material for its weight and can absorb large amounts of energy, both in bending and impact. Looking for a bedplate material recently for a heavy vibrating system, I couldn't find anything better, in terms of performance and price, than European oak supported by steel beams. If I had been able to replace the oak beams with diamond, I rather think the vibration would shatter it along the fault planes in no time.
On the other hand, if you know a way to make cheap diamonds a metre long by 10cm square as one perfect crystal, at a price under $100, I'd like to be your European sales agent.
I don't know about your wind levels, but have you considered using a windmill to drive the pool pump? This is far simpler and more efficient than using anything to generate electricity and then using electricity to drive a motor, and inherently more reliable. You do need a positive displacement pump so it will work at any wind speed enough to turn the vanes.
This is far from an impracticable technology. In the days of wooden ships, the Dutch used to buy English ships that had become waterlogged (yes, they do...) fit them with windmill pumps and continue to use them, just letting the wind keep the bilge dry.
To be really clever, if you manage to set up a windmill pumping system, run it in parallel to the electric pump with a simple rotation sensor (two microswitches and a simple cam on the shaft, linked to a timer circuit) so that when the wind stops, the electric pump starts.
A data driven application is surely one in which the content of data streams drives activity. An example is a real-time monitoring application in which the current state of incoming data and historical data gets fed into a rule engine, and events get triggered based on this combination of the system state and the history. A more detailed example might be an engine management system which looks at current operating conditions, load demand, and the history of vibration patterns, exhaust temperatures, fuel flow rates etc. under similar demand conditions in the past. A change in the data (vibration trending upwards, exhaust or combustion temperature changes trending either way) could result in a variety of events ranging from an alarm to a modification to the operating envelope. Note that there is no specific identifiable external event that results in a trigger.
Most programs are driven by user input. For instance, an accounting program does not create an invoice because of the contents of a data package; it creates an invoice because a human being carries out a sequence of input events called "raising an invoice." (For web based businesses, the process is initiated by a buyer clicking on an event button.)
Not that I am saying this distinction is being made here. But "Data driven application" can be a useful term - especially if (like me) you develop data driven applications and have to explain to people that the competition's application is purely event driven.
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What the Kansas case shows is in fact a tragedy - that the standard of education of some ministers of religion has gone backwards in the US till in some cases it is probably as poor as that of Islamic fundamentalists. As Jay Gould has observed, the Roman Catholic church is now relatively progressive compared to many Protestant churches in the US.
I suspect the situation is just as bad in the UK, but fortunately (except in Northern Ireland) the Prot fundies don't have nearly as much influence.
At least now the Archbishop of Canterbury has pulled back from the brink of supporting the African fundamentalists in the Anglican church.
A particular problem in the US is that anybody, just anybody, can set up as a minister of religion. You can't set up as an electrician or a psychiatrist without proper qualifications, but you can tell people what to believe and how to live their lives on very little knowledge indeed. That's what you get when you have separation of Chuch and State.
Meanwhile, in the UK, the Government keeps talking about training a generation of educated English speaking imams, which sounds like an excellent recipe for a long term solution to Islamic extremism.
An issue that the US needs to address is that it has created a huge rod for its own back by providing vast outpourings of violent content. "24" is a good example. It is quite amazingly good propaganda for Islamic fundamentalists, because it portrays extreme violence as being appropriate in dealing with any perceived threat. How can you tell fundamentalists that beheading hostages is wrong when it is clearly behaviour approved of so long as it is by Americans? How can you persuade Iraqis that the US army doesn't spend its time torturing them when they can pass around professionally made videos showing that this is exactly how Americans behave when they want something? I am quite sure that Al-Queda recruiting and training camps spend more time showing their gullible trainees mainstream American material than their own videos because they can use it to "prove" that the US will go to any lengths at all to get what it wants.
I think there is a case to be made that game producers should be required to document their content. It should not be necessary for reviewers to sit through games. Somewhere there are surely storyboards, scripts, and a system map. It should be possible to identify content against an agreed set of criteria and to identify risk areas ("Players can create anatomically detailed avatars."
Please note this is not censorship. It merely applies the same level of disclosure to a game as applies to a book. Hiding extremely violent content in difficult to access levels of a game is not an excuse for not documenting content, even if that documentation is necessarily restricted in circulation
The producers of a film and the publishers of a book make the entire content readily available for assessment. This has not prevented the circulation of either. I cannot see why the same standard of disclosure should not apply to games. I suspect that an issue in the response here is that some of the younger /. readers get kicks out of doing something which they think is a closed book to the adult world. I have news for them. Games are produced by corporations: you are not doing something counter-cultural, you are doing something that is ultimately for the benefit of midle aged suits. In the same way there is nothing rebellious about teenagers drinking whisky; you are just doing what the drink marketing people are trying to persuade you to do through carefully judged advertising.
When a paper is as full of weasel words as this one, reach for your Dilbert collection.
Apart from Linux (Linnux? Leenux? Lie-nux?) there are the old saws of schoolteachers - words like periodate, unionised, benzoyl - and even simple looking words like "kilometre" - kilo-metre or kilom-eter?
This actually provides a credible explanation for the Senator's proposal. Care about a few library users inconvenienced by school kids using social sites? Library users probably don't vote Republican. Care about library users with time on their hands contributing to a Democrat candidate's blog? Yes indeed, Sir.
After all, this is what top of the range direct mail houses do to ensure that their clients do not send the same letter to the same household under two different names, or that the new Porsche brochure is addressed to the father and not the 15-year-old son, so an equal standard should obviously apply to cases where a lawsuit might be involved. They could reasonably argue that a judge in a court does not have access to the necessary technical skills to make a proper judgement on correct identification, so it would be improper to release data that could not be fairly assessed by a court.
Assuming one dollar per record, the ISPs could be entirely funded by the "music industry" in short order.
I checked Nelson's blockade - in Rodger's book, btw - and it turns out that the blockade was continuous for two years not three. The fact it went on for so long seems to be that St Vincent, as a master of the close blockade, was prepared to push the envelope. This suggests that the situation was not normal. Rodger says, carefully, that the squadron was based on an anchorage in the Maddalena Islands, and that the blockade was maintained without interruption for two years. He says that Nelson was continually at sea. Given the existence of the anchorage, however, this is a rather different position from a Mars mission where there is no anchorage - the mission cannot be diverted or park in space - and there is no possibility of resupply.
I have the impression that you don't actually know anything about the reality of sailing ships, if you think that Nelson was continuously at sea for three years before Trafalgar. Hints - whaling ships, which did make long voyages without touching, did not have to support a complement of guns, gunners and crew sufficient to operate sail even under combat conditions. Blockades were conducted by flotilla or even fleets. And, BTW, sail power is actually not that unpredictable in the Atlantic.
I suggest you try visiting a few of the ports than have been blockaded, from the sea, consider the state of land communications at the time, (often almost nonexistent) and consider how with, a naval blockade a town would get in sufficient artillery munitions. A little practical experience will quickly show you that under 18th century conditions, things were not nearly as simple as you think.
Of course it is, and I have the hardback on my shelf. An idiot typo, at least you were polite in correcting it.
If Churchill ever said that, he was joking.
Very arguably indeed. The Economist has hijacked its title - it exists purely to promote a particular free market economics, and therefore you cannot expect any kind of reasoned debate on its pages. It's about as independent and academically respectable as the "Cato Foundation". It's likely that, taking the world as a whole, the majority of economists do not accept the baseline belief of "The Economist".
The problem is, it is a black box. You could hide all the real logic in the interface, you could even be connected to a different box entirely. It is hard to see how this demo proves that anything works.
It reminds me of a 1930s example of a "perpetual motion" IC engine that ran on water. The con-man showed it running in an hotel room in Chicago, connected to the hotel water faucet. The trick, of course, was that he knew enough about the hotel to know that the water faucet was fed via a vertical pipe from the basement pump, and that he could safely pump a certain amount of kerosene into the pipe backwards since it floated on water. The engine was running on the kerosene.
Now that lobbying is going to be regulated, the parties have to make money somehow. Buy shares in HDD manufacturers and network hardware providers and then regulate to send their sales through the roof - profit!
Apart from the fact that the US has the truly wonderful NIH (all you "Libertarian" opponents of state funded medicine out there really need to find out what the NIH does for you, and then think very hard), most European countries have state healthcare systems which have incentives to save money. The fallacy in your argument is that State systems do not want or need to make a profit, whereas they do want to reduce the cost of treatment. They have the simple option of paying for clinical trials knowing that later on they can simply pay a pharmaceutical company to make the drug - and if the likes of GSK or Merck decline, they can go to India or Brazil. Which the Western drug companies would just enjoy so much.
A genuinely free-market Republican administration would surely want the truth about climate change to be readily available so that the markets could respond appropriately and make capital and resources available for the inevitable re-shaping of society, rather than be associated by similarity of behaviour with the guys in funny skirts who inadvertently helped the Protestants take over the world.
Remember, a lawyer is paid to advise you on your legal interests. A merely smart lawyer knows what plays well in court. A truly smart lawyer knows that public opinion is also a court, and that the best interests of the client involve playing well there as well. The RIAA merely has smart lawyers; they are trying to spread compliance through fear but generate reams of bad press in the process. At the other end of the scale, I once heard of a case in which another US industry body was trying to prevent a foreign firm gaining a foothold by bending a number of rules. A truly smart firm of lawyers reviewed the evidence and sent out a single letter (which I have seen) which caused the sudden collapse of the opposition. It spelled out the evidence, the laws they believed had been broken, the action they could take, and the resulting publicity. My belief is that where there is a real case, this is usually what happens.
Now, how much steeper is the learning curve from, say, Office 2009 to Office 2012 compared to OOo 4 (or whatever) to Office 2012? Probably not much. They will have learnt to do the same things - write badly formatted over-decorated documents that disobey the rules of typography (check), produce badly designed spreadsheets on which inputs and outputs are confused, with pointless background colors (check), produce content-free presentations that send people to sleep (check) and possibly learn to use a database front end that makes it hard to use the power of SQL while making it quite difficult to do clever queries (check). They are just going to heave to learn a new menuing interface. And that, compared to the general steepness of the school to work transition, is peanuts.
It's noticeable that the tossers who ten years or so ago believed that buying a Leica or a Contax would suddenly make them great photographers (but not, somehow, learning to print which is hard work) now get together and boast about their megapixel count, monitor size and Photoshop add ons, but the pictures are still crap. Understanding CCDs is about as difficult as understanding the different grain types of different halide films, and they haven't the interest to do that. When I realised I was never going to be a great photographer I bought myself a small, simple, and so far very reliable Pentax digital and stopped worrying. I find that ceasing to worry about CCD behaviour (I did a lot of work on CCD imaging some years ago) doesn't make my photos any worse. A bit of colour balance, a bit of saturation control, a bit of scaling and getting the right DPI for the printer - all the average person really needs.
The current British PM is a Scot. The current Home Secretary is a Scot. The next Prime Minister will most likely be a Scot. The Home Office is admittedly in chaos; we have severe prison overcrowding. The head of the Youth Offending division has just resigned and given an interview in which he complained of the criminalisation of the behaviour of young people and the drawing of excessive numbers of them into the criminal justice system, with no signs whatever that this was reducing crime or reforming the convicted. This guy is no bleeding heart liberal; he is the former head of the Probation Service with an excellent track record. Because he opposed the Government lock-them-up policy, he was told he had to re-apply for his own job. The present Government is attracting the opposition of the judges because it keeps passing new laws to create new crimes, regardless of whether existing ones are being applied. Of course a mess of new laws lengthens trials, increases the number of appeals, increases the cost of justice and creates confusion in the police, who are expected to understand them all, completely and immediately they are passed. My side swipe about Scots passing excessive legislation in England was based on a serious point about Government attitudes and policy.
When it was clear that the Government had lied over Iraq, I formally resigned my membership of the Labour Party. I learnt last week that a former leading party activist in our area - who had asked me not to leave - has now resigned in disgust.
Personally, as a very English - Home Counties, Cambridge graduate, working in IT - person, I feel I usually have far more in common with English people of Indian and West Indian extraction than the Scots, and I don't just mean cricket. Their whole cultural and philosophical tradition I find quite alien, more so than, say, the Dutch and the North Germans (and yes, I have read Hume as well as Trainspotting. But I do make an exception for that great genius Macaulay). Now that there is a separate Scottish parliament, there is a perfectly legitimate question to be asked as to why the Scots are allowed to legislate on social laws, education etc., when England cannot legislate for Scotland. Consider the hypocrisy of Scottish MPs who voted for university tuition fees in England while their fellow party members voted against them in Scotland. If it's flamebait to refer to this, then the level of what is allowed in political debate has sunk very low indeed.
When you give it to somebody, it obligingly hides in the body so by the time it is identified, it's far too late to do anything. It is nearly a perfect poison.
The assassin seems not to have taken precautions to stop it spreading. Think about it. If it is intended to send a warning, why do something (spread radiation round London) that causes vast expense and will seriously annoy the UK Government? And if you want to try and put the blame of the Russian government, why do it in a way that causes people to say "Surely the real Russian security services are more competent than that?"
If Putin wanted to scare the oligarchs out of the UK - which would be understandable, especially if he's current shorting Foxtons, since his schtick is "You stole my country, I want it back" - demonstrating the ability to kill them anywhere without the slightest trace would be far more effective than leaving a trail everywhere.
Also in cold climates people spend more time indoors thinking about things. In hot climates you need a big enough GNP to afford air conditioning.
This may or may not explain why England is often (as it is currently) ruled by the Scots, and when they get down South to London they spend all their time passing laws against English behaviour.
Let's try this one. I have the fire going in the house. The weather gets warmer. My wife asks why I have the fire going. I say "The heat is nothing to do with the fire, it's caused by the weather getting warmer. There's nothing I can do about it"
Why is it so hard for these people to understand the idea that several factors can contribute to the same phenomenon, and if we don't want it to happen we should ameliorate the factors we can affect, not bitch about the ones we can't?
They surely can't ALL be PR flacks for Exxon posting?
On the other hand, if you know a way to make cheap diamonds a metre long by 10cm square as one perfect crystal, at a price under $100, I'd like to be your European sales agent.
This is far from an impracticable technology. In the days of wooden ships, the Dutch used to buy English ships that had become waterlogged (yes, they do...) fit them with windmill pumps and continue to use them, just letting the wind keep the bilge dry.
To be really clever, if you manage to set up a windmill pumping system, run it in parallel to the electric pump with a simple rotation sensor (two microswitches and a simple cam on the shaft, linked to a timer circuit) so that when the wind stops, the electric pump starts.
Most programs are driven by user input. For instance, an accounting program does not create an invoice because of the contents of a data package; it creates an invoice because a human being carries out a sequence of input events called "raising an invoice." (For web based businesses, the process is initiated by a buyer clicking on an event button.)
Not that I am saying this distinction is being made here. But "Data driven application" can be a useful term - especially if (like me) you develop data driven applications and have to explain to people that the competition's application is purely event driven.