no way? I don't believe it!;-) come on, you knew I was being ironic, didn't you?
In case you're interested: Scotland Yard might have been named as such because the kings of Scotland had their ambassador's residence in the area. But then again, maybe some property developer called the area Scotland Yard because he thought it sounded cool or it would impress people. A lot of streets in London, UK are named for that very deep reason too.
I agree. I am not sure how it works. I think though you might find they agree certain prices for certain markets and they don't like it when items get moved between markets.
When I was in India I noticed that the computer bookshops had local imprints of O'Reilly books for a fraction of the price back home (maybe 10-20% of the cost). They are printed under licence by a local printer and on the back they said 'only for sale in the Indian subcontinent.... illegal for sale outside of these countries.' or something like that. Paper is a bit thinner than the European printing, but the its the same text, same content etc. Naturally on my last day I scooped up an armful of the titles that I'd always quite liked to have a look at but couldn't justify buying and brought them home with me. I think it might be the same situation here.
Ok, technically, it's a newspaper, but over here in the UK if you said to somebody "I know Fact X is true because I read it in The Sun" they'd burst out laughing. It's regarded as a bit of a joke here, light entertainment. Referring to it as a major newspaper and your main information source rather undermines your argument.
It's what a lot of people read to get entertainment gossip, horse racing tips, football results, and to see a woman showing her boobs on Page 3. Very few people would use it as their sole information source. It does run news stories but its more famous for its gossip. This is the newspaper than brought you the headline "Freddie Starr ate my hamster" as its main news one day. I've been told the equivalent in the USA is The National Enquirer, apologies, I don't know this newspaper too well.
Nobody is going to take you through the courts for selling your grandfather's Rolex. But if you form a watch company and get a sweet deal on 5000 Rolexes through some intermediary company in Asia, and they offer you another 5000 when you've sold the first lot, then you might get a court summons. These are the people the orginal manufacturers are upset about. They want their expensive looking shops in the premier end of the mall selling their products at a high mark up, and they get upset when a bulk distributor like Costco manages a deal and undercuts the places on Fifth Avenue.
It's the Fifth Avenue shops that will be the ones who've got this one into the courts; they know people will stop shopping there if Costco do a better deal and they are terrified the online traders like Amazon will jump on board next.
If Arthur C Clarke was right in saying that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, then commonplace technology is banal and not worth mentioning. When the first films came out, directors would put in gratuitous shots of autos and trains rushing towards the audience as they knew it would get gasps and screams. These days I don't think you'd find a director hoping to have audiences faint in the aisles if they included a shot of a train rushing towards the viewer.
Hopefully as another poster has written, the focus will shift to well written scripts and plots. But there's probably another shiny thing round the corner....
well "traveller", as in "hey man, I am a traveller, not a tourist!" - means a tourist with pretensions.
I had great fun backpacking round the world and telling the international hippy set that I was most definitely a tourist, not a "traveller'. Either you live somewhere, or you're just touring through it, or you're popping in for a quick look.
And yup, most of the time you're a fish out of water and a total idiot. But hey, we all got to get along. I put up with dumb Americans in my neighbourhood and gently try to educate them when its possible so when I visit America they'll tolerate me being dumb and hopefully educate me a little too....
The problem I think is deciding what "it" is. The state of the area on 13 December 2010? What happens if a tourist breaks off a piece of something / steals something? do you put a replica in its place? What happens if there is heavy snowfall this year or rainstorms and these threaten to damage the soviet murals in the buildings or even collapse a roof of a building. Do you let them collapse, rebuild them, actively preserve them in some state?
This is the dilemma - what is the state you want to keep things in? Clearly the place has been touched by people, weather, and wildlife since (1986 was it?) - there's decay, graffitti, some stuff has been moved or stolen. What are your feelings? is it a tourist park, or a memorial, or other? Historians and cultural experts all have opinions about this.
Close to home, in the town I live in, Bletchley Park also has this issue to a small degree. They are always struggling for money but one question they have to think about is what state to preserve the place. A lot of the the famous codebreaking huts are in really poor condition - but then they were only designed as temporary wooden buildings to last a few years in the war. Now 70 years on their cheap constructions are falling apart. Do we freeze them somehow? tear them down and build replicas (but maybe to higher quality so they last longer and can survive tourists)? Do we save what is left and incorporate some of that original material alongside new material (replacing rotten wood, etc?
A big challenge for cultural preservation everywhere. What is the purpose of the Chernobyl area? What do you do when the buildings become unsafe because the weather has got in and they are in danger of falling down?
I think the parent thread is pointing out that in terms of saving lives, money spent on road safety campaigns and improving driving ability might be better value than spending it on counter-terrorism in the way we do right now.
But you also make the fine point that spending money on public health and health education would also be a fine use of that money, perhaps even a better one. It's probably easier to spend money on driver education and reducing road deaths than curing the common cold but anti-poverty measures, better public health care for at-risk populations etc would also be worthwhile spending and as you note probably save many lives.
Sat phones are trying to solve a problem that doesn't really exist
The problem they are solving is providing voice and data access to places where other networks don't reach.
I'm a university researcher. We want to get data and voice back from researchers in the field who are not IT experts and don't have the budget or the time to set up wireless networks from where they are doing fieldwork. "Switch this on, check a couple of settings, plug your laptop in and you can text chat to us and send us your data" or "phone us if you get stuck with the equipment" is where we want to be with them. Recent situations: oceanographic surveying in Antarctic oceans, geological surveys on a volcano in Nicaragua. Also, proof of concept for geological research on the seashores on the North East coast of England, under some rather high cliffs (nearest line of sight wireless would probably be err, Denmark or Norway maybe?).
As you yourself say, "Most folks" are ok with terrestrial cellular service. But the interesting research sometimes happen where there aren't many people so commercial providers will never connect.
Seeing as you're promoting a book and telling us how valuable it is, and that it's out of print, are you Seth A Klarman? or somebody sitting on a pile of copies of his book?
The 1 star reviews in amazon (including one by somebody who has read a library copy) make the interesting suggestion that the mythologising of the book gives it its value, rather than the content itself. Sounds like Seth A Klarman is making his money not from his wise investment strategies but from selling books which cost him 10 dollars to purchase from the publisher at 500 plus dollars to the seller. Good business model!
I'd also query the NYTimes ability to know what the most stolen library books are around the whole world. I don't believe a journalist in New York would have written to the national library associations of 200 plus countries and collated that information.
What does "pioneering spirit" mean? I think in the formation of the USA it meant overcoming hardship to get land and become rich?
If this is what you mean I am guessing the bankers, entrepreneurs etc reckon there's better promise on good returns to be made down here, possibly with the exception of Richard Branson who reckons sub orbital flight will make him some money.
As for science, that's maybe a different issue from pioneering? I am sure the scientists would like some more money to do more space science but I think they'll be split between whether to spend the money on manned or unmanned research.
Me, I am a romantic. I'd like to go to Mars and beyond because I am selfish and I want to go there and I think it would be really cool. I should imagine some scientists would like to join me to learn new science though, and probably some entrepreneurs in case there's money to be made out of it. I suppose the last group are the pioneering team?
That's a reasonably valid point. Certainly true of the UK and many other countries as well. We all seem to be using up our mineral reserves at terrific rates.
I often despair that the UK doesn't invest in renewable energy research and development more, seeing as it is a windy set of islands on the edge of a huge ocean. Lots of challenges but potentially huge amounts of renewable energy always going to be available, waves rolling in from thousands of miles and fairly blowy at times too.
I hear the USA economy is in a poor way. Might be worth helping out now and investing in their local communities rather than waiting for 50 years...
But fair play to Bill Gates for getting rich folk to sign over more wealth than a lot of folk have done in the past. Some of it's blood money/guilt money and there's a big philosophical debate about the balance of happiness at the end of them giving their money away vs what troubles they might have caused getting there in some cases. But fair play for giving it away rather than building marble temples or gold swimming pools or whatever.
Well I am guessing (please correct and educate me here) that a womb was needed to bring the fertilised cells through embryonic stages to normal birth? So that means two women could have a child together without input from a man? Two men will still need a woman to carry the embryo through til birth though?
More like end game for men, rather than for women here. Might be all that radical 60s feminist rhetoric about men not being needed any more could come true?
You do know that Guy Fawkes was fighting to replace one monarchy with another? That his intention was not to get rid of Parliament but rather to kill Protestant Christians and replace them with Catholic Christians and maintain the political status quo (a group of rich, landed members of Parliament serving a monarch), just change England from Protestant to Catholic rule?
I think a lot of people cheer Guy Fawkes because they think he was standing up for democracy and overthrowing tyrannical states whereas I am pretty sure the situation was that he just wanted to overthrow one religious authority with another. He wanted the same political system (monarch served by ineffectual unrepresentative MPs) just a different religious flavour.
His goal was to replace King James the first of England (and sixth of Scotland) with his nine year old daughter princess Elizabeth.
I think the poster highlighting USA as no.20 and other countries as higher was noting that in practical terms, rather than theoretical-legal terms, other countries have greater press freedoms (according to one organisation).
Why do you think that the USA, given it has apparently better legal grounding for greater press freedom, comes out with a worse record?
Personnel and supply lines to the ISS are already secure with Soyuz and Ariane, but perhaps you meant "secured by US owned and launched missions"?
Soyuz definitely has proven to be reliable over the last 40 years, and Ariane missions have a good track record. Probably reliable as long as you keep paying. But I understand the USA wants US flight capability. Not sure how much cheaper Falcon/SpaceX will be though. I'd be interested to see figures.
I am sure the US public will get by without weather reports but affecting tv programming? does this mean NO TV?! I predict a riot. Maybe even a revolution. This could bring down the USA!
"I don't think it's fair to expect Amazon to keep them on"
Your argument made rational sense until you claimed it was about "fairness". Not quite sure why you confused your own argument when in the next sentence you were probably closer to the truth - that Amazon have decided it doesn't make financial sense to host Wikileaks any longer.
Fairness in business is up there with all that "invisible hand of the market" fairy tale stuff. It's down to fallible people making judgements on what they think will make most profit for their businesses.
An L-shaped interface has obvious restrictions on how it can be reconfigured.
The photo of the guy in the white t-shirt shows him reaching ahead at full stretch, and in the article they note testers suffered from muscle fatigue. Not surprising. Clearly the guy is at full stretch, reaching too far. Their prototype would benefit from a couple of hours consultancy with some industrial / furniture designers. Probably the guys in the next corridor down at the university. How you make this work for a range of people to sit at, rather than stand at, for tall and short, now that might be more tricky. Sitting down close to the edge of the desk, my comfortable / optimal arm reach might be X cms, while I can imagine a short person and a tall person might vary by +/- 10cm centimetres difference easily. Not sure how designers would deal with making suitable for a whole range of people sizes.
But I completely approve of university folk experimenting, if they can't, where can this stuff be tested out?
British people are all cowards these days? I'd like you to walk into a British army base or even a town centre on a Saturday night and suggest that to a random sample of the population and see what the response is. Or even walk into a cancer patients ward and suggest that.
Probably true that we are more interested in workplace safety, I am not sure this is a bad thing though. My experience is that the people who most complain about workplace safety are those most removed from serious workplace danger: office workers who sit in front of computers all day tend to think it's a waste of time, steel workers, oil rig workers, fire fighters etc tend to think its really valuable.
I can imagine if an invader was on nearby shores 22 miles away as they were in 1940, then yes, I can imagine "Britain entering a war that would cost hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties again, however pressing the need or however good the cause?".
I grew up in the UK. In the 70s and 80s there were bombs going off regularly in the UK because of the situation in Northern Ireland but the response seemed to be less significant than the response to the present 'terror'. People seemed to get on with life more back then and seemed to be more pragmatic in their responses.
Anybody know why it seems like we've responded with a much greater response this time round? Because these guys are suicide bombers? People worry more? Or did we respond at about the same level last time round?
I was in London when the truck bomb blew up large parts of Canary Wharf, the people I knew who worked in the area seemed to be more concerned about checking if they should go to work the next day, if the office was still there, more than anything else.
Slashdot Mirror
no way? I don't believe it! ;-) come on, you knew I was being ironic, didn't you?
In case you're interested: Scotland Yard might have been named as such because the kings of Scotland had their ambassador's residence in the area. But then again, maybe some property developer called the area Scotland Yard because he thought it sounded cool or it would impress people. A lot of streets in London, UK are named for that very deep reason too.
Exactly, just like New York not being a new suburb of York, the county town of Yorkshire, England. It's an American thing.
I agree. I am not sure how it works. I think though you might find they agree certain prices for certain markets and they don't like it when items get moved between markets.
When I was in India I noticed that the computer bookshops had local imprints of O'Reilly books for a fraction of the price back home (maybe 10-20% of the cost). They are printed under licence by a local printer and on the back they said 'only for sale in the Indian subcontinent.... illegal for sale outside of these countries.' or something like that. Paper is a bit thinner than the European printing, but the its the same text, same content etc. Naturally on my last day I scooped up an armful of the titles that I'd always quite liked to have a look at but couldn't justify buying and brought them home with me. I think it might be the same situation here.
Ok, technically, it's a newspaper, but over here in the UK if you said to somebody "I know Fact X is true because I read it in The Sun" they'd burst out laughing. It's regarded as a bit of a joke here, light entertainment. Referring to it as a major newspaper and your main information source rather undermines your argument.
It's what a lot of people read to get entertainment gossip, horse racing tips, football results, and to see a woman showing her boobs on Page 3. Very few people would use it as their sole information source. It does run news stories but its more famous for its gossip. This is the newspaper than brought you the headline "Freddie Starr ate my hamster" as its main news one day. I've been told the equivalent in the USA is The National Enquirer, apologies, I don't know this newspaper too well.
Nobody is going to take you through the courts for selling your grandfather's Rolex. But if you form a watch company and get a sweet deal on 5000 Rolexes through some intermediary company in Asia, and they offer you another 5000 when you've sold the first lot, then you might get a court summons. These are the people the orginal manufacturers are upset about. They want their expensive looking shops in the premier end of the mall selling their products at a high mark up, and they get upset when a bulk distributor like Costco manages a deal and undercuts the places on Fifth Avenue.
It's the Fifth Avenue shops that will be the ones who've got this one into the courts; they know people will stop shopping there if Costco do a better deal and they are terrified the online traders like Amazon will jump on board next.
If Arthur C Clarke was right in saying that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, then commonplace technology is banal and not worth mentioning. When the first films came out, directors would put in gratuitous shots of autos and trains rushing towards the audience as they knew it would get gasps and screams. These days I don't think you'd find a director hoping to have audiences faint in the aisles if they included a shot of a train rushing towards the viewer.
Hopefully as another poster has written, the focus will shift to well written scripts and plots. But there's probably another shiny thing round the corner....
well "traveller", as in "hey man, I am a traveller, not a tourist!" - means a tourist with pretensions.
I had great fun backpacking round the world and telling the international hippy set that I was most definitely a tourist, not a "traveller'. Either you live somewhere, or you're just touring through it, or you're popping in for a quick look.
And yup, most of the time you're a fish out of water and a total idiot. But hey, we all got to get along. I put up with dumb Americans in my neighbourhood and gently try to educate them when its possible so when I visit America they'll tolerate me being dumb and hopefully educate me a little too....
You hope that tourists don't wreck "it".
The problem I think is deciding what "it" is. The state of the area on 13 December 2010? What happens if a tourist breaks off a piece of something / steals something? do you put a replica in its place? What happens if there is heavy snowfall this year or rainstorms and these threaten to damage the soviet murals in the buildings or even collapse a roof of a building. Do you let them collapse, rebuild them, actively preserve them in some state?
This is the dilemma - what is the state you want to keep things in? Clearly the place has been touched by people, weather, and wildlife since (1986 was it?) - there's decay, graffitti, some stuff has been moved or stolen. What are your feelings? is it a tourist park, or a memorial, or other? Historians and cultural experts all have opinions about this.
Close to home, in the town I live in, Bletchley Park also has this issue to a small degree. They are always struggling for money but one question they have to think about is what state to preserve the place. A lot of the the famous codebreaking huts are in really poor condition - but then they were only designed as temporary wooden buildings to last a few years in the war. Now 70 years on their cheap constructions are falling apart. Do we freeze them somehow? tear them down and build replicas (but maybe to higher quality so they last longer and can survive tourists)? Do we save what is left and incorporate some of that original material alongside new material (replacing rotten wood, etc?
A big challenge for cultural preservation everywhere. What is the purpose of the Chernobyl area? What do you do when the buildings become unsafe because the weather has got in and they are in danger of falling down?
I think the parent thread is pointing out that in terms of saving lives, money spent on road safety campaigns and improving driving ability might be better value than spending it on counter-terrorism in the way we do right now.
But you also make the fine point that spending money on public health and health education would also be a fine use of that money, perhaps even a better one. It's probably easier to spend money on driver education and reducing road deaths than curing the common cold but anti-poverty measures, better public health care for at-risk populations etc would also be worthwhile spending and as you note probably save many lives.
Sat phones are trying to solve a problem that doesn't really exist
The problem they are solving is providing voice and data access to places where other networks don't reach.
I'm a university researcher. We want to get data and voice back from researchers in the field who are not IT experts and don't have the budget or the time to set up wireless networks from where they are doing fieldwork. "Switch this on, check a couple of settings, plug your laptop in and you can text chat to us and send us your data" or "phone us if you get stuck with the equipment" is where we want to be with them. Recent situations: oceanographic surveying in Antarctic oceans, geological surveys on a volcano in Nicaragua. Also, proof of concept for geological research on the seashores on the North East coast of England, under some rather high cliffs (nearest line of sight wireless would probably be err, Denmark or Norway maybe?).
As you yourself say, "Most folks" are ok with terrestrial cellular service. But the interesting research sometimes happen where there aren't many people so commercial providers will never connect.
Seeing as you're promoting a book and telling us how valuable it is, and that it's out of print, are you Seth A Klarman? or somebody sitting on a pile of copies of his book?
The 1 star reviews in amazon (including one by somebody who has read a library copy) make the interesting suggestion that the mythologising of the book gives it its value, rather than the content itself. Sounds like Seth A Klarman is making his money not from his wise investment strategies but from selling books which cost him 10 dollars to purchase from the publisher at 500 plus dollars to the seller. Good business model!
I'd also query the NYTimes ability to know what the most stolen library books are around the whole world. I don't believe a journalist in New York would have written to the national library associations of 200 plus countries and collated that information.
What does "pioneering spirit" mean? I think in the formation of the USA it meant overcoming hardship to get land and become rich?
If this is what you mean I am guessing the bankers, entrepreneurs etc reckon there's better promise on good returns to be made down here, possibly with the exception of Richard Branson who reckons sub orbital flight will make him some money.
As for science, that's maybe a different issue from pioneering? I am sure the scientists would like some more money to do more space science but I think they'll be split between whether to spend the money on manned or unmanned research.
Me, I am a romantic. I'd like to go to Mars and beyond because I am selfish and I want to go there and I think it would be really cool. I should imagine some scientists would like to join me to learn new science though, and probably some entrepreneurs in case there's money to be made out of it. I suppose the last group are the pioneering team?
That's a reasonably valid point. Certainly true of the UK and many other countries as well. We all seem to be using up our mineral reserves at terrific rates.
I often despair that the UK doesn't invest in renewable energy research and development more, seeing as it is a windy set of islands on the edge of a huge ocean. Lots of challenges but potentially huge amounts of renewable energy always going to be available, waves rolling in from thousands of miles and fairly blowy at times too.
I hear the USA economy is in a poor way. Might be worth helping out now and investing in their local communities rather than waiting for 50 years...
But fair play to Bill Gates for getting rich folk to sign over more wealth than a lot of folk have done in the past. Some of it's blood money /guilt money and there's a big philosophical debate about the balance of happiness at the end of them giving their money away vs what troubles they might have caused getting there in some cases. But fair play for giving it away rather than building marble temples or gold swimming pools or whatever.
Well I am guessing (please correct and educate me here) that a womb was needed to bring the fertilised cells through embryonic stages to normal birth? So that means two women could have a child together without input from a man? Two men will still need a woman to carry the embryo through til birth though?
More like end game for men, rather than for women here. Might be all that radical 60s feminist rhetoric about men not being needed any more could come true?
Curious choice of words there. It sounds like you're not too happy about the UK drilling for oil off its shores? Green concerns, or other?
I suppose that oil is propping up the UK economy in the same way that agriculture props up the US economy?
You do know that Guy Fawkes was fighting to replace one monarchy with another? That his intention was not to get rid of Parliament but rather to kill Protestant Christians and replace them with Catholic Christians and maintain the political status quo (a group of rich, landed members of Parliament serving a monarch), just change England from Protestant to Catholic rule?
I think a lot of people cheer Guy Fawkes because they think he was standing up for democracy and overthrowing tyrannical states whereas I am pretty sure the situation was that he just wanted to overthrow one religious authority with another. He wanted the same political system (monarch served by ineffectual unrepresentative MPs) just a different religious flavour.
His goal was to replace King James the first of England (and sixth of Scotland) with his nine year old daughter princess Elizabeth.
I think the poster highlighting USA as no.20 and other countries as higher was noting that in practical terms, rather than theoretical-legal terms, other countries have greater press freedoms (according to one organisation).
Why do you think that the USA, given it has apparently better legal grounding for greater press freedom, comes out with a worse record?
Personnel and supply lines to the ISS are already secure with Soyuz and Ariane, but perhaps you meant "secured by US owned and launched missions"?
Soyuz definitely has proven to be reliable over the last 40 years, and Ariane missions have a good track record. Probably reliable as long as you keep paying. But I understand the USA wants US flight capability. Not sure how much cheaper Falcon/SpaceX will be though. I'd be interested to see figures.
I am sure the US public will get by without weather reports but affecting tv programming? does this mean NO TV?! I predict a riot. Maybe even a revolution. This could bring down the USA!
"I don't think it's fair to expect Amazon to keep them on"
Your argument made rational sense until you claimed it was about "fairness". Not quite sure why you confused your own argument when in the next sentence you were probably closer to the truth - that Amazon have decided it doesn't make financial sense to host Wikileaks any longer.
Fairness in business is up there with all that "invisible hand of the market" fairy tale stuff. It's down to fallible people making judgements on what they think will make most profit for their businesses.
An L-shaped interface has obvious restrictions on how it can be reconfigured.
The photo of the guy in the white t-shirt shows him reaching ahead at full stretch, and in the article they note testers suffered from muscle fatigue. Not surprising. Clearly the guy is at full stretch, reaching too far. Their prototype would benefit from a couple of hours consultancy with some industrial / furniture designers. Probably the guys in the next corridor down at the university. How you make this work for a range of people to sit at, rather than stand at, for tall and short, now that might be more tricky. Sitting down close to the edge of the desk, my comfortable / optimal arm reach might be X cms, while I can imagine a short person and a tall person might vary by +/- 10cm centimetres difference easily. Not sure how designers would deal with making suitable for a whole range of people sizes.
But I completely approve of university folk experimenting, if they can't, where can this stuff be tested out?
British people are all cowards these days? I'd like you to walk into a British army base or even a town centre on a Saturday night and suggest that to a random sample of the population and see what the response is. Or even walk into a cancer patients ward and suggest that.
Probably true that we are more interested in workplace safety, I am not sure this is a bad thing though. My experience is that the people who most complain about workplace safety are those most removed from serious workplace danger: office workers who sit in front of computers all day tend to think it's a waste of time, steel workers, oil rig workers, fire fighters etc tend to think its really valuable.
I can imagine if an invader was on nearby shores 22 miles away as they were in 1940, then yes, I can imagine "Britain entering a war that would cost hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties again, however pressing the need or however good the cause?".
I grew up in the UK. In the 70s and 80s there were bombs going off regularly in the UK because of the situation in Northern Ireland but the response seemed to be less significant than the response to the present 'terror'. People seemed to get on with life more back then and seemed to be more pragmatic in their responses.
Anybody know why it seems like we've responded with a much greater response this time round? Because these guys are suicide bombers? People worry more? Or did we respond at about the same level last time round?
I was in London when the truck bomb blew up large parts of Canary Wharf, the people I knew who worked in the area seemed to be more concerned about checking if they should go to work the next day, if the office was still there, more than anything else.
Tell that to the people who will have to emigrate from Ireland in search of work. A bit of a sore point I believe because of history.
100 years ago, they travelled to the USA. Now they'd probably not be allowed entry because the USA frowns upon economic migrants.