I mostly agree with you, even though, I can't see attaching more than 2 USB devices to a laptop at any one time.
Really? I have three plugged in pretty much permanently: - cooler pad (essential when using laptop on top of duvet/comforter on a bed) - mouse - headset
Tonight I also had my USB pendrive so I could download network card drivers for my housemate, my phone has a USB connection (which admittedly I rarely use) and there are a variety of other USB devices that get occasional use (including the surprisingly excellent USB fan and the unsurprisingly useless missile launcher).
Fortunately my laptop has four USB ports, and the cooler pad has a USB passthrough too.
Did you see the huge mobs dancing in the streets celebrating 9/11?
If you lived somewhere under constant economic and cultural attack from another country, with occasional military attacks, and no means of response, wouldn't you celebrate someone finally being able to fight back in a dramatic manner?
You may not agree with their sentiments, but at least try and understand them.
Also be aware of the rarity of such celebrations. Even in those countries such public displays weren't common. TV cameras just happen to gravitate to newsworthy images..
Sadly this is not the case. The U.S. potential punishment for Gary McKinnon is 30ish years in prison. The UK punishment would be nearer 30 months.
However, the UK CPS has chosen not to prosecute him, indicating that they don't feel he broke UK laws to sufficient extent to warrant prosecution. The US nonetheless want to extradite him and lock him up without a fair trial.
So Mark is safe in the U.S., but in other countries like Egypt or Turkey he might be in some danger.
Only because the US Government will show rather more balls over this than the UK Government has shown with Gary McKinnon.
This is no different and no worse than the US attempts to extradite Gary McKinnon: Bloke in country A breaks laws in country B without ever stepping foot in country B. Country B demands extradition in order to exact life-destroying retribution completely out of proportion to the alleged crime, which wasn't even illegal in country A.
Although your analogy does hold; the US does hold a big sign up to the world that reads "We're a backwards shithole, filled with intolerant Bible-thumping hicks. Don't even think about coming here or doing business here."
he was Catholic in the same way Marx was Jewish--both are religions that are also ethnic identities, because people are inducted into them in childhood.
No, the Jewish race is exactly that: a race. Not a religion.
The link between the Jewish race and Judaism is arbitrary (albeit heavily enforced by religious bigots).
So being a Jew is an ethnic identity. Following the Jewish religion is not.
Similarly, following the Catholic religion has fuck all to do with ethnicity.
Hitler's birth into a Catholic family didn't make him a Catholic. It tooked years of indoctrination and brainwashing to do that, and in my view he demonstrated perfectly the obvious outcomes of such education.
Catholicism (and most other religions) are about the acquisition and exercise of power and control. Hitler merely happened to be better at it than the average child raping priest.
It's fine if you choose not to believe in Christianity but you should at least research the facts before you make claims when you clearly don't know the subject matter.
I'm intrigued. What are the facts?
Given the evidence that the New Testament was rewritten when nobody that had ever met Jesus was still alive, the dozens of missing gospels and the contradictions within the current Bible versions, the only facts I can see as having any certainty are:
- There was a bloke called Jesus - He was probably a Jew
Call me a cynic, but this seems a curious basis for a major world religion, let alone berating someone for criticising the proponents of that hypocritical overbearing irrelevant self-aggrandising religion for 'not researching their facts'.
I should read down the rest of this page to see if you're just trolling.
I tried to watch it...and just got a bit bored. The low scoring, and letting people tie just doesn't seem right to me for a competitive game.
What has the rate of scoring got to do with competitiveness? I'm kind of confused. Even baseball doesn't have humungously high scores.
Perhaps you'd prefer cricket, where a side can score several hundred points (known as 'runs') and take up to twenty wickets in a match.
As for ties. Only America thinks a draw is unacceptable in sport. The rest of the world copes quite easily with the concept.
Sometimes, just possibly, neither team is sufficiently better than the other to win the match. Why not allow the final score the reflect this?
Obviously this is the World Cup and so there'll be a knock-out cup format (instead of the league format, which is the current stage). As you can't knock someone out in the event of a draw (sorry, a 'tie') the rules permit the use of a couple of mechanisms to avoid this. First is a 30 minute period of extra time (erm, 'overtime'?) then there are penalties.
I don't understand that....I mean, I thought the world cup was analogous to to the Super Bowl in the US, something played every year to determine the champion.
Superbowl: - Annual - Play-off following league competition - Only involves American teams - Competed by professional sports clubs
World Cup: - Every four years - 2 year qualification involving regional qualifiers (in Europe taking the form of mini-leagues) - Involves the entire world - Competed by National teams
So no, not analogous to the Superbowl at all.
Is there not a soccer champion every year?
No. There are thousands.
E.g. the equivalent in Football terms to a Superbowl winner is whoever wins the MLS play-offs.
However, there are equivalents in the English Premier League, the Scottish Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, the J League and.. well, every country has its own league competition, producing a champion.
Of course, there are also cup competitions. In England there's the League Cup, the FA Cup, the Johnson's Paint Trophy, the Community Shield and a number of lesser trophies competed for annually. There are also the Europe wide competitions such as the Intertoto Cup, the Europa League (which despite the name is a cup competition) and the Champions League (which despite the name is both a cup competition, and also involves non-champions).
Other continents have their own equivalents.
Each year there's also a World Club tournament, the winner of which are the World Club Champions.
Then there's the African Cup of Nations, which is a competition for national teams, which takes place at the start of each year.
Every four years (bisecting the world cup) there are the European Championships, in which the European national teams compete.
I'll stop now, but hopefully you at least have an inkling of just how much bigger this whole football thing is than something as inconsequential as the Superbowl in the US.
Yeah, I posted abuse on the Google blog because of that.
They showed me a really interesting and nice picture as a background.. but I wasn't there to browse artistic photographs, I was there to a clean, simple, elegant and useful search interface.
I have every bit as much respect for the hardware designers and software engineers as the computer scientists.
Anybody that doesn't hasn't experienced the unfeasibly complex social dynamics of an overdue business project in which they're trying to prevent the company making an expensive mistake. Trust me, to deal with that well requires a vast range of skills, with mere programming a trivial distraction.
Really, I think a lot of the new changes are to make the BCS more relevant to what commerce wants to know, rather than being a comp sci enclave. The thrust has changed direction, though this isn't necessarily a bad thing.
I concur - I hated the old bias towards arcane and irrelevant computer science degrees, while penalising people that were far more capable at IT but had a degree in something else (or even no degree).
The whole thing continues to be fascinatingly public sector biased though, which isn't an area in which I really want to work (even disregarding the impending gutting it's overdue).
No, it highlights the biased nature of foreign police towards British fans, the aggressive way in which they attack our fans and the corruptness of the foreign courts.
I became CITP by writing them a letter saying nice things about myself. A couple of guys I worked with sent them letters saying nice things about me too. In response, they gave me CV fodder.
Since then, they have tightened the process - there's now an interview and/or test.
It lacks credibility for many reasons, but it's only in the last year or so that the BCS has finally realised that giving MBCS/CITP to anybody that's successfully stayed employed for 8 years isn't giving them any credibility at all.
Me, I waited until I could go straight to CITP before even joining - I resented the fact that people with a 2:2 in Computer Science from a crap university had a 2 year shorter qualification for MBCS than I did with a good BSc in an unaccredited degree from a Russell Group uni.
There are a lot of pretty low paid, low skill people in IT.
There are a lot of low skill jobs in IT, and I have no problem in populating them with lower paid workers. Why pay higher than call centre rates for IT support staff that sit there answering the phones reading from scripts?
What annoys me are the vast number of pretty high paid, low skill people in IT.
It got me through HR for my last job, and in the technical interview when asked what I thought of it, the contemptuous expression on my face helped me get the job.
CITP needs to actually have intrinsic value (through demonstration of knowledge, skills and experience) before it will become a requirement for jobs.
Sorry, I had a 352×416 screen phone running Opera in 2007; I chose against the 800x352 pixel screen alternative due to form factor.
Although neither of them were touchscreens, I was using a 480 pixel wide touchscreen handheld in 1999; this is hardly new. And they both had hardware keyboards, something the iPhone still lacks.
Take a look at the Nokia n900, the Sony xPeria x10, the Nexus One: All of them running at 800x480, rather better than the iPhone.
So no, I'm not buying your trendsetter claim, or indeed your similarities in spec.
That said, the iPhone 4 has set a new benchmark for screens. That is a very good resolution for the size of screen, and I probably will buy a new Android phone when one comes out with a comparable screen (and qwerty keyboard).
IMO it's only criminal if they actually knew they were killing only civilians and intentionally did so.
There was no evidence the people in the van were anything other than civilians. So yes, they did know they were killing only civilians, and yes, they very intentionally did so.
MO the Geneva convention ban on directly attacking civilians is simply untenable as it's based on uniform fighting outside populated areas
I disagree. I appreciate that it's a difficult decision to make.
However:
The CIA missile strikes in Pakistan always kill civilians, again they are usually part of the insurgency but they are still civilians.
The CIA missile strikes in Pakistan are murder. If they happened in the UK I would be demanding government action, including murder trials.
If an attempt to arrest someone is met with a violent response, at that point I'm far more comfortable with lethal action being taken against them. It doesn't justify use of lethal means from the outset, without positive identification, with civilian (non-insurgent too) casualties.
Or you may get shot by a helicopter circling over a kilometre away, whose gunner is going "he's holding out his hands, I think he must have a detonator he's threatening them with. Clear us to shoot, we have to take him down before he blows everyone up"
Which is why from a certain perspective the WTC attacks were a stunning vision, a marvel of planning and a flawless execution that led to a thing of obscene beauty.
Me, I'm genuinely in awe.
Is it wrong? Of course. Is it beautiful? War is often beautiful, from a safe distance.
And where identified, dealt with through criminal prosecution.
I've never heard of collateral rape. Sure, murder's a little harder to prove, but that video demonstrates a fairly explicit lack of effort to minimise civilian casualties.
Slashdot Mirror
I mostly agree with you, even though, I can't see attaching more than 2 USB devices to a laptop at any one time.
Really? I have three plugged in pretty much permanently:
- cooler pad (essential when using laptop on top of duvet/comforter on a bed)
- mouse
- headset
Tonight I also had my USB pendrive so I could download network card drivers for my housemate, my phone has a USB connection (which admittedly I rarely use) and there are a variety of other USB devices that get occasional use (including the surprisingly excellent USB fan and the unsurprisingly useless missile launcher).
Fortunately my laptop has four USB ports, and the cooler pad has a USB passthrough too.
(all of which is offtopic)
Did you see the huge mobs dancing in the streets celebrating 9/11?
If you lived somewhere under constant economic and cultural attack from another country, with occasional military attacks, and no means of response, wouldn't you celebrate someone finally being able to fight back in a dramatic manner?
You may not agree with their sentiments, but at least try and understand them.
Also be aware of the rarity of such celebrations. Even in those countries such public displays weren't common. TV cameras just happen to gravitate to newsworthy images..
Me, I was in the pub celebrating..
Israel has given up land.
Israel continues to evict Palestinians from occupied territory and build new homes on it for Israeli settlers.
I'm not going to pretend Hamas are fluffy angels, but Israel continually contravenes UN resolutions and is causing serious hardship in Palestine.
Me, I think Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Greek Cyprus should all blockade Israel, see how they like it.
Sadly this is not the case. The U.S. potential punishment for Gary McKinnon is 30ish years in prison. The UK punishment would be nearer 30 months.
However, the UK CPS has chosen not to prosecute him, indicating that they don't feel he broke UK laws to sufficient extent to warrant prosecution. The US nonetheless want to extradite him and lock him up without a fair trial.
So Mark is safe in the U.S., but in other countries like Egypt or Turkey he might be in some danger.
Only because the US Government will show rather more balls over this than the UK Government has shown with Gary McKinnon.
I pity the next girl you say, "I love you" to.
This is no different and no worse than the US attempts to extradite Gary McKinnon:
Bloke in country A breaks laws in country B without ever stepping foot in country B. Country B demands extradition in order to exact life-destroying retribution completely out of proportion to the alleged crime, which wasn't even illegal in country A.
Although your analogy does hold; the US does hold a big sign up to the world that reads "We're a backwards shithole, filled with intolerant Bible-thumping hicks. Don't even think about coming here or doing business here."
Which is why I don't visit the US or Pakistan.
he was Catholic in the same way Marx was Jewish--both are religions that are also ethnic identities, because people are inducted into them in childhood.
No, the Jewish race is exactly that: a race. Not a religion.
The link between the Jewish race and Judaism is arbitrary (albeit heavily enforced by religious bigots).
So being a Jew is an ethnic identity. Following the Jewish religion is not.
Similarly, following the Catholic religion has fuck all to do with ethnicity.
Hitler's birth into a Catholic family didn't make him a Catholic. It tooked years of indoctrination and brainwashing to do that, and in my view he demonstrated perfectly the obvious outcomes of such education.
Catholicism (and most other religions) are about the acquisition and exercise of power and control. Hitler merely happened to be better at it than the average child raping priest.
It's fine if you choose not to believe in Christianity but you should at least research the facts before you make claims when you clearly don't know the subject matter.
I'm intrigued. What are the facts?
Given the evidence that the New Testament was rewritten when nobody that had ever met Jesus was still alive, the dozens of missing gospels and the contradictions within the current Bible versions, the only facts I can see as having any certainty are:
- There was a bloke called Jesus
- He was probably a Jew
Call me a cynic, but this seems a curious basis for a major world religion, let alone berating someone for criticising the proponents of that hypocritical overbearing irrelevant self-aggrandising religion for 'not researching their facts'.
I should read down the rest of this page to see if you're just trolling.
I tried to watch it...and just got a bit bored. The low scoring, and letting people tie just doesn't seem right to me for a competitive game.
What has the rate of scoring got to do with competitiveness? I'm kind of confused. Even baseball doesn't have humungously high scores.
Perhaps you'd prefer cricket, where a side can score several hundred points (known as 'runs') and take up to twenty wickets in a match.
As for ties. Only America thinks a draw is unacceptable in sport. The rest of the world copes quite easily with the concept.
Sometimes, just possibly, neither team is sufficiently better than the other to win the match. Why not allow the final score the reflect this?
Obviously this is the World Cup and so there'll be a knock-out cup format (instead of the league format, which is the current stage). As you can't knock someone out in the event of a draw (sorry, a 'tie') the rules permit the use of a couple of mechanisms to avoid this. First is a 30 minute period of extra time (erm, 'overtime'?) then there are penalties.
I don't understand that....I mean, I thought the world cup was analogous to to the Super Bowl in the US, something played every year to determine the champion.
Superbowl:
- Annual
- Play-off following league competition
- Only involves American teams
- Competed by professional sports clubs
World Cup:
- Every four years
- 2 year qualification involving regional qualifiers (in Europe taking the form of mini-leagues)
- Involves the entire world
- Competed by National teams
So no, not analogous to the Superbowl at all.
Is there not a soccer champion every year?
No. There are thousands.
E.g. the equivalent in Football terms to a Superbowl winner is whoever wins the MLS play-offs.
However, there are equivalents in the English Premier League, the Scottish Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, the J League and.. well, every country has its own league competition, producing a champion.
Of course, there are also cup competitions. In England there's the League Cup, the FA Cup, the Johnson's Paint Trophy, the Community Shield and a number of lesser trophies competed for annually. There are also the Europe wide competitions such as the Intertoto Cup, the Europa League (which despite the name is a cup competition) and the Champions League (which despite the name is both a cup competition, and also involves non-champions).
Other continents have their own equivalents.
Each year there's also a World Club tournament, the winner of which are the World Club Champions.
Then there's the African Cup of Nations, which is a competition for national teams, which takes place at the start of each year.
Every four years (bisecting the world cup) there are the European Championships, in which the European national teams compete.
I'll stop now, but hopefully you at least have an inkling of just how much bigger this whole football thing is than something as inconsequential as the Superbowl in the US.
Yeah, I posted abuse on the Google blog because of that.
They showed me a really interesting and nice picture as a background.. but I wasn't there to browse artistic photographs, I was there to a clean, simple, elegant and useful search interface.
Aye, but the Scottish football fans don't get the chance to attend many major tournaments.
See also: The Welsh.
I've found the skills, techniques, approaches and cynicism learned as a software engineer invaluable in my subsequent architecture career.
that last and most elite guy.
I have every bit as much respect for the hardware designers and software engineers as the computer scientists.
Anybody that doesn't hasn't experienced the unfeasibly complex social dynamics of an overdue business project in which they're trying to prevent the company making an expensive mistake. Trust me, to deal with that well requires a vast range of skills, with mere programming a trivial distraction.
'bloody idiot' is a lot more likely.
'daft plonker' is unlikely, but recognisable.
Really, I think a lot of the new changes are to make the BCS more relevant to what commerce wants to know, rather than being a comp sci enclave. The thrust has changed direction, though this isn't necessarily a bad thing.
I concur - I hated the old bias towards arcane and irrelevant computer science degrees, while penalising people that were far more capable at IT but had a degree in something else (or even no degree).
The whole thing continues to be fascinatingly public sector biased though, which isn't an area in which I really want to work (even disregarding the impending gutting it's overdue).
Tell that to the residents of Manchester, who still haven't forgiven the Rangers fans.
No, it highlights the biased nature of foreign police towards British fans, the aggressive way in which they attack our fans and the corruptness of the foreign courts.
Sorry, did I just stereotype based on anecdote?
I became CITP by writing them a letter saying nice things about myself. A couple of guys I worked with sent them letters saying nice things about me too. In response, they gave me CV fodder.
Since then, they have tightened the process - there's now an interview and/or test.
It lacks credibility for many reasons, but it's only in the last year or so that the BCS has finally realised that giving MBCS/CITP to anybody that's successfully stayed employed for 8 years isn't giving them any credibility at all.
Me, I waited until I could go straight to CITP before even joining - I resented the fact that people with a 2:2 in Computer Science from a crap university had a 2 year shorter qualification for MBCS than I did with a good BSc in an unaccredited degree from a Russell Group uni.
There are a lot of pretty low paid, low skill people in IT.
There are a lot of low skill jobs in IT, and I have no problem in populating them with lower paid workers. Why pay higher than call centre rates for IT support staff that sit there answering the phones reading from scripts?
What annoys me are the vast number of pretty high paid, low skill people in IT.
I'm a member, for the CITP entry on my CV.
It got me through HR for my last job, and in the technical interview when asked what I thought of it, the contemptuous expression on my face helped me get the job.
CITP needs to actually have intrinsic value (through demonstration of knowledge, skills and experience) before it will become a requirement for jobs.
Sorry, I had a 352×416 screen phone running Opera in 2007; I chose against the 800x352 pixel screen alternative due to form factor.
Although neither of them were touchscreens, I was using a 480 pixel wide touchscreen handheld in 1999; this is hardly new. And they both had hardware keyboards, something the iPhone still lacks.
Take a look at the Nokia n900, the Sony xPeria x10, the Nexus One: All of them running at 800x480, rather better than the iPhone.
So no, I'm not buying your trendsetter claim, or indeed your similarities in spec.
That said, the iPhone 4 has set a new benchmark for screens. That is a very good resolution for the size of screen, and I probably will buy a new Android phone when one comes out with a comparable screen (and qwerty keyboard).
IMO it's only criminal if they actually knew they were killing only civilians and intentionally did so.
There was no evidence the people in the van were anything other than civilians. So yes, they did know they were killing only civilians, and yes, they very intentionally did so.
MO the Geneva convention ban on directly attacking civilians is simply untenable as it's based on uniform fighting outside populated areas
I disagree. I appreciate that it's a difficult decision to make.
However:
The CIA missile strikes in Pakistan always kill civilians, again they are usually part of the insurgency but they are still civilians.
The CIA missile strikes in Pakistan are murder. If they happened in the UK I would be demanding government action, including murder trials.
If an attempt to arrest someone is met with a violent response, at that point I'm far more comfortable with lethal action being taken against them. It doesn't justify use of lethal means from the outset, without positive identification, with civilian (non-insurgent too) casualties.
Or you may get shot by a helicopter circling over a kilometre away, whose gunner is going "he's holding out his hands, I think he must have a detonator he's threatening them with. Clear us to shoot, we have to take him down before he blows everyone up"
Which is why from a certain perspective the WTC attacks were a stunning vision, a marvel of planning and a flawless execution that led to a thing of obscene beauty.
Me, I'm genuinely in awe.
Is it wrong? Of course. Is it beautiful? War is often beautiful, from a safe distance.
And where identified, dealt with through criminal prosecution.
I've never heard of collateral rape. Sure, murder's a little harder to prove, but that video demonstrates a fairly explicit lack of effort to minimise civilian casualties.