Posts by Graham Dawson 2678 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2007
Metics were foreigners and slaves, never a majority, even in Athens.
Hoi polloi literally means "the many" or the majority, and was never used for the category you're thinking of. If anything that would be hoi oligoi. I don't know what Apple fanboys would be called in Ancient Greece, but I'm pretty sure it would be rude.
Speaking with my Christian hat on for a moment, it annoys me the number of times people invoke God as a justification for whatever bit of pseudo-scientific nonsense they're foisting on the general population (in turn to justify raising taxes and throwing more money at international NGOs who exist only to, er, justify their existence apparently).
But then I always believed God was a libertarian so I'm probably somewhat atypical. :D
Stupidity isn't limited to any particular social group - nor is wisdom and intelligence, before anyone decides to claim that group X is dumb because they do or do not believe in hypothetical concept Y.
I'm going to have some coffee.
No, that's choice. You seem to be complaining that there will be relatively painless alternatives when an open source project up and dies.
What happens when proprietary software is abandoned? No choice there. You have to find something else that likely is completely incompatible with your existing system. With the forks you at least have something that resembles what you already do, and most likely have something that is exactly the same as the software you already use, except it has some bug fixes and Feature X tacked on.
Transmission losses and conversion losses make the final efficiency of electrical cars approximately the same as internal combustion (slightly worse, if I recall), yet there's little room for improvement without significant and possibly unachievable advances in technology. Batteries certainly can be improved, but the transmission losses are only going to go away if we can invent room-temperature superconductors and replace the entire national transmission infrastructure with them, and then invent a way to convert from high to low voltage without any power losses. And of course all electric vehicles have the same insurmountable problem: range and weight. They waste a lot of energy carting dead batteries around.
You want a truly efficient electric vehicle? Build a trolleybus. Put the electricity directly in from the supply when it's needed rather than converting it three times and losing most of it in the process. Of course that would mean every street in the country would need a dodgems-style electricity supply suspended over it and your car wouldn't be able to operate independent of that supply, but it's a small sacrifice to pay for increased efficiency, no?
Those behemoths are keeping the sea lanes safe from piracy. Perhaps you don't realise that international trade used to be fraught with danger until Great Britain began regular sea patrols around the world. The world economy went through a huge boom once that projection of force cut down piracy and made the seas safe for international trade. The US navy took over that role after world war 2 and it's only within the last decade, with politically correct rules of engagement that prevent decisively dealing with pirates, that piracy has started to become a problem again.
They're a metaphor for the relative freedom from misery that sanitary products apparently provide women and presumably for the joy that comes with not having to stuff rags down your pants and rinse them out in the river every day.
Seems all those years I spent at university have finally found a use...
They make absolutely marvellous media things. I have one stuck to the back of the TV running raspbmc, and another running MPD. They don't need to be turned off and they consume virtually no power, especially compared to the PC I previously had running for both reasons.
And that's not even a particularly creative use for them. I've got plans for all sorts of nifty things to do with them.
"Watching the sun" is exactly what these stones were built to do. They had to be accurate (or accurate enough) and they had to be permanent in order to provide a known quantity.
The summer solstice wasn't really that important as summer was a time of bountiful supplies of food. Devices like Stone Henge were built to collect the timing of the winter solstice, for both an agricultural and a religious reason.
The agricultural reason was quite simple: they had to have a point from which to count the days until planting began. It was their farmer's almanac and set the seasonal calendar without reliance on the moon.
The religious reason was a little more esoteric. It was the fairly commonly held belief that the winter solstice was the time when life hung in the balance, and not merely in terms of the cold and shortening of food supplies. The days were getting shorter and shorter, the nights getting longer and longer, and there was a very palpable fear that the sun might just decide not to come back next year. They had to know with absolute certainty that the days were getting longer, and they had to know when that change began, in order to time the big week-long celebratory feast. Similar religious practices are found throughout Eurasia, especially in the more northerly areas, and defined much of the form and function of Christmas (and no, before anyone claims it, christianity didn't coopt the old religious practices to trick or ease pagans into converting: converts to the new religion simply carried on their old feasts with new names, to the great dismay of the religious leaders of the time).
This is all well-known and has been for some time. What this particular study has done is directly verify that which was already known from other sources.
Still won't convince all those nellies that thing Stone Henge was built to measure the summer solstice and use it as an excuse to dance around in their underpants, but what can you do?
And now back to my little Florentine adventure. Ho the Medici! I require more culturally attuned steak!
English criminal law used to be entirely about intent. Intent is a very important differentiator between criminal and mistaken behaviour. You can, for instance, be prosecuted for the simple intent to commit certain crimes and rightly so, without ever doing anything more dangerous than gathering the materials necessary to carry out the crime - if you can be proven to actually have that intent.
Even crimes that appear to lack intent, such as manslaughter (for example, killing someone by running them over while driving dangerously) are usually the restful of intent to commit a related action. In the example case, driving dangerously: you choose to commit a potentially criminal act and in the process you cause a death.
Unfortunately the burden of proof for intent is very high, which is why we now have all these laws that criminalise acts without consideration of intent - it makes it much easier to bring prosecutions and bump up the stats, and consequently makes it much easier for politicians and the police to look like they're being tough on crime, when all they're actually doing is criminalising acts that are often either the result of misadventure, or are entirely innocent.
I think you're showing a little prejudice if you think the Jesus story was "twisted" by a church that didn't even exist for much of the time said "twisting" was taking place.
From a purly historical perspective, Christianity arose as one of several offshoots of a temple-based religion that suddenly had to adapt to a world where that temple no longer existed. It's mirrored in the rise of judaism which, despite its claims, isn't actually older than christianity; it was also an attempt to cope with a world where the temple was gone. Both firmed up around 200AD into the religious we know and love today but they'd had very different starts.
Christianity based itself around a revolutionary concept. It was a revelation-based faith; that is, it waits for revelation to be provided in dealing with unforseen circumstances (the great mysteries), which is why there are so many christian denominations; they all had different revelations on particular subjects.
Judaism based itself on a consensus of opinion and is an evolutionary faith with some revelationary characteristics, which is why there are so relatively few jewish splits and why they tend to mix and merge again over the centuries.
On the subject of whether Jesus was married, there's a lot of speculation based on fantasy and hearsay and gnostic pseudographia written many hundreds of years after the events in question but no actual evidence. The bible itself implies that Jesus was celibate and may have been a nazirite for much of his life before having a revelation, breaking his vows and attempting to restore the "true path" of the temple faith of Israel. Being celibate would rather preclude marriage, I feel, and the nazirites were a very powerful sect at the time, with many thousands having taken the vows. Certainly they were powerful enough that Paul had to appease their leadership more than once.
Widgets. I can turn off my data connection, wifi and sound by tapping little buttons on my home screen. I have a calendar and more things one screen to the left, my music player widget one screen to the right. I don't have to trawl through an endless list of icons and settings to do all these things, I can just unlock the phone and bam, done.
I can install a completely different launcher if I want. I can completely customise the lock screen itself. I take ownership of my device by making it look the way I want it to look instead of just getting a grid of icons.
That's just off the top of my head.
He may well be the lovechild of engels and hitler and have genghis khan as his godfather, but that doesn't mean the label hasn't become meaningless. The "far right" label is so abused in Swedish politics these days that my cynicism meter pegs as soon as I hear it. When it can encompass everything from being an actual jew-hating neo-nazi who wants to restart the ovens to being someone who considers that perhaps the government should be a little less involved in the citizen's daily life - that is, when it can mean just about anything the speaker wants it to mean - it is, by definition, meaningless.
... one merely has to express the opinion that taxes might be too high and that the government should not be in the position to seriously debate whether men should be forced to sit down while taking a piss.
This label is meaningless and is purely used to denigrate and dismiss someone Andrew Orlowski does not like.
The regs regarding electrical outlets in Zone 2 are taken directly from EU regulatory directives (in turn taken directly from some ISO agency tasked with standardising such things). Regulatory directives are not passed through member-state governments and go straight on the books without even examination by the civil service, let alone parliament. The only oversight any UK body has on them is when the IET writes them in a form suitable for inclusion in BS7671 and that won't change anything except formatting or internal references to other parts of the regs.
The regs don't ban electrical outlets from bathrooms, believe it or not. They ban mains outlets within Zones 0 and 1 and require outlets within Zone 2 to be IPX4 or better (that is, protected against splash and mechanical ingress). Outside of zone 2 you can place any number of outlets you like. It's just that most modern bathrooms don't extend much beyond the dimensions specified for zone 2 due to the recent practice of building houses so small that a hamster could feel cramped.
I was with it up to the last line, when the hyperbole broke down into the fallacy of guilt by association. The fact that she's a grasping greedy little snit doesn't mean the people that she used for promotional purposes agree with that stance. In fact I'd suggest rather the opposite.
Great job, Richard! You found the phone you desire!
But what does that have do do with the price of fish? Many people, such as myself, want a device that can do a lot more than just make phone calls. Many people require a device that allows them access to things that a dumb phone cannot provide. Some do in fact need mobile internet for their work or for something to do on a break, or perhaps they just want it. And they're willing to pay extra to get it. They may choose an overpriced piece of tat or they may make a sensible buying decision. They pick a device that they want and they spend their money on it.
You have the phone you want. Great! You spent your own money on it. Fantastic! But now you're proclaiming yourself superior because of that choice. You're just as smug as all the fanbois and fandroids and fan...whatever it is they call windows mobile users these days.
If there's one thing I hate, it's smug.
Quick Office is pretty good. I use it all the time for writing, even on my phone. Does all the basic office productivity stuff and I doubt most people would need more than that on their slab. I believe Goog own it now but it was good even before they got their paws on it. The only downside I've found is that it doesn't support opendocument, which is a bit of a drawback, but one I'm willing to live with if it lets me write.
And OpenOffice or LibreOffice (can't remember which) is being ported to android as we speak. So there you go.
All it takes is a little searching.
Actually Jon, it is a mental illness, in the sense that the physiology of an aspergic brain is different from the average to a significant degree. The general defintiion of mental illness includes differing perception of the world; by that measure alone Aspergers qualifies.
It's not an extreme "male" behaviour either. My wife is aspergic. Her behaviours aren't masculine, extreme or otherwise (and I believe I'd know), they're simply the typical behaviours of someone with Aspergers.
"After watching some of the videos in which he is interviewed I got the feeling that this chap does not really suffer too much from anything. I almost got the impression that he was proud of his achievements."
One of the symptoms of a more extreme case of Aspergers is the reduced ability to both properly understand and properly enact emotional cues. It's akin to a lack of empathy. Despite what some believe Aspies feel and express emotion but they don't do it the way "normal" people do and, as a consequence, they often appear to display inappropriate emotions. He might appear proud (arrogance is an accusation often levelled at aspies; they tend to be aloof as a coping strategy and that can often be interpreted as something malicious or purposeful) but any apparent pride he displays has nothing to do with the morality of a situation.
Patents were once required to have a demonstration or a working model to accompany the application, which would significantly reduce the cost of checking whether the idea worked. You'd have a conclusive demonstration that it worked. It was eventually dropped as a requirement because of the warehousing costs.
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