Posts by frank ly 6077 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
It's time to draw a line under this so called 'rocket' incident and move forward. I was mislead by advice from recognised experts; so don't judge me on what I did, but on what I do from now on, for the next few days anyway.
'c', the speed of light, is the speed at which light _must_ travel at. If you use Maxwell's equations to analyse a self sustaining EM wave (e.g. light) then it's velocity can only be a value determined by the permeability and permittivity of the medium in which it exists. For free space, this is 'c', so if the characteristics of free space change, then the speed of light will change.
This classical analysis yields the value of 'c' and is easy enough to understand. How we got from there to Special Relativity, etc, is something that makes my brain hurt.
This is not about the existing legal requirement to record business activity for HMRC/Gov/Tax purposes. It is about resolving disputes between companies.
E.g. if a previous client claimed that your business had defrauded them by misrepresenting equipment capabilities and/or falsifying system acceptance test results, and they had a few 'key' emails from five years ago, for evidence in court; then you'd look a bit silly if you couldn't find some e-mails which your chief engineer remembered sending that would prove you to be innocent.
In court, the jury would be faced with a situation where the defendant appeared to have deliberately destroyed e-mails from the relevant time, contrary to 'accepted industry practice'. It wouldn't look good for you.
The most fascinating, and potentially instructive, aspect of human nature would be the entire process of how and why he was appointed to the House Science, Space and Technology Committee.
You also raise an interesting point of how someone who _appears_ to reject modern scientific belief (in certain areas) can practice as a physician. It is probably the case that you don't need to deeply understand medications to know which ones should be prescribed for certain ailments. I don't need to believe in evolution to believe that antibiotics cure many bacterial infections and he doesn't need to 'believe in science' to know which antibiotics are best and what the side-effects and potential interactions are. Any belief that the world is 9,000 years old has no bearing on his ability to set a broken bone and give advice about diet, .... etc.
It is possible for a person to have a high level of functionality in modern society while rejecting many modern scientific beliefs, but the problem, for other people, is when that person is in a position of great influence in those areas that depend on modern scientific beliefs.
In a modern car, there is lots of room on the passenger side of the 'dashboard', so some kind of slot (with sprung pressure restraints, or whatever) could easily be accommodated, either central or off toward the passenger side. They could even make a special receptacle inside the glove compartment with Bluetooth interface for calls when driving.
This story in The Independent caught my attention earlier:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/national-virtual-id-card-scheme-set-for-launch-is-there-anything-that-could-possibly-go-wrong-8196543.html
Read it and weep. I'm wondering if it's a prank article, and if El Reg will cover it.
If you're storing the simple type of data you gave as examples, why do you need some kind of novel flexible memory? The amount of spare and usable volume in a car is enormous if you're looking for somewhere to place a memory device, and currently available 16GB flash chips are tiny.
I'm a 10Mb/s cheapskate too. I politely suggested that it was time for me to leave them, since I hardly ever use my VM cable phone, and since '3' seem to have nice mobile broadband offers. They offered me a 'special' deal of £25 a month gets cable phone and 10Mb/s internet. I took it. I doubt that my speed will be upgraded :)
"... addresses typed in the Latin alphabet will continue to reach sites using both .cn and .中国 addresses. "
It would for those Chinese organisations which take advantage of the privileged upgrade period and for those that take double registration in the future. There will come a time when Chinese organisations (and people) only register .中国 addresses; then the rest of the world will need familiarity with Chinese characters if they want to use the internet to explore and use those sites.
This will probably happen in other regions too, with Cyrillic and other scripts.
Good idea. Also, on each site, they could have a link to a list of all titles that have been blocked by order of that nation's courts. Perhaps with some/many called 'Title Forbidden' if the title itself was deemed to be offensive by that nation's courts.
That way, people would know what their courts were preventing them from watching.
"... including China, Indonesia, and India. Life+ will be available in just those three, and only in English, ..."
Can many poor people in those countries read English? If you want to get people as future paying customers, I'd have thought a native language service would be the best way to get them to feel good about you.
My immediate reaction was to make a comment along those lines. However, ....
If you see a collection of family photographs, the oldest of which shows your great-grandfather as a newborn baby, would you say 'here is the youngest person in the collection'? It is a photo of the 'youngest person at the time'. Semantics ...Pendantics......
1: AFAIK, in the UK it is illegal for the jury to discuss their deliberations with anyone, even after the trial. Is this not the case in the USA?
2: People talk about the expense of lawyers, understandably. Are the lawyers and legal teams involved actually the long term employees of Apple and Samsung? (In which case the marginal costs are travel, accomodation, any court administration charges, etc.)
Maybe you have, but is your presence 'social'? Can people interact with you and express themselves in a multi-faceted and meaningful manner and develop their own paradigms of presence with shared visibility from 'your-space'?
If not, then I would suggest that..... er, ...... you're in a fortunate position.
Congratulations and best wishes of course, but please note the following:
I've often picked up articles from your Australian correspondents via a headline on the RSS feed and later found that the article is not listed on your main front page. I hope that was a temporary situation and they will be fully incorporated into El Reg from now on.
"any other product with a feature or features not more than colorably different from any of the infringing feature or features in any of the Infringing Products.”
I try to keep up, but this derivative of the word 'colour' has me stumped. Can anyone explain what it means?
I think I know what the entire sentence is trying to say.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
