Posts by Jonathan 69 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Sep 2006
re: Bill's quote about stealing Xerox's TV. Two things. First, as someone that studied law at Harvard, you'd have thought that Bill would understand the notion that because some else had committed a crime, it doesn't mean it's ok to do it again - it just goes to show what a piece of work this guy is.
i think the comment was meant more along the lines of "people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones" rather than "this is a legally watertight argument"...
my first job was coding in COBOL and despite being a tad (understatement) disappointed at the time i've got to say that after 15 years in the industry my appreciation for COBOL just keeps growing, and its basically down to the fact that "it just works"
i've worked on systems dealing with hundreds of thousands of transactions per minute, shifting hundreds of billions of pounds daily and ALL the reliable ones were written in COBOL and all the ones that keep spitting out errors and exceptions and falling over have been C++, Java or .Net at the core.
Admittedly this probably has as much to do with having proven, reliable management and review processes in the institutions using COBOL, but the difference is like night and day - I haven't worked anywhere newer language development has been anywhere near as well controlled or as thoroughly as you will get in a COBOL house. Seriously... I almost pull my hair out when I see/hear what some people get away with writing and putting live.
So, yeah, I see COBOL as a stark remnder that you used to beable to write code that quickly and efficiently did what it said on the tin, without thinking "mmmm... what fancy bells and whistles do i want before i start writing the guts".
(Add to that that every 3 yearsyou don't get your vendor pulling support and forcing you to upgrade your code to the latest, more expensive, version of their proprietary language/development environment)
And dude... if you need a fancy text editor to tell you what is what in your code....
I work in an IT department who are interviewing at the moment and every single CV that has come in is from a bloke. Should they all be binned?
I've also worked in a steel mill and I don't recall either
a) a lot or women working there
or
b) any campaign to increase the number of women.
(none of the secretaries in the office block ever commented how they were fed up of their 'woman's job' and wanted to work in the blast furnace but hadn't been allowed to)
same thing for coal-mining.. where is the government and media campaign to get more more women working down t'pit?
"It is possible that this exemplifies that category mentioned by Lord Hunt in summing up on extreme porn: people whom the police would like to "do something about", but who haven’t actually broken any laws."
I thought people "who haven’t actually broken any laws" were called innocent people.
Is it part of the police's job to "do something about" them?
Who else would the police like to do something about?
thank god businesses won't loose out!
shame about the people, but think lof the savings... who needs those databases and CCTV when everyone is locked away int heir little cubes working 16 hours a day and stumbling home too knackered to do anything...
apart from those who can't get jobs as those who have one are working twice the hours the are paid to.
myth
By abigsmurf Posted Thursday 6th November 2008 14:48 GMT
"contrastingly, the UN figure for deaths directly attributable to cannabis was...
2.
worldwide.
ever.
"
Rubbish. How about a link from the UN (not some sourceless pro-drug site) to back that up? Why would they even bother measuring such a figure?
There are plenty of road deaths caused by people driving while high they just generally get lumped in with other DUI stats.
re:"How about a link from the UN (not some sourceless pro-drug site) to back that up? "
you are correct, i should have backed it up/posted references
article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/oct/02/drugsandalcohol.drugspolicy
or, if you want the report itself:
"http://www.beckleyfoundation.org/policy/cannabis_commission.html"
"A report on cannabis prepared for next year's UN drug policy review will suggest that a "regulated market" would cause less harm than the current international prohibition. The report, which is likely to reopen the debate about cannabis laws, suggests that controls such as taxation, minimum age requirements and labelling could be explored.
The Global Cannabis Commission report, which will be launched today at a conference in the House of Lords, has reached conclusions which its authors suggest "challenge the received wisdom concerning cannabis". It was carried out for the Beckley foundation, a UN-accredited NGO, for the 2009 UN strategic drug policy review.
There are, according to the report, now more than 160 million users of the drug worldwide. "Although cannabis can have a negative impact on health, including mental health, in terms of relative harms it is considerably less harmful than alcohol or tobacco," according to the report. "Historically, there have only been two deaths worldwide attributed to cannabis, whereas alcohol and tobacco together are responsible for an estimated 150,000 deaths per annum in the UK alone."
The report, compiled by a group of scientists, academics and drug policy experts, suggests that much of the harm associated with cannabis use is "the result of prohibition itself, particularly the social harms arising from arrest and imprisonment." Policies that control cannabis, whether draconian or liberal, appear to have little impact on the prevalence of consumption, it concluded.
"In an alternative system of regulated availability, market controls such as taxation, minimum age requirements, labelling and potency limits are available to minimise the harms associated with cannabis use," said the report.
It claimed that only through a regulated market could young people be protected from the increasingly potent forms of cannabis, such as skunk. It is intended that the report will form a blueprint for nations seeking to develop a "more rational and effective approach to the control of cannabis".
The authors suggest there is evidence that "the current system of cannabis regulation is not working, and ... there needs to be a serious rethink if we are to minimise the harms caused by cannabis use."
Last night, the report was welcomed by drug law reform organisations. "The Beckley foundation are to be congratulated for the clarity of their call for cannabis supply to be brought within government control," said Danny Kushlick of Transform. "We look forward to the same analysis being applied to heroin and cocaine."
The report is being launched at a two-day conference, which will be attended by leading figures in the drugs policy world.
The conclusions are unlikely to be embraced by the government or the Conservative party, both of which are opposed to relaxing restrictions on cannabis use."
I think that has covered it :-)
Pedant II
sorry to be pedantic, but... you forgot your backslash..
<Pedant subtype="gricer">
blah.. blah
</Pedant>
and then...
"Surely they can't be using coal to heat the water. Shouldn't they be using a small nuclear reactor? I wonder if that would be more efficient than using a nuclear reactor to drive a turbine to produce electricity to drive the train, all on-board of course."
Though I'd read a bit recently about how environmentally clean new coal-powered plants could be in comparison to oil and gas (and ho wmuch of the stuff is still lying under the ground in the UK) ?
most of the point of the house of lords for ages has been that its not a short-sighted vote-grabbing grubby little forum like the house of commons.
its the only place in the government where "will Sun readers like this" isn't important.
and people want to get rid of it, or make it a short-sighted vote-grabbing grubby little forum like the house of commons!
why?
(as (in part) it also functions as the highest court in the land.. lets make those positions political as well?)
, in which people are asked if they support the card only after being told of the benefits expected by the service."
so, its:
-are you worried about terrorism/paedophiles?
-do you think the government should be able to track and monitor suspected terrorists/paedophiles ?
-do you think a person should be able to prove beyond doubt who they are?
-do you support id cards?
rather than:
-do you care about your personal liberty?
-are you concerned about the identity data lost by the government?
-would you worry about some incorrect information about you being kept on your permanent record?
do you support id cards?
"...the Information Commissioner's Office.... agreeing with the firm's claim that explaining to subscribers they were being monitored would have been difficult."
so they decided just not to bother and to hell with the law?
and this is an acceptable excuse?
the mind boggles!
'if Guardian readers switched to energy efficient light bulbs "this week, we could turn off a coal-fired power station for one day, one hour, 46 minutes and 1 second." '
i don't get statements like this... its not as if they will turn off the power station, i doubt its even as if they will put a bit less coal in the furnace...
"oh look... we've got 10,000 energy saving light bulbs plugged in... we had better take a few shovels of coal out of the furnace"
i'd have thought its more likely to be a case of
"we've got peak demand of x MegaWatts from <list of assorted major industrial consumers/>, we'll leave the furnace running at the most efficient level to meet that demand and hang the wasted energy when we're below peak"
reading the comments i get the impression thatthey have been written by 2 distinct sets of people.
1. brian miller and those agreeing with him who, i'm guessing have worked on large-scale mainframe applications in large companies
2. windows/unix developers.
i've worked in both environments, in the same sort of firms, and really there is very little comparison between the design and planning that goes into each type of system.
any mainframe system that i have worked on:
a) the requirements are gathered
b) the specifications are drawn-up
c) the design is drawn up
all 3 are checked and the tests designed to see that all the requirements are met and all specified behaviour is implemented.
- unit tests (what is a unit test? - please.. it took me 2 weeks in the industry to figure that one out), link(/component) tests, integration tests and overall system tests.
any wintel/unix system i have been near:
a) the requirements are gathered
b) the specifications are drawn-up
c) ... the programmer just gets on and does what they think should be done with no checking back to the requirements or the spec with testing sort of bolted on the end in an ad-hoc manner.
the results have normally been:
- mainframe code with little or no errors by the time it hits production and a clear traceable path between a specific requirement, a specific section in a design doc and test references so that the few errors occuring are easily fixed and retested
- windows/unix code that bounces back and forth between test and development with, each time, the developer insisting they have tested it and it works, fixes for one bug interfering with other code and whole mess of nobody knowing who has changed what or why they did so.
proper design and proper planning...
Brian,
you may have a (bit of a) point, but it would have been just as easy for Mr. Beens to come on here and say...
"hey, i've found this great little search engine which gives me excellent results, deletes my ip address within 48 hours and stores no cookies.
from: a randiom reader"
he may have plugged, but at least you know he was plugging
By andy gibson
Posted Thursday 26th July 2007 11:26 GMT
I thought cats were well known to be able to see the grim reaper and predict death?
agreed - has this not been observed behaviour for centuries?
...except now we're looking to science to explaim it instead of dunking the cat's owner in the river and seeing if they live (before burning them at the stake)
what have they done wrong?
if they have been convicted of a crime, done their time (if any) and been released then... they have every bit as much right to be on myspace, facebook or anywhere else as the archbishop of cantebury.
i'm sorry, but if these people are not actively (and proveably) taking part in criminal activities, then what justification is there for 'kicking them off' ?
if this is happening based on peoples past activities, which they have been punished for, then its a disgrace. might as well boot off everyone who has ever commited a crime.
2 possibilities, either:
a) they still pose a danger, in which case they should still be banged up
or
b) they no longer pose a danger, in which case myspace etc. should keep their noses out of it.
"Its a very dark road you go down when you start word or partial word blocking.
You suggest blocking 'loto' .So a domain that i own that is blotord.com gets blocked? Keep going on that thought and it never ever stops. You havent really though this out have you?"
Reminds me of the time when Scunthorpe (FC) put a word checking filter on their message board. Not surprisingly very few messages got through.
I wonder if Arsenal had the same problem?
i can't get past the thought that these are solutions in search of a problem - following on from comments on the previous article about banks and financial institutions not using floating point numbers.
at work we use what i guess would be called scaled integers for our calculations - and these are calculations on VERY large sums of money for clients who would be very (sorry, VERY) annoyed if rounding errors started creeping in to interest calculations etc. a small error on a calculation involving a few hundred million pounds can still be pretty big!
e.g. for a calculation involving 1.3 and 63.215 those numbers would get nowhere near our systems.
they would be stored as:
13 * 10^-1 and 63215 * 10^-3
thats a 13 and a -1 and a 63215 and a -3
then its relatively straightforward mathematics involving the numbers and the powers
Addition: 1.3 + 63.215
equates to
63215 + (13 * 10^(-1 - -3)) to get the numbers on the same 'scale'
= 63215 + (13 * 10^2)
= 63215 + 1300
= 64515
remembering to reapply the initial power this is 64515 * 10^-3 (64.515) so 64515 and -3 are stored for the result.
Multiplication: 1.3 * 63.215
Multiplying the numbers:63215 * 13 = 821795
Calculating the correct power of the result: 10^(-3 + -1)
= 821795 * 10^-4 (or 82.1795)
so the result stored would be 821795 and -4
.....with no loss of precision.
is this not a case of a lack of knowledge of a solution that has been used for decades rather than a need for a new solution ? (if you want to get something done properly ask a bloke who has worked on a mainframe)
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