If you posit the Big Bang, you also have to explain what came before the Bang . Something you and your fellow reductionists have consistently failed to do.

The thing is, we’re working on it.

How convenient. It’s almost as if it was designed rather than a massive fluke.

Please don’t… 🙁

Very good introduction to Higgs Here[/url]

Practically? Nothing.

in our lifetime. See also: electrons

So we’re discussing the merit of a statement (‘no one educated has believed…in 2000 years’) which was made in response to a statement (‘scientists were right that the earth isn’t flat’) ignoring the fact the 1st statement is only relevant if scientists only came into existence in the past 2000 years and no earlier?

Nice tangent.
(All THAT for a PUN? Madness)

How about compulsory black boxes in cars that record all driving data (speed, acceleration, braking, lateral g-force in corners etc) then use that info to adjust your insurance premiums?

I’m going to have to grow ever more comfortable with a man in a suit peering over my shoulder all my life, aren’t I?

Sugar makes you depressed.

As it’s not accessing your HDD much, it might be turning it off.
Go into Power options from the control panel, then Change Plan Settings followed by Hard Disk and up the ‘turn off after’ time. See if that makes a difference 🙂

In case it’s not clear,

I wasn’t comparing F1 to road driving in any practical sense other than to show (badly) that, all other factors aside, driving quickly does not always equate to causing accidents. Please don’t get tied up dissecting light hearted but poor analogies, it’s not important.

Everyone knows the air gets sucked out of your lungs above 60mph, right?

Yup, good idea. I swapped my SPDs for flats recently. I half expected my legs to explode from the poor technique the internet had told me I had developed from my SPD use. I was shocked to find that my legs remained in-tact, I could bunnyhop just fine, and that my feet gripped the pedals very well.
I must stop listening to people on the internet.

This doesn’t bode well for humanity.

(Cats serves as the typical internet control)

Details? Avail us!

To be honest, if I had their fan base, I’d probably see how much I could get away with too.

Well that’s a shame.

PHYSICS INJECTION!

Surely not being able to model it is not the same same as not understanding it. It’s a stochastic process and we understand the mechanisms which govern the flow. Of course we can’t predict the random effects, but that doesn’t mean we don’t understand them does it?

We’re modelling it very well for simple, low Renolds number flows. Complexity and Re is increasing with computational power available.

Experiment vs Direct numerical simulation of turbulence (this is solving the Navier Stokes equations across tiny-ickle length and time scales without turbulence modelling)

Anyone can start their own business, it just needs the demand to be there for the product or service targeted.

There’s a market and demand for infinite energy.
I take it the only reason no one has started a business that sells this infinite energy is that they don’t want to pay tax?

So does anyone on here actually want the UK to maintain a permanent nuclear deterrent?

Nah. Everyone’s got those now. I’d prefer spacebourne high energy weapons. Much cleaner.

We need to pay teachers more, invest heavily in STEM subjects, have leading scientists develop new metrics (in multiple teams, competing against each other to find the best) by which we measure performance, thereby getting rid of all middle-managers who do not understand the work of those they manage (especially in the education sector).
Universities are run in tandem by academics and MBAs, with no party having complete control.
Churn out thousands of top-quality engineers. Subsidise the development of spacebourne high-energy weapons.

Rule the world from my bunker.

i’ll concede that you’re half right, but surely you’ve got to be very, very, very, very, sceptical to suggest that AV would have been the last stop on the ‘electoral reform’ journey.

we didn’t even get on the bus, we’ll never know where it would have taken us.

While I agree with you, I feel most people simply made the vote that was in front of them. However, ‘No to AV’ votes have been taken to mean ‘No to election reform’, which is madness.
(apologies for my post-coffee edit)

we were asked if we want to try something else, but it turns out we don’t.

No, we were asked if we prefered one other system to the system we currently have. This is not the same.

How about a shared STW blocked bidders list.. I have a whole heap of dicks who ive got in my blocked buyers list. If anyone sends me a stupid question or doesnt pay then they go on the blocked list

I will set up and manage a shared stw-classifieds blocked list for you. Just 2% a transaction to query my database.

No. We’d still be human.

If no one else sorts it sooner, I’ll give it a shot at tabbing with performance notes tonight.

You want lots of reverb and maybe a little bit of Chorus, a volume pedal could help for the swells (but I’m at work and these headphones aren’t the best).

I’d default.

And I must have at least a dozen USB-to-microUSB leads lying around the house from various different devices.

Non-proprietary standards are great, aren’t they? 😉

*baaaarp* Sorry, the correct answer was “It would work just fine with the Apple charger too (as it is USB)”

That’s funny, I don’t see microUSB anywhere here…

Reviews on amazon are mixed. And it’s not obvious from the picture but the reviews say you also need to plug a second microUSB into that box to supply the power, which is annoying.

Good job it’s a microUSB charger and not proprietary one!

“Plug the white cable into the bottom of your phone”

or

“Plug the black mini-HDMI cable into the side of your phone, plug the 3.5mm jack into the socket at the top, plug the micro-USB power cable into the bottom, plug the micro-USB data cable into the other hole. Now connect to your wifi. Do you know the password?”
*Whooooosh*

Amazingly some other people plug phones into docks that are slightly further away and would like to use a remote?

Why does this proclude the use of a universal standard?

Ahhh right.

So if we close our eyes and forget about all the billions of existing non Micro-USB chargers out there and the ecological cost of disposing of them THEN Apple are the eco bad guys? I see.

Sounds like the same kind of “eco” approach where someone scraps an existing car to buy a brand new Prius, closing their eyes to the environmental costs of the scrappage and the manufacturing of the new car.

Now THAT was just a rant 🙂
I think he’s cracked, everyone!

You assume. We don’t really know yet.

The article (which this thread is about) assumes.

Unfortunately there is a MASSIVE difference between specifying MicroUSB as a standard physical interface for charging (as the EU did) and defining standard USB Device Classes in an attempt to standardise everything a smartphone can do.
As I understand it there has been no work on the latter.

If apple adopted MicroUSB, it would be a step toward the latter. If apple do not adopt the standard, it is the continuation of what we have now. How is this progressive, innovative or desirable?

I’m not sure why that makes Apple the eco bad guys!

You’re living in the past.

>it’s one of the main reasons I’ve always avoided the iPhone; the problem with buying expensive kit designed specifically for a device….
Yes, but the alternative is to buy a device that has no kit specifically designed for it and just gets by through a series of kludges.

That’s the only alternative? C’mon, you’re a smart bloke – is that really the only alternative?
I’ll give you a hint – you use USB every day. Kit no longer has to be specifically designed (driver level) for different computers. Is it kludgey…?

Yep, that’s great. So how does it display artist/track information on your stereo? How do you control track selection with your docks remote? How do you get video and data out a 3.5mm plug? How do you plug in third-party accessories?

Hopefully with a unversal standard so there is no vendor lock-in when the third-party accessories / stereo are purchased. Perhaps microUSB? Oh…

Did all the other phone manufacturers offer converters for their legacy devices?

This isn’t about legacy! This is about a new apple standard that is different to the new universal standard.

One of the main selling points of iDevices is the massive range of third-party docks and widgets that are designed specifically for them.

Funny, this thread is about Apple trumping a universal standard in favour of their own. Imagine how wonderful the world would be if everything ‘just works’ together by using universal standards. This would eliminate the need for things to be designed specifically.

Proprietary anything discourages interoperability.
(Oh wait, people like the walled garden)

Firewire

Bollocks. They haven’t had a Firewire chip in years. (Ok, they did when the connector was made. Me and my haste)

…TuckerUK public sector whinge…

The Public Sector sounds awesome. Why aren’t you in it?

Looking like you have some ishoos capn. You might want to consider winding it back a touch.

Shh! The more he does it, the more I can cry ‘Teh Ironings!’

My particular bugbear is people starting new threads without checking that the subject has already been discussed.

My bugbear is people on any forum replying with ‘this has already been discussed’ or ‘use the search function’. But nothing is worse than people who criticise other posters’ replies without adding content of their own
😀

The problem is it means that either catch-up is required which means the next qualifications content suffers or the teacher is stressed to death doing extra, or the students miss out.

Bang on.

Some exam boards offer very poor GCSE science double awards. AQA’s “21st Century Science”, for example, featured this gem of a question:
“Mark is in the aisle of a supermarket dressed as a cow. Why might Shaniqua be offended by this?”. Pupils then, understandably, struggle at the start of their Physics AS level (but the teachers are aware of this and plan accordingly). It is similar for the A level – University transition.

As said above, pupils often have no choice between separate or double award science – the school has made the decision for them on what are often (sadly) financial and political grounds.

I don’t care what the exams are called. Pay teachers more and stop distributing funding based on poor metrics and easily manipulated targets.

Yes.

Your DNA is 3.2 billion base pairs long (ish). The 20 numbers are just counts of the number of times that certain sequences repeat at specific points.

Ok, happy days. Thank you!

However I am good at information theory and reducing the 3.2 billion base pairs of the human genome into a profile of just 20 numbers has a very high degree of entropy. The resulting profile is not going to be useful for determining the genetics risks of diseases.

I don’t know anything about information theory or genetics. Surely 20 numbers can be used to store / reference a hell of a lot of information? Please explain.