Bikerman

I think there is an evitable abrogation of abstruse lexiphany, which is egregious and may engender epistemological indolence in multitudinous idiolects and endemic inexactitude in allusive efficacy.

First problem - definitions. That definition of luxury is poor - in fact it is inaccurate.i) Luxury need not be 'things' ii) Your 'wants' might themselves be luxury Start with a dodgy definition and it can only end up in confusion

Searching for plagiarism is quite an involved thing. I use a professional service for my essay checking and it works pretty well.I agree about RSS - I use RSS feeds on my own site for the headlines and science latest news. Entirely legitimate to do and gives the user the latest headlines from the BBC and the latest tech/IT news from wherever (I tend to use science daily for the science feeds). I keep a 7 day 'live' copy of the RSS articles which is user searchable (my site is in Joomla so I have a little bit of code that converts the RSS feed into a Joomla article, sets the expiry date and stores it according to feed - I use feedBingo now which suits my needs). After 7 days the articles are archived and kept for a further 3 weeks. Finally the headline and url is stripped and saved in a database and the rest of the article deleted.The only thing you need to do is make sure you leave the credits in for whatever site you take the feed from - apart from that it is legal, totally legitimate and will not annoy visitors like me who HATE plagiarism.If you are determined to plagiarise other sites then frankly you deserve everything that could, and I trust will, happen to you. A letter from a major firm of solicitors can often have a remarkable effect on your day, especially when it names a 5 figure fee and a court date for breaching the Copyright Designs and Patents Act (1988). Maximum penalty - 6 months prison and/or unlimited fine for a section 1 breach (the sort of thing you are doing). Up to 10 years and unlimited fine for a section 2 breach (where the criminal sets up in business copying for profit).It is sheer dishonesty to claim others hard work as your own or use it without acknowledgement and permission to appear to be an authority. People spend hours preparing well written and researched materials, only for some little toe-rag to rip it off and display it on his own site as if he had written it.BAH!

Steal is probably not the correct word here. Once you put something on the net then unless you have registered some intellectual property then it is going to be fair game. Plagiarism is probably a more appropriate word - where a person takes quotes, ideas, passages or designs from another person without proper acknowledgement of the source and sometimes in an effort to pretend that they are the author.This is something that, as a teacher/lecturer, I see more of nowadays with sources like wiki and similar. It is something I have no mercy on. If a student copies a couple of paragraphs and doesn't cite it properly then that is a fail, no arguments or questions. That is the general rule in academia - plagiarism is really serious - it can cost you your career. A chap called Raj Persaud used to present a program on radio 4 called 'all in the mind' about psychiatry. He wrote a book and 'forgot' to acknowledge several passages copied from other sources. That was the end of his radio program and he was hauled-up before the General Medical Council and found guilty of dishonesty and bringing the profession into disrepute. He had asked the original author for permission to use the quotes - he just didn't acknowledge them. That is how serious it is treated in the academic and professional spheres.This is unlikely to impress the young lady in this case and there is little you can do except to console yourself that if she is a person who does this sort of thing routinely then sooner or later it will come home to bite her on the backside.

Then there is the thermodynamic study of the other place The thermodynamics of Heaven Notice from rvalkass: Anything copied must be wrapped in Quote tags. Copied from Applied Optics (1972, 11 A14).

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This question is absolutely key and science students have been pondering it for some time.I refer you to a thermodyanmical consideration of Hell and the problems it presents to science, by a post-graduate resarch student of my acquaintence: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=105x4758603

I think it is even deeper than you say Anwiii. Adult personalities are largely formed by the time people leave school and if that period is characterised by deprivation and lack of ambition then you can pretty much predict the results - in fact there is no 'pretty much' about it - we can pretty accurately predict it over any reasonable sample size. Of course the odd one or two will make it out of the cycle, but the great majority will not. As teachers we do what we can, but, as we frequently say at parents evenings - the parents who are here we don't need to see, and the parent's we need to see aren't here....The US used to be regarded as the land of opportunity - rather as we did a couple of centuries ago. That has been changing for 3 decades now and the mobility up and down the income scale is slowing, to the point where the US now has less economic mobility than many EEC countries..http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/national/20050515_CLASS_GRAPHIC/index_03.html

Whose complaining? I'm pointing out the inequity in response to your misleading inaccurate and pretty much made up postings. So why should I be grateful to them for 'letting me live the life I do' if they are not my betters? If they have the power to control me, as you seem to imply, then they must be higher up some scale.... You don't know what you are talking about. I lecture IT so please don't start *BLEEP*ting on that as well as the rest. Go on then.(Gates didn't invent anything. Do your research). He bought QDOS, from Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products - the real author - for 50 grand. He then just rebranded it as MS-DOS and sold it to IBM (who had already approached him for an OS) and made his fortune.

Do you just make this stuff up as you go along? Here's the Forbes top 10: 1 Bill Gates - wealthy middle-class family 2 Warren Buffett - son of a Congressman 3 Lawrence Ellison - middle class Jewish family 4 Christy Walton - inherited from husband 5 Jim C. Walton - inherited from family 6 Alice Walton - Inherited from daddy 7 S. Robson Walton - Inherited from daddy 8 Michael Bloomberg - middle class Jewish family 9 Charles Koch - Rich and famous daddy 10 David Koch - ditto Now you say that they almost all started poor. Which 'almost all' is that then, because I can't see anyone in the list who was even slightly hard-up, never mind poor. PS JK Rowling came from a comfortable middle-class background. The reason she was on welfare is because she hadn't made it as a successful writer - her own choice, not enforced poverty

Do you just make this stuff up as you go along?Here's the Forbes top 10: 1 Bill Gates - wealthy middle-class family 2 Warren Buffett - son of a Congressman 3 Lawrence Ellison - middle class Jewish family 4 Christy Walton - inherited from husband 5 Jim C. Walton - inherited from family 6 Alice Walton - Inherited from daddy 7 S. Robson Walton - Inherited from daddy 8 Michael Bloomberg - middle class Jewish family 9 Charles Koch - Rich and famous daddy 10 David Koch - ditto Now you say that they almost all started poor. Which 'almost all' is that then, because I can't see anyone in the list who was even slightly hard-up, never mind poor.

Brought in investments? To whom? The hedge fund manager doesn't work for those companies in which the money is invested, he/she works for him/herself by investing clients money. They basically take the money of the very wealthy and use it in a variety of ways to make more. Do you think that appears from nowhere? They basically redistribute money to the richest - a reverse Robin Hood role. A favourite is short-selling. So these heros of yours - like George Sorros, make their fortunes by using rich peoples money to bully the market in such a way that (in the case of Sorros) the Bank of England looses billions trying to stop him shorting the currency and forcing a devaluation, which would essentially make 60 million people poorer - all so that he can give the vastly wealthy a few more bilions which they don't need to start with. You do talk some nonsense. To become a stockbroker you are going to want some money from mommy and daddy to do your first degree and then hopefully your MBA - call it 60-100 grand. Come into my class and tell my students exactly how easy it is to become a doctor, lawyer or stockbroker and the laughter would be deafening. Many of them live on the local council estate with one parent, on benefit, and several siblings. They may get one meal a day - the one we give them at school. Hometime brings arguments with parents over whether they can afford 5 pounds for a school trip to the museum (usually no, because dad/mom has to buy his/her booze/ciggs). Talk to these kids about university and they will think you are a nutcase. They have as much change of getting a degree as they have of flying to the moon - even if they are born with the brains to study at a high level. What the hell has this got to do with anything? Total straw man argument. Who exactly is complaining about veterans getting a free dinner? Yes, it is clear that you have little respect. You clearly live in a world where everyone has the same chances, drunken parents don't ruin their children's lives, money is available to the poor to study higher education and postgrad courses and everyone can be anything. Sounds like a great place, shame it isn't on earth. What a grubby little world you live in. Most people I know do what they do because they enjoy it and get enough money to pay the bills - and most people I know are really lucky because they have jobs which they can enjoy. In your world people do things only for money? What a sad world that must be. Furthermore, the idea that a cap on personal income would stop invention is complete nonsense and is easily refuted by a quick glance at the history books. Between 1948 and 1965 the US had a top rate of income tax of over 90% - effectively a pretty good cap on high earnings, since you only keep 10c in every dollar you make over the higher income limit - not exactly a motivator in your world. Did the US fall apart? Did electricity stop? Did all the cars vanish? Did invention stop? Of course it didn't. Actually many people regard this as a golden age in the US. Invention carried on - sufficient to put a man on the moon - despite the super-rich loosing 90% of every dollar they made over the higher income limit. Oh, I am supposed to be grateful to my 'betters' am I? The fact that I decided to use my talents to teach rather than accrue a personal fortune is clearly nowhere near as much use to society as forcing companies into liquidation and grabbing the profits from betting they would fail...how could I not see that I wonder? What a weird world you inhabit.

Sure about that are you? I wonder what gives you such confidence.Here's what I know about 3 millenia ago... The Babylonians were at constant war with the Assyrians. The Assyrians won in the second half of the 11th century BCE and immediately went to war with the Aramaeans. The Jews (under David) were at war with the Phillistines. Most of the warfare in that era was pretty much like any other time - a matter of power and wealth - they certainly weren't fighting because they needed more room for their populations. Life expectancy would have been about 20ish, with over half of those born dying before their 5th birthday. The rest depends pretty much were in the world you were. In my country it was the time of the Celts. Europe was entering the time of the Greeks (Doric era), the Egyptians are busy building pyramids. Amenemope was Pharaoh, busy accumulating money for his tomb. All in all it was a pretty brutish time to be alive - however briefly. They were anything but peaceful, and certainly gave as much importance to money as we do, depending on where we are talking about. Subsistence nomads and very early farmers wouldn't have cared much about money, because what would they buy with it? They spent all their time trying to get enough food to eat and avoid falling prey to other tribes, starvation, cold or disease. You can take it and welcome. Me, I'll stay right here thanks. PS - yes they did have money. Standard units of 'wealth' go back much further - to at least 2500BCE in Egypt. Small gold bars or gold rings were used as payment for goods/services - not disimmilar to modern currency in some ways, but entirely based on the worth of the bar/ring rather than promisary notes from the bank with little intrinsic value but freely exchangable to the stated amount.

Well, since I read the thread trying to find some science, I may as well kick in my own thoughts.a) Has the white west exploited Africa (and most of the rest of the world)? You betcha - undeniable. Are all the current problems in Africa down to the 'white man'. Nope. There is some blame - much of it for how aid has been targetted and distributed. Global monies from institutions like the IMF has been historically tied to measures designed to deliver a market economy in the country receiving the money. That has meant, for example, that countries in Africa have been encouraged to turn land over from food production to crop-for-export. In countries where there is not a huge surplus of land to start with, that is bordering on criminal. The West has also played colonial power politics in Africa for so long that many current ethnic issues can be laid at our door - because we (I am a Brit) were the ones, in a lot of cases, who drew the borders of countries. Much of the time the newly created countries spanned unstable tribal mixtures which was always bound to lead to violence.HOWEVER, African countries need to start taking responsibility for themselves. The West is to blame for much, no denying that, but it is NOT entirely to blame for the massive levels of corruption in many African states. Neither is it entirely to blame for Mugabe's suicidal land-reform program that has essentially turned his country from a relatively prosperous country producing enough food for export, into a basket-case.c) Are poor people just lazy. Of course not. It is true that there is, certainly in the UK, a benefits sub-culture, where generations have not worked and subsist on state benefits. That is partly the blame of the state for allowing it to develop and partly the blame of the people concerned. One should not underestimate, however, exactly how much of a millstone such a family can be around the neck of any child, however well intentioned, and it seems rather simplistic and callous to blame such children for their own fate when they almost inevitably grow into the next generation of benefit receivers.There does seem to be some underlying acceptance that rich people work hard for their money and therefore deserve it. I would say that is a pile of .... well, nonsense, to put it politely. Is it seriously being maintained that the Hedge-fund manager, earning $100 million per annum, works ten thousand times harder than a hospital nurse, or a street cleaner, or a maid/house cleaner, who earns maybe $10,000. obviously that is garbage. The system is setup to allow the rich to keep their money and to make the poor pay disproportionately for running society. Most highly paid employees use the argument that 'you have to pay the best to get the best'. OK, but when you get below top management the argument changes to 'supply and demand'. In other words we can get a nurse anytime we like, but not an executive of a multinational company. Well, sorry, I think this is one of the greatest hoaxes of the 20th and 21st century. The major skill possessed by many Chief Executives is possession of the sort of personality that lets you fire workers without loosing sleep. The notion that these men are somehow incredibly gifted is not one I have ever believed and having known a couple, not one I have ever witnessed either.Given a finite quantity of money in a society, it seems obscene to me that the top fraction of a percentage earn sums of money so large that they are telephone numbers to most people. They cannot possibly need so much and the notion that they are somehow 'worth it' seems to me to be ridiculous - they have it and others don't. They got it by either gambling other peoples money on the markets, firing lots of people who actually make things, or inheriting it from mummy and daddy. Very occasionally someone from the working class will make it big but this is very rare and a glance at the social mobility stats for the US and the UK show it is getting rarer. The US notion that anyone can achieve anything - and even become president - is a rather cruel joke played on the gullible. You can do better than you were, and you can be moderately successful with hard work, but you need a lot more than hard work to join the elite mega-rich.

Hi folks,I'm bikerman - a middle-aged English chap. My main job is lecturer/teacher of IT and Computing Science. I have also worked in industry as a systems manager and for a brief 2 year period as a recording engineer in a London studio.I am married, no kids, spend far too much time on the internet and enjoy music engineering (I have a small home studio), motorbikes, and occasionally juggling. I am not religious (in the slightest) and I have taken part in two live debates with creationists in local venues. I am a huge fan of science in general and physics in particular and can often be found on the Science forums discussing quantum physics or relativity with some of the very expert scientists, who kindly take the time to explain my latest confusions :-)Now you know all there is to know about me

No, this is fundamentally wrong. a) Time is relative. Time passes at different rates depending on how fast you move. This is not some illusion - it really does. This means that there is no such thing as 'time'. There are 'times' and each one is potentially different. c) For various other reasons (to do with Relativity) we cannot really talk sensibly about time without also talking about space. Since time varies with movement through space it is, in a real sense, PART of a bigger whole which we call spacetime. So - everything above is factual and not a matter of debate. Now you need to work out the implications, and they are pretty astonishing for most people. For example: If I go in a very fast spaceship and travel for a year at about 70% of the speed of light then on my return it is NOT next July. It is next September. No trick - on my spaceship exactly one year has passed - I am one year older. On earth 1.4 years has passed and everyone is 1.4 years older. If the trip was 20 years then when I returned 28 years would have passed. if I get an upgrade to my engine so that I can go at 0.9 the speed of light then for every year I travel 2.3 years passes on earth. If I get to 95% of the speed of light then my year is 3.2 years and if I manage to get to 99.99% of the speed of light then each of my years is 70 years on earth. That is one little factoid - we call it time dilation. Any budding Einsteins will already be realising other things that follow from this - like the fact that distances also change as you move at different rates, or like the fact that simultaneous events are not simultaneous for other observers. That last one is a poser to be sure. Think about it. When I see two events happening at the same time, other observers may see them happen at different times. Really, I promise! :-) I'm glad you believe in some scientific ideas. Do you also accept evolution? Because if so then it seems that God created a whole lot of stuff for just one species. Why create the universe and wait 8-9 billion years before creating earth and then wait billions more before man evolves? Seems like a strange way of doing things, but maybe He has a reason eh? :-)Actually the notion that God exists outside time is fine by me - I am an atheist but I have nothing against religious belief so long as it is not 'fundamentalist' and it doesn't result in harm to others.* What I cannot abide is those who let their faith blind them to reality - the creationists and fundamentalists of all types who cannot accept obviously true facts because it contradicts what they think their faith position should be. No time for that at all. I want to know how things are in reality, and if what I learn is scary or hurtful then so be it. Fairytales are for children :-) *PS - that is not meant to apply to Muslims in particular by the way. Fundamentalist Christians scare me just as much as the Islamist terrorists do.

We could now get into the topic of whether time actually flows or whether it is an illusion. Related and introductory to that would be the question - is there a smallest possible unit of time (a 'quantum' of time) ? This is pretty important in physics at the moment because the answer will determin whether General Relativity is fundamentally flawed in concept, rather than simply being incomplete. It is worth thinking about the 'childish' stories from Xeno and other ancient Greeks who thought about this matter. Remember - the tortoise and the hare? If there isn't a shortest unit of time then what connects 'now' to 'past' and 'future'? If there IS a smallest unit of time then imagine two objects side by side. The first object moves North for the smallest possible unit of time. The second moves south for the same period. After 1 unit of time they are therefore 2 units apart. Whoopsie... If General Relativity is actually correct and time does NOT quantise (divide into units) then the implication is, I think, that time does not flow. Everything is just 'there' - past, present, future. Since we know that ideas like 'simultaneous', 'absolute time' and 'absolute distance' are not real - they change for different observers - then it also follows that my past is someone else's present. Anyone on the moon sees me (if they could) in me past, not my present. Likewise the astronaut returning to earth after a 10 year voyage and finding that 100 years have passed on earth has things to say about the future already 'written'. Fascinating subject time - it can give you a headache when you think about it deeply though.. :-)

That is a tricky one because the voice is so integrated into the frequency map. I suspect it had been very heavily compressed/limited and whoever mastered it has done some naughty tricks as shortcuts. The version I have is impossible to treat so that I would be happy to be associated with the results (I have a home recording studio here in Frodsham - mainly for my own interest). I ran it through a couple of frequency analysers trying to construct a filter-map for the voice, but the result is very poor. If I take even more voice out then you loose all the headroom and middles on the acoustic guitar picking segment. As it is the removal of such a prominent frequency range has phased the sound quite badly. I could spend a couple of hours on it, clean it up and have something that I still would be unhappy with, so I'd rather not. You are welcome to download the test version I made, but as I said - I'm really unhappy with it and wouldn't want anyone to associate it with me, so please don't say who did it - I would have the music-crime enforcement unit down here in no time, making me do my recording engineers course again and lecturing me about GIGO. I'm presuming, of course, that you wanted the end credit theme so that's what this is. If not and you have a copy of the segment you want - or a reference to it - then I'll have a look - but no promises. Download

No I am not. Nothing to do with time zones or the sun. This is the passage of time - the tick of the clock. The clocks actually tick at different rates when they are moving apart. It is called Time Dilation.

This 'theory' has been around for a long time, so sorry to disappoint you but this is not new. It is also wrong in anything other than a subjective sense. You are talking about perceived time and mixing it up with real measured time. Time does not change with brain activity, merely the perception of time intervals. neither does it change in linear proportion with the activity of the brain - nothing so obvious :-) You may find the following interesting reading: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-experience/ http://4mind4life.com/blog/2008/07/23/time-perception-how-the-brain-controls-time/ Time is relative in actual fact, in the sense that it is your relative motion that decides at what rate it 'ticks'.* * If you move away from me at any speed then our clocks are then different. This is only tiny and would not be noticable, but when you start going really fast then it becomes obvious. If you could go at about 70% of the speed of light and you departed now for a journey of 12 months, then the difference in our clocks would mean that you would return not next July but next September. Your clock would show July, but here on earth it would be september....

This and similar cons have been around for a long time. Here is a simple message, worth remembering because it will ALWAYS stand you in good stead. Thermodynamics tells us that you always loose energy converting one type to another. Now, this car works by electrolysing water into H2 and O2. The energy to do that comes from the alternator in the conventional engine. The alternator is, in turn, powered by the petrol/diesel engine. A few facts: An engine is, at best, 30% efficient and an alternator around 80% efficient. So, even if you didn't waste ANY of the power from the alternator, you have still effectively wasted about 85% of it. So 85% of the petrol you have burned to turn the alternator to make the electricity to split the water ...is wasted. Now, let's be kind and say that since the engine is operating anyway, we will assign this 'waste' to normal running and not to our wonderful kit. Let's even assume it is magic and 100% of the energy from the alternator is converted into H2 and O2. You can still get no more back than the 100% - no matter what you do to the H2 and O2. Once this was pointed out to the scammers they evolved a new theory - that the H2 allows better combustion of the petrol and that explains the supposed increased MPG figures. Bad news - we tested it at the science forums. It is baloney. Any savings that drivers get are due to them driving better and nothing to do with the magic water in their expensive and useless gadgets.

Yes I agree - it is too easy to sit back and gripe about companies like M/S and that is actually counter productive because the real points of complaint become lost in the noise.As for apple - I've always respected their design and technology, though I am not fashion or style conscious enough to own their kit (I have an old walkman somewhere - that is all I think).However, recent events with the Iphone4 are beggining to hurt Apple. When it is discovered that a phone costing ?600 plus drops the signal everytime a finger touches a part of the case, then the correct response is 'hell, sorry, we'll sort it'. Apple's response was 'common to all phones, no issue, hold it differently'.Bad move. People buy Iphones for the look more than the functionality and the only option Apple have offered their customers (now they have admitted that there is a real problem) is a horrible case to put the phone in. Who is going to pay 600 quid for a sexy style icon and then put it into a plain wrapper?bad times ahead methinks.