Sunday, February 27, 2005

Google News U.K.

Google News U.K.

new to me localised news

Google Search: charles wedding

Google news Search: charles wedding
legal but ludicrous say some Aussies

After the wedding at the Guildhall in Windsor, the Queen is to host a reception for 700 people within the precincts of Windsor Castle. Prince Charles is said to have been overruled in his plans for a lavish reception by his mother, whose staff will provide a light buffet rather than a sit-down banquet of organic food.

Advertisement
AdvertisementCharles and Mrs Parker Bowles on Wednesday jointly hosted a reception at Clarence House for Australians and New Zealanders before the Prince's trip Down Under next week. Among the guests were Delta Goodrem and Kiri Te Kanawa, who sang at Charles's first wedding.

Earlier, the Prince lost his temper with his courtiers, telling them that his wedding plans "had turned into a bloody farce", the Daily Mirror reported. His private secretary, Sir Michael Peat, the architect behind the wedding, has been criticised for a succession of blunders

European Scientists Believe in Life on Mars

Science News Article | Reuters.com: "Gerhard Neukum, of the High Resolution Stereo Camera team, showed several pictures of the 'Frozen Sea' near the equator. The area is some 800 by 900 kilometers and the original depth was some 50 meters with ice rafts of up to 30 kilometers in size.

Mars remains a very hostile environment -- a fierce solar wind is blowing away planetary materials and penetrates deep down the dayside atmosphere while during polar night, the atmosphere is minus 130 to minus 143 degrees Celsius. But David Southwood, ESA Director of Science, said Europe should return to Mars and needs to find money for a second mission to probe deeper into its mysteries. "

BACTERIA

Shuttle Safety Weighs Heavily on Fuel Tank (washingtonpost.com)

Shuttle Safety Weighs Heavily on Fuel Tank (washingtonpost.com): "'If you want certainty, you're in the wrong business,' said Wayne Hale, deputy space shuttle program manager. 'We are doing our level best to provide a maximum degree of confidence, but certainty is something we don't have a lot of.'

The external tank has dictated almost everything that NASA has done for two years under the rubric of shuttle 'Return to Flight.' Because of the Columbia accident, engineers altered the tank's design to minimize foam loss during launch and eliminated foam from the bipod that connects the tank to the forward part of the orbiter. Bipod foam was the source of virtually every large debris chunk that ever hit the shuttle undercarriage. "

as early as May 15, when a three-week launch window opens for a shuttle to lift off from Kennedy Space Center for the first time since Columbia disintegrated on reentry over Texas on Feb. 1, 2003.


if repairs to a damaged shuttle cannot be satisfactorily completed in space, NASA has devised a last-ditch plan for the crippled orbiter's seven-person crew to seek "safe haven" aboard the space station for at least 45 days, until a rescue shuttle can be sent to retrieve them. Atlantis will have this role initially and will be ready to fly by June 14, should Discovery run into trouble.

Some have urged caution, and perhaps a delay, in launching Discovery to buy more time to work on safety, but NASA in recent months has had some success making the point that "space is hard," and the space shuttle, even after 113 flights, is an experimental program.

much snipped

Thursday, February 24, 2005

Design Studies: History of the Design profession (European)

At Loughborough University Design Studies: History of the Design profession (European): "The European Roots of Industrial Design
Art Nouveau Henry van der Velde
Hector Guimard Belgium & France
Antoni Gaudi
Spain
Tony Garnier - The Industrial City 1904
The Deutsche Werkbund - founded 1907
Peter Behrens - AEG
Herman Multhesius
Walter Gropius
Henry van der Velde
Germany
FuturismAntonio Sant EliaItaly
De StijlPiet Mondrian
Gerrit Rietveld
Netherlands
The Bauhaus Henry van der Velde
Walter Gropius
Marcel Breuer
Wassily Kandinsky
Paul Klee Germany
Le Corbusier - Villa Savoie
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Scandinavian Modern designAlvar Aalto"

USENET-SE.NET Peering Page

USENET-SE.NET Peering Page

This is a service intended for the global Usenet community. The idea is to make finding suitable newspeers easier. On this page you can put up a peering request and supply data about your system as well as info about what you'll require or wish from your would-be peers. Click here if you want to add a peering request to the list.

The Freenix ratings are old and inaccurate, in many cases, as they haven't been updated for quite a while. Sometime soon we'll setup an automated system that remembers Path: headers to keep track of various sites' Freenix positions but until that is in effect you'll have to take the figures with a grain of salt.


now that news.fu-berlin.de is going commercial
I am looking for a new source or interface, of course theoretically I could set up my own nntp server on this machine.

I failed at that last time I tried it.

to http://www.zedat.fu-berlin.de/services/news.html
I am sorry to be leaving you on 1st April after many years good service

I am 69 years of age living under the poverty margin on two half state pensions
pian in Danish Kroner and UK ponds sterling
and the expense of paying in EURO will be greater than the subscription

I do not now what MOMS or VAT is in german
but ancestry.com in USA has to charge sales tax on all their sales to european users

I think you should have a Sales tax identification number in accordance with § 27a of the sales tax law

Umsatzsteuer-Identifikationsnummer gemäß § 27 a Umsatzsteuergesetz

I hope you don't get into trouble :-(

regards

Hugh W





Wednesday, February 23, 2005

BreakTheChain.org - Stop Junk E-Mail and Misinformation

BreakTheChain.org - Stop Junk E-Mail and Misinformation: "Question everything! E-mail is an unreliable medium for sharing information.
It is unreliable, cannot be tracked and no company uses it to give away money or products.
It's an ineffective tool for political activism and won't make you a millionaire overnight. "

and never write a private email - they go astray

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

a usenet era ends

News.Individual.NET - Registration

Dear users of News.Individual.NET,

effective from April 1th, 2005, use of News.Individual.NET will
not be free of charge anymore. The news service will continue as
a fee-based service.


The details:
============

Effective immediately, registration for our news service is only
possible through our web site:

http://news.individual.net/

Registration by e-mail (as hitherto) is no longer possible.

Holders of existing accounts who want to continue using their account
need to convert it into a pay account. This is also only possible
through our web site:

http://news.individual.net/

You will also find all details on payment options, terms of use, and
terms of contract on the web site.

The time until March 31th, 2005, is a transitional period so that
holders of existing accounts will have plenty of time for convenient
conversion. Sign-up for new accounts or conversion of existing accounts
made within the transitional period (before April 1th, 2005) will not
cause any disadvantages:

Contracts concluded within the transitional period will last until
March 31th, 2006 (Annual Subscription) or June 30th, 2005 (3 Months
Subscription) without additional costs. Then the contracts will auto-
matically renew themselves for another year or another three months
respectively.

Important notes:

Effective from April 1th, 2005, all non-converted accounts will stop
working.

Users who use the server News.CIS.DFN.DE as part of the DFNNetNews
project are not effected by the changes described above. Nothing will
change for these users, they do not need to do anything.

The fee:
========

The fee for an account for News.Individual.NET is 10 EUR per year
(annual payment), that converts to only 0.84 EUR per month. The price
includes VAT at 16%.

The background:
===============

The tradition of running news servers at Freie Universitaet Berlin goes
back as far as 1989 (historic keyword: "Methan"). The news service was
open for external users ever since: Until 1992, there was no access
restriction at all (as usual at that time). Later, a basic access
management where IP numbers and domain names were added on request was
established.

Starting with the CIS project (a third-party funded project of DFN)
of ZEDAT of Freie Universitaet Berlin, the news service was expanded
by the feature of registration for individual users in the beginning
of the year 1998:

News.CIS.DFN.DE was born. (*)

(*) see Message-ID: <6apqmg$rbe$1@fu-berlin.de>

After the CIS project was finished in mid 2002, the administrators kept
this service alive by maintaining it mainly in their spare time. Since
this was not sustainable in perpetuity, options on how to raise money
from external people and institutions for the provision and maintenance
of the service had to be researched and created. Several approaches to
find sponsors for the service eventually failed, especially due to the
lack of understanding by the potential sponsors for the nature of Usenet.

Since July 1th, 2003, ZEDAT offers - again in cooperation with DFN - news
services to other research and education institutions for money (service
name: "DFNNetNews"). In the course of this cooperation, the server name
"News.CIS.DFN.DE" vested exclusively to DFNNetNews:

"News.Individual.DE" and "News.Individual.NET" are the new server names
under which the service is available for the more than 250,000 external
individual users that were registered since the beginning of 1998.

After a long evaluation and preparation period, the service will convert
to a fee-based service for these external individual users effective from
April 1th, 2005. We regret that it is no longer possible to offer this
service free of charge.

We would be very happy if our service convinced its users of its quality
and of the engagement of its operators during the many years of its
existence so that they decide to stay our users even if the service is not
free of charge anymore.

Besides, we would - of course - like to thank all people that recommended
our service over the years and used it responsibly and carefully in the
spirit of Usenet!

Best regards,
the NetNews Team of Freie Universitaet Berlin

Glossary:
=========

CIS = DFN project "Center for Information Services"
DFN = Germany's National Research and Education Network
ZEDAT = Computer Center of Freie Universitaet Berlin

Sun Microsysems

Sun Microsystems

StarOffice 8 Preview - Sun shows beta code at Linuxworld conference this week.

Projects

Sunday, February 13, 2005

Roskilde Festival

Roskilde Festival: "30 June - 3 July 2005,
Warm-up from 26 June 2005"
time to get a ticket

Thursday, February 03, 2005

Why is 102,981,500 wrong?

This number was computed at LEGO in 1974
(snipped - from the web)

This number is - roughly - the number of ways one can build a tower of height six with two-by-four studded LEGO bricks. But when one builds with LEGO one does not have to put each brick on top of the previous one. Indeed, it is a main feature of LEGO that one can combine the bricks much more freely.

see http://www.math.ku.dk/index.html.en

Of current interest: LEGO counting problem

Why is this interesting?

Clearly nobody really needs to know exactly how many ways there are to combine 6 or more LEGOs, as clearly demonstrated by the fact that LEGO has done very nicely with the smaller number over several decades!

Thus this is mainly interesting as a challenge for mathematicians:
To compute or at least estimate the number of ways to combine a given number of two-by-four LEGO bricks.

Such challenges are always important to drive mathematical research, and it oftens happens that methods developed to study a problem with no practical applications (like this one) are useful to study problems which do have an impact on everyday life.

Mathematicians often get the question of whether there is anything left to study in mathematics.

The common misconception that the study of mathematics is somehow complete is probably induced by the fact that the mathematics most people encounter during their education is several centuries old.

The fact of the matter is that mathematics is a vivacious research area with lots of open problem, and here is a good one to point out.

thanks to Bergfinnur Durhuus, Søren Eilers and Mikkel Abrahamsen