This a pittance, especially for those of us who live in London
There's a solution to that. At least two solutions, actually. Personally, I'd go for the thermonuclear revocation of the last millennium of planning consents, but some people might consider London to have some features worth not being a smoking hole in the ground.
From the article: 'But in contrast to its conventional form, it is soft and malleable by hand' - so not quite usable for jewelry
That depends on what sort of jewellery you're using it for.
While I wouldn't claim to be a jeweller, I have probably made more items of jewellery then the other hundred people on this boat, and repaired a number more. I could certainly envisage using, for example, the red form as the centre piece for a pendant, with (say) alternating "rays" of gold and silver sheet (or gold rays laid over a silver foil base) to represent a sunburst.
That's without the intrinsic interest (well - to a chemist and mineralogist) of these essentially different allotropes of the metal.
Though many places allow prisoners to vote, i don't know if the UK is or isn't on that list.
The UK government has recently been told by the courts that they have to allow prisoners to vote (if they're on an indefinite sentence, IIRC), and the UK government are livid about being told that that is the law.
To get this amount of dimming, you'd need an awful lot of comets (possible - let's say a Jupiter-mass worth of them), and for them to be in a relatively compact group. That would be (as I mentally draw models of the system) concentrated around something like 1/10th of the circumference of the orbit. And you'd need something to hold them in that position.
My mental imaging is suggesting that this could be a dense "Trojan" swarm held in place by a "Super-Jupiter" whose transit we haven't observed yet.
If it's a dupe, it wasn't showing up when I submitted it. And indeed the other one was posted at the same time that I was composing mine and checking for dupes. So blame the Slashdot "editors" and/ or system, not me. I did my due diligence.
The guy has got up my nose more than a few times with that shit that he used to do through - was it Medium, Vice, or MediumVice, or some such piece of shit. It got to the point that I was looking for ways to actively block his stuff from coming up again (short of completely trashing Slashdot.
But props to the guy - he has improved his posting somewhat the last couple of months, and has squeaked back into being worth paying attention to. In particular, in this one he STARTS with a link to TFP (that The FUCKING PAPER, for the multitude of Slashdotters whose association with science is more in their imagination than the reality) on ARXIV. So I think he's learning his craft.
I've no idea what his writing on Forbes is like because I can RTFP, so I don't need second hand presentations. But if he's trying to be a science journalist there, then the fact he's appreciating the importance of primary sources is worth noting and encouraging.
IPv6 specific security features, such as not automatically assigning IP addresses to anything that may just be loitering about in the vicinity of the network?
I didn't see any mention of this being a wireless router, so I'd expect the simples way of not having random devices connect to it would be to not plug a cable into the router.
Right, so long as its not my offspring that you are willing to sacrifice. And everybody has this same viewpoint for his own value of "my".
You chose to use the word "everyone" ; that is a word with only one meaning.
You are wrong. It is absolutely and incontrovertibly untrue that "everyone has this same viewpoint". I do not hold this opinion. The two-decade old receipt for my vasectomy (before having any children ; it was a bureaucratic struggle) supports my assertion that I hold a different opinion to you on this matter. I can also think of at least ten others of my friends who do not have children and who assert that they do not want to have children ; several of them are at or beyond the technical limits of child-starting age and remain child-free. This also supports my correction of your claim that "everyone" thinks like you. "Every-", "all" etc are words and prefixes that you should think several times before ever using.
Incidentally, I object to paying taxes to subsidise your children, their education and your spending on food and clothing for them. I'd rather spend the money on development of elder-care robots and extending lifespans. Robots are considerably less resource wasteful than people. Since I do get out and vote, this might be an incentive for you to do likewise.
But "Backup Earth" is not the only reason to go out colonizing.
"Backup Earth" never has been a credible reason for going out to colonise, in any sense of possibly providing a place where Earth-born humans can go to in any demographically significant numbers (for Earth ; far smaller numbers would be significant for the putative colony). The number of people who will ever die on a planet that they were not born on is always (caveat follows!) going to be far smaller than the number who die on the planet of their birth, for the same reason that today most people die in the country of their birth : transport is expensive. Colonies rarely receive more than 1% / year of their population by immigration - most of their growth is by local breeding of second and higher generation natives. Meanwhile the colony's internal growth can exceed 3% / year. Those numbers add up.
(Caveat : assuming that the currently-understood laws of physics hold, in particular the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass, and the speed of light being an upper limit on speed. Actually, it doesn't matter that c is "legal max" ; even getting to c/10 qualifies as "expensive".)
If we (our generations) conspire with your children to fuck up the planet for their children, then it is your children's grandchildren who will suffer on Earth in consequence. The odds of your descendants including anyone who gets off planet (e.g., to the asteroids) are low (the corresponding probability for me is zero, of course).
Mars will be much easier to colonize than the moon.
That's a moot point.
Neither place is going to provide a solution to Earth's population problems and environmental problems. If people go around gibbering that "if we fuck up on Earth, we can always go to Mars or the Moon", then they're condemning the large majority of the Earth's population to death in the ecological collapse they'll allow on Earth.
The inhabitable area of the Earth is approximately 510072000 sq.km.
Allowing that Mars can be terraformed to Earth standards (if it's not impossible, I reckon that's a multi-million year project), then the inhabitable area of the Earth plus Mars is about 654870500 sq.km, a 28% increase. Human population on Earth has increased by that much in my lifetime, so a terraforming project on Mars would buy less than 50 years of human population growth. Let's be optimistic and hope that the Solar system has enough available volatiles to perform the terraforming project, and I'm wrong by a factor of a hundred on how fast that atmosphere can be put onto Mars - so a 10,000 year terraforming project on Mars would yeild a 50 year buffer space to stack humans on. Humankind must get it's addiction to population increase under control. Permanently.
In reality, I would expect that the first humans to live in space will continue to grow as human populations do. So before the terraforming project on Mars is half-way complete, there will be another Earth-full or several of humans who will need accommodating. Mars simply won't get the resources (volatiles) for the terraforming unless someone goes around mining Jupiter's atmosphere.
Then you'd immediately get "false flag" operations happening as the corporate pigs fight amongst themselves to damage each other's business interests. The drugs will still be released, but by other companies seeking to damage the genuine manufacturer for other corporate strategy reasons.
Same reason that Newton (a near contemporary) never won a Nobel. While the work was almost certainly up to standard, they're both disqualified by having been dead before the awards committee met.
I suppose they've both eligible for a "lifetime achievement" type award of some sort though. Might be worth suggesting. I'll get on the phone to Nobel, if you get on the phone to Oscar?
The Hobbit book wasn't that, it was all in good fun.
Which is precisely why Tolkein had Gandalf (the Ainu) go off to do his "big scene" stuff with the "Necromancer" (another Ainu, called Sauron) OFF STAGE. Same reason that some guy called Shakespeare (who is reputed to know a thing or several about writing screenplays) had his guys Rosencrantz and Guildenstern killed offstage - to keep the focus on Hamlet.
You don't understand Tom, do you? He's not "God Mode" anything. He's a god (well, Ainu), though not one of the major ones. He certainly out ranks the other Ainu in the plot (Gandalf, Sarumen, Radagast, Sauron) put together, but he's not allowed to act by orders of the Boss.
returned soldiers from WWII
Tolkein was referring to his own return from the trenches of WW1. Remember that he started to write this in the late 1920s.
I understand and accept Jackson's reasons for leaving the whole Tom Bombadil story out of the film version of LoTR. I don't like it, but I do accept his reasons. It would have made the whole story significantly more complex and if he tried to tie up the loose ends (who the fuck is Tom Bombadil? ; why is he unaffected by the Ring? ; why doesn't he take it and wipe out Sauron with the back of his hand, without even thinking of using the Ring?) it makes the whole of the rest of the mythology of Middle Earth unavoidable. That's a whole shitload of other movies. About fifteen for the Silmarillion (five major battles ; one movie per battle ; one movie each for Beren & Luthien ; Tuor and his girl and the dragon ; another for Gondolin ; Earendil ; and another five for setting up the Ainu and Numenor)... and I can see why Jackson just left Tom Bombadil out of it.
They should have left the Scouring in. but that wouldn't have fitted in with Hollywood's requirement for happy endings. Sucks to work with Hollywood.
I just got my hands on a piece of Apple hardware for the first time in about 5 years. A colleague is having problems with his Macbook Something not charging properly.
Whoever designed that power cord connector was a dribbling idiot, as was everyone in the design chain up to the level at which someone realised "we can make a shitload of profit on selling replacements when this breaks." Which moved it's problems from being design deficiencies to being business assets.
A reversible, magnetically latched power lead - sounds a cool idea. But the consequence of needing a contact pin, a sliding contact, and a spring instead of a static soldered joint triples the component count and triples the number of failure points. And sure enough, the guy in question has a useless lump of Apple hardware (until he gets to a store - next month) because of the failure of one of those 3 failure points. It's the third such failure he has had at the same point in consecutive power bricks, each brought from Apple at full retail price. We've got three Electronics Technicians on board with a reasonably equipped lab - and ont one of them wants to take responsibility for trying to repair this failed component, because it is very compactly put together and designed to be irreparable.
The guy with the borked Apple won't be buying any more Apple hardware - that's for certain. I won't either (I sold my Apple gear about 5 years ago).
Really great piece of design, Apple's business managers!
Actually... I'm just wondering about proposing to the guy that we should be able to repair his machine by ripping it's shirt off, soldering flying leads into the inside of the power connector, then repeating the action with the power brick's lead. That should get him up and working again (well - his MacThing ; obviously since he had a MacThing, he brought along a working computer in addition, so he's able to do the paperwork part of his job on that) and be recoverable if he does decide to waste more money following the Apple route.
Only if you're printing LoTR on A4 and Hobbit on A3. I'm in a different country to my copies of both (both of which are over 35 years old), but I think the difference is more like 4:1 or 5:1 than 10:1 . There is a "background information" section at the end of my LoTR which bulks the 3rd book up a bit too, without really adding to the actual storyline.
The pacing of the LoTR films was a bit too rushed. The pacing of the Hobbit film was dragged out to at least twice it's appropriate length, and more likely three times it's appropriate length.
As a matter of the fact, he is not the first person to think of this.
Quite. just as a "for instance,", in the late 1990s I was reading related ideas by a German called Manfreid Eigen published back in the early 1990s, and Eigen was referring back to work from the 80s and 70s. It's a well-established way of thinking about things, even if it does somewhat bemuse chemists, geologist and others trying to approach the same problems from their own fields of expertise.
was it somehow "collected" from the system over the generations (i.e. it was always present in the system since the Big Bang?) or is information somehow "generated" over time (which is strange, because the process that creates it would probably contain the information in its definition).
This is where the geologists and crystallographers throw in their few cents, because the realities of crystal structures and their interactions include a LOT of information, some of which is repetitive, constrained in possible values, reproducible with modest error rates... all sorts of interesting properties for the information scientist to conjure with. If you pass those properties back and forth between physical (crystal) and chemical (molecules loosely bound to the surfaces), you've got some potentially very interesting systems, and as a by product you've substantially reduced the "dilution problem" too.
That the CIA sub-recovering cover story is real doesn't actually mean that "abyssal plain nodules" are unreal. The first discoveries of them happened back in the 1880s (from the British research vessel "Challenger" which gave it's name to the "Challenger Deep", and possibly some spaceships, and essentially invented the whole subject of oceanography ; in fact, it's "five year mission to explore..." sounds familiar too), and the results - more like lists of questions - were published mostly over a century ago.
The research projects that the CIA set up did yield results - most research does, even if it's a cover story - and since then there has remained a significant degree of interest in the subject, because they do represent a considerable potential metal resource. Whether they can be exploited at acceptable economic and environmental costs remains a question requiring further research and potentially technological development.
Probably the biggest problem with this technology is that the process of raking up the whole of the seabed, separating out the nodules (easy - keep anything larger than a couple of mm) and dumping the mud, results in the disturbance of the seabed, probably de-oxygenation of the deep water column, and potentially large effects on the survivability of the seabed community. What effects that would have up towards the surface is an open question. (Note that the mud itself may - or may not, or it may be variable on a km-by-km basis - contain significant amounts of adsorbed metals, which may or may not be toxic if disturbed. For this, you need samples and analyses by the 100s of thousands.)
Slashdot Mirror
There's a solution to that. At least two solutions, actually. Personally, I'd go for the thermonuclear revocation of the last millennium of planning consents, but some people might consider London to have some features worth not being a smoking hole in the ground.
That depends on what sort of jewellery you're using it for.
While I wouldn't claim to be a jeweller, I have probably made more items of jewellery then the other hundred people on this boat, and repaired a number more. I could certainly envisage using, for example, the red form as the centre piece for a pendant, with (say) alternating "rays" of gold and silver sheet (or gold rays laid over a silver foil base) to represent a sunburst.
That's without the intrinsic interest (well - to a chemist and mineralogist) of these essentially different allotropes of the metal.
You need to remember the song about Uncle Joe's Mint Balls. Then you'd know that your granny was a right little goer in her time.
Oh, hang on. Damn.
The UK government has recently been told by the courts that they have to allow prisoners to vote (if they're on an indefinite sentence, IIRC), and the UK government are livid about being told that that is the law.
To get this amount of dimming, you'd need an awful lot of comets (possible - let's say a Jupiter-mass worth of them), and for them to be in a relatively compact group. That would be (as I mentally draw models of the system) concentrated around something like 1/10th of the circumference of the orbit. And you'd need something to hold them in that position.
My mental imaging is suggesting that this could be a dense "Trojan" swarm held in place by a "Super-Jupiter" whose transit we haven't observed yet.
That time is of course in GMT.
To quote a UK junior minister at about 2001-09-11 15:00, "Today is a good day to bury bad news.
If it's a dupe, it wasn't showing up when I submitted it. And indeed the other one was posted at the same time that I was composing mine and checking for dupes. So blame the Slashdot "editors" and/ or system, not me. I did my due diligence.
But props to the guy - he has improved his posting somewhat the last couple of months, and has squeaked back into being worth paying attention to. In particular, in this one he STARTS with a link to TFP (that The FUCKING PAPER, for the multitude of Slashdotters whose association with science is more in their imagination than the reality) on ARXIV. So I think he's learning his craft.
I've no idea what his writing on Forbes is like because I can RTFP, so I don't need second hand presentations. But if he's trying to be a science journalist there, then the fact he's appreciating the importance of primary sources is worth noting and encouraging.
Of course he does - he's posting to Slashdot.
I didn't see any mention of this being a wireless router, so I'd expect the simples way of not having random devices connect to it would be to not plug a cable into the router.
... Downloading away merrily on the account, not seeing any adverts.
You chose to use the word "everyone" ; that is a word with only one meaning.
You are wrong. It is absolutely and incontrovertibly untrue that "everyone has this same viewpoint". I do not hold this opinion. The two-decade old receipt for my vasectomy (before having any children ; it was a bureaucratic struggle) supports my assertion that I hold a different opinion to you on this matter. I can also think of at least ten others of my friends who do not have children and who assert that they do not want to have children ; several of them are at or beyond the technical limits of child-starting age and remain child-free. This also supports my correction of your claim that "everyone" thinks like you. "Every-", "all" etc are words and prefixes that you should think several times before ever using.
Incidentally, I object to paying taxes to subsidise your children, their education and your spending on food and clothing for them. I'd rather spend the money on development of elder-care robots and extending lifespans. Robots are considerably less resource wasteful than people. Since I do get out and vote, this might be an incentive for you to do likewise.
"Backup Earth" never has been a credible reason for going out to colonise, in any sense of possibly providing a place where Earth-born humans can go to in any demographically significant numbers (for Earth ; far smaller numbers would be significant for the putative colony). The number of people who will ever die on a planet that they were not born on is always (caveat follows!) going to be far smaller than the number who die on the planet of their birth, for the same reason that today most people die in the country of their birth : transport is expensive. Colonies rarely receive more than 1% / year of their population by immigration - most of their growth is by local breeding of second and higher generation natives. Meanwhile the colony's internal growth can exceed 3% / year. Those numbers add up.
If we (our generations) conspire with your children to fuck up the planet for their children, then it is your children's grandchildren who will suffer on Earth in consequence. The odds of your descendants including anyone who gets off planet (e.g., to the asteroids) are low (the corresponding probability for me is zero, of course).
That's a moot point.
Neither place is going to provide a solution to Earth's population problems and environmental problems. If people go around gibbering that "if we fuck up on Earth, we can always go to Mars or the Moon", then they're condemning the large majority of the Earth's population to death in the ecological collapse they'll allow on Earth.
The inhabitable area of the Earth is approximately 510072000 sq.km.
Allowing that Mars can be terraformed to Earth standards (if it's not impossible, I reckon that's a multi-million year project), then the inhabitable area of the Earth plus Mars is about 654870500 sq.km, a 28% increase. Human population on Earth has increased by that much in my lifetime, so a terraforming project on Mars would buy less than 50 years of human population growth. Let's be optimistic and hope that the Solar system has enough available volatiles to perform the terraforming project, and I'm wrong by a factor of a hundred on how fast that atmosphere can be put onto Mars - so a 10,000 year terraforming project on Mars would yeild a 50 year buffer space to stack humans on. Humankind must get it's addiction to population increase under control. Permanently.
In reality, I would expect that the first humans to live in space will continue to grow as human populations do. So before the terraforming project on Mars is half-way complete, there will be another Earth-full or several of humans who will need accommodating. Mars simply won't get the resources (volatiles) for the terraforming unless someone goes around mining Jupiter's atmosphere.
Oh, Unobtanium cake! Lovely!
Then you'd immediately get "false flag" operations happening as the corporate pigs fight amongst themselves to damage each other's business interests. The drugs will still be released, but by other companies seeking to damage the genuine manufacturer for other corporate strategy reasons.
I suppose they've both eligible for a "lifetime achievement" type award of some sort though. Might be worth suggesting. I'll get on the phone to Nobel, if you get on the phone to Oscar?
Which is precisely why Tolkein had Gandalf (the Ainu) go off to do his "big scene" stuff with the "Necromancer" (another Ainu, called Sauron) OFF STAGE. Same reason that some guy called Shakespeare (who is reputed to know a thing or several about writing screenplays) had his guys Rosencrantz and Guildenstern killed offstage - to keep the focus on Hamlet.
You don't understand Tom, do you? He's not "God Mode" anything. He's a god (well, Ainu), though not one of the major ones. He certainly out ranks the other Ainu in the plot (Gandalf, Sarumen, Radagast, Sauron) put together, but he's not allowed to act by orders of the Boss.
Tolkein was referring to his own return from the trenches of WW1. Remember that he started to write this in the late 1920s.
They should have left the Scouring in. but that wouldn't have fitted in with Hollywood's requirement for happy endings. Sucks to work with Hollywood.
Whoever designed that power cord connector was a dribbling idiot, as was everyone in the design chain up to the level at which someone realised "we can make a shitload of profit on selling replacements when this breaks." Which moved it's problems from being design deficiencies to being business assets.
A reversible, magnetically latched power lead - sounds a cool idea. But the consequence of needing a contact pin, a sliding contact, and a spring instead of a static soldered joint triples the component count and triples the number of failure points. And sure enough, the guy in question has a useless lump of Apple hardware (until he gets to a store - next month) because of the failure of one of those 3 failure points. It's the third such failure he has had at the same point in consecutive power bricks, each brought from Apple at full retail price. We've got three Electronics Technicians on board with a reasonably equipped lab - and ont one of them wants to take responsibility for trying to repair this failed component, because it is very compactly put together and designed to be irreparable.
The guy with the borked Apple won't be buying any more Apple hardware - that's for certain. I won't either (I sold my Apple gear about 5 years ago).
Really great piece of design, Apple's business managers!
Actually ... I'm just wondering about proposing to the guy that we should be able to repair his machine by ripping it's shirt off, soldering flying leads into the inside of the power connector, then repeating the action with the power brick's lead. That should get him up and working again (well - his MacThing ; obviously since he had a MacThing, he brought along a working computer in addition, so he's able to do the paperwork part of his job on that) and be recoverable if he does decide to waste more money following the Apple route.
The pacing of the LoTR films was a bit too rushed. The pacing of the Hobbit film was dragged out to at least twice it's appropriate length, and more likely three times it's appropriate length.
Quite. just as a "for instance,", in the late 1990s I was reading related ideas by a German called Manfreid Eigen published back in the early 1990s, and Eigen was referring back to work from the 80s and 70s. It's a well-established way of thinking about things, even if it does somewhat bemuse chemists, geologist and others trying to approach the same problems from their own fields of expertise.
This is where the geologists and crystallographers throw in their few cents, because the realities of crystal structures and their interactions include a LOT of information, some of which is repetitive, constrained in possible values, reproducible with modest error rates ... all sorts of interesting properties for the information scientist to conjure with. If you pass those properties back and forth between physical (crystal) and chemical (molecules loosely bound to the surfaces), you've got some potentially very interesting systems, and as a by product you've substantially reduced the "dilution problem" too.
The research projects that the CIA set up did yield results - most research does, even if it's a cover story - and since then there has remained a significant degree of interest in the subject, because they do represent a considerable potential metal resource. Whether they can be exploited at acceptable economic and environmental costs remains a question requiring further research and potentially technological development.
Probably the biggest problem with this technology is that the process of raking up the whole of the seabed, separating out the nodules (easy - keep anything larger than a couple of mm) and dumping the mud, results in the disturbance of the seabed, probably de-oxygenation of the deep water column, and potentially large effects on the survivability of the seabed community. What effects that would have up towards the surface is an open question. (Note that the mud itself may - or may not, or it may be variable on a km-by-km basis - contain significant amounts of adsorbed metals, which may or may not be toxic if disturbed. For this, you need samples and analyses by the 100s of thousands.)
The person you're responding to didn't use the word "US" anywhere in his discourse. Why did you?