Considering that the design was a world war 2 one when there were no cruise missiles (nor nukes to tip them with), and if "rods from God" had appeared anywhere, it was in a science fiction story along with all those unrealistic out-of-atmosphere rockets... what's so unreasonable about that?
WTF is a "thermobaric device"? Oxygen lance? OIC, a "fuel-air bomb". Well, if your aircraft carrier is letting bombers from the enemy actually get to the carrier, then you've got some pretty serious failure of your aircraft carrier already. Part of the point of such weapons is to fight at a stand-off distance from the enemy.
I'm not quite clear on this - are you saying that Clarkson is an execrable excuse for a presenter who is a liability to any show on which he appears? That him being present on a panel show is actually going to harm it's ratings and re-sale value?
I'm just trying to get an accurate handle on just how much of an arsehole Clarkson is, so that his career is destroyed and he disappears from public life.
Not to mention their brand of humor was getting very juvenile of late
Of late? That infestation has been there as long as I can remember, which is as long as I've had a TV && bothered to see Top Gear. And it's probably 5 years since I started to refuse to watch anything with Clarkson in it after his "trade unionists should be shot" claim. Friends of mine have been shot by firing squads for being trade unionists, and I'd be more than happy to return the favour to Clarkson (with him trusting that the first time I pick up a gun I'll be able to successfully shoot to hurt but not kill).
I can't conceive of the circumstances that would cause me to remain in the room while this were on, let alone actually pay for it. If I were to consider taking on Amazon Prime (which I've been fairly neutral on thus far), then this is a strong argument against it.
Back from my trip. Didn't see a single wireless charging point, so it's a null consideration at the moment.
In any event I do not see a whole lot of public wireless charging ports. Starbucks being the big one but they are using the powermat devices.
There was a Starbucks at one of the airports, but with 7 minutes to make it from passport control to my gate, I didn't investigate. We'll have to remind the booking minions that an hour is not long enough to make it through an airport, even without added security.
Ah, a rather different sort of core. For catching yours, you'll probably need a bit more than breathing apparatus.
But hang on a few seconds - your cores are already a happening event, so what have you got to achieve? Stop it going anywhere ; stop any nuclear reactions ; minimise venting of volatiles ; cool it down. For stopping the nuclear reactions, you need either boron by the tonne or cadmium (and of the two, cadmium is a poisonous heavy metal and boron a bio-not-particularly-nasty ; easy choice) ; IIRC. For cooling it down and stopping it going anywhere, you really need thermal inertia ; dumping heat you can do by running it into a bed of sand or anything with a high thermal mass, as long as it contains enough (dispersed) boron to kill the reaction. Arranging your flow paths so the the core separates into multiple smaller, isolated units to increase the cooling surface - would that make clean up harder or easier. Reducing volatiles - I guess you need to choose your mineralogy.
Can you make cement with 30% by weight boron? Or cement with an aggregate of a high-melting boron mineral?
I'm sure this has been well discussed before, but I don't know the state of the art, and after an 8 hour meeting today, I'm going to the bar!
and the keyboard default layout will never change because at this stage almost everyone in the (developed, at least) world uses a keyboard in that layout.
Dream on, Sunshine.
You describe your frustrations with switching between US and UK layouts. Well, I have that fun, because I'm a Brit and the client's laptop includes software (which I don't use, but "meh") which requires a US-ian layout. But, of course, the physical key caps are laid out in the Dutch pattern (about as different from UK and US as they are from each other. But I've got a Russian keyboard layout installed, for when I'm chatting to the wife from the other side of the world. Three month's ago the trainee (uses the machine on night shift) had German installed because she's German. The partner representatives - who also use the machine - had added Arabic and Turkish layouts. And the next job, we'll have Francophones along, so they'll probably go AZERTY too.
I doubt that a USian or British QWERTY layout is even a majority, worldwide.
Do you think that is what stops us from drilling deeper? I always thought that the biggest problem was the drill strings. After all, a working bit only gets above 150 degrees (Centigrade, of course) if you've fucked your pumps and have a crack head on the brake.
Core catchers? As in the jamming sleeve that stops your core from sliding out of the bottom of the core barrel, after you've cut it?
I've seen dozens of them when I've been catching core (and I just had the lovely news that I'll probably be catching my next series of cores in breathing apparatus. Oh joy!), but I've never seen one that had significant signs of heat damage.
What sort of coring do you do that burns out catchers?
It is Qi so most will work it's pretty much the winner.
Care to back that claim up with some stats?
I've never seen any wireless charging technology in the wild, so I've literally no idea which one of the standards is likely to be the one that wins. From wiki-ing, I get that there are at least Qi,
Open Dots, a competing wireless power standard promoted by the Open Dots Alliance PMA / Powermat, a competing wireless power standard promoted by the Power Matters Alliance Rezence, a competing wireless power standard promoted by the Alliance for Wireless Power WiPower
I've chosen VL-bus over PCI ; SCSI over IDE ; parallel port over USB (1.0), I dodged the HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray question by realising that neither offered any real (to me) use case. I see no reason at all to dive into another standards war until all bar one of the competing standards are dead on the field of battle.
Just checking if my current phone has a wireless charge capability - it's that invisible a technology... well, that's a surprise - my phone (Samsung, by coincidence) actually does have an official Qi-charging alternative back cover (or flip case). That's vaguely interesting. Since I'm travelling over the next few days for business, I'll see if I can actually spot the charging places. See if they're common enough to actually be a useful discriminator (i.e. let's coffee there not here, because there has Qi pads available and here doesn't.
It's the same problem as those people who are prescribed antibiotics and don't finish their full course: that's how you get antibiotic resistant bacteria.
Even with a population composed entirely of people who take the full antibiotic course, you'd still develop bacterial resistance, but you'd do it a lot slower. Unless your antibiotic dose is so high that you kill every single solitary one of the bacteria in your body, then the antibiotic will change the structure of the bacterial population by killing off the most susceptible strains first. Since most antibiotics have significant side effects at high doses (trashing gut bacterial populations, skin bacteria, sometimes out right toxicity to humans), the dosage is set at a level that will provide sufficient effect without excessive side effects. That dosage information one of the significant outputs from later stages of human testing.
Fisher and Haldane, and later Hamilton, set up the neo-Darwinian synthesis understanding of evolution with significant amounts of statistics because evolution is a thing that happens to populations, not individuals. You really do need to keep awareness of the underlying population statistics when you're thinking about evolution.
I don't see why accidentally ending up in America because transport messed up should be funny. First day's flight was delayed by about 19 hours by snow. Next airport I missed my connection (unsurprisingly) and the office booked me to continue home through America. Had to book one of those ESTER things online in the half-hour between getting the flight details and having to get through the passport control (did the airport have wired network sockets? did they fuck - had to work out how to set up wifi on the laptop!), then got the third degree from the woman on the passports because I was travelling with my work gear and she thought I was an illegal immigrant or something. Totally stupid. Almost caused me another day sweating into the same clothes.
before "assuming" fuck no - they're probably from the USA.
Normally a safe assumption on here. Not true in this case though. Been to America twice - once for a fortnight holiday, and once accidentally because of travel problems. Might go back, if someone pays my fees.
I sort of like all my wrinkles. Which is just, um, weird. My girlfriend freaks out about hers. I catch sight of mine in a mirror and it just makes me laugh, which causes her to lecture me about not making the laugh lines worse (which just makes it harder not to laugh).
"One man's wrinkles are another man's laughter lines."
It's probably not worth the effort of trying the line on your girlfriend. She's going to kill you for mentioning them anyway, though you might get a slightly quicker and less agonising death. Which might be a small gain.
If the BBC opened up all their content online and then instead of using geoblocking, used geotargetted ads
There are minor outlets of the BBC that use adverts - they were annoying me in Turkey a couple of weeks ago - but the BBC as a corporation doe not do broadcast advertising. They do have appropriate infrastructure for trailers and internal advertising of next weeks Downton Pigs or Vetbum Abbey, which is probably coordinated with the advertising breaks on their affiliates international broadcasting.
But for their core market, the BBC does not do adverts. That's why their more recent programming has included a 10-minute segment in at the end of each hour of programme time with things like "making of Dances with Whales" or "Being Eaten By Cats - camaeraman's diary" : it provides chunks of programming that can be detached from the editorial stream (maybe broadcast later) and frees up 10 minutes of screen time per hour for soap adverts.
None of the broadcasters in the world is set up on the basis of serving the globe, not even "giants" like NBC, CBS, ABC, or the BBC.
Yet.
And the interesting thing is with there being about 4 markets in the world (China - about a billion ; India, potential of a billion ; Europe at a half-billion ; North America, a third of a billion) then the broadcaster that doesn't get into those markets soon is not going to survive against it's global competitors. Particularly the ones that broadcast in common languages - Mandarin and English.
The (mobile) consumer does through his/her connection fees.
The only thing that changes for (say) BBC is that they chuck out or switch off their Geo-IP management servers at their gateway. Where the data goes to after that isn't their concern. That's the point about IP being an unbiased transmission protocol.
It was just a joke bro.. who would be insulted by it?
Someone who is worried about their slowly deteriorating sight and has their worst fears raised by this deliberately crude joke.
OP might wish to spend a few hours trying to navigate the world without vision - or with severely degraded vision. In fact, it's an experiment that almost anyone who isn't already severely visually impaired would benefit from. It's the old "walking a mile in another man's shoes" thing.
Try it one day. If you don't hate and fear the experience, then you're very unusual.
BTW, did you know that there's an STD that has a 35 year symptom-free incubation period. You could have caught it from the person (or farm animal) that you lost your virginity to.
had cataract surgery May '14. BIG mistake. My vision wasn't that bad, and now I have to put on reading glasses to read anything: computers, books, my phone, differentiating between Euro coins, whatever. Total PITA.
I've been wearing glasses for about as long (within a year). If my (opthalmic) optician told me that I had a cataract and that I needed surgery, I'd be starting from the expectation that I was going to lose the lens in one or both eyes, and that would drastically affect my vision, and my visual flexibility ("accommodation" is the technical term, IIRC), because, well, you lose the lens from the affected eye. Most of the focussing power of the eye comes from the air-cornea refraction, it is true, but even so you need the adjustment from the lens to accommodate changes of focus.
Fortunately, I've no indications of cataracts forming yet. I'm slowly getting used to needing to carry a pair of single-vision glasses and a pair of bi-focals for use in the office. But most days I don't bother.
another application I could envision would be amateur prospecting. But smartphones know your location, so same problem.
So? The smart phone will report it's location at the time that you analyse your specimen. Which will probably be in the hotel/ motel that you go to when you get back to something resembling civilisation.
You think that you'll have a mobile phone signal out in the field at your prospect? Damned all chance of that, because mobile phone companies don't put transmission towers where they don't have customers, and if there are any significant numbers of people in an area then it has probably been gone over already by mineral prospectors.
I'm an amateur mountaineer and professional geologist. I don't normally have signal on my mobile when I'm out on the hill. Likewise when I do onshore jobs in the deserts of Arabia or the tundra of Russia. And when I'm 100km out at sea, again, no signal.
Look at this map ; get out into unpopulated areas and you've got little chance of getting a signal. If you're in a populated area, then it's almost certainly already been prospected.
The controversy isn't about the fossil ; it's about the origin of the fossil.
The lithology of the encasing rock and age of the specimen (the report I had didn't go into details ; I'd assume micropalaeontology - it usually is) suggests that the specimen came from the Crato formation of Brazil. But Brazil has had a blanket ban on export of fossils since the 1940s. So, how did the fossil get to appear in a small museum in southern Germany? (By coincidence, I've actually been to that museum.)
and probably this is not a snake but a specimen from some extinct group.
One of the specific characteristics that they use to deduce that this is more closely related to modern snakes than to an other group is that the body (between the pelvic and pectoral girdles) is considerably elongated compared to other vertebrates. This lengthening is achieved by increasing the number of vertebrae and ribs, not by lengthening the vertebrae (which is the strategy that giraffes use, for example). There is also a hint (though it is admittedly unclear and the specimen isn't well enough preserved to tell) that the ventral surface of the body (i.e. the belly) has a single scale running across the full width.
Slashdot Mirror
WTF is a "thermobaric device"? Oxygen lance? OIC, a "fuel-air bomb". Well, if your aircraft carrier is letting bombers from the enemy actually get to the carrier, then you've got some pretty serious failure of your aircraft carrier already. Part of the point of such weapons is to fight at a stand-off distance from the enemy.
I'm just trying to get an accurate handle on just how much of an arsehole Clarkson is, so that his career is destroyed and he disappears from public life.
Of late? That infestation has been there as long as I can remember, which is as long as I've had a TV && bothered to see Top Gear. And it's probably 5 years since I started to refuse to watch anything with Clarkson in it after his "trade unionists should be shot" claim. Friends of mine have been shot by firing squads for being trade unionists, and I'd be more than happy to return the favour to Clarkson (with him trusting that the first time I pick up a gun I'll be able to successfully shoot to hurt but not kill).
I can't conceive of the circumstances that would cause me to remain in the room while this were on, let alone actually pay for it. If I were to consider taking on Amazon Prime (which I've been fairly neutral on thus far), then this is a strong argument against it.
There was a Starbucks at one of the airports, but with 7 minutes to make it from passport control to my gate, I didn't investigate. We'll have to remind the booking minions that an hour is not long enough to make it through an airport, even without added security.
But hang on a few seconds - your cores are already a happening event, so what have you got to achieve? Stop it going anywhere ; stop any nuclear reactions ; minimise venting of volatiles ; cool it down. For stopping the nuclear reactions, you need either boron by the tonne or cadmium (and of the two, cadmium is a poisonous heavy metal and boron a bio-not-particularly-nasty ; easy choice) ; IIRC. For cooling it down and stopping it going anywhere, you really need thermal inertia ; dumping heat you can do by running it into a bed of sand or anything with a high thermal mass, as long as it contains enough (dispersed) boron to kill the reaction. Arranging your flow paths so the the core separates into multiple smaller, isolated units to increase the cooling surface - would that make clean up harder or easier. Reducing volatiles - I guess you need to choose your mineralogy.
Can you make cement with 30% by weight boron? Or cement with an aggregate of a high-melting boron mineral?
I'm sure this has been well discussed before, but I don't know the state of the art, and after an 8 hour meeting today, I'm going to the bar!
Dream on, Sunshine.
You describe your frustrations with switching between US and UK layouts. Well, I have that fun, because I'm a Brit and the client's laptop includes software (which I don't use, but "meh") which requires a US-ian layout. But, of course, the physical key caps are laid out in the Dutch pattern (about as different from UK and US as they are from each other. But I've got a Russian keyboard layout installed, for when I'm chatting to the wife from the other side of the world. Three month's ago the trainee (uses the machine on night shift) had German installed because she's German. The partner representatives - who also use the machine - had added Arabic and Turkish layouts. And the next job, we'll have Francophones along, so they'll probably go AZERTY too.
I doubt that a USian or British QWERTY layout is even a majority, worldwide.
Or both?
Do you think that is what stops us from drilling deeper? I always thought that the biggest problem was the drill strings. After all, a working bit only gets above 150 degrees (Centigrade, of course) if you've fucked your pumps and have a crack head on the brake.
I've seen dozens of them when I've been catching core (and I just had the lovely news that I'll probably be catching my next series of cores in breathing apparatus. Oh joy!), but I've never seen one that had significant signs of heat damage.
What sort of coring do you do that burns out catchers?
Care to back that claim up with some stats?
I've never seen any wireless charging technology in the wild, so I've literally no idea which one of the standards is likely to be the one that wins. From wiki-ing, I get that there are at least Qi,
All of which leads me to the inevitable XKCD.
I've chosen VL-bus over PCI ; SCSI over IDE ; parallel port over USB (1.0), I dodged the HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray question by realising that neither offered any real (to me) use case. I see no reason at all to dive into another standards war until all bar one of the competing standards are dead on the field of battle.
Just checking if my current phone has a wireless charge capability - it's that invisible a technology ... well, that's a surprise - my phone (Samsung, by coincidence) actually does have an official Qi-charging alternative back cover (or flip case). That's vaguely interesting. Since I'm travelling over the next few days for business, I'll see if I can actually spot the charging places. See if they're common enough to actually be a useful discriminator (i.e. let's coffee there not here, because there has Qi pads available and here doesn't.
Even with a population composed entirely of people who take the full antibiotic course, you'd still develop bacterial resistance, but you'd do it a lot slower. Unless your antibiotic dose is so high that you kill every single solitary one of the bacteria in your body, then the antibiotic will change the structure of the bacterial population by killing off the most susceptible strains first. Since most antibiotics have significant side effects at high doses (trashing gut bacterial populations, skin bacteria, sometimes out right toxicity to humans), the dosage is set at a level that will provide sufficient effect without excessive side effects. That dosage information one of the significant outputs from later stages of human testing.
Fisher and Haldane, and later Hamilton, set up the neo-Darwinian synthesis understanding of evolution with significant amounts of statistics because evolution is a thing that happens to populations, not individuals. You really do need to keep awareness of the underlying population statistics when you're thinking about evolution.
Very un-funny experience.
Normally a safe assumption on here. Not true in this case though. Been to America twice - once for a fortnight holiday, and once accidentally because of travel problems. Might go back, if someone pays my fees.
Hey - it was a compliment! A good quality insult is a joy to find.
"One man's wrinkles are another man's laughter lines."
It's probably not worth the effort of trying the line on your girlfriend. She's going to kill you for mentioning them anyway, though you might get a slightly quicker and less agonising death. Which might be a small gain.
There are minor outlets of the BBC that use adverts - they were annoying me in Turkey a couple of weeks ago - but the BBC as a corporation doe not do broadcast advertising. They do have appropriate infrastructure for trailers and internal advertising of next weeks Downton Pigs or Vetbum Abbey, which is probably coordinated with the advertising breaks on their affiliates international broadcasting. But for their core market, the BBC does not do adverts. That's why their more recent programming has included a 10-minute segment in at the end of each hour of programme time with things like "making of Dances with Whales" or "Being Eaten By Cats - camaeraman's diary" : it provides chunks of programming that can be detached from the editorial stream (maybe broadcast later) and frees up 10 minutes of screen time per hour for soap adverts.
Yet.
And the interesting thing is with there being about 4 markets in the world (China - about a billion ; India, potential of a billion ; Europe at a half-billion ; North America, a third of a billion) then the broadcaster that doesn't get into those markets soon is not going to survive against it's global competitors. Particularly the ones that broadcast in common languages - Mandarin and English.
The only thing that changes for (say) BBC is that they chuck out or switch off their Geo-IP management servers at their gateway. Where the data goes to after that isn't their concern. That's the point about IP being an unbiased transmission protocol.
(I don't know the answer. I raise the point to illustrate the complexity of the problem, and to show what problems the EU is about removing.
Someone who is worried about their slowly deteriorating sight and has their worst fears raised by this deliberately crude joke.
OP might wish to spend a few hours trying to navigate the world without vision - or with severely degraded vision. In fact, it's an experiment that almost anyone who isn't already severely visually impaired would benefit from. It's the old "walking a mile in another man's shoes" thing.
Try it one day. If you don't hate and fear the experience, then you're very unusual.
BTW, did you know that there's an STD that has a 35 year symptom-free incubation period. You could have caught it from the person (or farm animal) that you lost your virginity to.
I hate to tell you this, but you're well within the normal range of variation. Sorry to break the news to you.
You will die ; maybe not because of this medical issue, but you will die.
Incidentally, I'm following the same progress of eye disease, within about 25%. I'm going to die too.
I've been wearing glasses for about as long (within a year). If my (opthalmic) optician told me that I had a cataract and that I needed surgery, I'd be starting from the expectation that I was going to lose the lens in one or both eyes, and that would drastically affect my vision, and my visual flexibility ("accommodation" is the technical term, IIRC), because, well, you lose the lens from the affected eye. Most of the focussing power of the eye comes from the air-cornea refraction, it is true, but even so you need the adjustment from the lens to accommodate changes of focus.
Fortunately, I've no indications of cataracts forming yet. I'm slowly getting used to needing to carry a pair of single-vision glasses and a pair of bi-focals for use in the office. But most days I don't bother.
So? The smart phone will report it's location at the time that you analyse your specimen. Which will probably be in the hotel/ motel that you go to when you get back to something resembling civilisation.
You think that you'll have a mobile phone signal out in the field at your prospect? Damned all chance of that, because mobile phone companies don't put transmission towers where they don't have customers, and if there are any significant numbers of people in an area then it has probably been gone over already by mineral prospectors.
I'm an amateur mountaineer and professional geologist. I don't normally have signal on my mobile when I'm out on the hill. Likewise when I do onshore jobs in the deserts of Arabia or the tundra of Russia. And when I'm 100km out at sea, again, no signal.
Look at this map ; get out into unpopulated areas and you've got little chance of getting a signal. If you're in a populated area, then it's almost certainly already been prospected.
The lithology of the encasing rock and age of the specimen (the report I had didn't go into details ; I'd assume micropalaeontology - it usually is) suggests that the specimen came from the Crato formation of Brazil. But Brazil has had a blanket ban on export of fossils since the 1940s. So, how did the fossil get to appear in a small museum in southern Germany? (By coincidence, I've actually been to that museum.)
One of the specific characteristics that they use to deduce that this is more closely related to modern snakes than to an other group is that the body (between the pelvic and pectoral girdles) is considerably elongated compared to other vertebrates. This lengthening is achieved by increasing the number of vertebrae and ribs, not by lengthening the vertebrae (which is the strategy that giraffes use, for example). There is also a hint (though it is admittedly unclear and the specimen isn't well enough preserved to tell) that the ventral surface of the body (i.e. the belly) has a single scale running across the full width.
Snake-y enough for you?