Corporations already have the right to free speech, the right to own arms, and many other liberties we otherwise only give to humans.
Are you sure on that? Does a corporation have a right of free speech which is distinct from the right of free speech which (allegedly) accrues to the humans that work for the corporation? Does a corporation have a right to bear arms which isn't likewise derivative from the rights of the humans who comprise it. Can a corporation have a right to bear arms that, for an example a bear would not have to pick up a gun from a hunter and blow the fucker away?
will give you a year's background radiation in half a day
This is precisely the sort of thing that the original author is complaining about. What do you mean by "background radiation"? It varies a lot from place to place. My terrestrial background radiation in a granite-based northern city could easily be five times someone else's in a concrete-built city near the tropics, but on the other hand your background medical radiation if you were an American could be twice my level of medical background radiation through not being an American.
It wasn't a surprise to me that there was a wikipedia article on "background radiation" ; but the huge amount of risk that Americans expose themselves to through medical radiation was genuinely a shock. The five-fold difference in natural radiation levels between Americans and Japanese was also a surprise.
it's possible to reschedule some energy consuming stuff to those hours - like timers on washers and driers.
Heretical idea that. It'll never catch on. Despite the fact that having two electricity meters and charging different rates for the off-peak circuit was the norm 30 years ago.
You have? That'll be novel. Can you name them, because I've not heard of them. what specific laws do you have against propaganda, and as a matter of interest, how do they define propaganda?
Looking at our legislation here (obviously. I don't know which country you're in. Afghanistan or Pakistan, guessing from your chosen name.) we have laws requiring advertising to be "legal decent, honest and truthful". And the BBC has an obligation to "educate and entertain". During election campaigns, broadcasters and printed media have an obligation to be even-handed in their presentation of different candidates (ensuring they're all listed, with their political affiliations if any ; approximately even time to all major candidates). We have some laws against blasphemy (almost completely useless since being the subject of ridicule the last time they were used). There are laws against doing things that are racist, but none against saying anything racist. But beyond that, I can't think of any anti-propaganda laws, and I've never actually heard of anything being acted with that sounds like a law against propaganda. Or a definition of it.
The sun isn't expected to explode - ever. For really quite large values of "ever". In about 4 or 5 billion years, the sun will expand to around a million times it's present volume over a period of a few million years, but that's hardly "explosion" in any normal meaning of the word. Later, at around 10^30 years from now (disregarding the instants from the big bang to now), protons may go unstable, and in a short period of time all nuclei will disintegrate. Then the black holes will evaporate. Probably. But we'd be heat dead or in another universe by then. Or, most likely, just plain vanilla dead.
The two challenges are very different. In one, you have the problems of low temperatures and ambient pressures of up to atmosphere or several (unless you specifically want to pump something up, such as a fuel tank ; but typically, they're kept cold to keep the pressures low) ; on the other hand, you're dealing with temperatures up in the red to orange heat (which softens all materials, but softens some more then others) and confining pressures in the megabars.
We do have the materials for the former ; we don't have the materials for the latter. We don't even have hints of the materials for the latter (unless you know something different).
But it sounds like we still haven't gotten a significant sample from inside the earth to validate the theory.
Nor is it going to happen. You'll need to get to a depth of around 650km below surface, and get your sample THEN quench it through a temperature range of around 500+Kelvin to prevent it from decomposing into other materials as it's passing through the pressure-temperature regimes between it's natural environment and the surface.
Remember : this is mineralogy : the composition of a material is not the only thing that is important - the crystalline structure is important too. As would have been plain to you the first time you compared calcite (CaCO3) and aragonite (CaCO3) under crossed polarising filters in the microscope.
To make this material in the laboratory, you need a diamond anvil press to squeeeze a few cubic microlitres to the appropriate pressure, then ramp the pressure with laser heating. Bring it to surface and your diamonds are likely to explode from the thermal stresses before you manage to quench your sample.
That is why they had to go to the very high strain rates and heating and cooling rates generated in a meteorite impact.
Of course we could drill for a sample. Just doing a quick calculation... 650km if 5x4.276in drill pipe is around 19,714,153 kg of Unobtanium drill pipe (if it has density and stiffness comparable to steel, at temperatures in dull orange heat). When you've fulfilled that order for Unobtanium, we'd need a few thousand tonnes more for the surface drilling equipment. I have no idea whatsoever how you're going to solve the quenching problem. Nor, for that matter, how you're going to stop the bottom of the hole spalling off and collapsing on your nice shiny Unobtanium drill string. Nor what you're going to use for a drilling fluid (probably that gaseous warp drive coolant that fucked Spock over?)
The Russians took almost 20 years to drill to almost 12.3km depth on the Kola peninsula, while the German KTB in Bavaria took 8 years to get to 9.1km. It's not easy drilling.
MS Clipart wasn't internal, or stored on your local PC since Microsoft Office 2003.
That could quite likely be the last time I was tempted to use clipart in a document.
Probably around then, I snaffled a copy of an open clipart library. But I don't think I've needed to use it since. Try https://openclipart.org/downlo... for a DVD or two.
TFS doesn't say that he's "wanted", only that he's been "pressured" (undefined) to release information (also undefined) about Ukrainian activists (also undefined) .
Which is pretty peculiar, since it implies one of two fairly unlikely events : that the Russian authorities can't get someone of their own into the administration system of VKontact (which I think implausible for a multi-million userbase system), or that the way the system has been set up by Durov has him mis-trusting his own administrator staff to the extent that everything is encrypted everywhere (where are the keys???) and that Durov set the system up like this years ago. Which is a pretty major piece of paranoia, as well as making a lot more work for himself to do.
That's exactly what I do, when sufficiently motivated. And generally it works. (I normally include some questions or comments raised by the abstract, or whatever other report of the paper I've received) to indicate that I've RTFP (I know - Slash-Heresy!).
Maybe the resulting collision would create a Black Hole so dense it would suck in the entire Universe.
Why would it create a particularly dense black hole. Larger black holes are less dense than smaller ones, so if you want to find a particularly dense one, you need to look for "cosmological" black holes, not ones formed by stellar collapse.
We have plenty of supermassive black holes in galaxy cores. They haven't eaten the universe yet. So we don't need to worry about your scenario.
in no small part because of how little infrastructure their was. Just a village or two in the sticks dropping off the map and not reporting back.
It might help if you did a little research. The first recorded outbreak was, surprisingly, communicated to the Belgian microbiology labs who dispatched a team to Yambuko. Coincident was an outbreak in Sudan which actually started earlier. The cotton factory that was the centre of infection there didn't exist in a vacuum, but it processed locally-grown cotton and exported it. Third outbreak may fit your description, but wasn't identified until after the event. Fourth outbreak was a recurrence of the Sudan leg of the first outbreak at the same factory. 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th were the Reston virus outbreaks in the Philippines exporting monkeys to America and Italy (not normally described as areas of little infrastructure) ; 9th was a a range of gold mines in Gabon ; 10th was a scientist working in the Tai National Park (also not particularly associated with absence of infrastructure) and the next was in the city of Kikwit, a university town of ~400,000 population.
Of course, we don't know how many minor outbreaks there have been in previous centuries and millennia. But the cases recorded since identification of the disease don't match your characterisation very well.
You may not have noticed it, but when the Kikwit outbreak was going on, there was a lot of concern about the disease breaking out to the capital Kinshasha. Indeed, people fleeing the quarantines did get to the capital and die there (similarly to the Nigerian outbreak of this current cluster) but with the strength of the Congolese response, they managed to contain it. Otherwise, we'd probably not have been having this problem today.
This outbreak will be contained when there is a working cure or a working vaccine, not before.
The last time that I checked the laws of the universe, there was no guarantee that any particular disease had a cure. Or, for that matter a vaccine.
But that (probably undue) pessimism aside, if an acceptable design for a vaccine becomes available on the (optimistic) time scale discussed a month or so ago, then it'll only become widely deliverable late in 2015. By that point, deaths will have reached the point that the rate of growth will be decreasing because the population will have significantly decreased. Potentially around a million dead by late January - or 5% of the population.
Treatments are not going to be available on a much shorter time scale. The ZMAPP material is horribly production-limited. There are other treatments in trial - so expect them to take around another month to complete the trials, then make decisions. Then start production, which will take months to ramp up. Of course, you could probably accelerate production of treatments if you stopped producing, say, influenza vaccine. How many deaths from that cause?
I don't know about your country, but in this one we have a concept called a "spent sentence", whereby if you commit a crime and are then tried and convicted for it, you then get punished. And then it stops. the punishment is over. End of sentence. After a few more years (depending on the terms of the punishment) you[re not even required to tell people that you've ever been in jail. Because you've been punished. And now, it has stopped. ended. Finished.
Given the shortness of the sentence, it seems likely that you do not have the right to this information.
Some areas it's 2&2 ; others it's 2-on,2-off-2-on-3-off. Others it's 4 and 4. Others it's 6 and 6.
Entirely variable depending on which country you're in. And (pretty separate point) which country's laws apply.
Who said that I need to do additional work? I didn't - though I have done that sort of thing ever since I was a student (and the friend who runs the company set his business up). Sometimes I'll go out and do a couple of days voluntary work maintaining nature reserves instead - good fun, but un-paid.
Unless you are absolutely bound to certain hours of work (e.g. you're in retail), can't you shift your working hours by a couple of hours one way or the other so that you're not travelling at rush hour? Even fairly small proportions of people moving away from the 9-to-5 (to 8-to-4 or 10-to-6) would considerably erode the severity of the rush hour.
I do on-shift work (oil rigs) and typically work 24x7x28/28. In my 28 days leave I sometimes do a bit of C-I-H for a friend who runs a removals company. It keeps me out of the pub for several days, and pays for the next several days in the pub.
The tax is pennies compared to my normal tax payments. If I had to go through the palaver of setting up a sole - trader company, I'd just not do the work.
That Wikipedia article basically reiterates what I said. "not finished, but we'll down the road to being finished. " Decades more work to go doesn't scare me. I'm used to working in projects with decades of planning, years of implementing and hardware that is required to work for decades, then need further decades of deconstruction and site remediation.
In an attack of small world syndrome I was talking to a friend of 3 decades literally 5 minutes ago about renovating a 1950s War Department Geiger counter, in particular to go hunting for 'hot' particles. Seems an interesting material to have in the house. Though in deference to the wife's sensitivity I might melt down a few kilos of diving lead weights to store them in. (The wife was working 50 odd km down wind from Chernobyl when it went up.)
If you fancy calling me "reckless", feel free. But I think I've reckoned the hazards quite carefully. I' cautious about radioactivity, but not hysterical. Unless you work in a pretty unusual business, it's likely that I've done more radiation surveys and measurements than you have, and have more friends, colleagues and university class - mates who are registered radiation workers than you. Risk, of various sorts up to and including death under torture, is something I include in pricing up a job. Which is why we (work 'we') declined the proposed job in Somalia 3 years ago : we didn't believe the security plans were adequate. TTBOMK the job has gone back onto the back burner for a decade or so. OTOH I'm pissed that the politicos stopped the North Korea job.
... none of which were available when the equipment was designed.
The equipment will be used until it has broken down completely - which shouldn't be for another 15 or so years. The task hasn't changed ; the analytical requirements haven't changed, and the equipment is still working and has already amortised it's costs. So every additional day that it can be rented out is pure profit, and every cent that is spent on maintenance, modification or development comes straight out of the profit margin.
It is more efficient to spend money on developing new products that do not overlap with this one, so that an additional service can be leased to the client. re-developing an existing service is a waste of money.
There are items of equipment working in this industry which have been earning pure profit since the mid-1950s. They do their job ; they do it adequately ; they are robust ; they paid for their manufacture within a few months of manufacture. And when they break, they won't be replaced since the spare parts inventory (5000psi pressure vessels, clockwork mechanisms, springs) were sold for scrap decades ago. But while a particular piece of equipment continues to work, use it.
(That's "coins" as in stamped discs of sheet metal ; "wallet" as in pouch of fabric and leather for storing payment tokens in without wearing out the fabric of one's pockets.)
Slashdot Mirror
What astonishes me is that he hasn't been assassinated. Decades ago.
Are you sure on that? Does a corporation have a right of free speech which is distinct from the right of free speech which (allegedly) accrues to the humans that work for the corporation? Does a corporation have a right to bear arms which isn't likewise derivative from the rights of the humans who comprise it. Can a corporation have a right to bear arms that, for an example a bear would not have to pick up a gun from a hunter and blow the fucker away?
This is precisely the sort of thing that the original author is complaining about. What do you mean by "background radiation"? It varies a lot from place to place. My terrestrial background radiation in a granite-based northern city could easily be five times someone else's in a concrete-built city near the tropics, but on the other hand your background medical radiation if you were an American could be twice my level of medical background radiation through not being an American.
It wasn't a surprise to me that there was a wikipedia article on "background radiation" ; but the huge amount of risk that Americans expose themselves to through medical radiation was genuinely a shock. The five-fold difference in natural radiation levels between Americans and Japanese was also a surprise.
The only way it'll improve is if you personally post more, better articles, and make more, better comments.
(For all values of "you". Not just you personally.)
Heretical idea that. It'll never catch on. Despite the fact that having two electricity meters and charging different rates for the off-peak circuit was the norm 30 years ago.
You have? That'll be novel. Can you name them, because I've not heard of them. what specific laws do you have against propaganda, and as a matter of interest, how do they define propaganda? Looking at our legislation here (obviously. I don't know which country you're in. Afghanistan or Pakistan, guessing from your chosen name.) we have laws requiring advertising to be "legal decent, honest and truthful". And the BBC has an obligation to "educate and entertain". During election campaigns, broadcasters and printed media have an obligation to be even-handed in their presentation of different candidates (ensuring they're all listed, with their political affiliations if any ; approximately even time to all major candidates). We have some laws against blasphemy (almost completely useless since being the subject of ridicule the last time they were used). There are laws against doing things that are racist, but none against saying anything racist. But beyond that, I can't think of any anti-propaganda laws, and I've never actually heard of anything being acted with that sounds like a law against propaganda. Or a definition of it.
The sun isn't expected to explode - ever. For really quite large values of "ever". In about 4 or 5 billion years, the sun will expand to around a million times it's present volume over a period of a few million years, but that's hardly "explosion" in any normal meaning of the word. Later, at around 10^30 years from now (disregarding the instants from the big bang to now), protons may go unstable, and in a short period of time all nuclei will disintegrate. Then the black holes will evaporate. Probably. But we'd be heat dead or in another universe by then. Or, most likely, just plain vanilla dead.
We do have the materials for the former ; we don't have the materials for the latter. We don't even have hints of the materials for the latter (unless you know something different).
Nor is it going to happen. You'll need to get to a depth of around 650km below surface, and get your sample THEN quench it through a temperature range of around 500+Kelvin to prevent it from decomposing into other materials as it's passing through the pressure-temperature regimes between it's natural environment and the surface.
Remember : this is mineralogy : the composition of a material is not the only thing that is important - the crystalline structure is important too. As would have been plain to you the first time you compared calcite (CaCO3) and aragonite (CaCO3) under crossed polarising filters in the microscope.
To make this material in the laboratory, you need a diamond anvil press to squeeeze a few cubic microlitres to the appropriate pressure, then ramp the pressure with laser heating. Bring it to surface and your diamonds are likely to explode from the thermal stresses before you manage to quench your sample.
That is why they had to go to the very high strain rates and heating and cooling rates generated in a meteorite impact.
Of course we could drill for a sample. Just doing a quick calculation ... 650km if 5x4.276in drill pipe is around 19,714,153 kg of Unobtanium drill pipe (if it has density and stiffness comparable to steel, at temperatures in dull orange heat). When you've fulfilled that order for Unobtanium, we'd need a few thousand tonnes more for the surface drilling equipment. I have no idea whatsoever how you're going to solve the quenching problem. Nor, for that matter, how you're going to stop the bottom of the hole spalling off and collapsing on your nice shiny Unobtanium drill string. Nor what you're going to use for a drilling fluid (probably that gaseous warp drive coolant that fucked Spock over?)
The Russians took almost 20 years to drill to almost 12.3km depth on the Kola peninsula, while the German KTB in Bavaria took 8 years to get to 9.1km. It's not easy drilling.
That could quite likely be the last time I was tempted to use clipart in a document.
Probably around then, I snaffled a copy of an open clipart library. But I don't think I've needed to use it since. Try https://openclipart.org/downlo... for a DVD or two.
Which is pretty peculiar, since it implies one of two fairly unlikely events : that the Russian authorities can't get someone of their own into the administration system of VKontact (which I think implausible for a multi-million userbase system), or that the way the system has been set up by Durov has him mis-trusting his own administrator staff to the extent that everything is encrypted everywhere (where are the keys???) and that Durov set the system up like this years ago. Which is a pretty major piece of paranoia, as well as making a lot more work for himself to do.
That's exactly what I do, when sufficiently motivated. And generally it works. (I normally include some questions or comments raised by the abstract, or whatever other report of the paper I've received) to indicate that I've RTFP (I know - Slash-Heresy!).
Why would it create a particularly dense black hole. Larger black holes are less dense than smaller ones, so if you want to find a particularly dense one, you need to look for "cosmological" black holes, not ones formed by stellar collapse.
We have plenty of supermassive black holes in galaxy cores. They haven't eaten the universe yet. So we don't need to worry about your scenario.
It might help if you did a little research. The first recorded outbreak was, surprisingly, communicated to the Belgian microbiology labs who dispatched a team to Yambuko. Coincident was an outbreak in Sudan which actually started earlier. The cotton factory that was the centre of infection there didn't exist in a vacuum, but it processed locally-grown cotton and exported it. Third outbreak may fit your description, but wasn't identified until after the event. Fourth outbreak was a recurrence of the Sudan leg of the first outbreak at the same factory. 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th were the Reston virus outbreaks in the Philippines exporting monkeys to America and Italy (not normally described as areas of little infrastructure) ; 9th was a a range of gold mines in Gabon ; 10th was a scientist working in the Tai National Park (also not particularly associated with absence of infrastructure) and the next was in the city of Kikwit, a university town of ~400,000 population.
Of course, we don't know how many minor outbreaks there have been in previous centuries and millennia. But the cases recorded since identification of the disease don't match your characterisation very well.
You may not have noticed it, but when the Kikwit outbreak was going on, there was a lot of concern about the disease breaking out to the capital Kinshasha. Indeed, people fleeing the quarantines did get to the capital and die there (similarly to the Nigerian outbreak of this current cluster) but with the strength of the Congolese response, they managed to contain it. Otherwise, we'd probably not have been having this problem today.
The last time that I checked the laws of the universe, there was no guarantee that any particular disease had a cure. Or, for that matter a vaccine.
But that (probably undue) pessimism aside, if an acceptable design for a vaccine becomes available on the (optimistic) time scale discussed a month or so ago, then it'll only become widely deliverable late in 2015. By that point, deaths will have reached the point that the rate of growth will be decreasing because the population will have significantly decreased. Potentially around a million dead by late January - or 5% of the population.
Treatments are not going to be available on a much shorter time scale. The ZMAPP material is horribly production-limited. There are other treatments in trial - so expect them to take around another month to complete the trials, then make decisions. Then start production, which will take months to ramp up. Of course, you could probably accelerate production of treatments if you stopped producing, say, influenza vaccine. How many deaths from that cause?
I think that you mean "defectors".
I don't know about your country, but in this one we have a concept called a "spent sentence", whereby if you commit a crime and are then tried and convicted for it, you then get punished. And then it stops. the punishment is over. End of sentence. After a few more years (depending on the terms of the punishment) you[re not even required to tell people that you've ever been in jail. Because you've been punished. And now, it has stopped. ended. Finished.
Given the shortness of the sentence, it seems likely that you do not have the right to this information.
Entirely variable depending on which country you're in. And (pretty separate point) which country's laws apply.
Who said that I need to do additional work? I didn't - though I have done that sort of thing ever since I was a student (and the friend who runs the company set his business up). Sometimes I'll go out and do a couple of days voluntary work maintaining nature reserves instead - good fun, but un-paid.
Unless you are absolutely bound to certain hours of work (e.g. you're in retail), can't you shift your working hours by a couple of hours one way or the other so that you're not travelling at rush hour? Even fairly small proportions of people moving away from the 9-to-5 (to 8-to-4 or 10-to-6) would considerably erode the severity of the rush hour.
The tax is pennies compared to my normal tax payments. If I had to go through the palaver of setting up a sole - trader company, I'd just not do the work.
In an attack of small world syndrome I was talking to a friend of 3 decades literally 5 minutes ago about renovating a 1950s War Department Geiger counter, in particular to go hunting for 'hot' particles. Seems an interesting material to have in the house. Though in deference to the wife's sensitivity I might melt down a few kilos of diving lead weights to store them in. (The wife was working 50 odd km down wind from Chernobyl when it went up.)
If you fancy calling me "reckless", feel free. But I think I've reckoned the hazards quite carefully. I' cautious about radioactivity, but not hysterical. Unless you work in a pretty unusual business, it's likely that I've done more radiation surveys and measurements than you have, and have more friends, colleagues and university class - mates who are registered radiation workers than you. Risk, of various sorts up to and including death under torture, is something I include in pricing up a job. Which is why we (work 'we') declined the proposed job in Somalia 3 years ago : we didn't believe the security plans were adequate. TTBOMK the job has gone back onto the back burner for a decade or so. OTOH I'm pissed that the politicos stopped the North Korea job.
EXIT LEFT, PURSUED BY A BEAR.
Better?
The equipment will be used until it has broken down completely - which shouldn't be for another 15 or so years. The task hasn't changed ; the analytical requirements haven't changed, and the equipment is still working and has already amortised it's costs. So every additional day that it can be rented out is pure profit, and every cent that is spent on maintenance, modification or development comes straight out of the profit margin.
It is more efficient to spend money on developing new products that do not overlap with this one, so that an additional service can be leased to the client. re-developing an existing service is a waste of money.
There are items of equipment working in this industry which have been earning pure profit since the mid-1950s. They do their job ; they do it adequately ; they are robust ; they paid for their manufacture within a few months of manufacture. And when they break, they won't be replaced since the spare parts inventory (5000psi pressure vessels, clockwork mechanisms, springs) were sold for scrap decades ago. But while a particular piece of equipment continues to work, use it.
(That's "coins" as in stamped discs of sheet metal ; "wallet" as in pouch of fabric and leather for storing payment tokens in without wearing out the fabric of one's pockets.)