Stonehenge has been at least partialy solved - the rocks are bell stones,
Citation required.
Considering that the stones have been significantly eroded (not just by weather ; humans including generations of souvenir hunters have taken their chip, and many of the stones were significantly re-shaped multiple times during the site's 1500-odd years of use, including at least two major rebuilding and re-arrangement episodes.
But don't let facts and evidence get in the way of telling a nice story.
this particular leak has not as of yet reached the ocean yet. TEPCO says it won't make it to the ocean,
Given that all the alkaline earth elements except beryllium and magnesium have moderately to extremely insoluble sulphates, and excess of sulphate is not hard to supply without turning the place into a blasted wasteland (whether delivered by ploughing the soil with potash alum (potassium aluminium sulphate, used sometimes as a fertilizer and other times as a treatment for indigestion), or just spraying the ground with "don't use this as eye-wash" strength of sulphuric acid, this isn't exactly an unrecoverable situation.
Not good either, but not a run for the hills situation either.
Presumably with carefully malformed packets you could crash at least some receivers.
But what warped imagination would put time and effort into that, purely for the joy of maliciously killing a stranger with very little chance of being caught for it (the first time).
That's my #1 game too. The #2 being a Tetris or a card game.
Oh, I have DOSbox, for running ~1990 Civilisation (I forget which version) and occasional forays into shooting the XCom alien hoards. But it's probably 2 months since I last fired up XCom.
Ignoring that we are omnivores is unethical. Vegan is just a large fad clique based on marketing over science.
They chose to do it to themselves. So it's not really your place to decide if it's ethical or not. Or are you one of those people who serenade the midnight bedrooms of teenage boys with "Every Sperm is Sacred"?
You might have a point if you were talking about vegan parents pushing their children to being vegan too. Enjoy making that case in court, because you'll probably have to argue against (for example) faith healing and religious indoctrination too. I doubt that you'd live to see the case in court.
perhaps over a span of only 60,000 years. The shorter time scale means that organisms would have had less time to react and adapt to changes in climate, atmospheric CO2 and ocean acidity. Without the ability to adapt, they died
Which is a bit trite to say, really. Otherwise there wouldn't have been a mass extinction.
The rates of climate change that we're experiencing at the moment are substantially stressing the ability of many organisms to move to adapt to the changes. Where organisms meet immovable barriers (e.g. in trying to get away from spreading continent-centre deserts, they come up against the northern or southern coastline... and either have to learn to fly, or crawl back into the oceans. Or then then become extinct.
Way to go! Humanity. Your first planet trashed and you've only had mechanised power for barely 3 centuries!
Feynman discussed this ages ago. And I'm sure he did it better.
This was probably discussed in Feynman's undergraduate textbook in "Statistics for dummies" from about 1935.
Intuitive gamblers have known that most people don't have a good understanding of the statistics of improbable events since Egyptian pyramid chisellers played dice over their lunch time beer and bread. They might not have been able to express it in mathematically rigorous form, but they understood it. And profited from it.
Touchscreens totally suck. Everywhere. No exceptions. Even the iPad, best touchscreen ever, sucks.
I would probably agree on the speech-not-touch for car infotainment systems, if I'd ever done anything more complex than plug the MP3 player of audio books in before I release the hand brake. But I haven't ever needed to do that, so I simply don't know.
Touch screens though, can be pretty good. The one I was using from about 1997 to 2008 (on a series of Psion Mk5s) was pretty damned good. Didn't suck at all - until the screen got cracked, which happened on a yearly basis. But it was good enough to be worth repairing for about 5 or 6 years after production ceased. That's why I started to use ebaY.
I don't know how it compares to an iPad/ iPhone/ iWankstain - never used any.
We've spent 10 years trying to find it, but the political bullshit of trying to work there just became a waste of effort.
It's highly likely that they've got oil (they're along strike from large oilfields in the Gulf of Bohai in China) ; but it's a probable reserve, not a proven reserve.
What, you expected some bullshitty political response? Sorry, this is slashdot, not BETA.
Beware of nicer cameras which might be fitted with a UV filter. They are common.
Yes, that's another flaw. Most professional-level photographers keep UV filters on their cameras just as a matter of course.
Slapping a UV filter on any decent lens that may get used in a less than pristine environment is a no-brainer. you can always take it off if you specifically want to have a mid-UV response in your pictures. Every one of my lenses sports an appropriate UV filter before it leaves the shop, or goes into the camera bag (but most of my photography is landscape and often muddy landscape and vigorous sports photography ; mud splatters are the norm, and flying gravel nothing uncommon ; a cheap UV filter is a lot nicer to replace than a 2-3-day's-earnings lens).
It's not a professional level thing ; it's simple protection.
And just like a DDOS they would start filtering and dropping packets (ie refusing people entry).
... at which point, the person refused entry has to buy a ticket out of there as soon as reasonably possible. Which would typically mean buying a business class ticket. You'd also have to demonstrate to the airline you're buying from that you've got the right to enter the country at the far end of the new flight. Since you've just been refused entry to a country, you'll have to re-apply for any pre-existing visas or entry permits that you have, since almost every country in the world is likely to take "refusal of entry" as being information that may materially change their decision to allow you a visa / ewntry permit, or what ever.
Generally, your only option after being refused entry is a business-class seat back to your home country. Not going to be cheap.
Part of the job of us grey-beards is to make sure that when (not if) the things that the kids depend on get broken (including by other kids), then there's a backup system in place. You see, kids today haven't seen things fuck up completely. So they know that it's not going to happen to them because they're immortal and of infinite intelligence.
When (not if) the "kids" encounter their first major fuck up - they have friends killed in a car crash ; their employer goes bust because of something completely unrelated to their actions ; someone puts an excavating machine through their communications cable; or the power goes out for a week - and they have to use other techniques... then they're starting to have their innocent youth torn away from them and they're proceeding towards adulthood and impending grey-beard-hood.
I remember a conversation with a friend in infrastructure maintenance work once - when I was bitching about having to tear down, move and re-build my laboratory's power and sensor equipment every couple of months. He was telling me that the equipment he works with is intended for an average (not maximum or mean, but mode) lifetime of 50 years. You're going to be living with that equipment for a long time, and you'd better hope that it was built with redundancy in mind.
How can you push out propaganda if your main distribution method goes away?
By continuing to use your multiple other methods of distribution?
One system may be fastest or cheapest, but you have to be really, really sure that you're never going to need what you used previously before you unplug it and sell (or throw away) the hardware.
Case in point : I'm working on a 100-million dollar ship equipped with around ten million dollars of the best shiniest and newest of equipment for robotically handling one of the most dangerous of every-day operations. And in the last few days, the robot broke down, so we went down to the heavy tool store and broke out the manual tools (whose design hasn't changed significantly in about 70 years) and carried on working while the mechanics and electronics technicians got on with repairing the robot.
Why did we have those tools in the heavy tool store? Because someone planned for system level redundancy.
Do people still think cell phones cause gas pumps to explode?
I work with flammable and potentially explosive atmospheres all the time.
Unsurprisingly, we're very careful about the equipment that we take into such areas - designing them to equipment classes Ex-e (enhanced safety) Ex-i (intrinsically safe), or Ex-d (explosion-proof, meaning it will contain an explosion within itself) not to mention surface temperature ratings.
Unsurprisingly, that equipment is rather more expensive than consumer grade shit. Tens to hundreds of times more expensive. But it's what the job requires, so we get it and use it. (Just for entertainment, I also had to shave off 5 years growth of beard yesterday. Poison gas is another hazard we take appropriate action over.)
Consumers rarely come across explosive atmospheres, because they're fucking dangerous. I bet you're not surprised about that, either.
One of the few places where consumers have a reasonably good chance of coming into contact with an explosive atmosphere is... you guessed it... at the petrol station. Particularly when filling the fuel tank and displacing a cloud of flammable petroleum vapour into the general atmosphere, where it will dilute down and pass through the upper explosive (composition) limit and then through the lower explosive limit.
Frankly, I'm surprised there are not more cases of people triggering fireballs at petrol stations by clanging their keys off the metal work, dropping their phones, striking sparks off nailed boots...
You won't be surprised to learn that petrol stations don't like to remind their customers that they're sitting in the middle of a fairly substantial bomb. They think that it might upset the customers.
My mobile, when I get to the petrol station, stays exactly where it is when I drive : in the passenger cabin, with the windows closed, bluetoothed to the hands-free kit. And I give the vapour cloud time to disperse by going to the kiosk to pay BEFORE opening the door to get back in.
Those batteries represent stored energy, quite a lot of it. Stored energy getting un-stored at the wrong time is a very popular cause of death. Enough said?
I don't smoke at the petrol pump either. Well DOH!
if I use a more American example, that you might care about
Sorry, but I don't follow that non-sequiteur at all. Why would I care more if it's an American example? Compared to what? Outer Mongolian goat polo? (Actually, that's got quite simple rules ; fight over the goat until it's too smashed up to be worth eating, then eat a different goat.)
to not be in that "read the rules, but still can't understand how it's played" zone.
I don't enter that zone. I get to "it's a team sport, and therefore no-one I know is likely to die because of it"... and I find something interesting to care about. such as the suffering of Mongolian goats, who aren't euthanased before being put into "play" in goat polo.
If there are rules to rugby... or Mongolian goat polo... they only matter if you care about the sport.
Righty-Tighty, lefty-loosey - might be asking alot!
I had to think for a few seconds there - you're talking about screw threads, aren't you?
You've not had to deal with many "left-hand" threads, have you? A couple of encounters (and they're not that uncommon) and you'll be getting into the habit of checking every bolt to determine it's sense of turn. If you do encounter one in the wild, then you're likely to encounter more.
I had a trainee trying to unscrew the pillar valve from a (full) cylinder of (extremely flammable) hydrogen once, before I realised just how dangerous "knowing the rule and applying it" could be. I'm more careful since then, but you've got to break that habit of rote learning as soon as possible.
I get to choose those who I work with, and if they're incompetent, they don't get to come back for a second piece of work.
No, I don't work in a "public facing role". And nor would I want to.
Pretty much the whole thing about viruses, malware and fucked-up computers is largely down to people who aren't capable of following technical rules. They'll disappear. One funeral and/ or one personal education at a time.
'The oil companies have, in effect, profited off polluting.'
Will nobody think of the accountants and corporate lawyers? Did they get their bonuses for doing their jobs (i.e. making as much money as possible for their employers)? Were they promoted.
This is business! It's business is to make money anywhere they can. Boiling babies down into soup? Not a problem! Ripping off taxpayers, state and national government? That'll do nicely.
Which is going to be a great explanation to talk about on TV talk shows. Alongside of why ISPs cut off innocent people who are victims of a crime off the internet as an additional punishment, and what should be done about those evil ISPs.
I do see (but don't particularly care) about the ISPs side of things.
So, don't "cut [granny] off from the internet" ; set up router rules so that all data emanating from that particular (or those thousand) IP addresses always get sent the same package of data - an information page saying "you've been hacked ; print this, take it to a competent computer technician and get your computer fixed ; you will get nothing else out of the Internet until the instructions on this page have been followed." And then the cut'n'pasted techno-babble relevant to this week's attacks.
It's not nice - but what these spambots are doing isn't nice either. There's no good grounds to expect there to be a nice solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Citation required.
Considering that the stones have been significantly eroded (not just by weather ; humans including generations of souvenir hunters have taken their chip, and many of the stones were significantly re-shaped multiple times during the site's 1500-odd years of use, including at least two major rebuilding and re-arrangement episodes.
But don't let facts and evidence get in the way of telling a nice story.
There's your problem. Actually understanding what you've been exposed to is such a Web 0.0 way of doing things.
Given that all the alkaline earth elements except beryllium and magnesium have moderately to extremely insoluble sulphates, and excess of sulphate is not hard to supply without turning the place into a blasted wasteland (whether delivered by ploughing the soil with potash alum (potassium aluminium sulphate, used sometimes as a fertilizer and other times as a treatment for indigestion), or just spraying the ground with "don't use this as eye-wash" strength of sulphuric acid, this isn't exactly an unrecoverable situation.
Not good either, but not a run for the hills situation either.
FTFY
But what warped imagination would put time and effort into that, purely for the joy of maliciously killing a stranger with very little chance of being caught for it (the first time).
Uh, when put that way ... yes.
Oh, I have DOSbox, for running ~1990 Civilisation (I forget which version) and occasional forays into shooting the XCom alien hoards. But it's probably 2 months since I last fired up XCom.
They chose to do it to themselves. So it's not really your place to decide if it's ethical or not. Or are you one of those people who serenade the midnight bedrooms of teenage boys with "Every Sperm is Sacred"?
You might have a point if you were talking about vegan parents pushing their children to being vegan too. Enjoy making that case in court, because you'll probably have to argue against (for example) faith healing and religious indoctrination too. I doubt that you'd live to see the case in court.
Which is a bit trite to say, really. Otherwise there wouldn't have been a mass extinction.
The rates of climate change that we're experiencing at the moment are substantially stressing the ability of many organisms to move to adapt to the changes. Where organisms meet immovable barriers (e.g. in trying to get away from spreading continent-centre deserts, they come up against the northern or southern coastline ... and either have to learn to fly, or crawl back into the oceans. Or then then become extinct.
Way to go! Humanity. Your first planet trashed and you've only had mechanised power for barely 3 centuries!
I haven't changed my signature for several years, and I've meant every character of it.
This was probably discussed in Feynman's undergraduate textbook in "Statistics for dummies" from about 1935.
Intuitive gamblers have known that most people don't have a good understanding of the statistics of improbable events since Egyptian pyramid chisellers played dice over their lunch time beer and bread. They might not have been able to express it in mathematically rigorous form, but they understood it. And profited from it.
I would probably agree on the speech-not-touch for car infotainment systems, if I'd ever done anything more complex than plug the MP3 player of audio books in before I release the hand brake. But I haven't ever needed to do that, so I simply don't know.
Touch screens though, can be pretty good. The one I was using from about 1997 to 2008 (on a series of Psion Mk5s) was pretty damned good. Didn't suck at all - until the screen got cracked, which happened on a yearly basis. But it was good enough to be worth repairing for about 5 or 6 years after production ceased. That's why I started to use ebaY.
I don't know how it compares to an iPad/ iPhone/ iWankstain - never used any.
It's highly likely that they've got oil (they're along strike from large oilfields in the Gulf of Bohai in China) ; but it's a probable reserve, not a proven reserve.
What, you expected some bullshitty political response? Sorry, this is slashdot, not BETA.
Slapping a UV filter on any decent lens that may get used in a less than pristine environment is a no-brainer. you can always take it off if you specifically want to have a mid-UV response in your pictures. Every one of my lenses sports an appropriate UV filter before it leaves the shop, or goes into the camera bag (but most of my photography is landscape and often muddy landscape and vigorous sports photography ; mud splatters are the norm, and flying gravel nothing uncommon ; a cheap UV filter is a lot nicer to replace than a 2-3-day's-earnings lens).
It's not a professional level thing ; it's simple protection.
... at which point, the person refused entry has to buy a ticket out of there as soon as reasonably possible. Which would typically mean buying a business class ticket. You'd also have to demonstrate to the airline you're buying from that you've got the right to enter the country at the far end of the new flight. Since you've just been refused entry to a country, you'll have to re-apply for any pre-existing visas or entry permits that you have, since almost every country in the world is likely to take "refusal of entry" as being information that may materially change their decision to allow you a visa / ewntry permit, or what ever.
Generally, your only option after being refused entry is a business-class seat back to your home country. Not going to be cheap.
Part of the job of us grey-beards is to make sure that when (not if) the things that the kids depend on get broken (including by other kids), then there's a backup system in place. You see, kids today haven't seen things fuck up completely. So they know that it's not going to happen to them because they're immortal and of infinite intelligence.
When (not if) the "kids" encounter their first major fuck up - they have friends killed in a car crash ; their employer goes bust because of something completely unrelated to their actions ; someone puts an excavating machine through their communications cable; or the power goes out for a week - and they have to use other techniques ... then they're starting to have their innocent youth torn away from them and they're proceeding towards adulthood and impending grey-beard-hood.
I remember a conversation with a friend in infrastructure maintenance work once - when I was bitching about having to tear down, move and re-build my laboratory's power and sensor equipment every couple of months. He was telling me that the equipment he works with is intended for an average (not maximum or mean, but mode) lifetime of 50 years. You're going to be living with that equipment for a long time, and you'd better hope that it was built with redundancy in mind.
And therefore the BETASUCKS campaign was an abject failure.
Fine.
By continuing to use your multiple other methods of distribution?
One system may be fastest or cheapest, but you have to be really, really sure that you're never going to need what you used previously before you unplug it and sell (or throw away) the hardware.
Case in point : I'm working on a 100-million dollar ship equipped with around ten million dollars of the best shiniest and newest of equipment for robotically handling one of the most dangerous of every-day operations. And in the last few days, the robot broke down, so we went down to the heavy tool store and broke out the manual tools (whose design hasn't changed significantly in about 70 years) and carried on working while the mechanics and electronics technicians got on with repairing the robot.
Why did we have those tools in the heavy tool store? Because someone planned for system level redundancy.
I work with flammable and potentially explosive atmospheres all the time.
Unsurprisingly, we're very careful about the equipment that we take into such areas - designing them to equipment classes Ex-e (enhanced safety) Ex-i (intrinsically safe), or Ex-d (explosion-proof, meaning it will contain an explosion within itself) not to mention surface temperature ratings.
Unsurprisingly, that equipment is rather more expensive than consumer grade shit. Tens to hundreds of times more expensive. But it's what the job requires, so we get it and use it. (Just for entertainment, I also had to shave off 5 years growth of beard yesterday. Poison gas is another hazard we take appropriate action over.)
Consumers rarely come across explosive atmospheres, because they're fucking dangerous. I bet you're not surprised about that, either.
One of the few places where consumers have a reasonably good chance of coming into contact with an explosive atmosphere is ... you guessed it ... at the petrol station. Particularly when filling the fuel tank and displacing a cloud of flammable petroleum vapour into the general atmosphere, where it will dilute down and pass through the upper explosive (composition) limit and then through the lower explosive limit.
Frankly, I'm surprised there are not more cases of people triggering fireballs at petrol stations by clanging their keys off the metal work, dropping their phones, striking sparks off nailed boots ...
You won't be surprised to learn that petrol stations don't like to remind their customers that they're sitting in the middle of a fairly substantial bomb. They think that it might upset the customers.
My mobile, when I get to the petrol station, stays exactly where it is when I drive : in the passenger cabin, with the windows closed, bluetoothed to the hands-free kit. And I give the vapour cloud time to disperse by going to the kiosk to pay BEFORE opening the door to get back in.
Those batteries represent stored energy, quite a lot of it. Stored energy getting un-stored at the wrong time is a very popular cause of death. Enough said?
I don't smoke at the petrol pump either. Well DOH!
Sorry, but I don't follow that non-sequiteur at all. Why would I care more if it's an American example? Compared to what? Outer Mongolian goat polo? (Actually, that's got quite simple rules ; fight over the goat until it's too smashed up to be worth eating, then eat a different goat.)
I don't enter that zone. I get to "it's a team sport, and therefore no-one I know is likely to die because of it" ... and I find something interesting to care about. such as the suffering of Mongolian goats, who aren't euthanased before being put into "play" in goat polo.
If there are rules to rugby ... or Mongolian goat polo ... they only matter if you care about the sport.
I had to think for a few seconds there - you're talking about screw threads, aren't you?
You've not had to deal with many "left-hand" threads, have you? A couple of encounters (and they're not that uncommon) and you'll be getting into the habit of checking every bolt to determine it's sense of turn. If you do encounter one in the wild, then you're likely to encounter more.
I had a trainee trying to unscrew the pillar valve from a (full) cylinder of (extremely flammable) hydrogen once, before I realised just how dangerous "knowing the rule and applying it" could be. I'm more careful since then, but you've got to break that habit of rote learning as soon as possible.
Most =/= all.
And "forced". Yes, I think we're actually in agreement there.
I don't understand the rules of rugby either. But I don't find that frustrating, because I don't care who's playing, or which side wins.
No, I don't work in a "public facing role". And nor would I want to.
Pretty much the whole thing about viruses, malware and fucked-up computers is largely down to people who aren't capable of following technical rules. They'll disappear. One funeral and/ or one personal education at a time.
FTFY
Will nobody think of the accountants and corporate lawyers? Did they get their bonuses for doing their jobs (i.e. making as much money as possible for their employers)? Were they promoted.
This is business! It's business is to make money anywhere they can. Boiling babies down into soup? Not a problem! Ripping off taxpayers, state and national government? That'll do nicely.
I do see (but don't particularly care) about the ISPs side of things.
So, don't "cut [granny] off from the internet" ; set up router rules so that all data emanating from that particular (or those thousand) IP addresses always get sent the same package of data - an information page saying "you've been hacked ; print this, take it to a competent computer technician and get your computer fixed ; you will get nothing else out of the Internet until the instructions on this page have been followed." And then the cut'n'pasted techno-babble relevant to this week's attacks.
It's not nice - but what these spambots are doing isn't nice either. There's no good grounds to expect there to be a nice solution.