A six-digit UID who has been here for 15+ ears. I'm not sure if that's impossible, unless you've lost the password to your original account, but "meh" on that point.
I've never used/. as a home page. For me it's always been following links in the 'headlines' emails, because I'm often without connectivity for days or weeks at a stretch. But I too have been suffering from increasingly vomit-inducing layouts as I've been using a tablet more often. for some dumb-fuck reason they try to force me to use a mobile interface which is utterly bouwfing. I mean - it doesn't even let you fill more than a third of a screen with text before it's UI goes up shit creek. And as for erasing your replies if you try to use Ctrl+(arrow key) to move around in your reply. Do they actually want only "Me, too" type replies?
Our main (UK, north) cave rescue team routinely practice cutting boulders in the 1-2m size range apart in order to retrieve a casualty (sometimes human, mostly mannequin), from where they're "trapped". It's not difficult. You use an 8mm diameter, long masonry drill, and 6mm (1/4 in) "Primacord", also known as "det cord", "shock cord", or "washing line", with random clay to hold the cord in place. Lots of little holes, lots of little lengths of high brisance "bang", a main line to transmit the det to each length of "working charge" (which is what det cord is designed for anyway), and tough fabric (i.e. conveyor belt material) to protect the casualty from flying debris.
It is as impressive as fuck. It still takes some balls to volunteer as the casualty though. Just because Hollywood celebrates people whose only answer is "you're going to need a bigger bang", doesn't mean that there aren't some real artistes with explosives out there.
Have you ever heard of using explosives in manufacturing precision components?
Doesn't sound like anything a bit of dynamite couldn't handle.
You need to have something on top of the dynamite to direct the explosive forces into the boulder (presumed) [on this side of the Pond we call it "tamping the charge" ; probably the same word root as "tampon"]. Which you could achieve in various ways, but you need to get your big expensive machinery out of harms way first. By that point, you can probably do the job with a large construction drill, a 30mm drill bit, and a half-stick of "bang". If the first half-stick doesn't work, use your drill in the remainder of the drilled hole as a starter and repeat the performance.
I didn't even bother to RTFA, because I see this every year or two when we're drilling big holes in glacial debris. It's about 50/50 between it being an artefact (anchor / piece of un-recorded piling / CIA Black Ops base) and a big boulder, because there are more artefacts in cities. but boulders are common enough.
Most of the time we drill through or round them, then cement the things in places ASAP. But sometimes they're more problematic because they tend to creep/ fall out of the walls and crush or trap later equipment at the most inconvenient possible time. Our normal response then, as a minimal cost / minimal risk strategy is to move location by 50 m and start again. On a tunnel-boring project, that could be much more of an issue.
But it's hardly unprecedented.
Ultimate solution : pull the TBM OOH (see, we have TLAs for this!), pump the cavity full of cement and let it set. Then drill ahead with a smaller probe drill (or several) to determine the extent of the problem. Apply sufficient quantity and placement of explosives to turn the big problem into lots of smaller problems. Tackle the small problems in sequence.
...which of itself has no value, as bus routes are publicly advertised.
True but irrelevant. The purpose of the GPS trackers (or the related ones that use short-range radios to trigger pickups in the bus stop shelters, which note the transit time of particular radios) is to document whether the bus company is achieving it's contractually required degree of punctuality. If the company fails to prove that it has good enough punctuality, then it could lose subsidy, or even suffer profit-destroying fines. (Note that for a long time use of GPS was considered too expensive and unreliable as it could have been switched off at any moment by a foreign government ; this issue has not been addressed fully yet, but it is being addressed.)
The trick is the widespread CCTV surveillance - if they want to know which bus you're taking, they can find out.
They could do that in the 1880s by the simple expedient of asking the driver (or conductor) if they saw someone carrying a bloody knife / head in a paper bag / blue jacket with "Wanker" written on it. Use of CCTV simply takes some of the vagaries out of the process. (Incidentally, the inside of a bus is the private property of the bus company ; they've as much right to video you there as if you were sitting in their office's waiting room. They don't even really need to inform you of the fact - though they probably do so to stay absolutely on the right side of the law.
By far and away the biggest use of on-bus cameras is to catch fare dodgers and people who assault staff.
provide DNA samples for a project that determines what percentage of drivers are operating under the influence of drugs or alcohol at given times.
How the fuck - I mean HOW THE FUCK - are you expected to determine if someone is under the influence of drink or drugs by checking their DNA?
That would imply that every time you take a drink (or smoke anything, including tobacco), you induce DNA changes in your cheek cells. And therefore, get cancer. Now, I do know that both drinking and smoking are associated with increased cancer rates, but they're not 100% cancer rates.
Someone has been writing absolute shit "science journalism".
It went back up again a bit after last week's dip (to about 975). That was all the idiots thinking they were going to make money after the Chinese thing caused a crash...
Isn't that what the white-collar thieves and scoundrels call a "dead cat bounce".
There weren't exactly large groups running around to intermingle.
Precisely. At this time the entire humanoid population of Europe was under a hundred thousand. Less than a football (any shape or rules) stadium full, spread over an entire continent.
At which sort of population density, almost everyone you meet has at least one great grandparent in common with you (a modern definition of "incest") ; most people you meet on a daily basis have a grandparent in common with you.
So, for both Neander-boys and Neander-girls, you get what you can get. If they hadn't, then they'd have become extinct within a couple of tens of years, instead of a couple of myriads (10^5) of years. Seen in that light, it wasn't an unsuccessful strategy.
Creating your own ammunition is not a legitimate use. Not in this country.
When I next get to see my competition shooter friend... oh, I forget, there's another who was in the Olympic biathlon team... I'll ask one or the other of them if they've ever heard of anyone "rolling their own" ammo. I wouldn't be surprised if it's simply not allowed at competition, so there is no point in practising with it.
Tantalum and hafnium are relatively rare metals. Tantalum is 1 to 2 ppm ; hafnium 5 to 6 ppm. The current normal metal for making lightbulb filaments is tungsten - which is about 160 ppm.
Annual production of tungsten is about 100 times that of tantalum.
A nail bomb is pretty easy to assemble with ingredients that are readily available in most industrialised nations, but doing so requires (at the very least) a few hours of work.
Right... so lets see.
- Nails - easily obtained.
- Bags to hold the nails and the explosive - just buy nails in bags already.
- Explosives. Ah, now there's a bit of a problem. Where are you going to get the explosives from again? From the corner explosives shop? They don't exist. How about stealing some from the local quarry? Well, that's an idea - just a second while I consult my local geologist (myself, actually) for the location of the nearest quarry that uses explosives. Still thinking. Oh, there's one in Sutherland - 6 hours drive away. But they store their explosives in the local police station (dangerous stuff ; not allowed to leave it laying around unattended). Oh, there's one in Ayrshire (5 hours drive)... but they use draglines, not explosives. And... well, they may start a mine at Tyndrum in a few years if they get permission. But again, they'd keep the explosives at the police station which is only half an hour away on the train.
OK ; let's make some explosives then... sulphur - not really a problem ; charcoal - not a problem ; potassium nitrate or sodium nitrate or ammonium nitrate - problem. You see, we used to have a war here - the terrorist war between the factions in Northern Ireland - when people used to make bombs out of agricultural chemicals. So, their sale is closely monitored, and at the factory they're doped with detonation suppression compounds. Let's make some TNT instead? Order the chemicals from a chemical supply company... and you get the 3am wake up call of the terrorist police smashing in through your door.
Sorry - I forgot - you've had the same restrictions in America since that gun nut, Tim Something, blew up a government building in... sorry, I forgot which state.
So... again. Where are you getting the explosives from? Bear in mind that I've got first year university chemistry, and I've worked with laboratory supply companies for years and know how their systems work - at least in this country.
The grandparent said "trying to make their own ammo", and you started to talk about reloading ammo.
You've missed the point. In Britain it is very hard to get hold of any ammunition. You have to present your gun license ; you're severely limited in the amount that you can buy in one go, and the sales are recorded to your license and reported to the police - every shell or cartridge, and the police do keep track of your usage. Possession of ammunition without a gun is an offence in and of itself - which routinely sees people who stash ammunition for criminals doing jail time. You need to have a gun license to legally posses ammunition, even if you don't own a gun itself (e.g. you're part of a target shooting club, which owns and stores some guns at the range ; a friend was in this situation and is my source).
As for reloading equipment : I've never heard of anyone even attempting such, and I suspect that the possession and importation of such equipment would really get the attention of the police. "Attention" in the sense of 20 policemen smashing through your doors and windows at 3 in the morning.
Criminals in the UK often have to find a machine shop with sufficiently skilled staff to manufacture cartridge casings from sheet brass. And I'd bet that suppliers of such brass sheet are under orders to keep a detailed record of their buyers.
Then they have to get loading equipment manufactured, and propellant supplies. There's no legitimate market for such. None, zip, zilch, nada. So maybe you'd have to make your own cordite. And then you discover what happens if you try to order fuming nitric acid from a chemical supply company to make your own cordite.
It is difficult. Deliberately. People who understand how to do these things have put regulations and laws in place in order to make it difficult.
We need a war on guns. Make drugs legal and guns illegal. Shut down the manufacturers and the death merchants. It won't take every gun off the street but it will eliminate most of them within a few years.
Stopping ammunition sales would turn most guns rapidly into expensive cludgels.
But that won't happen either. Because Americans are committed to being able commit mass murder on demand.
The "MM" thing is a piece of moronicity that I only see from Americans, and even there almost solely confined to the oilfield. It's their way of writing "a thousand thousands", meaning a million.
What the fuck it's doing in a context where the overwhelming majority of the audience are going to be comfortable with the SI multiplier prefixes (and their 2^[10*n] computing relatives), I don't know.
My first thought : 507 MM / 6.8 MM = 74.5 lines of code per pupil. That is, depending on which language they're using, only a couple of "hello world" programmes and a couple of "receive data, calculate average and print results" programs. A start, but hardly a gret leap forward in computing.
Water acts polar because of the nature of the oxygen atom itself.
Sort-of true. It's actually a consequence of the symmetries of p and s orbitals. Hybridising one s and three p orbitals (each oriented on one of the x, y and z axes gives you four "sp^3" orbitals. But that's true for any atom, not just oxygen. The symmetries involved - well can you think of a way that orients four directions in space in a maximally symmetrical manner and which doesn't end up with a tetrahedral orientation of the resultant orbitals.
That tetrahedral orientation of the sp^3 orbitals is what leads to the asymmetry of water and therefore it's dipole moment (and incidentally ammonia, hydrogen sulphide and phosphine, but not methane, silane and the halides of hydrogen).
This was all worked out in the mid-1930s, but I recall people struggling with it in the mid-80s when I was a student. It's not stunningly difficult, but it's not the easiest thing in the world either.
Yes it did, originally. For the first 30 or 40 years after they were discovered, none of them had any known chemical compounds. Off the top of my head, xenon compounds were discovered in the late 1940s, krypton by the late 1950s, I'm not sure about argon's history, and neon compounds were announced some time since I was a student, so post 1980s.
all of the noble elements can be ionized, with enough energy, just like any other element. What it means is they have a stable electron configuration. Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon, and Radon all have there outermost electron orbital shells filled.
True, but not relevant ; the term "noble gasses" was in use long before there was any detailed understanding of atomic orbitals. The law of octets - related to classical valence theory - on the other hand, goes back to [I've forgotten his name] who was groping towards the theory of the periodic table a couple of decades before Mendeleev, and so nearly 4 decades before the discovery of helium.
This means they're not inclined to give, borrow, or take electrons from other elements, this is why there called noble.
This is in flat contradiction to your first statement.
As someone who has spliced fiber: It's such a PITA, no wonder no one's buying it.
I've never spliced fibre - but I've wired up enough 64-way intrinsically-safe sensor cables, and enough mutliple-channel co-ax TV distribution circuits, all in high-noise and flammable-atmosphere rated cables to understand that wiring things up can be a right pain in the ass. Doing it in the snow and seawater-spray laden howling gales just adds to the entertainment.
What aspect of splicing fibre do you find a PITA? The closest that I've come to it is having to get the installation's technicians back into the unit three days in a row before we got a connection that was then stable for the next couple of months we were on that site. Not my equipment, so I felt no inspiration to pick up a soldering iron and duct tape to have a bash at the job myself. Or even, to be honest, to look over their shoulders to see what they were up to - I had enough work of my own to get on with.
Taking it is just considered theft, they don't tack on extra charges because you took it from the public (and they arguably should).
Infrastructure doesn't belong to "the public" ; it was pretty much all sold off to private for-profit companies in the 1980s and 1990s burst of governmental kleptocracy. I can't think of a piece of government-owned infrastructure at the moment other than roads - and they're trying to privatise them too. Gas, electricity, telephone, water - all sold off. Canals, railways, airports, larger bridges are likewise sold off. Oh, the army and other military haven't been sold - yet.
Journalists in general don't have any obligation to educate or inform people ; their only obligation is to produce the number of column inches that their editors desire, to deadline. What obligations the editors have - to educate, or entertain, or inform - is policy of the proprietors.
There are some relatively good proprietors out there - that's why I read the Lebedev Pravda (a.k.a. the Indescribablyboring or Independent) - and there are some abysmal ones - which is why I never read, let alone actually buy, a Murdoch piece of second-user arse-wipe .
Slashdot Mirror
I've never used /. as a home page. For me it's always been following links in the 'headlines' emails, because I'm often without connectivity for days or weeks at a stretch. But I too have been suffering from increasingly vomit-inducing layouts as I've been using a tablet more often. for some dumb-fuck reason they try to force me to use a mobile interface which is utterly bouwfing. I mean - it doesn't even let you fill more than a third of a screen with text before it's UI goes up shit creek. And as for erasing your replies if you try to use Ctrl+(arrow key) to move around in your reply. Do they actually want only "Me, too" type replies?
Their UI people are really doing a bad job.
It is as impressive as fuck. It still takes some balls to volunteer as the casualty though. Just because Hollywood celebrates people whose only answer is "you're going to need a bigger bang", doesn't mean that there aren't some real artistes with explosives out there.
Have you ever heard of using explosives in manufacturing precision components?
I guess it's back to http://www.discovery.org/ for some real nastiness.
You need to have something on top of the dynamite to direct the explosive forces into the boulder (presumed) [on this side of the Pond we call it "tamping the charge" ; probably the same word root as "tampon"]. Which you could achieve in various ways, but you need to get your big expensive machinery out of harms way first. By that point, you can probably do the job with a large construction drill, a 30mm drill bit, and a half-stick of "bang". If the first half-stick doesn't work, use your drill in the remainder of the drilled hole as a starter and repeat the performance.
Most of the time we drill through or round them, then cement the things in places ASAP. But sometimes they're more problematic because they tend to creep/ fall out of the walls and crush or trap later equipment at the most inconvenient possible time. Our normal response then, as a minimal cost / minimal risk strategy is to move location by 50 m and start again. On a tunnel-boring project, that could be much more of an issue.
But it's hardly unprecedented.
Ultimate solution : pull the TBM OOH (see, we have TLAs for this!), pump the cavity full of cement and let it set. Then drill ahead with a smaller probe drill (or several) to determine the extent of the problem. Apply sufficient quantity and placement of explosives to turn the big problem into lots of smaller problems. Tackle the small problems in sequence.
True but irrelevant. The purpose of the GPS trackers (or the related ones that use short-range radios to trigger pickups in the bus stop shelters, which note the transit time of particular radios) is to document whether the bus company is achieving it's contractually required degree of punctuality. If the company fails to prove that it has good enough punctuality, then it could lose subsidy, or even suffer profit-destroying fines. (Note that for a long time use of GPS was considered too expensive and unreliable as it could have been switched off at any moment by a foreign government ; this issue has not been addressed fully yet, but it is being addressed.)
They could do that in the 1880s by the simple expedient of asking the driver (or conductor) if they saw someone carrying a bloody knife / head in a paper bag / blue jacket with "Wanker" written on it. Use of CCTV simply takes some of the vagaries out of the process. (Incidentally, the inside of a bus is the private property of the bus company ; they've as much right to video you there as if you were sitting in their office's waiting room. They don't even really need to inform you of the fact - though they probably do so to stay absolutely on the right side of the law.
By far and away the biggest use of on-bus cameras is to catch fare dodgers and people who assault staff.
How the fuck - I mean HOW THE FUCK - are you expected to determine if someone is under the influence of drink or drugs by checking their DNA?
That would imply that every time you take a drink (or smoke anything, including tobacco), you induce DNA changes in your cheek cells. And therefore, get cancer. Now, I do know that both drinking and smoking are associated with increased cancer rates, but they're not 100% cancer rates.
Someone has been writing absolute shit "science journalism".
Isn't that what the white-collar thieves and scoundrels call a "dead cat bounce".
These "switch" devices that you talk of are too complex for Apple users.
Precisely. At this time the entire humanoid population of Europe was under a hundred thousand. Less than a football (any shape or rules) stadium full, spread over an entire continent.
At which sort of population density, almost everyone you meet has at least one great grandparent in common with you (a modern definition of "incest") ; most people you meet on a daily basis have a grandparent in common with you.
So, for both Neander-boys and Neander-girls, you get what you can get. If they hadn't, then they'd have become extinct within a couple of tens of years, instead of a couple of myriads (10^5) of years. Seen in that light, it wasn't an unsuccessful strategy.
When I next get to see my competition shooter friend ... oh, I forget, there's another who was in the Olympic biathlon team ... I'll ask one or the other of them if they've ever heard of anyone "rolling their own" ammo. I wouldn't be surprised if it's simply not allowed at competition, so there is no point in practising with it.
Tantalum and hafnium are relatively rare metals. Tantalum is 1 to 2 ppm ; hafnium 5 to 6 ppm. The current normal metal for making lightbulb filaments is tungsten - which is about 160 ppm. Annual production of tungsten is about 100 times that of tantalum.
Making a suicide belt isn't exactly easy, even if you can get the explosives.
Right ... so lets see.
How about stealing some from the local quarry? Well, that's an idea - just a second while I consult my local geologist (myself, actually) for the location of the nearest quarry that uses explosives. Still thinking. Oh, there's one in Sutherland - 6 hours drive away. But they store their explosives in the local police station (dangerous stuff ; not allowed to leave it laying around unattended). Oh, there's one in Ayrshire (5 hours drive)... but they use draglines, not explosives. And
OK ; let's make some explosives then
Sorry - I forgot - you've had the same restrictions in America since that gun nut, Tim Something, blew up a government building in ... sorry, I forgot which state.
So ... again. Where are you getting the explosives from? Bear in mind that I've got first year university chemistry, and I've worked with laboratory supply companies for years and know how their systems work - at least in this country.
Yes.
What legitimate use do they have? None.
You've missed the point. In Britain it is very hard to get hold of any ammunition. You have to present your gun license ; you're severely limited in the amount that you can buy in one go, and the sales are recorded to your license and reported to the police - every shell or cartridge, and the police do keep track of your usage. Possession of ammunition without a gun is an offence in and of itself - which routinely sees people who stash ammunition for criminals doing jail time. You need to have a gun license to legally posses ammunition, even if you don't own a gun itself (e.g. you're part of a target shooting club, which owns and stores some guns at the range ; a friend was in this situation and is my source).
As for reloading equipment : I've never heard of anyone even attempting such, and I suspect that the possession and importation of such equipment would really get the attention of the police. "Attention" in the sense of 20 policemen smashing through your doors and windows at 3 in the morning.
Criminals in the UK often have to find a machine shop with sufficiently skilled staff to manufacture cartridge casings from sheet brass. And I'd bet that suppliers of such brass sheet are under orders to keep a detailed record of their buyers.
Then they have to get loading equipment manufactured, and propellant supplies. There's no legitimate market for such. None, zip, zilch, nada. So maybe you'd have to make your own cordite. And then you discover what happens if you try to order fuming nitric acid from a chemical supply company to make your own cordite.
It is difficult. Deliberately. People who understand how to do these things have put regulations and laws in place in order to make it difficult.
Stopping ammunition sales would turn most guns rapidly into expensive cludgels.
But that won't happen either. Because Americans are committed to being able commit mass murder on demand.
What the fuck it's doing in a context where the overwhelming majority of the audience are going to be comfortable with the SI multiplier prefixes (and their 2^[10*n] computing relatives), I don't know.
My first thought : 507 MM / 6.8 MM = 74.5 lines of code per pupil. That is, depending on which language they're using, only a couple of "hello world" programmes and a couple of "receive data, calculate average and print results" programs. A start, but hardly a gret leap forward in computing.
Sort-of true. It's actually a consequence of the symmetries of p and s orbitals. Hybridising one s and three p orbitals (each oriented on one of the x, y and z axes gives you four "sp^3" orbitals. But that's true for any atom, not just oxygen. The symmetries involved - well can you think of a way that orients four directions in space in a maximally symmetrical manner and which doesn't end up with a tetrahedral orientation of the resultant orbitals.
That tetrahedral orientation of the sp^3 orbitals is what leads to the asymmetry of water and therefore it's dipole moment (and incidentally ammonia, hydrogen sulphide and phosphine, but not methane, silane and the halides of hydrogen).
This was all worked out in the mid-1930s, but I recall people struggling with it in the mid-80s when I was a student. It's not stunningly difficult, but it's not the easiest thing in the world either.
Yes it did, originally. For the first 30 or 40 years after they were discovered, none of them had any known chemical compounds. Off the top of my head, xenon compounds were discovered in the late 1940s, krypton by the late 1950s, I'm not sure about argon's history, and neon compounds were announced some time since I was a student, so post 1980s.
True, but not relevant ; the term "noble gasses" was in use long before there was any detailed understanding of atomic orbitals. The law of octets - related to classical valence theory - on the other hand, goes back to [I've forgotten his name] who was groping towards the theory of the periodic table a couple of decades before Mendeleev, and so nearly 4 decades before the discovery of helium.
This is in flat contradiction to your first statement.
Oh, you want me to trust your government. Now, why would I do that?
I've never spliced fibre - but I've wired up enough 64-way intrinsically-safe sensor cables, and enough mutliple-channel co-ax TV distribution circuits, all in high-noise and flammable-atmosphere rated cables to understand that wiring things up can be a right pain in the ass. Doing it in the snow and seawater-spray laden howling gales just adds to the entertainment.
What aspect of splicing fibre do you find a PITA? The closest that I've come to it is having to get the installation's technicians back into the unit three days in a row before we got a connection that was then stable for the next couple of months we were on that site. Not my equipment, so I felt no inspiration to pick up a soldering iron and duct tape to have a bash at the job myself. Or even, to be honest, to look over their shoulders to see what they were up to - I had enough work of my own to get on with.
Infrastructure doesn't belong to "the public" ; it was pretty much all sold off to private for-profit companies in the 1980s and 1990s burst of governmental kleptocracy. I can't think of a piece of government-owned infrastructure at the moment other than roads - and they're trying to privatise them too. Gas, electricity, telephone, water - all sold off. Canals, railways, airports, larger bridges are likewise sold off. Oh, the army and other military haven't been sold - yet.
Journalists in general don't have any obligation to educate or inform people ; their only obligation is to produce the number of column inches that their editors desire, to deadline. What obligations the editors have - to educate, or entertain, or inform - is policy of the proprietors.
There are some relatively good proprietors out there - that's why I read the Lebedev Pravda (a.k.a. the Indescribablyboring or Independent) - and there are some abysmal ones - which is why I never read, let alone actually buy, a Murdoch piece of second-user arse-wipe .
That would be the case if someone was running the company as a tax write-off for some other reason.