Because we can't make vaccines mandatory for everybody,
You can't? Why not?
You (America, not you personally) already require children to be vaccinated before attending public schools. So there's no theoretical impediment to banning un-vaccinated people from other public properties (i.e. structures built using money from the public purse, in any degree including tax allowances). So... libraries : "You're not vaccinated, get out now!" Many hospitals : "You're not vaccinated, get out now!" Roads : "You're not vaccinated, get off now!" Telephone service (I bet there's public subsidy somewhere there) : "You're not vaccinated, so you're now disconnected!" Water supply and sewage services : "You're not vaccinated so you're now disconnected had here's the bill for decontaminating the tubes while disconnecting them from your property." Driving license renewal in a federally-owned building : "You're not vaccinated, get out now!"
Yes, the policy is intended to either kill them, or drive them to live on isolated ranches out in the far west. Which is what is necessary. Leper colonies weren't exactly nice places, but as a public health policy in the Middle Ages, they were reasonably effective. Oh, and I've been to Eyam several times ; it's a lesson forcefully made.
As I point out above, people do travel, and for good reasons. And microbes are considerably more effective at stowing away (including potentially on or in, but not infecting, already vaccinated people) than crocodiles are. Eradication programmes need to be global in effect to have any chance of succeeding, which is why the actions of Boko Haram (spelling? probably variable) in up-country Nigeria and some Pakistani and Afghani tribal leaders are threatening the global efforts to eradicate polio.
I wouldn't stop distributing those vaccines for a generation, at least. My home town had a smallpox scare nearly a decade after the apparent eradication of wild smallpox, and my parents were very glad that the whole family were vaccinated. (There was a distribution and storage depot for a distance-learning university ; they found a sealed box of equipment from one of the research labs which had been working on smallpox previously, but couldn't find records of it having been autoclaved before storage. Turns out that it had been used, and contaminated, but had probably been sterilised afterwards but the paperwork wasn't there. But... a slightly anxious week.)
I received travel orders for Gabon yesterday afternoon, which puts me straight into the firing line for ebola.
I'm vaccinated to the eyeballs (my vaccination passport is off to the visa department along with my travel passport, but the current list includes smallpox, pertussis, diphtheria, tetanus, polio, TB [several boosters - repeated known exposures through work history and XDR TB is really scary ; plain old TB killed one of my grandparents], yellow fever, rabies plus boosters, meningitis [a couple of weeks ago], tick-borne encephalitis, and I forget how many others), but TTBOMK there is no recognised vaccine for ebola.
As a citizen of a western nation who travels to non-western nations for work reasons, explain to me again why I shouldn't be doing that.
(Incidentally, my contract explicitly requires me to educate and train local staff to do my job.)
Well, you could argue that the heinous sin for which they're being punished (or in Snowden's case, punishment is being planned) is that they exposed the lies of government.
But the foaming-at-the-mouth Internet atheists with their insults and sophmoric arguments are as bad as the worst religious nut.
Oh, I feel so deeply upset. I suppose that I'd better give up on being a moral atheist and go and cut the cunt out of a little girl using a broken bottle, shouting "Jesus Akbar", as you religious fuckwits do.
Nah, I'll resist the temptation, because I still can't hear the Voice of Dog ordering me to punish you unto the seventh generation, though it's statistically a near certainty that someone in your 2^7+2^6+2^5+2^4+2^3+2^2+2^1= 128+64+32+16+8+4+2= 254 ancestors will have done something sufficiently reprehensible for you to be smitten.
While I certainly hope that the mapping society have done their homework, this sort of fascinating discovery is precisely the sort of thing that would attract the attention of skilful, knowledgeable and experienced forgers.
There's an old adage that "if it seems too good to be true, it probably is" ; always worth remembering when something comes along like this which seems too good to be true.
I'd recommend you read one of Tim Severin's books about the "Brendan Voyage", to sober you up about the joys of seafaring in the Arctic in a sail boat with a thousand-year-old design.
It's not a lot of fun in modern boats. Getting hit by a 22m wave spills your coffee, even in a modern 100,000 tonne dynamic-positioning vessel.
Otherwise, you can say the New World was discovered about 50,000 years ago, according to the latest findings.
Errr, there's new evidence? Last I heard was that the likely settlement date was around 14-15 thousand years ago. There's the slim possibility of an earlier settlement which went extinct, but that's on very scant and much-doubted evidence.
Australia, OTOH, was probably settled around 50,000 years ago. But the ice in NE Siberia then was thick enough to make it unlikely that anyone could have got across to the Bering Strait, let alone across it, until approaching 16,000 years ago. There's always the possibility of a coastal access route, but with sea level rise relevant evidence is very likely to have been submerged, which makes such assertions implausible. Besides, where are the Native American artefacts and sites from, say, 30,000 to 20,000 years ago in South America?
Journal, volume and page number are adequate reference details.
I predict this will be the least commented on article in Slashdot's history.
At 57 comments (plus this one), it's not even in contention. I've submitted articles with lower comment counts than that. And noting that you've a lower UID than I have (rare!), I wouldn't be terribly surprised if you had too.
I had no idea they've been building quantum devices since the 1950's.
Plants have been building quantum devices - a.k.a chlorophyll molecules in chloroplasts - since... well the date is uncertain, but given that the "Great Oxidation Event" was pretty much over before 1950 million years ago, the invention date was significantly before then.
Oh, you mean humans making quantum devices? Hmmm, paints and phosphor have some interesting properties at the atomic and molecualr scale, though I can't think of any specifically quantum examples back in the 19th century. So I'll stick to the junction diode ("cat's whisker", of "tickling" fame) which was discovered in the early 20th century. My grandfather was making and re-making one in the 1930s.
It could just as well be proof of their stupidity.
So, CI have their corpseicle store in north Canada, or the centre of Australia? For "geological stability" (which is my territory). And where are they? "MI" (Michigan? Not my country.) That's maybe not quite the epitome of instability, but it's not wildly stable either. Smells of bovine excrement to me.
I assumed gasoline would give a positive result on the test, you mean it doesn't?
The number of false positives from a detector that picked up plain old hydrocarbon vapours would be gigantic, particularly considering that airports and airplanes literally run on kerosene. Jet-A1 is essentially a low octane, slightly higher-boiling-than-gasoline mixture of hydrocarbons. Even without perfectly innocent fuel spills, as you describe, there are going to be non-trivial traces in the atmosphere all the time.
Then there's the nearly 2ppm of methane present in the normal atmosphere. That's going to complicate any simplistic hydrocarbon detection system.
I don't know what the detection technology inside these systems is, but I'd bet in IR spectroscopy. Gas chromatography is credible, but they'd need analytical-grade bottles of carrier gas or some major advances in gas generators since.... nah, GC isn't credible. Mass spectrometry... certainly got the sensitivity and range of detection capabilities (the same systems do drug analyses too), but they're delicate lumps. And not terribly compact. IR's your lead contender by far.
Nitrate groups have an absorbtion pattern in the IR (see Table 1 in http://www.umsl.edu/~orglab/documents/IR/IR2.html for an example); see that and you have a positive. Organic nitrates aren't terribly common in the general public. Got a prescription to go with this claim of nitroglycerine for your dodgy heart, Sir? Been sniffing the old poppers, Sir ? ; I've got a lovely long rubber glove for you! Been playing cards, have we, Sir? ; well that was good enough to jail the Birmingham Six.
So I guess a gasoline fuel-air bomb would be easier to smuggle on board?
Hmmm, that would be how many litres of gasoline - when you're not allowed to board with liquids - and a compressed gas supply (also not allowed - look for the IATA "Do Not Carry these..." posters all over the airport. think of a small SCUBA tank.). And the control and ignition circuitry (you want a bomb, not just a fire on board).
Fuel-air bombs ; what is the smallest you've test-detonated sucessfully, and how reliable is your implementatin?
Sonic level sensors are old hat. Battery life is going to be shit - you'll want to install cabling pretty damned quick, otherwise the cumulative radiation loading on the workers replacing batteries will rapidly exceed that from installing the cabling. These things are going to be in use for decades, so it's worthwhile doing it right, once.
Wireless... yeah, great, marvellous. With a lot of steel-framed buildings around... some of which you're going to be demolishing during the lifetime of the project. Have fun de-bugging that without adding to your worker's exposure budget. Just make up the cables off-site (after planning the project, of course ; use cameras) with the sensors attached, then make one pass through the site deploying your carefully-spooled and ready-tested cable (and sensors, which hook over the edges of the tanks.
Sonic sensors are OK, but have persistent problems with latching onto echoes from internal pipework in the tanks. Have fun de-bugging that (lovely stable echo ; that tank's not leaking!) without increasing your work force's total exposure. Unfortunately, the least-spoofable sensing technology (strings of reed switches and a magnetic float) also implies bulky sensors.
And measuring the level of fluid in your tanks is one thing - but for each tank it's only going to tell you the difference between net inflow (rainfall, dead bird, groundwater run-off, continuing leakage from nearby tanks) and net outflow.
Designing and installing instrumentation systems is great fun. I'd suggest that you (timothy, and the original author Akiba) spend a few years doing it, then living with having to maintain and repair what you've built, while also having to use the data from those sensors 24x7x52 in safety-critical applications.
Of course it does. We have a problem with Muslim terrorists as much as any other country
But we're perfectly capable of growing our own Muslim terrorists without importing dirty little foreign Muslim terrorists. We've even got a valuable pool of non-dark-skinned Muslim terrorists with valid passports indicating them to be from thousand-year British-resident families.
Perhaps we should start to brand people all people with their religious affiliation in the middle of their foreheads? Multiple-branding for people who can't keep their mind made up. Might as well do visiting tourists while we're at it. And definitely for the under-5s.
Hmmm, original site is unresponsive - probably slashdotted. Or NSA'd
with an explosive swab test on his pants which came back positive for some unknown reason,
This is why I don't fly in clothes that I've handled gasoline or worked on cars in, you never know what might have been absorbed into the fibers
I don't see the relationship between these two comments. when I've had friends fail the swab test when trying to board flights, it's been because the machines picked up traces of organic nitrates on the clothes of the people in the party... which was adequately explained by them having spent then previous night sleeping in the garage of one member of the party... who happened to be carrying his explosives user licence with him, as well as receipts for him having recently been buying and using high explosives.
Gasoline compositions don't normally contain organic nitrates - at least not ones I've heard of. So... what are you doing with gasoline that gets... nitrate... in... it... oh, you're not processing your coca leaf with nitric acid are you? That's going to drop your yield by 20% or so!
To amplify... damn, this stupid "mobile" site doesn't quote the comment you're replying to, for citation. Stupid design ; first and last time I'll use it...
To amplify the reasons for the Grauniad destroying the computer (in sight of, but not in contact with "GCHQ officers") rather than facing the risk of it being seized after a court battle, they (the Grauniad, corporately) were concerned that forensic analysis of the computer if seized, might lead to exposure of communications with other "sources". It wasn't clear if they were concerned about things to do with the present investigation, or previous work done on that machine. Deleted drafts of documents, correspondence, etc were considered vulnerable.
The Guardian were explicit that the machine in question was never connected to the Internet. By implication, data went on and off the machine by USB or disc. The pictures showed components of a fairly standard PCI (or PCI-Express?) desktop machine, and made reference to using drills and angle grinders, so I suspect that the bits (of oxide) really are spread all over the place.
Since the Gurkhas are well aware that they can get work as mercenary soldiers for the UK army at a lot higher rate than $1028/month, including settlement rights in the UK at the completion of the employment, they'd be fools to take that sort of deal.
I'll let you call a Gurkha a fool to his face ; I'm not going to. The situation is almost certainly not as you describe it.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't? Why not?
You (America, not you personally) already require children to be vaccinated before attending public schools. So there's no theoretical impediment to banning un-vaccinated people from other public properties (i.e. structures built using money from the public purse, in any degree including tax allowances). So ... libraries : "You're not vaccinated, get out now!" Many hospitals : "You're not vaccinated, get out now!" Roads : "You're not vaccinated, get off now!" Telephone service (I bet there's public subsidy somewhere there) : "You're not vaccinated, so you're now disconnected!" Water supply and sewage services : "You're not vaccinated so you're now disconnected had here's the bill for decontaminating the tubes while disconnecting them from your property." Driving license renewal in a federally-owned building : "You're not vaccinated, get out now!"
Yes, the policy is intended to either kill them, or drive them to live on isolated ranches out in the far west. Which is what is necessary. Leper colonies weren't exactly nice places, but as a public health policy in the Middle Ages, they were reasonably effective. Oh, and I've been to Eyam several times ; it's a lesson forcefully made.
I wouldn't stop distributing those vaccines for a generation, at least. My home town had a smallpox scare nearly a decade after the apparent eradication of wild smallpox, and my parents were very glad that the whole family were vaccinated. (There was a distribution and storage depot for a distance-learning university ; they found a sealed box of equipment from one of the research labs which had been working on smallpox previously, but couldn't find records of it having been autoclaved before storage. Turns out that it had been used, and contaminated, but had probably been sterilised afterwards but the paperwork wasn't there. But ... a slightly anxious week.)
I'm vaccinated to the eyeballs (my vaccination passport is off to the visa department along with my travel passport, but the current list includes smallpox, pertussis, diphtheria, tetanus, polio, TB [several boosters - repeated known exposures through work history and XDR TB is really scary ; plain old TB killed one of my grandparents], yellow fever, rabies plus boosters, meningitis [a couple of weeks ago], tick-borne encephalitis, and I forget how many others), but TTBOMK there is no recognised vaccine for ebola.
As a citizen of a western nation who travels to non-western nations for work reasons, explain to me again why I shouldn't be doing that.
(Incidentally, my contract explicitly requires me to educate and train local staff to do my job.)
Well, you could argue that the heinous sin for which they're being punished (or in Snowden's case, punishment is being planned) is that they exposed the lies of government.
Oh, I feel so deeply upset. I suppose that I'd better give up on being a moral atheist and go and cut the cunt out of a little girl using a broken bottle, shouting "Jesus Akbar", as you religious fuckwits do.
Nah, I'll resist the temptation, because I still can't hear the Voice of Dog ordering me to punish you unto the seventh generation, though it's statistically a near certainty that someone in your 2^7+2^6+2^5+2^4+2^3+2^2+2^1= 128+64+32+16+8+4+2= 254 ancestors will have done something sufficiently reprehensible for you to be smitten.
There's an old adage that "if it seems too good to be true, it probably is" ; always worth remembering when something comes along like this which seems too good to be true.
Hitler Diaries, anyone?
It's not a lot of fun in modern boats. Getting hit by a 22m wave spills your coffee, even in a modern 100,000 tonne dynamic-positioning vessel.
Errr, there's new evidence? Last I heard was that the likely settlement date was around 14-15 thousand years ago. There's the slim possibility of an earlier settlement which went extinct, but that's on very scant and much-doubted evidence.
Australia, OTOH, was probably settled around 50,000 years ago. But the ice in NE Siberia then was thick enough to make it unlikely that anyone could have got across to the Bering Strait, let alone across it, until approaching 16,000 years ago. There's always the possibility of a coastal access route, but with sea level rise relevant evidence is very likely to have been submerged, which makes such assertions implausible. Besides, where are the Native American artefacts and sites from, say, 30,000 to 20,000 years ago in South America?
Journal, volume and page number are adequate reference details.
At 57 comments (plus this one), it's not even in contention. I've submitted articles with lower comment counts than that. And noting that you've a lower UID than I have (rare!), I wouldn't be terribly surprised if you had too.
Plants have been building quantum devices - a.k.a chlorophyll molecules in chloroplasts - since ... well the date is uncertain, but given that the "Great Oxidation Event" was pretty much over before 1950 million years ago, the invention date was significantly before then.
Oh, you mean humans making quantum devices? Hmmm, paints and phosphor have some interesting properties at the atomic and molecualr scale, though I can't think of any specifically quantum examples back in the 19th century. So I'll stick to the junction diode ("cat's whisker", of "tickling" fame) which was discovered in the early 20th century. My grandfather was making and re-making one in the 1930s.
It could just as well be proof of their stupidity.
So, CI have their corpseicle store in north Canada, or the centre of Australia? For "geological stability" (which is my territory). And where are they? "MI" (Michigan? Not my country.) That's maybe not quite the epitome of instability, but it's not wildly stable either. Smells of bovine excrement to me.
The number of false positives from a detector that picked up plain old hydrocarbon vapours would be gigantic, particularly considering that airports and airplanes literally run on kerosene. Jet-A1 is essentially a low octane, slightly higher-boiling-than-gasoline mixture of hydrocarbons. Even without perfectly innocent fuel spills, as you describe, there are going to be non-trivial traces in the atmosphere all the time.
Then there's the nearly 2ppm of methane present in the normal atmosphere. That's going to complicate any simplistic hydrocarbon detection system.
I don't know what the detection technology inside these systems is, but I'd bet in IR spectroscopy. Gas chromatography is credible, but they'd need analytical-grade bottles of carrier gas or some major advances in gas generators since .... nah, GC isn't credible. Mass spectrometry ... certainly got the sensitivity and range of detection capabilities (the same systems do drug analyses too), but they're delicate lumps. And not terribly compact. IR's your lead contender by far.
Nitrate groups have an absorbtion pattern in the IR (see Table 1 in http://www.umsl.edu/~orglab/documents/IR/IR2.html for an example); see that and you have a positive. Organic nitrates aren't terribly common in the general public. Got a prescription to go with this claim of nitroglycerine for your dodgy heart, Sir? Been sniffing the old poppers, Sir ? ; I've got a lovely long rubber glove for you! Been playing cards, have we, Sir? ; well that was good enough to jail the Birmingham Six.
Hmmm, that would be how many litres of gasoline - when you're not allowed to board with liquids - and a compressed gas supply (also not allowed - look for the IATA "Do Not Carry these ..." posters all over the airport. think of a small SCUBA tank.). And the control and ignition circuitry (you want a bomb, not just a fire on board).
Fuel-air bombs ; what is the smallest you've test-detonated sucessfully, and how reliable is your implementatin?
Wireless ... yeah, great, marvellous. With a lot of steel-framed buildings around ... some of which you're going to be demolishing during the lifetime of the project. Have fun de-bugging that without adding to your worker's exposure budget. Just make up the cables off-site (after planning the project, of course ; use cameras) with the sensors attached, then make one pass through the site deploying your carefully-spooled and ready-tested cable (and sensors, which hook over the edges of the tanks.
Sonic sensors are OK, but have persistent problems with latching onto echoes from internal pipework in the tanks. Have fun de-bugging that (lovely stable echo ; that tank's not leaking!) without increasing your work force's total exposure. Unfortunately, the least-spoofable sensing technology (strings of reed switches and a magnetic float) also implies bulky sensors.
And measuring the level of fluid in your tanks is one thing - but for each tank it's only going to tell you the difference between net inflow (rainfall, dead bird, groundwater run-off, continuing leakage from nearby tanks) and net outflow.
Designing and installing instrumentation systems is great fun. I'd suggest that you (timothy, and the original author Akiba) spend a few years doing it, then living with having to maintain and repair what you've built, while also having to use the data from those sensors 24x7x52 in safety-critical applications.
But we're perfectly capable of growing our own Muslim terrorists without importing dirty little foreign Muslim terrorists. We've even got a valuable pool of non-dark-skinned Muslim terrorists with valid passports indicating them to be from thousand-year British-resident families.
Perhaps we should start to brand people all people with their religious affiliation in the middle of their foreheads? Multiple-branding for people who can't keep their mind made up. Might as well do visiting tourists while we're at it. And definitely for the under-5s.
... whereas by getting turned into a woman, it's going to be the male prison officers that'll be fucking Chelsea into a bloody pulp.
Well, that's not exactly going to be a surprise to anyone, is it?
I don't see the relationship between these two comments. when I've had friends fail the swab test when trying to board flights, it's been because the machines picked up traces of organic nitrates on the clothes of the people in the party ... which was adequately explained by them having spent then previous night sleeping in the garage of one member of the party ... who happened to be carrying his explosives user licence with him, as well as receipts for him having recently been buying and using high explosives.
Gasoline compositions don't normally contain organic nitrates - at least not ones I've heard of. So ... what are you doing with gasoline that gets ... nitrate ... in ... it ... oh, you're not processing your coca leaf with nitric acid are you? That's going to drop your yield by 20% or so!
Probably a bit dry and crunchy in the uterine epithelium department by now.
When did that increase occur? Last time I looked at US-ian TV, 3 seconds was considered a long attention span.
I won't say that I expected those details, but I am certainly not falling off the sofa in astonishment either.
Is it water-soluble?
Do environmental bacteria look at it and go "Yummy" before tucking in and converting it to some potent neurotoxin?
Important considerations.
Do you get to choose the gender(s) of the person(people) you get laid with (by)? Or do you not really care?
Collateral damage, eh? That sort of argument has been soooooo successful on so many occasions in the past ...
Such speculation would be coming from people who hadn't actually read what the Grauniad had mis-spelled on the subject.
To amplify the reasons for the Grauniad destroying the computer (in sight of, but not in contact with "GCHQ officers") rather than facing the risk of it being seized after a court battle, they (the Grauniad, corporately) were concerned that forensic analysis of the computer if seized, might lead to exposure of communications with other "sources". It wasn't clear if they were concerned about things to do with the present investigation, or previous work done on that machine. Deleted drafts of documents, correspondence, etc were considered vulnerable.
The Guardian were explicit that the machine in question was never connected to the Internet. By implication, data went on and off the machine by USB or disc. The pictures showed components of a fairly standard PCI (or PCI-Express?) desktop machine, and made reference to using drills and angle grinders, so I suspect that the bits (of oxide) really are spread all over the place.
I'll let you call a Gurkha a fool to his face ; I'm not going to. The situation is almost certainly not as you describe it.