Only faintly connected to your interest in Arcturan sponge-bagging (a variant on tea-bagging? I'd better Rule34 that.), but...
Gosh - you can do ANYTHING with the 27 holes of an Arcturian ! "
--
Those giraffes you sold me - they won't mate. You sold me queer giraffes. I want my money back.
... you did, of course, check that the giraffes were of the same species? There are more giraffe species than most humans are aware, but giraffes are better at telling giraffes apart than humans are at telling giraffes apart. Your giraffes may be perfectly straight, and your dealer, not being a giraffe-molesting perv, may not have noticed the packing error.
How about totally geeking out with paper tape or punch cards?
That would have been my preference too. If the data is un-encrypted, then you can read them with the Mk-1 human eyeball (takes a couple of hours practice, every day for a couple of weeks ; nothing drastic. Russian is harder to learn.) ; even if it's encrypted, you can transliterate from the paper tape to files on your new computer with the Mk-1 eyeball.
A tape reader is "nice to have", but not vital.
Tape has an advantage over punched cards that you only have one way to read it wrongly. But you can manage that risk perfectly adequately with punched card too, so that's not a deal-breaker. (I suspect that card readers have more moving parts than tape readers - all that card unstacking, moving and re-stacking - which would translate to a shorter lifetime.)
Someone suggested using plastic cards or tape ; I'd avoid those options. If your "fire safe" really is a fire safe, then paper should survive just fine while plastic may melt.
But again, the whole idea is fundamentally silly. If you really want the data to be secure, "disaster-recovery grade" backup is not exactly rocket science. Encrypt as desired. If you only want to do it with small amounts of data ("account information," whatever that means) then substitute SD cards, memory sticks or whatever floats your boats, but keep the data regularly refreshed. If you've really got to keep the data secure and usable for decades, then you need to go to "disaster-recovery grade" backup anyway, so just bite the bullet and pay for it. Then pass the cost to your customers. If they don't want to pay, then you probably don't want them as customers. This also applies if they're family.
I suppose it could be someone looking for a plot element in a "steam-punk" genre. That could be quite amusing. There may even be an RFC for that, similar to RFC 1149.
To (approximately... can't bring up source quote on this tablet) quote from that : "people have the right to protection from that interference by the law" (my emphasis.')
i.e., your protection from intrusion of privacy, fucking with communications etc, comes by the legal system. You do not have the right to apply techniocal fixes, you have to rely on the law.
Did you think that land sharks would write themselves out of a job?
Stage (5) : Porn industry learns how to do $FAD$ well enough for some people to really get their rocks off. This generates enough interest, and continuing revenue to beat the meat of the problems until they actually get solved this time.
We can take stages (5a) for granted : moral outrage. That's probably happening already.
If a technology isn't mature enough to watch women getting multiracially QPd, then it's probably not really ready for prime time.
... and as there ever any intention to release it in theatres, movie houses or cinemas? IT would be remarkable in the UK (home of DrWho, with special sofa designs for watching DrWho from behind.
Might happen in the US, that's a Someone Else's Problem, but I don't see any reason for it to happen in the BBC's region of legislated responsibility.
Not vastly more expensive, but you missed the point. It's not 5% of the TV-watching population who're watching the 3D channels ; it's 5% of the population who have already brought themselves "3D capable" TVs who are actually using them.
I haven't studied that particular issue in any detail, as it's only of interest to people who will (or do) have kids, which doesn't include me, but it doesn't surprise me. For whatever reason (un-diagnosed eye socket distortion after a car crash when I was 4, or something further back in time? Don't know, don't care ; water under the bridge.), I spent my formative years with one eye far more short-sighted than the other (about 3 units of spectacle strength, when it was diagnosed at 11) and I've always had terrible difficulty with depth perception. Case in point, I just spent the day hill-walking with the wife, and as expected found walking down hill to be as hard work in the mind and nerves as walking up hill was on the legs and knees.
It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest to find that stereovision systems could mess up a developing child's depth perception brain development. Doubly so if (as I'd bet is common) they're using glasses with the wrong inter-pupil distance, whch don't stay properly in position on the head, etc. A.b.s.o.lutely no surprise.
Do I hear the land shark ambulance chasers circling?
Nonsense. To be a successful terrorist you don't need a big pile of money, you just need to be willing to die for your cause.
Only if your definition of "successful" doesn't include "alive", which it does for most non-psychopaths and non-religious.
If you want to be both successful and a terrorist... that probably does take a little more cash, because you need to be able to stand-off from your targets, recruit psychopaths, get away, etc.
How much does it cost to make nailbombs? Or shoot people? Less than a lot of people spend every day, that's how much.
Out here in the civilized world, the difficulty is not the cost of explosives or ammunition, it's getting access to the explosives or ammunition. Getting access to guns is also pretty tricky. (Of course, if you can get ammunition, then you've got explosives, and quite good ones, so I treat guns and ammunition/explosives as distinct problems.) Unless, of course, you're already a criminal.
According to the prices that I hear, a pretty shitty converted-replica machine gun is going to set you back over a month's pre-tax income, and ammunition is separate. An actual military grade working weapon will be considerably more expensive, and ammunition correspondingly expensive. PowerGel demolition explosive is quite cheap, but getting a license to buy it (or getting some from someone with a license to buy it) is much harder.
Of course, you could always go to America, where they give you a gun as an incentive to open a bank account.
and your right to have one more massive blood-sucking operation slicing a chunk off your paycheck?
My union dues - which I've been happily paying for over 20 years now, since we set up the union in response to 167 of our colleagues being killed one night - average between 3 and 4 beers per month (depending slightly on the price of beer and the choice of bar). Hardly a severe imposition on my finances, and a voluntary one.
Give me a break.
Sure. Leg, neck or head? Never let it be said that I wasn't willing to help a non-dues paying freeloading bastard like yourself. But I wouldn't commit one iota of union resources to the task, I'd do it freelance.
2. What is the point of having a contest if you're not going to pick the winner?
They should not hold a naming contest if they're just going to pick the names they want anyway.
I'm holding a contest to rename all relatives of Ronald Reagan after incurable sexually transmitted diseases ; I've not consulted any of these relatives about my plans to rename them, but I'd expect them to take my suggestions into consideration.
The people who ran the competition were not the people who were going to be deciding on the names, they were just carrying out essentially a "focus group" study on what names are likely to be popular. And they said so at the time. Did you actually read the articles and their website, or did you just go "OMG Ponies!" and lose control of your sphincters without actually doing any checking for yourself.
You are the "they". Or at least, you could be if you go and do the work to be recognised in the exoplanet-hunting community ass being the prime expert on any exoplanetary system in Eridanus. Of which there are 29 candidates out of about 87 naked-eye stars. Were you thinking particularly of Epsilon Eridani, this being the closest to us?
Oh, sorry, didn't you know that? Is it relevant to the discussion?
In other news (to you, probably), you too could get to be a member of that committee. All it would take would be around 10 hours of work as an astronomer. Every day. For the next twenty years.
In better news, you too could get onto the committee tomorrow, if you had a time machine that would take you back so that you can do the requisite work.
So... this technology works. As intended. And this needs comment? And the only people who get caught are the ones who can't prove that their insurance/ license/ MOT etc really is in order (because there are errors in databases after all, and you've always got the option of disputing the allegation).
I'm trying to think of a single occasion when I've heard anyone talking on a mobile in a cinema, once the feature has started (OTOH, who wants to listen to the adverts?) I've seen a couple of people shuffling rapidly out of the auditorium and looking worriedly at their mobiles, but that's a correct response to the device being on vibrate. Having been the person making the call on the other end, with million-dollar problems happening in real time, now, answering their phones is what we pay those people for, but not to the detriment of other people. If we've got time to make a phone call to them, instead of hitting the blind-shear rams and run-don't-walk to the upwind lifeboat stations, then they can take the 30 seconds to walk out of the cinema.
I told one off for ananswering her phone while driving last week. Naughty employee!
is obviously not to be trusted with that position. That's anyone. Meaning "anyone", not meaning "anyone but you, latest inventor of a wallet application".
Whatever happened to that thing called cash, by the way? I seem to be using it more and more, and my plastic less and less these days. not that I ever used plastic for more than about 15% of my expenditure.
Exactly who? (Answer : a proportion of American populace and American military personnel ; for sure, not the Grauniad. You cannot buy publicity like this!)
While I don't think much of Robert Heinlein's politics, and citing fiction isn't generally relevant to describing the actuality of politics, in this case I think that the word that he put into the mouths of players in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" are entirely appropriate:
"The trouble with conspiracies is that they rot internaily. When the number is as high as four, chances are even that one is a spy."
[...]
a revolution starts as a conspiracy therefore structure is small, secret, and organized [so] as to minimize damage by betrayal -- since there always are betrayals.
[...]
Actually, I wouldn't be quite that pessimistic. You might (just) manage to get up to double digits before getting back-stabbers into the inner core. You might need to count in octal in order to make double digits though.
How many people were involved in WikiLeaks? A dozen or so? One back-stabber was almost inevitable, and multiple back-stabbers (given the nature of the opposition) a near certainty. And unless Assange and co are much much stupider than they seem to be, they knew it too.
Are you implying that someone high in the corridors of power has read Mein Kamph and accounts of the rise of the Nazi Party to power in inter-War Germany. My God! that's a book that Kim Jong-Un has heard of too! Horrors!
The Nazis were much misunderstood. They may not have been able to make the trains run on time (it could take days to get to Auschwitz!) most of the time, but they sure knew how to subvert a democratic state!
Definitely the guy deserved to die. That day, or at dawn the following day. No need for a trial ; there can be no "mitigating circumstances" or any other leeeeeberal shit like that. Just send the SWAT team into the premises, detain him (it was a "him", wasn't it? TFS was a bit long and my attention was wandering towards the second quarter), kill anyone in the property ^H^H^H^H^H area who objects, drag him in front of Judge Lynch and shoot the fucker at dawn. Before the fucking Snivelling Libertarians get out of their feather beds.
Take out a few blacks / poor people / foreigners / mental retards too at the same time. Clean up the streets a bit. What could possibly go wrong?
Was it in Texas? Probably ; more likely there than anywhere else.
a biotech entrepreneur in San Carlos, California, who had trained as a clinical geneticist in the 1980s, went from doctor to doctor looking for a diagnosis.
(My emphasis.)
Now, I don't know about you, the specific reader, but I do know that I've learned more about genetics as a geologist than the average man. (I'm interested in the OOL problem and in evolutions in general (a day-to-day tool for the working man, like hammers and chisels, I should say)
So, guesstimating reasonably that I know more about genetics than 99% of the population, and more than (say) 80% of the (biased) sample from that population who post on Slashdot, then I'm pretty damned near certain that someone who has trained as a clinical geneticist has forgotten more genetics than I've ever known. Which makes him a pretty good person to carry out this sort of investigation.
Well done that man!
(Incidentally, I hold Nature's reporters to far higher standards of technical accuracy than, say, a national newspaper with a multi-national audience.)
Slashdot Mirror
... you did, of course, check that the giraffes were of the same species? There are more giraffe species than most humans are aware, but giraffes are better at telling giraffes apart than humans are at telling giraffes apart. Your giraffes may be perfectly straight, and your dealer, not being a giraffe-molesting perv, may not have noticed the packing error.
That would have been my preference too. If the data is un-encrypted, then you can read them with the Mk-1 human eyeball (takes a couple of hours practice, every day for a couple of weeks ; nothing drastic. Russian is harder to learn.) ; even if it's encrypted, you can transliterate from the paper tape to files on your new computer with the Mk-1 eyeball.
A tape reader is "nice to have", but not vital.
Tape has an advantage over punched cards that you only have one way to read it wrongly. But you can manage that risk perfectly adequately with punched card too, so that's not a deal-breaker. (I suspect that card readers have more moving parts than tape readers - all that card unstacking, moving and re-stacking - which would translate to a shorter lifetime.)
Someone suggested using plastic cards or tape ; I'd avoid those options. If your "fire safe" really is a fire safe, then paper should survive just fine while plastic may melt.
But again, the whole idea is fundamentally silly. If you really want the data to be secure, "disaster-recovery grade" backup is not exactly rocket science. Encrypt as desired. If you only want to do it with small amounts of data ("account information," whatever that means) then substitute SD cards, memory sticks or whatever floats your boats, but keep the data regularly refreshed. If you've really got to keep the data secure and usable for decades, then you need to go to "disaster-recovery grade" backup anyway, so just bite the bullet and pay for it. Then pass the cost to your customers. If they don't want to pay, then you probably don't want them as customers. This also applies if they're family.
I suppose it could be someone looking for a plot element in a "steam-punk" genre. That could be quite amusing. There may even be an RFC for that, similar to RFC 1149.
i.e., your protection from intrusion of privacy, fucking with communications etc, comes by the legal system. You do not have the right to apply techniocal fixes, you have to rely on the law.
Did you think that land sharks would write themselves out of a job?
Anyone got a need for a VL-bus video card? I don't, any more.
[small voice] Rule 34?
We can take stages (5a) for granted : moral outrage. That's probably happening already.
If a technology isn't mature enough to watch women getting multiracially QPd, then it's probably not really ready for prime time.
Might happen in the US, that's a Someone Else's Problem, but I don't see any reason for it to happen in the BBC's region of legislated responsibility.
Not vastly more expensive, but you missed the point. It's not 5% of the TV-watching population who're watching the 3D channels ; it's 5% of the population who have already brought themselves "3D capable" TVs who are actually using them.
I haven't studied that particular issue in any detail, as it's only of interest to people who will (or do) have kids, which doesn't include me, but it doesn't surprise me. For whatever reason (un-diagnosed eye socket distortion after a car crash when I was 4, or something further back in time? Don't know, don't care ; water under the bridge.), I spent my formative years with one eye far more short-sighted than the other (about 3 units of spectacle strength, when it was diagnosed at 11) and I've always had terrible difficulty with depth perception. Case in point, I just spent the day hill-walking with the wife, and as expected found walking down hill to be as hard work in the mind and nerves as walking up hill was on the legs and knees.
It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest to find that stereovision systems could mess up a developing child's depth perception brain development. Doubly so if (as I'd bet is common) they're using glasses with the wrong inter-pupil distance, whch don't stay properly in position on the head, etc. A.b.s.o.lutely no surprise.
Do I hear the land shark ambulance chasers circling?
Only if your definition of "successful" doesn't include "alive", which it does for most non-psychopaths and non-religious.
If you want to be both successful and a terrorist ... that probably does take a little more cash, because you need to be able to stand-off from your targets, recruit psychopaths, get away, etc.
Out here in the civilized world, the difficulty is not the cost of explosives or ammunition, it's getting access to the explosives or ammunition. Getting access to guns is also pretty tricky. (Of course, if you can get ammunition, then you've got explosives, and quite good ones, so I treat guns and ammunition/explosives as distinct problems.) Unless, of course, you're already a criminal.
According to the prices that I hear, a pretty shitty converted-replica machine gun is going to set you back over a month's pre-tax income, and ammunition is separate. An actual military grade working weapon will be considerably more expensive, and ammunition correspondingly expensive. PowerGel demolition explosive is quite cheap, but getting a license to buy it (or getting some from someone with a license to buy it) is much harder.
Of course, you could always go to America, where they give you a gun as an incentive to open a bank account.
Would you care to cite a source for that? Viz : country name, and legal code reference to this asserted right being granted.
I'll not hold my breath while I'm waiting.
Enough said.
My union dues - which I've been happily paying for over 20 years now, since we set up the union in response to 167 of our colleagues being killed one night - average between 3 and 4 beers per month (depending slightly on the price of beer and the choice of bar). Hardly a severe imposition on my finances, and a voluntary one.
Sure. Leg, neck or head? Never let it be said that I wasn't willing to help a non-dues paying freeloading bastard like yourself. But I wouldn't commit one iota of union resources to the task, I'd do it freelance.
And, as if by perverted magic, the Internet was filled with pictures of your rectum. Do you have two girls and a cup to go with that?
I'm holding a contest to rename all relatives of Ronald Reagan after incurable sexually transmitted diseases ; I've not consulted any of these relatives about my plans to rename them, but I'd expect them to take my suggestions into consideration.
The people who ran the competition were not the people who were going to be deciding on the names, they were just carrying out essentially a "focus group" study on what names are likely to be popular. And they said so at the time. Did you actually read the articles and their website, or did you just go "OMG Ponies!" and lose control of your sphincters without actually doing any checking for yourself.
You are the "they". Or at least, you could be if you go and do the work to be recognised in the exoplanet-hunting community ass being the prime expert on any exoplanetary system in Eridanus. Of which there are 29 candidates out of about 87 naked-eye stars. Were you thinking particularly of Epsilon Eridani, this being the closest to us?
In terms of naming, yes.
Oh, sorry, didn't you know that? Is it relevant to the discussion?
In other news (to you, probably), you too could get to be a member of that committee. All it would take would be around 10 hours of work as an astronomer. Every day. For the next twenty years.
In better news, you too could get onto the committee tomorrow, if you had a time machine that would take you back so that you can do the requisite work.
So ... this technology works. As intended. And this needs comment? And the only people who get caught are the ones who can't prove that their insurance/ license/ MOT etc really is in order (because there are errors in databases after all, and you've always got the option of disputing the allegation).
One word : politeness.
I'm trying to think of a single occasion when I've heard anyone talking on a mobile in a cinema, once the feature has started (OTOH, who wants to listen to the adverts?) I've seen a couple of people shuffling rapidly out of the auditorium and looking worriedly at their mobiles, but that's a correct response to the device being on vibrate. Having been the person making the call on the other end, with million-dollar problems happening in real time, now, answering their phones is what we pay those people for, but not to the detriment of other people. If we've got time to make a phone call to them, instead of hitting the blind-shear rams and run-don't-walk to the upwind lifeboat stations, then they can take the 30 seconds to walk out of the cinema.
I told one off for ananswering her phone while driving last week. Naughty employee!
Whatever happened to that thing called cash, by the way? I seem to be using it more and more, and my plastic less and less these days. not that I ever used plastic for more than about 15% of my expenditure.
Exactly who? (Answer : a proportion of American populace and American military personnel ; for sure, not the Grauniad. You cannot buy publicity like this!)
Actually, I wouldn't be quite that pessimistic. You might (just) manage to get up to double digits before getting back-stabbers into the inner core. You might need to count in octal in order to make double digits though.
How many people were involved in WikiLeaks? A dozen or so? One back-stabber was almost inevitable, and multiple back-stabbers (given the nature of the opposition) a near certainty. And unless Assange and co are much much stupider than they seem to be, they knew it too.
The Nazis were much misunderstood. They may not have been able to make the trains run on time (it could take days to get to Auschwitz!) most of the time, but they sure knew how to subvert a democratic state!
Take out a few blacks / poor people / foreigners / mental retards too at the same time. Clean up the streets a bit. What could possibly go wrong?
Was it in Texas? Probably ; more likely there than anywhere else.
Can I haz Presidency?
(My emphasis.)
Now, I don't know about you, the specific reader, but I do know that I've learned more about genetics as a geologist than the average man. (I'm interested in the OOL problem and in evolutions in general (a day-to-day tool for the working man, like hammers and chisels, I should say)
So, guesstimating reasonably that I know more about genetics than 99% of the population, and more than (say) 80% of the (biased) sample from that population who post on Slashdot, then I'm pretty damned near certain that someone who has trained as a clinical geneticist has forgotten more genetics than I've ever known. Which makes him a pretty good person to carry out this sort of investigation.
Well done that man!
(Incidentally, I hold Nature's reporters to far higher standards of technical accuracy than, say, a national newspaper with a multi-national audience.)