My first construction job was in Texas in an area where the was a lot of limestone and caves. If the construction hit a cave,
... then you sued the person who had done the site investigation before you went ahead with the detailed planning. You know - the guy who charged a couple of thousand dollars to run over the site on a 5m spacing with a GPR machine and tell you about size and location of voids before you paid the seller for the land, and before you hired an architect to plan the building.
I believe the phrase that you're looking for is "due diligence".
You do plan things before you commit to spending money, don't you?
That usage does annoy me. What about perchlorate in the Martian environment makes it a "contaminant"? From what Pathfinder reported (backed up by the Viking experiments), perchlorate is a normal part of the environment, while deadly poisons such as oxygen (the subject of the worst pollution event in the history of the Earth) are the "contaminants".
Why do people think that the environment that they happen to live in is, in any sense, "normal". The huge majority of the universe - the "normal", for any meaningful meaning of "normal", is hard vacuum, with the large majority of it being pretty close to absolute zero.
Of the atmosphere-covered (rocky) ground surface in the Solar System, some is rich in carbon dioxide (about 11 units of area), some is rich in oxygen (around 6 units of area) and some is rich in methane (about 1 unit of area). So, which is "normal", for any "normal" meaning of "normal"?
By the time that we've surveyed the next couple of planetary systems (not in the inconceivably-distant future ; say, as far distant from us as we are from Columbus or Vasco de Gama), and we're starting to approach a representative sample of this galaxy, a peroxide-rich soil may well be "normal" and an organic-carbon+oxygen soil the rarity.
That's either a very large home, or you've got some weird lighting. For our 2 bed house, I'm estimating about 30 lamps. Including several desk lamps. So, you're in a ~6 bed house?
Besides, If I'm understanding TFS correctly, you'd be looking at one wifi-enabled lamp per lighting circuit.
In the real world, you'd need to pull a lot of cable to actually make significant use of this (e.g., as someone said, putting all the area lighting into the cornices of the room), which is going to be significantly more expensive then the lamps themselves. Unless you're going to do your decorating yourself, and a lot of the wiring work (whether that is legal will vary with your jurisdiction) yourself too, your biggest cost by far is going to be the tradesmen to do the work.
I couldn't justify the cost and hassle of wiring the house properly, so I put in a wifi modem for the wife, and my den has it's wired network strung along the back of the desk and connected to the ADLS wireless router using a couple of "wall wart" network bridges. Since our current to-the-door connectivity is only about 4MBPS, and unlikely to increase hugely, then an 80MBPS wall wart connection is more than adequate for the foreseeable future.
Can this discovery of old stuff be patented today, or is the fact that the romans did it so long ago constitute prior art?
Nope, because this general formulation has been being used for much of the last few centuries. Just for an example, the Suez canal was built in large part using concrete made this way from volcanic rock from the island of Santorini ; the mining of that volcanic ash uncovered the buried "city" of Akrotiri, and much interesting archaeology has followed on from that.
There's a good reason that "Portland" cement was invented near Leeds (England) using limestone (available nearby) and mudstone (available nearby), and not using volcanic ash (because it was not available nearby), was that the raw materials were available nearby. Where ready-ground raw materials like volcanic ash were available, they were used.
There have been lots of patents granted on "cement" formulations over the years, many of which have now expired.
At their peak in 1985, 60 million telegrams were being sent and received a year in India from 45,000 offices.
I make that 1333 telegrams per office per year, or 4 and a bit per day. Five and a bit if the office was closed at weekends. Say, a half an hour of work per operator per day, since telegrams were charged by the word, so people were terse ("PECCAVI").
And that was the peak of the system's use.
I bet that this is a figure for the general public's use of the system, and that the large majority of the system's traffic was carried for some separate reason, for example, with the telegraph cables laid alongside railway routes, and the bulk of the traffic being the railway's scheduling. Messages like "14:24 (a train left signal box) 14-56-34 (on line) 235 (and has ETA at signal box) 14-56-33 (at approx) 15:15".
You do realize that the majority of mass killings and other terrorist incidents in the U.S. have been the result of the actions of right-wing white male Christians, right?
Then bomb those terr'ists back to the Stone Age. They're already back in the Bronze Age, at best, so it should be cheaper too!
The "pleasure centre tickling" that Larry Niven talks about is not far removed from credible science. The "zone implants" that Stephen (Steven?) Donaldson talks about in his "Gap" series is a McGuffin - a necessary plot element which the reader just has to accept on faith - and is pretty much completely unrelated to credible science.
Which doesn't make Donaldson a bad author (though I don't waste time on him now, whereas I still follow Niven's publications) any more than it made Hitchcock a bad film maker.
Yeah except when something goes wrong and you get an overcharge...
As the AC said up-thread, that is not a problem:
Since wireheads tended not to breed (how can sex compare to wireheading?), a bit of rapid evolution went on: a few centuries later, the sort of pleasure-seeking that leads to drug use was a very rare trait in humanity.
Wireheads, in this conception, are not part of the human species. They have removed themselves from the gene pool. They are dead, but they just haven't stopped moving yet.
Perhaps you should go and read the Harry Harrison short story "Roommates", or the full length novel "Make Room, Make Room!" (from which "Roommates" was distilled), in order to get the joke.
I was reading "Make Room, Make Room!) on the train to my appointment for a vasectomy. Seemed appropriate, somehow.
The hoodie is normal here - something to do with the driving summer rain. And I've worn a full beard most of the time since I needed to shave (except, of course, when posing for passport photos) ; a heavy foreign accent would be far more intelligible than the local accent ("accent with a trace of English, not English with a trace of accent", to quote one chinless TV idiot from the capital).
But a baseball cap? Do you want to look like a deranged idiot?
Sign language. The US government is short of interpreters, especially for cell phone intelligence.
But I thought that the US Govt had a monopoly on sign language interpreters, or is that only for Navajho Sign Language?
Slightly more seriously, and slightly tangentially, I saw a comment last night wondering why people are designing "new" , "gestural" interfaces for computers, when there already exist a modest number of gesture languages called ASL (American Sign Language), BSL (British Sign Language)... I thought that one of the common mantras of the programming world had something to do with the avoidance of repetitious novel generation of rotationally symmetrical transport machines, but maybe this idea hasn't penetrated really.
For many years I've spent a lot of time working in high noise environments (90-100dB ; hearing protection is mandatory at 84dB), and have pondered the utility of learning such a language. If only there weren't so many regional dialects!
It must be Earth-shattering news. This "Google Reader" thing must be so totally unavoidably vital to everything in the universe that I can't understand how I could possibly have missed hearing about it for... well, ever. The only thing that possibly could interrupt my plans to commit seppuku over it's demise is that it doesn't as far as I know, do anything of any importance.
So what the hell is one of these things, what do I need it for, and should I kill others in my grief over it's passing?
Wouldn't it be lovely to know what the limits of acidity (or alkalinity) are for life in general. We don't even know, for sure, what the limits are for life on Earth, because we don't have a full catalogue of life forms on earth. We don't have any representatives of life on other planets, and we don't know if there are other possible chemistries on which life can work.
Even within a DNA-and-protein chemistry, we don't know the real limits ; we don't know of any existing lifeforms with triple- or quadruple- stranded DNA, but the basic stranding configurations are not wildly unstable, so it would be a brave chemist to declare that such a system is impossible, they're merely not-known.
(Some) existing lifeforms on Earth can live reasonably happily at a pH down to approaching 1.0 ; alkalinity is a bit more of a constraint, and I can't recall hearing of anything living at much higher than pH 10 ; but that's at surface temperatures and pressures. what the limits are at, say, 5km below water level, is a rather more open question.
In the not impossible (to the best of anyone's knowledge) for life to exist in liquid ammonia ; that's going to change the whole relative importance of hydrogen ions compared to hydroxyl ions.
Minimum pack for me to go to work is : work's laptop (work data is not allowed on non-work machines ; sacking offence) ; work boots, hardhat, flame resistant coveralls, gloves and chemical gauntlets, safety spectacles and goggles for some operations ; clothes for today ; clothes from yesterday to be lost in the laundry today ; travelling clothes on my body (losing two sets of clothes to the laundry is not unknown, and all the apologies of the laundry staff won't get you the several hundred miles to the nearest shop) ; office-in-a-briefcase supplies (in our contract we specify that a printer which can print PDFs is available at site). Then there are any medications (antimalarials particularly), first aid kit and sewing kit. Then there is any documentation (controlled, numbered paper copies, signed for) for the job. And normally a couple of screwdrivers and a little knife, sometimes a multimeter if I anticipate having to teach sub-contractors how to operate or repair their own machinery (common).
Travelling without baggage is a non-starter, whether I'm going to the deserts (lighter coveralls) or the mountains (add a thick coat.), or to sea.
It's really all a matter of "Do they do as YHVH commands or do they run a profitable carnival?
"Profitable carnival," of course. Which is why threatening that profit will get you into serious trouble.
The indigent-on-the-front-lawn idea won't last much longer than the first few bullets from the Police. Of course, the marks in the profitable carnival will be protected from witnessing such potentially disturbing sights.
Got equipment connected to the Internet? Then you should have it solidly firewalled too. You've probably got very strict IT policies about this already, and as the IT department, it's certainly within your bailiwick.
Now, make sure that you can connect to your department's firewall from the outside world.
Now, reconfigure the firewall so that it blocks all access except to/ from your office, and make that the machine's default route.
If the vendor wants to do something to the machine, they can do it from your office.
You may need to fire the first person to disconnect the machine from the firewall, and publicise the fact ; you may need to hide the firewall in a locked IT cabinet ; you may need to monitor the state of the physical connections. These are details that a competent IT person should be used to dealing with.
When the vendor wants to fuck with the machine again, you do your QC on their procedures before letting them even think about accessing the real machine.
Personally, I'd use the super glue and side cutters.
and finally receiving a quick and easy death just before the onset of old age, making him a martyr in the eyes of his followers.
Would torturing him to death through the US judicial system have been better in the long run?
(We can take it as read that if they'd got him alive, the injunction against "cruel and unusual punishment" wouldn't have lasted. Which may have been part of the un-written orders of the raid team - "make sure we don't have to ask that question of ourselves".)
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... then you sued the person who had done the site investigation before you went ahead with the detailed planning. You know - the guy who charged a couple of thousand dollars to run over the site on a 5m spacing with a GPR machine and tell you about size and location of voids before you paid the seller for the land, and before you hired an architect to plan the building.
I believe the phrase that you're looking for is "due diligence".
You do plan things before you commit to spending money, don't you?
Nope, you're very probably in the majority, and there are billions of "you."
[YA]Rats? Thee were lucky to 'ave rats. We 'ad ter mek do wi' path beaten dahn bah t'ants. Ah used ter dream o' rats. Still do.
Onna stick![/YA]
You're Stuart Hall's PR guy, right?
That usage does annoy me. What about perchlorate in the Martian environment makes it a "contaminant"? From what Pathfinder reported (backed up by the Viking experiments), perchlorate is a normal part of the environment, while deadly poisons such as oxygen (the subject of the worst pollution event in the history of the Earth) are the "contaminants".
Why do people think that the environment that they happen to live in is, in any sense, "normal". The huge majority of the universe - the "normal", for any meaningful meaning of "normal", is hard vacuum, with the large majority of it being pretty close to absolute zero.
Of the atmosphere-covered (rocky) ground surface in the Solar System, some is rich in carbon dioxide (about 11 units of area), some is rich in oxygen (around 6 units of area) and some is rich in methane (about 1 unit of area). So, which is "normal", for any "normal" meaning of "normal"?
By the time that we've surveyed the next couple of planetary systems (not in the inconceivably-distant future ; say, as far distant from us as we are from Columbus or Vasco de Gama), and we're starting to approach a representative sample of this galaxy, a peroxide-rich soil may well be "normal" and an organic-carbon+oxygen soil the rarity.
That's either a very large home, or you've got some weird lighting. For our 2 bed house, I'm estimating about 30 lamps. Including several desk lamps. So, you're in a ~6 bed house?
Besides, If I'm understanding TFS correctly, you'd be looking at one wifi-enabled lamp per lighting circuit.
In the real world, you'd need to pull a lot of cable to actually make significant use of this (e.g., as someone said, putting all the area lighting into the cornices of the room), which is going to be significantly more expensive then the lamps themselves. Unless you're going to do your decorating yourself, and a lot of the wiring work (whether that is legal will vary with your jurisdiction) yourself too, your biggest cost by far is going to be the tradesmen to do the work.
I couldn't justify the cost and hassle of wiring the house properly, so I put in a wifi modem for the wife, and my den has it's wired network strung along the back of the desk and connected to the ADLS wireless router using a couple of "wall wart" network bridges. Since our current to-the-door connectivity is only about 4MBPS, and unlikely to increase hugely, then an 80MBPS wall wart connection is more than adequate for the foreseeable future.
But don't you find the 20-odd nanosecond lifetime a bit restricting? You must have a hell of a training budget!
Nope, because this general formulation has been being used for much of the last few centuries. Just for an example, the Suez canal was built in large part using concrete made this way from volcanic rock from the island of Santorini ; the mining of that volcanic ash uncovered the buried "city" of Akrotiri, and much interesting archaeology has followed on from that.
There's a good reason that "Portland" cement was invented near Leeds (England) using limestone (available nearby) and mudstone (available nearby), and not using volcanic ash (because it was not available nearby), was that the raw materials were available nearby. Where ready-ground raw materials like volcanic ash were available, they were used.
There have been lots of patents granted on "cement" formulations over the years, many of which have now expired.
For no small number, there isn't a road to have an internet cafe anywhere "down".
Have you never lived in the third world?
I make that 1333 telegrams per office per year, or 4 and a bit per day. Five and a bit if the office was closed at weekends. Say, a half an hour of work per operator per day, since telegrams were charged by the word, so people were terse ("PECCAVI").
And that was the peak of the system's use.
I bet that this is a figure for the general public's use of the system, and that the large majority of the system's traffic was carried for some separate reason, for example, with the telegraph cables laid alongside railway routes, and the bulk of the traffic being the railway's scheduling. Messages like "14:24 (a train left signal box) 14-56-34 (on line) 235 (and has ETA at signal box) 14-56-33 (at approx) 15:15".
Then bomb those terr'ists back to the Stone Age. They're already back in the Bronze Age, at best, so it should be cheaper too!
I feel the sudden urge ... to watch Trainspotting again.
(Without subtitles - we only put them on for foreigners).
Ah, the old ones are the good ones. Including the one that has lived down the back of the sofa for the last two years.
Don't get burned, Fat Freddie!
The "pleasure centre tickling" that Larry Niven talks about is not far removed from credible science. The "zone implants" that Stephen (Steven?) Donaldson talks about in his "Gap" series is a McGuffin - a necessary plot element which the reader just has to accept on faith - and is pretty much completely unrelated to credible science.
Which doesn't make Donaldson a bad author (though I don't waste time on him now, whereas I still follow Niven's publications) any more than it made Hitchcock a bad film maker.
As the AC said up-thread, that is not a problem :
Wireheads, in this conception, are not part of the human species. They have removed themselves from the gene pool. They are dead, but they just haven't stopped moving yet.
On the other hand, it has stimulated an entire generation of alarm clock designers.
I was reading "Make Room, Make Room!) on the train to my appointment for a vasectomy. Seemed appropriate, somehow.
But a baseball cap? Do you want to look like a deranged idiot?
But I thought that the US Govt had a monopoly on sign language interpreters, or is that only for Navajho Sign Language?
Slightly more seriously, and slightly tangentially, I saw a comment last night wondering why people are designing "new" , "gestural" interfaces for computers, when there already exist a modest number of gesture languages called ASL (American Sign Language), BSL (British Sign Language) ... I thought that one of the common mantras of the programming world had something to do with the avoidance of repetitious novel generation of rotationally symmetrical transport machines, but maybe this idea hasn't penetrated really.
For many years I've spent a lot of time working in high noise environments (90-100dB ; hearing protection is mandatory at 84dB), and have pondered the utility of learning such a language. If only there weren't so many regional dialects!
So what the hell is one of these things, what do I need it for, and should I kill others in my grief over it's passing?
Wouldn't it be lovely to know what the limits of acidity (or alkalinity) are for life in general. We don't even know, for sure, what the limits are for life on Earth, because we don't have a full catalogue of life forms on earth. We don't have any representatives of life on other planets, and we don't know if there are other possible chemistries on which life can work.
Even within a DNA-and-protein chemistry, we don't know the real limits ; we don't know of any existing lifeforms with triple- or quadruple- stranded DNA, but the basic stranding configurations are not wildly unstable, so it would be a brave chemist to declare that such a system is impossible, they're merely not-known.
(Some) existing lifeforms on Earth can live reasonably happily at a pH down to approaching 1.0 ; alkalinity is a bit more of a constraint, and I can't recall hearing of anything living at much higher than pH 10 ; but that's at surface temperatures and pressures. what the limits are at, say, 5km below water level, is a rather more open question.
In the not impossible (to the best of anyone's knowledge) for life to exist in liquid ammonia ; that's going to change the whole relative importance of hydrogen ions compared to hydroxyl ions.
Travelling without baggage is a non-starter, whether I'm going to the deserts (lighter coveralls) or the mountains (add a thick coat.), or to sea.
"Profitable carnival," of course. Which is why threatening that profit will get you into serious trouble.
The indigent-on-the-front-lawn idea won't last much longer than the first few bullets from the Police. Of course, the marks in the profitable carnival will be protected from witnessing such potentially disturbing sights.
Now, make sure that you can connect to your department's firewall from the outside world.
Now, reconfigure the firewall so that it blocks all access except to/ from your office, and make that the machine's default route.
If the vendor wants to do something to the machine, they can do it from your office.
You may need to fire the first person to disconnect the machine from the firewall, and publicise the fact ; you may need to hide the firewall in a locked IT cabinet ; you may need to monitor the state of the physical connections. These are details that a competent IT person should be used to dealing with.
When the vendor wants to fuck with the machine again, you do your QC on their procedures before letting them even think about accessing the real machine.
Personally, I'd use the super glue and side cutters.
Would torturing him to death through the US judicial system have been better in the long run?
(We can take it as read that if they'd got him alive, the injunction against "cruel and unusual punishment" wouldn't have lasted. Which may have been part of the un-written orders of the raid team - "make sure we don't have to ask that question of ourselves".)