This means bottle gourds would have been domesticated long before any known food-crop cultivation - sometime well before 14000 BP when the Bering land-bridge disappeared.
If you accept that the Beringia land bridge was necessary to the settlement of the Americas. I still have a suspicion that boat (kayak, raft) transport along the Asian coast, island hopping along the Aleutians, and across the Bering "Strait" could all have been happening at the same time along a migration front a thousand km wide. It's a racing certainty that the people who made this migration did have relevant technologies, because their ancestors had the technology (how did Indonesia and Australia get populated without some sort of boat?) and essentially all of their descendants retain the technology. (The Navajo may not have many seaworthy kayaks, but they're a recent minority.) But... almost all of the evidence is going to be under up to 100m of sea water, which renders archaeological prospecting decidedly difficult and expensive compared to working on even the wettest of dry land.
"Bottle" gourds ; now that name might just be a hint of why they'd be a useful crop to any hunter-gatherer tribe. If indeed, they're water-tight enough to be a usable bottle (never met one myself ; wrong continent). But that then raises the awkward question of why they're not found (TTBOMK, but this is a new wrinkle to me) in any of the Asian landmass where you'd expect them to have passed, if they came into the Americas across the Beringia land bridge. Are they "ancient" in any parts of Asia?
There is also evidence for Taro domestication in New Guinea going back possibly as far as 25,000 BP. If true, this would make it the oldest still-cultivated food crop
Hmmm, that's a new one on me. Oldest clear evidence of cultivation by a considerable stretch. [Googles] A cursory search yields uncontroversial evidence going back to 9ka BP (The reference "Golson 1977"; I doubt that my local library has that on the shelves!). Ah, I see the 25,000 year BP claim made in the Wikipedia article on the Neolithic Revolution, where it's attributed to "Denham, Tim et al (received July 2005) "Early and mid Holocene tool-use and processing of taro (Colocasia esculenta), yam (Dioscorea sp.) and other plants at Kuk Swamp in the highlands of Papua New Guinea" (Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 33, Issue 5, May 2006)" (I'm mostly making notes to leave some breadcrumbs for me to follow along.)
Damn, it's an Elsevier one. And $31 for the full article. Not good enough value to overcome my dislike of Elsevier's predatory influence I'm afraid. The abstract doesn't mention the 25ks claim.
Hang on... that bit in the Wikipedia reference about "received July 2005" ; unless it's a typo, that's nearly a year before the article's 2006 publication, which suggest that there's something off the normal track here. Not necessarily "wrong" (a reviewer's comment? Or just a typo?), but odd. And the abstract, figures and tables visible on Elsevier's site make no mention of the startling 25,000 year BP claim which would surely have been the headline of the paper because it's SO much older than anything else.
Anyway, I've found the guy's recent email address, and I'll try to get the PDF from him. Interesting sidetrack.
And now that I think a little more about it (I've already sent the email)... the data that is visible from the paper is not incompatible with evidence for processing of taro (or whatever) which is not necessarily evidence of "domestication." You could get evidence like this from processing of naturally grown plants ; the "gatherer" part of "hunter-gatherer". Cut marks on a mammoth's thigh bone can b
The Younger Dryas cold spell did occur shortly before the mammoths disappeared (~12800 BP).
Errrr, but what about the Wrangel Island (71N, 179W) population, which persisted until around 5~6ka BP. Even if they were "dwarf" mammoths.
This is hypothesized to have been caused by a bolide impact or volcanism, but there is no consensus on this.
It was a nice idea. The evidence isn't strong enough or persistent enough for most geologist to accept the hypothesis (though two considerably smaller events with partly overlapping footprints does remain as a possible interpretation of some of the evidence ; other geologists dispute the validity of even that evidence). If there is consensus, it is that this hypothesis is not a correct explanation for the loss of the megafauna. Well, that's my interpretation of the reports.
This is also shortly after the Clovis people (precursors to the Native Americans) appeared in North America,
... which explains the extinction of the European and Russian populations... sorry, I don't see the link here. (I accept that there's a good possibility that Clovis spear points did in a lot of megafauna ; in America and Canada. Whether they were preceded by or followed by other types of weapons or by other groups of people is an open question. For sure, it wasn't Clovis spear points that did in the Wrangel Island mammoths so the true story is not going to be simple. If we ever find out what the true story was.)
and around the time that agriculture was developed in the near east.
Hmmm, I think that you're a smidgen early there. OK, there was probably some proto-agriculture going in several places, but it's significantly before the development of full-blown agriculture with the associated habitation, dietary and social changes. But that's one where the evidence is under very active research at this moment. Knowing our luck, crucial evidence is having trenches and bomb craters smashed through it in Syria at this very moment. That'd be bloody typical, wouldn't it?
The only 2 answers I can give is that a sudden volcanic eruption could have occurred to blank out the sun nearly completely or there was an asteroid impact that blanked out the sky.
[/self : Dons my hard hat, and pulls on the coveralls that have "Geologist" stitched onto the breast pocket.]
A single volcanic eruption that could "flash freeze" (your words, not mine) animals tens of thousands of kilometres apart? Or an equivalent asteroid impact. Yes ; such an event should leave pretty clear traces in the geological record.
These traces are not found.
Therefore your thesis is not supported by the evidence. Next attempt, please.
A few years ago there were a couple of people proposing, on very limited evidence, a large "airburst" impact event with regional effects across the North American continent (not across Russia or Europe). Repeat work by them and others has failed to replicate their initial findings, with the proposed impact debris not being found at many sites in the proposed area, or with the levels of claimed impact debris being much lower than found at other sites and indistinguishable from background levels, or them being concentrated in strata of the wrong age. While it was an interesting idea 10-15 years ago, it really hasn't produced the evidence it should have, and no-one really believes it to be correct now. (Not that you'd get this message from the "Discovery" Channel ; it's a very telegenic idea, so they continue to repeat shows that mention it. Cheap TV is not science.) It remains possible that there were one or two smaller "airbursts" in the area, possibly even linked, because there are some unusual particles found. But the single big airburst idea is pretty much dead in the water. Sorry to burst your dreams, because it is an attractive idea. But, to misquote I-forget-whom, it's "a beautiful hypothesis laid low by an ugly fact".
If someone claims to understand mammoth ecology and environmental preferences, then they're wrong ; we've got some ideas, but they're by no means clearly differentiated and the evidence base for distinguishing between them is murky. One of the things that is pretty clear is that they lived in un-forested areas (OK ; to be more precise, their stomach contents only contain traces of woody material, and the soil around their bodies contains little tree pollen) ; it's considered likely that some ("many"? , but surely not "all"!) populations had a strong annual migration (well, a lot of the remaining Arctic megafauna does... it's a visibly effective adaptation to a difficult environment.)
We know enough to know how little we know. Not that you'd hear that on "Discovery" either.
the Tartar/Tatar peoples and how they live on the steppe.
... Steppes that are several thousand kilometres away from this find's area, and a wildly different environment. For a start, most steppe environments are towards the arid side of the moisture question, while the permafrost environments that I've worked on in Siberia (and all others of which I've heard) have been somewhere between moist and swampy when they've not been frozen.
(Taking my electrician friend Toly as a typical Tartar, because he's the only person I knew who self-identified as a Tartar, with his origin in Bishkek ; and looking at the first Arctic islands which are closer to Yakutsk than to Salekhard (which also has an Arctic research institute)... then I make it a bit over 4000km distance. Several mountain ranges and a desert too. I hear that New York and Los Angeles are practically indistinguishable.)
Yeah, I'd got the bit about enterprise-grade kit not being available on as school-grade budget. (Or even a "grade school" budget ? Or am I getting several different foreign school system terminologies confused, when I've no need to learn even my country's school terminology.)
GCC as a casino corporation rather than the Gnu Compiler Collection... that's a very curve ball to throw around in this forum! Impressively obscure.
where libertarian attitudes about taxes abound,
... you get teachers having to gamble to try to keep the school running. That's a truly wonderful lesson to be teaching the kids. Have they started hiring the teachers out as prostitutes yet, or is that next year's budget plan? That'd really teach the kids how money is vastly more important than anything at all else. I'm impressed, and I will be trying to get this schools-into-casinos-and-whorehouses bill into my legislature too. There's a certain degree of honesty in teaching values in such an unadulterated manner. "Totally dedicated to the fifty bucks," in the words of Frank Zappa ("Crew Slut" on Joe's Garage).
Because the laws of the country that you're operating in (stepping over the fact that the actual summit defines part of the China-Nepal border ; or Tibet-Nepal, if you take your salted yak-butter chai that way) require you to do that, and the permit (i.e. contract) that you agreed to the terms of in order to be permitted to climb on the mountain, requires that you comply by those laws. Also, on entering most countries that I've entered, I've had to sign forms that amount to "I'll follow your laws", amongst other things.
The relevant laws are not the ones that apply to you in your life at street level in [insert ISO3166 code here] ; the relevant laws are the laws of Nepal.
My country doesn't have any laws banning me from chiselling fossils out of the ground. So, if I travel to the socialist republic of Mongolia or to the US, that means that I can dig up and keep any fossils that I want? (Hint : the answer is "no", as the recent return to Mongolia of an illegally-mined tyrannosaurid fossil seized at a US fossil sales convention indicates ; the price in that question was several million USD. Plus shipping.)
What The Fuck is a one of them? I'm going to have to RTFA now!
about (computer) programming
There's non-computers that you can programme, in a meaningful sense of "programme"? I can't think of such. "Programme" the video recorder? That hardly counts as "programming" (no branching logic). But that's just the reporter probably, who struggles to programme his dishwasher.
Nope, no mention of a "casino night" in TFA. And no onward links. So where did that come from (and WTF is a "casino night with GCC"?). I'd have thought that most bars and casinos in Canada wouldn't have allowed school students in. Though the ubiquity of those idiotic "slot machines" in Canadian bars makes the distinction pretty moot.
actually if the guy is moving between hostels he isn't exactly loaded with cash,
Does not necessarily follow. I'm (relatively) loaded, and I enjoy the hostelling and camping lifestyle ; I also enjoy hitch-hiking. The wife has a fit of the screaming ab-dabs (or whatever the Russian equivalent is) at the idea of travelling by thumb, and has taken some persuading over the idea of hostelling (so I only take her to places which I know are high-quality). That's her personality freak (hypochondria ; Mum was a doctor), not finances.
That said ; taking several years off does imply a fair wad of cash. It's only sensible to be frugal.
there is a good chance that wherever you go will have slow or no internet access anyway,
Fairly plausible. More likely, there may be good and/ or relatively cheap internet access, but it'll take weeks or months to find out and organise. When I was working in Tanzania last year I could tell from the advertising that there were a lot of competing 3G mobile suppliers, but I couldn't read the details through only having a smattering of spoken Swahili. For a 1-2 month hitch, it wasn't worth the effort to acquire more. (The second trip persuaded me to get a "teach yourself"... which I'll make more use of before the third trip. If there is one.)
and power connectors vary between countries.
I cope with this by taking a multi-way fused power strip from home, with a moderate (~2m) extension lead on it, and a couple of different pattern plugs which I can put onto the end of the strip (UK/BS1363 ; Schuko with a French hole (also works for the Eastern Bloc) ; NEMA (for American-built workplaces) ; and I've got a weird Canadian "T-bar" plug too, but that lives in the toolbox except when I'm going to Canada). 5 minutes work with the screwdriver (you do keep a screwdriver in your hold baggage, don't you?) and I've got 4 (or 6, depending on which power strip I take on which trip) sockets that fit my equipment and have either 110 or 250V AC going to them. Most modern equipment is happy at either voltage (I check before I buy!). This is much, much easier and vastly cheaper than carrying a half-dozen of the wrong type of individual plug-adaptors, which then foul each other in multi-socket outlets. I am a lazy fucker, and have wasted too much time fucking with such things in the past to care to do it again ; problem solved.
I brought an [something... have to go check... a Wii, judging from the box on the shelf behind me] 4 or 5 years ago ; decided it was crap ; was about to try selling it to de-clutter the garage ; decided to hook it up again to test before selling and found myself moderately amused by a £5 (USD ~8?) zombie-chopping game that I'd picked up second-hand at a charity shop while the machine was boxed up. So I've got it set up now, and finding it worth while keeping.
How is that an "excessive lifespan" ? It's lasted longer than most laptops (though with admittedly less usage) but is still a good 5 years short of the lifetime of my first computer.
You forget the jingoistic nature of Joe Sixpack... [...] Don't even go the tariff route, just convince enough Americans to boycott all Chinese goods.
The jingoistic nature of Joe Sixpack (an insult, by the way ; in case your version of "English" has started to use this insult as a commendation) extends all the way to the impact on his wallet.
Last night I was having a clear-out, and found a 20-year-old copy of Analog (SF magazine ; may be extinct now) ; browsing it, there was a row in the letters page which itself was at least 20 years old (judging from the citations in the letters), amounting to "slitty-eyed yellow-skinned sub-humans sell more to America humans than Americans do to the slitty-eyed yellow-skinned hordes... because American goods cost more and are of poorer quality-price ratio. And that's a ["good" or "bad" ; depending on which contestant you agreed with] thing!" Citations suggested that similar exhortations had been a staple of American domestic politics for approaching two generations now. (If not longer ; I suspect much longer ; I just happened to have this example in my mind from last night.)
It was almost refreshing to see the argument made in openly racist terms. (I've abbreviated, without changing the tone of the exchange.) It seems that the creeping tide of political correctness had tainted my thought processes too.
Well, that's capitalism for you. Enjoy!
PS: congratulations to the Chinese hackers for doing their jobs successfully, and condemnations to the American (presumed) military (presumed) "computer security specialists" for fucking up royally. This contrast may have some bearing on the decisions of any future Joe Sixpack looking to buy computer security expertise. That's capitalism for you. Enjoy!
If you appear to be gay, than will increase your chances of being hired by me (gays don't have as many family distractions and can work longer hours).
That doesn't cover all plausible cases, and (as someone else has pointed out) could be interpreted in a way that would make lawyers not-starving (universally an undesirable situation).
What about the heterosexual people who do not wish to have children, or who have finished their breeding and are well down the road to being shot of the children. Or, for that matter, the homosexuals (or any mixture of genders and trans-genders) who are involved in parenting their own or other people's children, or are trying to breed using any variant of technologies?
In the utterly implausible event that I was to start a business and employ people, I'd decided to require them to state, in their application form, the date on which the last of their children achieves majority. (An age which varies between jurisdictions and cultures.) Which doesn't cope with the case of a relationship breakup, followed by entering a new relationship which changes childcare responsibilities ; but that's something that you can't legislate against entirely anyway. Though you might be able to insure against it.
People who have made a considered decision to not have (or to stop having) children, are reasonably likely to continue to count them if the relationship changes, which should be a discouragement to picking up new relationships which add yet more childcare responsibilities.
That is not what the OP wrote, and you can read it.
OK ; potential get out clause : does your local (friends, street, town, county, state, nation, continent) variant of English have different words for "homosexual male" ("gay") and "homosexual female" ("banana" or "zumfrischt", or something else?).
Even for those of us who don't have any work to do over the weekend, we'll probably end up reading all of our work-related emails as they roll in,
So... since it's yourpersonal smart phone (work-issued ones are a different question), at some point between you taking it out of it's box, and you "reading work-related emails as they roll in", someone spent some time configuring the smart phone to access the relevant servers, using your user name and password (or whatever other system). So, at some point, you have collaborated in this circumstance.
I tried that, 2 or 3 smart phones back ; since our work email solution has no option but to use a webmail interface (on those rare occasions when I'm in the same country as the office, or when at work anywhere in the world), it was unusable - as most desktop-targeted websites are on smart phones. So I haven't attempted since. If Work need to get a message to me, they have my (work) email address for when I'm at work, and they've got my mobile phone number for emergencies.
If either the message is random, or the encryption key is random and non-repeating, then the message cannot be deciphered.
I think that the OTP also needs to be longer than the message to be truly secure, but IANA-cryptanalyst, so I'm not better than 90% sure on that.
Most encryption systems that I've seen compress the message before encryption, which makes it close enough to random to help a lot on that front of making Eve's life difficult ; and it makes the balance between message length and OTP length more favourable too.
The one thing that kills them dead, and permanent, is boric acid.
Really? We don't have any significant cockroach problem on this side of the Atlantic - I had to struggle to recognise them the first time I saw them, in the Middle East - but it slightly surprises me that what is so often reported as a terrible scourge, could have such a relatively simple solution. (OK ; I'm more of a chemist than the average street full of people, so I'm more realistic about the hazards of using such chemicals ; but if that's going to put people off, more fool them.)
Googly-google... Looks good. OK ; cockroaches no longer considered a problem by me.
I'm guessing that the whole subject of discussion is some sort of spin off from yet another Star Trek movie. There's one out at the moment, isn't there? (I pay as little attention to advertising as possible, in the few seconds between the start of the adverts and my finger hitting the fast-forward button.)
I don't care about the one used by the USPTO ; I care about the system that we have to deal with. Which has been in legislative existence for about a century longer than the "US" part of the "USPTO."
Actually, the next time I see zymurgist Les (a fellow soldier-scientist from the anti-Creationist trenches), I'll have to check details with him, if he knows. He's a patent adviser now, rather than a scientist, so he may be involved in wording things so that they'll get past the Patent Office here AND past the USPTO, but obviously mean vastly different things in the two countries. It is, after all, "law", not sense.
But TBH, we're more likely to talk about beer.
HTTPS means that you have a securely encrypted connection with the remote server.
Are you sure about that? I thought that having an HTTPS connection means that the client and server have agreed on an encryption protocol to use, but that the list of acceptable encryption protocols in a lot of configurations includes "plain text". Certainly it used to include that possibility, as a common fall-back position. Possibly implementations have improved since, but it would be a surprise if so.
https is designed to prevent others from intercepting the traffic en route - it has basically nothing to do with how the data are stored. Should everything be encrypted? Yeah. Passwords should be salted+hashed+more because
... "because they should" ; yes.
Unfortunately, one of the methods of "encryption" that is permitted under the standards for HTTPS (and, I think, SSL) is "plain text".
As long as both ends of the conversation agree that this is the "encryption method" that they are going to use for the transaction, then the SSL/ HTTPS transaction completes validly. It's stupid, but it's valid.
What one really needs is for clients (i.e. our browsers and email clients) to refuse to drop down as far as "plain text". Which will break some service providers, and that will be a good thing. Either they fix their security, or they go out of business ; BFD.
Slashdot Mirror
You will be when Shah Guido G. gets hold of you.
You can have the Mammoth-Wurst ; I'll have the Mammoth-Best, thank you!
Hate it when that happens.
If you accept that the Beringia land bridge was necessary to the settlement of the Americas. I still have a suspicion that boat (kayak, raft) transport along the Asian coast, island hopping along the Aleutians, and across the Bering "Strait" could all have been happening at the same time along a migration front a thousand km wide. It's a racing certainty that the people who made this migration did have relevant technologies, because their ancestors had the technology (how did Indonesia and Australia get populated without some sort of boat?) and essentially all of their descendants retain the technology. (The Navajo may not have many seaworthy kayaks, but they're a recent minority.) But ... almost all of the evidence is going to be under up to 100m of sea water, which renders archaeological prospecting decidedly difficult and expensive compared to working on even the wettest of dry land.
"Bottle" gourds ; now that name might just be a hint of why they'd be a useful crop to any hunter-gatherer tribe. If indeed, they're water-tight enough to be a usable bottle (never met one myself ; wrong continent). But that then raises the awkward question of why they're not found (TTBOMK, but this is a new wrinkle to me) in any of the Asian landmass where you'd expect them to have passed, if they came into the Americas across the Beringia land bridge. Are they "ancient" in any parts of Asia?
Hmmm, that's a new one on me. Oldest clear evidence of cultivation by a considerable stretch. [Googles] A cursory search yields uncontroversial evidence going back to 9ka BP (The reference "Golson 1977"; I doubt that my local library has that on the shelves!). Ah, I see the 25,000 year BP claim made in the Wikipedia article on the Neolithic Revolution, where it's attributed to "Denham, Tim et al (received July 2005) "Early and mid Holocene tool-use and processing of taro (Colocasia esculenta), yam (Dioscorea sp.) and other plants at Kuk Swamp in the highlands of Papua New Guinea" (Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 33, Issue 5, May 2006)" (I'm mostly making notes to leave some breadcrumbs for me to follow along.) ... that bit in the Wikipedia reference about "received July 2005" ; unless it's a typo, that's nearly a year before the article's 2006 publication, which suggest that there's something off the normal track here. Not necessarily "wrong" (a reviewer's comment? Or just a typo?), but odd. And the abstract, figures and tables visible on Elsevier's site make no mention of the startling 25,000 year BP claim which would surely have been the headline of the paper because it's SO much older than anything else.
Damn, it's an Elsevier one. And $31 for the full article. Not good enough value to overcome my dislike of Elsevier's predatory influence I'm afraid. The abstract doesn't mention the 25ks claim.
Hang on
Anyway, I've found the guy's recent email address, and I'll try to get the PDF from him. Interesting sidetrack.
And now that I think a little more about it (I've already sent the email) ... the data that is visible from the paper is not incompatible with evidence for processing of taro (or whatever) which is not necessarily evidence of "domestication." You could get evidence like this from processing of naturally grown plants ; the "gatherer" part of "hunter-gatherer".
Cut marks on a mammoth's thigh bone can b
Errrr, but what about the Wrangel Island (71N, 179W) population, which persisted until around 5~6ka BP. Even if they were "dwarf" mammoths.
It was a nice idea. The evidence isn't strong enough or persistent enough for most geologist to accept the hypothesis (though two considerably smaller events with partly overlapping footprints does remain as a possible interpretation of some of the evidence ; other geologists dispute the validity of even that evidence). If there is consensus, it is that this hypothesis is not a correct explanation for the loss of the megafauna. Well, that's my interpretation of the reports.
Hmmm, I think that you're a smidgen early there. OK, there was probably some proto-agriculture going in several places, but it's significantly before the development of full-blown agriculture with the associated habitation, dietary and social changes. But that's one where the evidence is under very active research at this moment. Knowing our luck, crucial evidence is having trenches and bomb craters smashed through it in Syria at this very moment. That'd be bloody typical, wouldn't it?
[/self : Dons my hard hat, and pulls on the coveralls that have "Geologist" stitched onto the breast pocket.]
A single volcanic eruption that could "flash freeze" (your words, not mine) animals tens of thousands of kilometres apart? Or an equivalent asteroid impact. Yes ; such an event should leave pretty clear traces in the geological record.
These traces are not found.
Therefore your thesis is not supported by the evidence. Next attempt, please.
A few years ago there were a couple of people proposing, on very limited evidence, a large "airburst" impact event with regional effects across the North American continent (not across Russia or Europe). Repeat work by them and others has failed to replicate their initial findings, with the proposed impact debris not being found at many sites in the proposed area, or with the levels of claimed impact debris being much lower than found at other sites and indistinguishable from background levels, or them being concentrated in strata of the wrong age. While it was an interesting idea 10-15 years ago, it really hasn't produced the evidence it should have, and no-one really believes it to be correct now. (Not that you'd get this message from the "Discovery" Channel ; it's a very telegenic idea, so they continue to repeat shows that mention it. Cheap TV is not science.) It remains possible that there were one or two smaller "airbursts" in the area, possibly even linked, because there are some unusual particles found. But the single big airburst idea is pretty much dead in the water. Sorry to burst your dreams, because it is an attractive idea. But, to misquote I-forget-whom, it's "a beautiful hypothesis laid low by an ugly fact".
If someone claims to understand mammoth ecology and environmental preferences, then they're wrong ; we've got some ideas, but they're by no means clearly differentiated and the evidence base for distinguishing between them is murky. One of the things that is pretty clear is that they lived in un-forested areas (OK ; to be more precise, their stomach contents only contain traces of woody material, and the soil around their bodies contains little tree pollen) ; it's considered likely that some ("many"? , but surely not "all"!) populations had a strong annual migration (well, a lot of the remaining Arctic megafauna does ... it's a visibly effective adaptation to a difficult environment.)
We know enough to know how little we know. Not that you'd hear that on "Discovery" either.
... Steppes that are several thousand kilometres away from this find's area, and a wildly different environment. For a start, most steppe environments are towards the arid side of the moisture question, while the permafrost environments that I've worked on in Siberia (and all others of which I've heard) have been somewhere between moist and swampy when they've not been frozen.
(Taking my electrician friend Toly as a typical Tartar, because he's the only person I knew who self-identified as a Tartar, with his origin in Bishkek ; and looking at the first Arctic islands which are closer to Yakutsk than to Salekhard (which also has an Arctic research institute) ... then I make it a bit over 4000km distance. Several mountain ranges and a desert too. I hear that New York and Los Angeles are practically indistinguishable.)
GCC as a casino corporation rather than the Gnu Compiler Collection ... that's a very curve ball to throw around in this forum! Impressively obscure.
"Ha-ha, but serious question : which language has more fluent speakers, Klingon or Navajo ?
Because the laws of the country that you're operating in (stepping over the fact that the actual summit defines part of the China-Nepal border ; or Tibet-Nepal, if you take your salted yak-butter chai that way) require you to do that, and the permit (i.e. contract) that you agreed to the terms of in order to be permitted to climb on the mountain, requires that you comply by those laws. Also, on entering most countries that I've entered, I've had to sign forms that amount to "I'll follow your laws", amongst other things.
The relevant laws are not the ones that apply to you in your life at street level in [insert ISO3166 code here] ; the relevant laws are the laws of Nepal.
My country doesn't have any laws banning me from chiselling fossils out of the ground. So, if I travel to the socialist republic of Mongolia or to the US, that means that I can dig up and keep any fossils that I want? (Hint : the answer is "no", as the recent return to Mongolia of an illegally-mined tyrannosaurid fossil seized at a US fossil sales convention indicates ; the price in that question was several million USD. Plus shipping.)
What The Fuck is a one of them? I'm going to have to RTFA now!
There's non-computers that you can programme, in a meaningful sense of "programme"? I can't think of such. "Programme" the video recorder? That hardly counts as "programming" (no branching logic). But that's just the reporter probably, who struggles to programme his dishwasher.
Nope, no mention of a "casino night" in TFA. And no onward links. So where did that come from (and WTF is a "casino night with GCC"?). I'd have thought that most bars and casinos in Canada wouldn't have allowed school students in. Though the ubiquity of those idiotic "slot machines" in Canadian bars makes the distinction pretty moot.
Does not necessarily follow. I'm (relatively) loaded, and I enjoy the hostelling and camping lifestyle ; I also enjoy hitch-hiking. The wife has a fit of the screaming ab-dabs (or whatever the Russian equivalent is) at the idea of travelling by thumb, and has taken some persuading over the idea of hostelling (so I only take her to places which I know are high-quality). That's her personality freak (hypochondria ; Mum was a doctor), not finances.
That said ; taking several years off does imply a fair wad of cash. It's only sensible to be frugal.
Fairly plausible. More likely, there may be good and/ or relatively cheap internet access, but it'll take weeks or months to find out and organise. When I was working in Tanzania last year I could tell from the advertising that there were a lot of competing 3G mobile suppliers, but I couldn't read the details through only having a smattering of spoken Swahili. For a 1-2 month hitch, it wasn't worth the effort to acquire more. (The second trip persuaded me to get a "teach yourself" ... which I'll make more use of before the third trip. If there is one.)
I cope with this by taking a multi-way fused power strip from home, with a moderate (~2m) extension lead on it, and a couple of different pattern plugs which I can put onto the end of the strip (UK/BS1363 ; Schuko with a French hole (also works for the Eastern Bloc) ; NEMA (for American-built workplaces) ; and I've got a weird Canadian "T-bar" plug too, but that lives in the toolbox except when I'm going to Canada). 5 minutes work with the screwdriver (you do keep a screwdriver in your hold baggage, don't you?) and I've got 4 (or 6, depending on which power strip I take on which trip) sockets that fit my equipment and have either 110 or 250V AC going to them. Most modern equipment is happy at either voltage (I check before I buy!). This is much, much easier and vastly cheaper than carrying a half-dozen of the wrong type of individual plug-adaptors, which then foul each other in multi-socket outlets. I am a lazy fucker, and have wasted too much time fucking with such things in the past to care to do it again ; problem solved.
I brought an [something ... have to go check ... a Wii, judging from the box on the shelf behind me] 4 or 5 years ago ; decided it was crap ; was about to try selling it to de-clutter the garage ; decided to hook it up again to test before selling and found myself moderately amused by a £5 (USD ~8?) zombie-chopping game that I'd picked up second-hand at a charity shop while the machine was boxed up. So I've got it set up now, and finding it worth while keeping.
How is that an "excessive lifespan" ? It's lasted longer than most laptops (though with admittedly less usage) but is still a good 5 years short of the lifetime of my first computer.
The jingoistic nature of Joe Sixpack (an insult, by the way ; in case your version of "English" has started to use this insult as a commendation) extends all the way to the impact on his wallet.
Last night I was having a clear-out, and found a 20-year-old copy of Analog (SF magazine ; may be extinct now) ; browsing it, there was a row in the letters page which itself was at least 20 years old (judging from the citations in the letters), amounting to "slitty-eyed yellow-skinned sub-humans sell more to America humans than Americans do to the slitty-eyed yellow-skinned hordes ... because American goods cost more and are of poorer quality-price ratio. And that's a ["good" or "bad" ; depending on which contestant you agreed with] thing!" Citations suggested that similar exhortations had been a staple of American domestic politics for approaching two generations now. (If not longer ; I suspect much longer ; I just happened to have this example in my mind from last night.)
It was almost refreshing to see the argument made in openly racist terms. (I've abbreviated, without changing the tone of the exchange.) It seems that the creeping tide of political correctness had tainted my thought processes too.
Well, that's capitalism for you. Enjoy!
PS : congratulations to the Chinese hackers for doing their jobs successfully, and condemnations to the American (presumed) military (presumed) "computer security specialists" for fucking up royally. This contrast may have some bearing on the decisions of any future Joe Sixpack looking to buy computer security expertise. That's capitalism for you. Enjoy!
Why?
(hint : I don't treat /. as meaningless bullshit. Do you?)
I'm surprised that no-one appears to have got there before me. Unless someone is using particularly obscure spelling for "obligatory". Or for "XKCD".
That doesn't cover all plausible cases, and (as someone else has pointed out) could be interpreted in a way that would make lawyers not-starving (universally an undesirable situation).
What about the heterosexual people who do not wish to have children, or who have finished their breeding and are well down the road to being shot of the children. Or, for that matter, the homosexuals (or any mixture of genders and trans-genders) who are involved in parenting their own or other people's children, or are trying to breed using any variant of technologies?
In the utterly implausible event that I was to start a business and employ people, I'd decided to require them to state, in their application form, the date on which the last of their children achieves majority. (An age which varies between jurisdictions and cultures.) Which doesn't cope with the case of a relationship breakup, followed by entering a new relationship which changes childcare responsibilities ; but that's something that you can't legislate against entirely anyway. Though you might be able to insure against it.
People who have made a considered decision to not have (or to stop having) children, are reasonably likely to continue to count them if the relationship changes, which should be a discouragement to picking up new relationships which add yet more childcare responsibilities.
That is not what the OP wrote, and you can read it.
OK ; potential get out clause : does your local (friends, street, town, county, state, nation, continent) variant of English have different words for "homosexual male" ("gay") and "homosexual female" ("banana" or "zumfrischt", or something else?).
Which also leaves an open question for the OP.
So ... since it's your personal smart phone (work-issued ones are a different question), at some point between you taking it out of it's box, and you "reading work-related emails as they roll in", someone spent some time configuring the smart phone to access the relevant servers, using your user name and password (or whatever other system). So, at some point, you have collaborated in this circumstance.
I tried that, 2 or 3 smart phones back ; since our work email solution has no option but to use a webmail interface (on those rare occasions when I'm in the same country as the office, or when at work anywhere in the world), it was unusable - as most desktop-targeted websites are on smart phones. So I haven't attempted since. If Work need to get a message to me, they have my (work) email address for when I'm at work, and they've got my mobile phone number for emergencies.
I think that the OTP also needs to be longer than the message to be truly secure, but IANA-cryptanalyst, so I'm not better than 90% sure on that.
Most encryption systems that I've seen compress the message before encryption, which makes it close enough to random to help a lot on that front of making Eve's life difficult ; and it makes the balance between message length and OTP length more favourable too.
Really? We don't have any significant cockroach problem on this side of the Atlantic - I had to struggle to recognise them the first time I saw them, in the Middle East - but it slightly surprises me that what is so often reported as a terrible scourge, could have such a relatively simple solution. (OK ; I'm more of a chemist than the average street full of people, so I'm more realistic about the hazards of using such chemicals ; but if that's going to put people off, more fool them.)
Googly-google ... Looks good. OK ; cockroaches no longer considered a problem by me.
I'm guessing that the whole subject of discussion is some sort of spin off from yet another Star Trek movie. There's one out at the moment, isn't there? (I pay as little attention to advertising as possible, in the few seconds between the start of the adverts and my finger hitting the fast-forward button.)
Actually, the next time I see zymurgist Les (a fellow soldier-scientist from the anti-Creationist trenches), I'll have to check details with him, if he knows. He's a patent adviser now, rather than a scientist, so he may be involved in wording things so that they'll get past the Patent Office here AND past the USPTO, but obviously mean vastly different things in the two countries. It is, after all, "law", not sense.
But TBH, we're more likely to talk about beer.
Are you sure about that? I thought that having an HTTPS connection means that the client and server have agreed on an encryption protocol to use, but that the list of acceptable encryption protocols in a lot of configurations includes "plain text". Certainly it used to include that possibility, as a common fall-back position. Possibly implementations have improved since, but it would be a surprise if so.
Unfortunately, one of the methods of "encryption" that is permitted under the standards for HTTPS (and, I think, SSL) is "plain text".
As long as both ends of the conversation agree that this is the "encryption method" that they are going to use for the transaction, then the SSL/ HTTPS transaction completes validly. It's stupid, but it's valid.
What one really needs is for clients (i.e. our browsers and email clients) to refuse to drop down as far as "plain text". Which will break some service providers, and that will be a good thing. Either they fix their security, or they go out of business ; BFD.