I am sure they conduct radiological surveys of these mines.
Which part of "artesanal mining" did you not understand? The most technologically advanced part of the mining process is likely to be either the diesel engine in the truck hauling rock and dumping it into the crusher, or the sieves used by the workers to separate dense minerals from less dense minerals.
OK, I'm a geologist so this question might mean more to me than it does to you, but what useful information would you get from a "radiological survey" for a mine like that? Your ore selection is going to be by eye - someone who has worked previously in a cobalt mine says "I think that [point at vein in tunnel wall or layer in sand bank] is what they'll pay for" ; grunt labour follows the vein/ layer ; more grunt moves the rock ; more grunt separates the rock into heavy/ light or light-dark fractions. The next encounter with technology will be in the assay office before the cash is paid for this lorry load.
I'd be a very nervous geologist carrying round a $10000 hand-held XRF multi-element assay sensor in the Congo. But whether it'd be more dangerous having several armed bodyguards around (who would know that I had something valuable, including their wages) would be a very moot point.
That too contains zero Cobalt-60. Unless someone has recently introduced a large neutron flux to it.
I suspected it was something out of fiction, but had to trawl a bit to see it's a line from 'Dr Strangelove'. I suspect there was some vaguely scientific thinking going on in the screen writers mind about putting a neutron sourcing material into the mix. I think beryllium would probably have been better than thorium, as used in modern electrical neutron generators. But hey - I'll give the screenwriter some kudos for trying.
Someone who made his billions with digital technique (and greedy exploitation, of course) does not trust any digital technique to work!
Do you actually know how a mechanical clock works? An analogue power source (flowing electrons, descending weights, gerbils on a wheel - whatever) is applied to an oscillator resulting in the (almost) instantaneous change of state of a mechanism - the escapement - from one state to another. That DIGITAL change it then applied through various gearing to change the position of various dials. A mechanical clock is essentially digital in it's operation - even if in base 157 (or however many teeth the escapement wheel has) rather than base 2.
Off the top of my head, the last design of time measuring device I can recall as actually being analogue is the clepsydra.
A sundial is several minutes out at different times during each day (RMS error). And worse day-by-day throughout the year. The motion of the Sun across the sky is not uniform due to refraction ; the motion of the Sun along the ecliptic is not uniform through the year due to the ellipticity of the Earth's orbit around the sun (183/182 days between solstices ; 186/179 days between equinoxes within year / across New Year); the orbit of the Earth around the Sun does not repeat from year to year (nutation and precession of the equinoxes). Keeping accurate time across millennia is non-trivial.
All of which, the Clock of the Long Now ignores, using a mechanical detector to align the clock's midday with the sun crossing geographical south from the clock's position.
constructing a lunar space elevator / orbital ring complex for practice, followed by an Earth elevator/ring.
Hmmm, I know that we currently have no materials or processes for making a material strong enough for an Earth "space elevator" - it would need something like a fibre with the tensile strength of diamond, in a really light high-strength epoxy. And we don't have a process for making diamond-strength fibre in millimetre lengths, let alone multi-kilometre lengths.
But a lunar "space elevator" - with about 1/6th of the gravity field (and IIRC, 1/80th of the mass) - that's a lot closer to actually being possible. Useless, but less impossible.
Hmmm, down side would be that the system would either need a large counterweight, or to reach a significant part of the distance from Moon to Earth.
These men who do qualify...what would they want with a driven, programmer wife?
I read that first time as a "programmable wife", and thought - has this man not heard of Galatea (though the name is much more recent than the myth), or the Stepford Wives, or modern robotic sex dolls.
Ever since the (mass) production of the first (common) condoms (around 1850), sex and reproduction have been two distinct questions. But people still struggle to understand this. Sex robots and teledildonics are just another step along this road. When, for example, you can rent use of a sex robot and 10 minutes shared time up the best rent boy in Bangkok for the price of five beers, the sex industry is going to change, a lot. And it'll get even more separated from reproduction.
I was checking the most-recent census data recently. 20% of women who reach age 45 (currently the practical end of child bearing, for demographers at least) do so with no children. That's up from a low of 10% for women who were child-free through the "baby boom". Given the increase in availability of assisted fertility through that period, one can only conclude that significant numbers (10% or higher) of women in the last few decades have chosen to not reproduce.
Of course, it won't be enough. The acceleration of materials demand as living standards rise will become unsupportable before populations start to fall. Then populations will fall, faster, but with more suffering.
Every user name, not every person. And in the world of crypto, I think you mean "a grain of salt", not a birth date.
A perfectly reasonable use case is for "Joe" to have a Github account for the projects someone pays her to work on in the office, and a second account for his personal project tracking wombat breeding. And to extend that case, since I'm swapping Joe's gender-ish pronouns randomly, posit that "Joe" tries coding a FaceSpace-a-like that has gender fluidity at it's core concept, with 57 different "gender identities" (I heard a rumour that Facebook have 51 "internal" genders ; I don't use it and don't know, or care). "Joe" being both canny, and schizophrenic, decides on using a whole new identity including all security coding, private keys etc. And when Farcebook decides to buy that work for a modest fortune, then the whole kit and kaboodle of code, passwords, and public and secret keys and all and all can be passed over like a hot potato, while "Joe" takes the money and buys a wombat-wanking farm with ne'er a backwards glance.
One would hope that the PHBs who buy $Project$ will have learned to specify that buying $Project$ includes all private keys associated with $Project$. Put it in the contract.
Does this conflict with concepts of code ownership and responsibility? Maybe. And, so?
Same question for people who have recovered from a stroke?
Or those who haven't recovered from a stroke? (Mum hasn't had a stroke for nearly 5 years, but is only slowly regaining mental function and speech. She'll probably die before she learns how to handle a phone. Landline, or mobile.
My interpretation had nothing to do with littoral combat ships (a term I find perfectly comprehensible, largely because I know what "littoral" means from other fields). I took it to mean "Lowest Cost Supplier". And after yawning through TFS, I may still be right.
They're counting permafrost in the total they estimate the concentrations of mercury in. Permafrost soils can be very deep - easily up to a kilometre. And the Arctic is quite a large region. Put those two together and you've got a large soil volume estimate. That's off the top of my head - but I have drilled in the Arctic, and the depth of permafrost can be a significant issue in drilling and particularly well-control. For more, I'd need to RTFP too, but I suspect that soil volume estimate is going to be a major factor.
In the 20 minute of walking from city centre to the Go (board game) club a couple of nights ago, I passed three on-street chargers, each with a "community use" EV plugged in and charging, and a second cable for charging a second EV at the adjoining parking place.
So, an American city is technologically antiquated? Colour me astonished. Do you still have those rails for tying your horses to, too?
That comment applies to the Gary McKinnon case (where the extradition was blocked by a politician - the Home Secretary). In this case, the court system (different branch of government, in both UK and US) denied permission for the extradition. So for comparability, the US court system, not his Trumpetness, would have to deny the extradition of the hypothetical British criminal.
286 comments and only one mention of this XKCD. Oh, Spashdot, where have your balls gone?
Not because the XKCD is a startlingly or novel good description of the problem (Zimmerman's PGP release notes include it's essence) , but there just appears to be so much pathetically optimistic derangement in the hipster generations.
In the real world, on encountering a journalist-type (white, foreigner) with a memory device/ camera/ etc full of unreadable things... you smash any phones and cameras and anything else that may hold a transmitter. Then you gut one of the locals helping the white foreigner and leave him screaming in the dust, "pour encourager les autres". This criminal will "die trying to escape". Then, you torture the other locals, who are also trying to escape when they die, until the white foreigner gives you the passwords. If you run out of local criminals and their families to torture in front of the untouchable privileged white foreigner, then you photograph him being infected with a disease by an underage criminal, pour whiskey down his neck until he can't walk, and send him driving back to the city on the rough road.
Do millennial children not know how politics works? Or do they rely on Hollywood?
Either get off it or don't, stop pussyfooting around!
I keep, but don't log into, my account to make it harder for someone to impersonate me. I will continue this deliberate "pussyfooting" until Facebook is dead, or they stop being as creepy as that stalker who got out of hospital last month and is sending you the roots of flowers on a daily basis since.
I've been using that account so long, FB probably knows who I am.
They probably did within hours of
I have a fake account. I let my family know who I was and they added me.
Once more than a dozen or so of them had searched for (or even "Liked") your fake account, thn you'd have been pretty well pinned in their "web of relationships." The number necessary may be smaller than a dozen, for correspondingly lower levels of confidence.
Assault is a threat of imminent violence. You can't actually do that over computer communications.
Did you write that after POTUS45 (you know - immense hairdressing bill, turmeric-coloured skin) was threatening DPRK with fire and destruction. Or, indeed after the Hawaii "fake missile alert" ?
Slashdot Mirror
Which part of "artesanal mining" did you not understand? The most technologically advanced part of the mining process is likely to be either the diesel engine in the truck hauling rock and dumping it into the crusher, or the sieves used by the workers to separate dense minerals from less dense minerals.
OK, I'm a geologist so this question might mean more to me than it does to you, but what useful information would you get from a "radiological survey" for a mine like that? Your ore selection is going to be by eye - someone who has worked previously in a cobalt mine says "I think that [point at vein in tunnel wall or layer in sand bank] is what they'll pay for" ; grunt labour follows the vein/ layer ; more grunt moves the rock ; more grunt separates the rock into heavy/ light or light-dark fractions. The next encounter with technology will be in the assay office before the cash is paid for this lorry load.
I'd be a very nervous geologist carrying round a $10000 hand-held XRF multi-element assay sensor in the Congo. But whether it'd be more dangerous having several armed bodyguards around (who would know that I had something valuable, including their wages) would be a very moot point.
I suspected it was something out of fiction, but had to trawl a bit to see it's a line from 'Dr Strangelove'. I suspect there was some vaguely scientific thinking going on in the screen writers mind about putting a neutron sourcing material into the mix. I think beryllium would probably have been better than thorium, as used in modern electrical neutron generators. But hey - I'll give the screenwriter some kudos for trying.
Do you actually know how a mechanical clock works? An analogue power source (flowing electrons, descending weights, gerbils on a wheel - whatever) is applied to an oscillator resulting in the (almost) instantaneous change of state of a mechanism - the escapement - from one state to another. That DIGITAL change it then applied through various gearing to change the position of various dials. A mechanical clock is essentially digital in it's operation - even if in base 157 (or however many teeth the escapement wheel has) rather than base 2.
Off the top of my head, the last design of time measuring device I can recall as actually being analogue is the clepsydra.
All of which, the Clock of the Long Now ignores, using a mechanical detector to align the clock's midday with the sun crossing geographical south from the clock's position.
It would be nice if you were right with "Everyone", but I'm not even sure you'd be right with "A majority of people"
Hmmm, I know that we currently have no materials or processes for making a material strong enough for an Earth "space elevator" - it would need something like a fibre with the tensile strength of diamond, in a really light high-strength epoxy. And we don't have a process for making diamond-strength fibre in millimetre lengths, let alone multi-kilometre lengths.
But a lunar "space elevator" - with about 1/6th of the gravity field (and IIRC, 1/80th of the mass) - that's a lot closer to actually being possible. Useless, but less impossible.
Hmmm, down side would be that the system would either need a large counterweight, or to reach a significant part of the distance from Moon to Earth.
I read that first time as a "programmable wife", and thought - has this man not heard of Galatea (though the name is much more recent than the myth), or the Stepford Wives, or modern robotic sex dolls.
Ever since the (mass) production of the first (common) condoms (around 1850), sex and reproduction have been two distinct questions. But people still struggle to understand this. Sex robots and teledildonics are just another step along this road. When, for example, you can rent use of a sex robot and 10 minutes shared time up the best rent boy in Bangkok for the price of five beers, the sex industry is going to change, a lot. And it'll get even more separated from reproduction.
I was checking the most-recent census data recently. 20% of women who reach age 45 (currently the practical end of child bearing, for demographers at least) do so with no children. That's up from a low of 10% for women who were child-free through the "baby boom". Given the increase in availability of assisted fertility through that period, one can only conclude that significant numbers (10% or higher) of women in the last few decades have chosen to not reproduce.
Of course, it won't be enough. The acceleration of materials demand as living standards rise will become unsupportable before populations start to fall. Then populations will fall, faster, but with more suffering.
Every user name, not every person. And in the world of crypto, I think you mean "a grain of salt", not a birth date.
A perfectly reasonable use case is for "Joe" to have a Github account for the projects someone pays her to work on in the office, and a second account for his personal project tracking wombat breeding. And to extend that case, since I'm swapping Joe's gender-ish pronouns randomly, posit that "Joe" tries coding a FaceSpace-a-like that has gender fluidity at it's core concept, with 57 different "gender identities" (I heard a rumour that Facebook have 51 "internal" genders ; I don't use it and don't know, or care). "Joe" being both canny, and schizophrenic, decides on using a whole new identity including all security coding, private keys etc. And when Farcebook decides to buy that work for a modest fortune, then the whole kit and kaboodle of code, passwords, and public and secret keys and all and all can be passed over like a hot potato, while "Joe" takes the money and buys a wombat-wanking farm with ne'er a backwards glance.
... are kids doing with a smart phone at all, let alone someone else's smart phone? The whole basic premise is insane.
Does this conflict with concepts of code ownership and responsibility? Maybe. And, so?
Or those who haven't recovered from a stroke? (Mum hasn't had a stroke for nearly 5 years, but is only slowly regaining mental function and speech. She'll probably die before she learns how to handle a phone. Landline, or mobile.
My interpretation had nothing to do with littoral combat ships (a term I find perfectly comprehensible, largely because I know what "littoral" means from other fields). I took it to mean "Lowest Cost Supplier". And after yawning through TFS, I may still be right.
What is your kyu rating? I just bet it's higher than mine.
They're counting permafrost in the total they estimate the concentrations of mercury in. Permafrost soils can be very deep - easily up to a kilometre. And the Arctic is quite a large region. Put those two together and you've got a large soil volume estimate. That's off the top of my head - but I have drilled in the Arctic, and the depth of permafrost can be a significant issue in drilling and particularly well-control. For more, I'd need to RTFP too, but I suspect that soil volume estimate is going to be a major factor.
Why? It's your world. Fix the problems yourself.
Aye, there's the problem. If you want a next generation, then you fix the world. Not a concern of mine.
So, an American city is technologically antiquated? Colour me astonished. Do you still have those rails for tying your horses to, too?
That comment applies to the Gary McKinnon case (where the extradition was blocked by a politician - the Home Secretary). In this case, the court system (different branch of government, in both UK and US) denied permission for the extradition. So for comparability, the US court system, not his Trumpetness, would have to deny the extradition of the hypothetical British criminal.
In the real world, on encountering a journalist-type (white, foreigner) with a memory device/ camera/ etc full of unreadable things ... you smash any phones and cameras and anything else that may hold a transmitter. Then you gut one of the locals helping the white foreigner and leave him screaming in the dust, "pour encourager les autres". This criminal will "die trying to escape". Then, you torture the other locals, who are also trying to escape when they die, until the white foreigner gives you the passwords. If you run out of local criminals and their families to torture in front of the untouchable privileged white foreigner, then you photograph him being infected with a disease by an underage criminal, pour whiskey down his neck until he can't walk, and send him driving back to the city on the rough road.
Do millennial children not know how politics works? Or do they rely on Hollywood?
Oh, so that's what TED talks are about. Toasty warm lectures. But you''ll still be shamed for falling asleep because it's too warm.
I keep, but don't log into, my account to make it harder for someone to impersonate me. I will continue this deliberate "pussyfooting" until Facebook is dead, or they stop being as creepy as that stalker who got out of hospital last month and is sending you the roots of flowers on a daily basis since.
They probably did within hours of
Once more than a dozen or so of them had searched for (or even "Liked") your fake account, thn you'd have been pretty well pinned in their "web of relationships." The number necessary may be smaller than a dozen, for correspondingly lower levels of confidence.
Don't DPRK issue passports for, like $5? Proof of ID is PayPap payment not bouncing.
"Peak Sharknado". What. A. Concept.
Did you write that after POTUS45 (you know - immense hairdressing bill, turmeric-coloured skin) was threatening DPRK with fire and destruction. Or, indeed after the Hawaii "fake missile alert" ?
Get this man to a psychologist and a lombotomy theatre, STAT!