Nope. I decided that I don't need the technology some years ago, and have seen nothing to cause me to re-think that position. I don't need "super-fast boot times" because I re-boot every few weeks. The amount of data that I keep around and want to access is high enough that SSDs aren't in the feasible price range, and the main constraint on me finding stuff is thinking "where would I have put that?" Which is much faster than brute-force searching.
I would think if were a Head Liberarian, that simply avoiding Edwin Mellen Press products, would avoid imperiling my institution. My libarians wouldn't be able to critique Edwin Mellen Press, if they didn't have any.
And the moment that a request came in from a library user for a book published by $PUBLISHER$... your attempt at escaping controversy fails.
For something like this (where nobody died), you wouldn't attempt an evacuation.
You're confident that you'd be able to make the "nobody is going to die" call before the event?
I have to do that sort of risk assessment as part of my work (drilling high-pressure, high temperature oil wells, as per Macondo) and we're a lot more cautious about things than you sound. And we know that we're only talking about a small number of people (up to a hundred) and an environmental disaster. Not potentially thousands or tens of thousands of deaths. Making that call would scare the shit out of me.
I guess you'll need to contact the authors directly to get (advance) copy of the paper(s). Though they're quite likely to do that, when they've got a paper ready for publication.
I can guarantee you that while the scientific community is excited, the construction community is PISSED.
And FTFA:
"In California, you need a paleontologist and an archaeologist on-site" during such projects, Rivin says.
So... either your construction company has factored these costs into it's tender, and is complying with the law, OR they haven't factored these costs in (or haven't paid insurance), so their bid is either incomplete, or incompetent. In either case, tough on the construction company.
Which is also tough on their employees. But having an incompetent employer who doesn't follow local laws is generally not a recipe for employment bliss.
... and which is why there are regulations for site surveys (at least, on this side of the Pond) and local archaeological services are (relatively) swift to respond to reports like this.
And geologists like me, with an interest in archaeology, keep our eyes peeled.
but using terms meant to insult and degrade the beliefs of others
... is almost precisely what "Invisible Sky Daddy" isn't an example of. Three important characteristics of the bat-shit insane anthropomorphism of the blind forces of nature are used, mildly suggesting that the dribbling idiocy of believing such stupid bullshit might not be the most well thought-through of ideas.
Grow some skin, god-lover, before you consider trying to grow some balls and live without a protective god to cover your sorry incompetent arse.
Plan B then : if you think that you're good enough, move to a country with laws and regulations that you approve of more than the one you're in at the moment. Governments don't like to think that the rules of the market apply to them, but they do. (At least, for productive people.)
It's the slowest kind of internet access I'm aware of.
I first started accessing the Internet with a 2400bps modem down a telephone line at 3 i nthe morning - to avoid blocking the line for the other people in the house. And paying £0.042/minute for that access. I'll go and get my Zimmer frame now.
Yeah, this is a satnav -- but these things are commonly referred to as gps units, even though they do more than that.
Being commonly referred to as a GPS doesn't make it right to refer to them as GPS units. The common herd may do that, but this s Slashdot, a gathering place for self-proclaimed nerds who do know better.
I'm holding off from getting a satellite navigation tool to replace the one that was burgled in 2003, in part in anticipation of the installation of the Galileo system and the expansion of the GLONASS system. But I'm also careful about having such systems, because there are places where I've worked (and courted, and I expect to return to, for more work), where possession of such equipment is grounds for being charged with espionage, and nobody sane gives the police the slightest opportunity to detain you.
The wife got me a SatNav system for my birthday a few years ago. It's good in-car entertainment, fit for laughing at. For navigation... well, I'm a geologist. I don't do "lost". There are always navigation clues, and you do read and memorise the map of where you're going before you go there. Don't you?
Don't fight kids. There's a kilometre-scale impactor headed your way right now. It doesn't really matter which one of you gets it first, because you'll both wishing it hadn't arrived within a few seconds of touch-down.
To a first approximation. Many meteorites are significantly heterogeneous, so until you've collected a fair number of pieces (several dozen), you're still not terribly confident that you've got most of the diversity of a particular impactor.
There should be a nice strewn field from this event, and it shouldn't be hard to find pieces
I've seen the landscape between Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinborg. Lots of woodland, arable farmland. Unless you've got an eyewitness of an impact, searching isn't going to be easy. And a lot of the land is going to be covered by snow at the moment, which will rapidly melt and conceal evidence.
Yes, there will very likely be a strewn field. But finding it isn't going to be as easy as you make it sound.
I don't like the prequels either but um, it was called Episode 4 in the intro.
Are you sure? I remember seeing the original - it was the start of about a 20-year run of not bothering to go to the movies at all - and I don't recall any mention of "Episode IV", or "4", or whatever then. Just "long long ago" and "far far away".
Anyway... that's still the only one of the Star Wars franchise that I've seen in it's entirety. I've seen bits of the others - probably - but only when I've not had the choice of what to tune the Recreation Room TV into.
Find some other country with a good medical regulatory regime and less a stupid claim of what "moral" behaviour is, get them to do the safety and efficacy checks, and monitor production standards. Then you've just got the same problems as any drug smuggler, without the majority of the "moral" concerns. Next step : $$$ profit.
Or there's the Japanese "scientific whaling" tactic : run a trial on the compound for, say, longitudinal prevention of ankle sprains, requiring 150million participants over 50 years. Shouldn't be too hard to get people to volunteer for the trial, as long as the first-stage (safety and dosage) trials are OK and the efficacy looks fair.
Why would anyone want to spend spend any money, let alone trillions, on "defending" against a meteor that basically broke a bunch of windows and didn't cause any fatalities?
Because it's definitely got a lot of big brothers and cousins out there, and when one of them comes calling, if we don't have something set up which we know works, then we, as a species, may very well be dead.
But you probably know that, and consider your low taxes this year more important than your species survival next century. That's your choice, but don't try lying to yourself about what you're doing.
What interests me the most here is why wasn't this all over the news?
Errrr, it was on international news within about an hour of the event. It just so happened that I was up early and watching. How much more "all over the news" do you want?
It may have been different by the time that the terminator got round to your country and you got up. I was jet-lagged somewhat due to having come in from a couple of time-zones east, so I was up unusually early.
Anyone capable of driving should have been able to bring this under control in seconds.
1 - Hazard lights on ; horn blaring as often as possible.
2 - clutch down, out of gear. (I assume that you can do something similar in an automatic, though with 2 days of driving one in total out of 25 years, I'm not 100% certain. For sure it can be forced it into gear 2 or 1, because I've done that by accident. "Bye bye" to speed.)
3 - more horn and hazards
4 - handbrake as possible in between steering.
5 - come to a halt.
6 - kick car repeatedly as the engine revs itself to destruction.
FTFA : "his Renault Laguna, which is adapted for disabled drivers, "
OK, I take a lot of it back. Botched adaptation I suppose could do something like this. But what disabled-adapted vehicles I've seen in the past have also had the original controls accessible. It's not impossible, I suppose, that the adaptation would have rendered the control procedure above difficult or impossible, but then I'd still consider that a dangerously botched adaptation - at the design stage.
You're under the misapprehension that these machines are designed for the benefit of their users : they're not ; they're designed to make profit for their manufacturer.
It is possible to make high-quality, repairable hardware. but that generally costs more. M$ have clearly indicated that they see the Surface Pro as a disposable low-quality product, pricing and designing it accordingly. Nothing wrong with that - but don't be under any illusion about what they've done.
But what really happened was Windows came out. Microsoft wrote Word for Windows.
[. ..] More precisely, several years after Windows came out, MS re-wrote their previously very functional DOS-based word processor "Word" as a windows application. In the process they damaged it badly, though not irrevocably, as was the norm for translating applications to Windows. This mental thing about having an approach to WYSIWIG (as Windows still does) tended to obscure important aspects of significant documents such as their internal structure, style use and so on.
So I was very glad to leave a company that used Word for Windows and upgrade to better pay and using Lotus Manuscript - it suited my mindset and the type of work that we were doing much better.
Word was better than ALL other word processors written for windows
Yes, I agree, "Word" (sub-titled "for DOS v.5") was much better than any early word processor written for Windows, including "Word for Windows".
Since the power cells cost $20, they must contain more than fuel, they probably include some consumable electrodes or membranes.
That's my deduction too, though knowing the way that products are priced, I wouldn't be so sure.
Ah, a question to check : does the manufacturer mention a "buy back" scheme for discharged "power packs"?
No mention. Which probably breaks many countries recycling laws, but is a pretty solid indication that there are no "exotic" materials in the product. Otherwise, they'd want you to send them back (at your cost) rather than buying more material for themselves.
With no exotics in the pod, you're paying $10 for... "nectar pod weight: ~35g"... maybe 20g of butane? That's just a touch on the expensive side. And I'll just bet that you can't (easily) recharge them from a cigarette (gas) lighter supply. That'll be the first after-market modification to make it to market, I'd bet.
A worrying bit of small print : "Ships on Week 05/15/2013" , for the "pods".
So, fag-lighter valves in the "pods" - modification release about the first week of June (that is an American format date, isn't it? MM/DD/YYYY ?)
I know enough chemistry to expect that the catalysts in the fuel cell would be sensitive to things like "heavy metals" in the fuel stream. So... you'd want to steer clear of gas supplies with such contamination. However, in nearly 30 years working in the oil and gas industry, doing gas analysis work (amongst other things), I've never seen such contamination. I could probably make a gas supply with such "poisons" (as we refer to things that fuck our catalysts), but I wouldn't anticipate meeting a naturally contaminated gas mix like that.
It's an interesting idea, but I don't think that the word "compelling" applies. (Incidentally, the commentator on the site who complains about having to re-charge his smart phone more than once a day... is obviously a very heavy user. And even so, it's not a killer failing. I would routinely carry a spare set of batteries (AA, charged) for my pocket touch-screen computer, even though I only needed to change batteries every month or so. It's not a back-breaker.)
If the big boys in the industry cant get their shit together soon, we will get legislation, and that will be
... ignored by organisations based outside whichever jurisdiction has passed the laws you're talking about. So, companies will re-structure themselves.
Countries that think that they're the only country in the world are in for a nasty shock, as multi-national corporations learn to "route around" the "damage" that legislation and taxes represent.
Hmmm, "GPRS"... the name is familiar, but I don't associate it with GPS. It's some sort of terrestrial radio system, isn't it? Which I guess provides the "real time traffic information"?
Are you talking about a SatNav system, not a GPS system? A SatNav that uses GPS for it's positioning data and has some other junk related to cars and roads, and TomTom have broken that other stuff?
You can't disable the SatNav functions and retain the GPS functions? Yeuch - remind me to not get one of those, even if they're remaindered.
The SatNav my wife got me a few years ago was bloody atrocious too - it wouldn't output any of it's GPS information either, and it's maps were at least 20 years out of date in our area AFTER the "get updated maps" operation, and they wanted a 2 year (=£720) commitment to a subscription before they'd even accept bug reports for their maps. Still, it provides endless entertainment as the "deranged crack addict", which is about as much as one expects from such things. And it does get some roads right - you just have to know which ones are right. Which rather defeats the object of the exercise, doesn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. I decided that I don't need the technology some years ago, and have seen nothing to cause me to re-think that position. I don't need "super-fast boot times" because I re-boot every few weeks. The amount of data that I keep around and want to access is high enough that SSDs aren't in the feasible price range, and the main constraint on me finding stuff is thinking "where would I have put that?" Which is much faster than brute-force searching.
Then they're either dead by gunshot in their office, or dead by gunshot as soon as the perp's friends get out of jail.
Using force will only worsen the situation.
And the moment that a request came in from a library user for a book published by $PUBLISHER$ ... your attempt at escaping controversy fails.
Probably better to fight this one.
You're confident that you'd be able to make the "nobody is going to die" call before the event?
I have to do that sort of risk assessment as part of my work (drilling high-pressure, high temperature oil wells, as per Macondo) and we're a lot more cautious about things than you sound. And we know that we're only talking about a small number of people (up to a hundred) and an environmental disaster. Not potentially thousands or tens of thousands of deaths. Making that call would scare the shit out of me.
Would you like some beef with your horse-burger?
The article is a summary, as far as I can tell, of a symposium discussion involving a number of specialists in whale palaeontology. http://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2013/webprogram/Session5818.html has the list of speakers, including ... just links to abstracts. http://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2013/webprogram/Paper9513.html
I guess you'll need to contact the authors directly to get (advance) copy of the paper(s). Though they're quite likely to do that, when they've got a paper ready for publication.
(Geologist here too.)
And FTFA :
So ... either your construction company has factored these costs into it's tender, and is complying with the law, OR they haven't factored these costs in (or haven't paid insurance), so their bid is either incomplete, or incompetent. In either case, tough on the construction company.
Which is also tough on their employees. But having an incompetent employer who doesn't follow local laws is generally not a recipe for employment bliss.
And geologists like me, with an interest in archaeology, keep our eyes peeled.
Grow some skin, god-lover, before you consider trying to grow some balls and live without a protective god to cover your sorry incompetent arse.
Plan B then : if you think that you're good enough, move to a country with laws and regulations that you approve of more than the one you're in at the moment. Governments don't like to think that the rules of the market apply to them, but they do. (At least, for productive people.)
I first started accessing the Internet with a 2400bps modem down a telephone line at 3 i nthe morning - to avoid blocking the line for the other people in the house. And paying £0.042/minute for that access. I'll go and get my Zimmer frame now.
Being commonly referred to as a GPS doesn't make it right to refer to them as GPS units. The common herd may do that, but this s Slashdot, a gathering place for self-proclaimed nerds who do know better.
I'm holding off from getting a satellite navigation tool to replace the one that was burgled in 2003, in part in anticipation of the installation of the Galileo system and the expansion of the GLONASS system. But I'm also careful about having such systems, because there are places where I've worked (and courted, and I expect to return to, for more work), where possession of such equipment is grounds for being charged with espionage, and nobody sane gives the police the slightest opportunity to detain you.
The wife got me a SatNav system for my birthday a few years ago. It's good in-car entertainment, fit for laughing at. For navigation ... well, I'm a geologist. I don't do "lost". There are always navigation clues, and you do read and memorise the map of where you're going before you go there. Don't you?
Don't fight kids. There's a kilometre-scale impactor headed your way right now. It doesn't really matter which one of you gets it first, because you'll both wishing it hadn't arrived within a few seconds of touch-down.
To a first approximation. Many meteorites are significantly heterogeneous, so until you've collected a fair number of pieces (several dozen), you're still not terribly confident that you've got most of the diversity of a particular impactor.
I've seen the landscape between Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinborg. Lots of woodland, arable farmland. Unless you've got an eyewitness of an impact, searching isn't going to be easy. And a lot of the land is going to be covered by snow at the moment, which will rapidly melt and conceal evidence.
Yes, there will very likely be a strewn field. But finding it isn't going to be as easy as you make it sound.
You have evidence for this assertion? (I bet this is going to lead to KookWatch, or something similar.)
Are you sure? I remember seeing the original - it was the start of about a 20-year run of not bothering to go to the movies at all - and I don't recall any mention of "Episode IV", or "4", or whatever then. Just "long long ago" and "far far away".
Anyway ... that's still the only one of the Star Wars franchise that I've seen in it's entirety. I've seen bits of the others - probably - but only when I've not had the choice of what to tune the Recreation Room TV into.
Find some other country with a good medical regulatory regime and less a stupid claim of what "moral" behaviour is, get them to do the safety and efficacy checks, and monitor production standards. Then you've just got the same problems as any drug smuggler, without the majority of the "moral" concerns. Next step : $$$ profit.
Or there's the Japanese "scientific whaling" tactic : run a trial on the compound for, say, longitudinal prevention of ankle sprains, requiring 150million participants over 50 years. Shouldn't be too hard to get people to volunteer for the trial, as long as the first-stage (safety and dosage) trials are OK and the efficacy looks fair.
Because it's definitely got a lot of big brothers and cousins out there, and when one of them comes calling, if we don't have something set up which we know works, then we, as a species, may very well be dead.
But you probably know that, and consider your low taxes this year more important than your species survival next century. That's your choice, but don't try lying to yourself about what you're doing.
Errrr, it was on international news within about an hour of the event. It just so happened that I was up early and watching. How much more "all over the news" do you want?
It may have been different by the time that the terminator got round to your country and you got up. I was jet-lagged somewhat due to having come in from a couple of time-zones east, so I was up unusually early.
1 - Hazard lights on ; horn blaring as often as possible.
2 - clutch down, out of gear. (I assume that you can do something similar in an automatic, though with 2 days of driving one in total out of 25 years, I'm not 100% certain. For sure it can be forced it into gear 2 or 1, because I've done that by accident. "Bye bye" to speed.)
3 - more horn and hazards
4 - handbrake as possible in between steering.
5 - come to a halt.
6 - kick car repeatedly as the engine revs itself to destruction.
FTFA : "his Renault Laguna, which is adapted for disabled drivers, "
OK, I take a lot of it back. Botched adaptation I suppose could do something like this. But what disabled-adapted vehicles I've seen in the past have also had the original controls accessible. It's not impossible, I suppose, that the adaptation would have rendered the control procedure above difficult or impossible, but then I'd still consider that a dangerously botched adaptation - at the design stage.
You're under the misapprehension that these machines are designed for the benefit of their users : they're not ; they're designed to make profit for their manufacturer.
It is possible to make high-quality, repairable hardware. but that generally costs more. M$ have clearly indicated that they see the Surface Pro as a disposable low-quality product, pricing and designing it accordingly. Nothing wrong with that - but don't be under any illusion about what they've done.
[. . .] More precisely, several years after Windows came out, MS re-wrote their previously very functional DOS-based word processor "Word" as a windows application. In the process they damaged it badly, though not irrevocably, as was the norm for translating applications to Windows. This mental thing about having an approach to WYSIWIG (as Windows still does) tended to obscure important aspects of significant documents such as their internal structure, style use and so on.
So I was very glad to leave a company that used Word for Windows and upgrade to better pay and using Lotus Manuscript - it suited my mindset and the type of work that we were doing much better.
Yes, I agree, "Word" (sub-titled "for DOS v.5") was much better than any early word processor written for Windows, including "Word for Windows".
... and what would one do with one in a car?
That's my deduction too, though knowing the way that products are priced, I wouldn't be so sure.
Ah, a question to check : does the manufacturer mention a "buy back" scheme for discharged "power packs"?
No mention. Which probably breaks many countries recycling laws, but is a pretty solid indication that there are no "exotic" materials in the product. Otherwise, they'd want you to send them back (at your cost) rather than buying more material for themselves.
With no exotics in the pod, you're paying $10 for ... "nectar pod weight: ~35g" ... maybe 20g of butane? That's just a touch on the expensive side. And I'll just bet that you can't (easily) recharge them from a cigarette (gas) lighter supply. That'll be the first after-market modification to make it to market, I'd bet.
A worrying bit of small print : "Ships on Week 05/15/2013" , for the "pods".
So, fag-lighter valves in the "pods" - modification release about the first week of June (that is an American format date, isn't it? MM/DD/YYYY ?)
I know enough chemistry to expect that the catalysts in the fuel cell would be sensitive to things like "heavy metals" in the fuel stream. So ... you'd want to steer clear of gas supplies with such contamination.
However, in nearly 30 years working in the oil and gas industry, doing gas analysis work (amongst other things), I've never seen such contamination. I could probably make a gas supply with such "poisons" (as we refer to things that fuck our catalysts), but I wouldn't anticipate meeting a naturally contaminated gas mix like that.
It's an interesting idea, but I don't think that the word "compelling" applies. (Incidentally, the commentator on the site who complains about having to re-charge his smart phone more than once a day ... is obviously a very heavy user. And even so, it's not a killer failing. I would routinely carry a spare set of batteries (AA, charged) for my pocket touch-screen computer, even though I only needed to change batteries every month or so. It's not a back-breaker.)
... ignored by organisations based outside whichever jurisdiction has passed the laws you're talking about. So, companies will re-structure themselves.
Countries that think that they're the only country in the world are in for a nasty shock, as multi-national corporations learn to "route around" the "damage" that legislation and taxes represent.
Are you talking about a SatNav system, not a GPS system? A SatNav that uses GPS for it's positioning data and has some other junk related to cars and roads, and TomTom have broken that other stuff?
You can't disable the SatNav functions and retain the GPS functions? Yeuch - remind me to not get one of those, even if they're remaindered.
The SatNav my wife got me a few years ago was bloody atrocious too - it wouldn't output any of it's GPS information either, and it's maps were at least 20 years out of date in our area AFTER the "get updated maps" operation, and they wanted a 2 year (=£720) commitment to a subscription before they'd even accept bug reports for their maps. Still, it provides endless entertainment as the "deranged crack addict", which is about as much as one expects from such things. And it does get some roads right - you just have to know which ones are right. Which rather defeats the object of the exercise, doesn't it?