The gun-nuts of America are working on getting this pitiably poor record of massacres up to standard. there'll be a new massacre along soon, just as soon as someone gets hacked-off enough with life to take a new crack at the record.
I'm just glad they're abandoning 999 used in the UK. Its far too easily miscalled on a locked phone.
I haven't heard of the UK's "999" being phased out, nor have I had the experience of accidentally dialling it while trying to unlock a phone. However, I have heard of cases where an excavator (American : "backhoe" ; UK : J.C.B. ; archaeologist's "big yellow trowel") has gone through a large phone cable, and while the repairs were being carried out hundreds of calls went to the emergency switchboard because of "make", [pause], "make", [pause], "make", "break", "make" sequences as te wires were reconnected "hot".
Yes, pulse dialling does still work. Pulse telephones do still exist, and do still work.
I suspect that someone has come up with a fix for this, since I've not heard of a repeat of the event since the early 2000s. But it is a distinct problem with "112" as an emergency number. Similarly however, the pulse train for "999" or "911" is considerably longer than that for "112". In short... there isn't a simple, obvious solution.
Sure, line printers were their own thing, but when used as an adjective, it was always synonymous with DMP.
You never changed wheels on a daisywheel printer to do itallics? "Line Printer" and "Dot Matrix Printer" may have been synonymous at your place of work in the dim and distant past, but that doesn't mean that your place of work was correct.
A properly malfunctioning line printer could spit it's chain through a wall. Daisywheels could spray "leaves" all over the room, and dot matrices are for poofs.
If you're in an area lit by fluorescent lighting (conventional tubes ; compact fluorescents may or may not work), then you may well be able to pick up the power frequency using video too. Though you'd have to be running your camera at above 100Hz (120Hz in the US and parts of Japan) to be able to pick it up.
(I had contractors blaming their equipment's poor performance on frequency variations in the remote site's power supply ; once I told them that I was running a frequency sensor with a USB oscilloscope, they came up with a different story.)
The "long" signal intended for military use requires a substantial key to decode. It's not jam-proof, but it should be spoof-proof.
Of course, that all depends on the key remaining secret...
And the military being able to get hold of enough military-grade chipsets when they need them.
I imagine the drone that was landed via GPS spoofing merely didn't have the equipment for the long signal. It's supposedly a pain in the ass to deal with.
My precise point.
As I understand it, during several of the recent Gulf Wars the military have had to use lots of civilian GPS systems because their suppliers couldn't crank out the military-grade systems fast enough, or at a low-enough cost. There is no reason to believe that the logistics will be any better for the future Gulf Wars.
Bloody Slashcode and it's inability to handle normal characters. Who the fuck thought it would be a good idea to restrict the character set to just ASCII?
Speaking as an ethnically Irish person, brought up in England, educated to my degree in Scotland, and continuing to live in Scotland ("What higher compliment can you give to a country than to choose to live there?" as I occasionally ask.) for almost 30 years now, I can certainly say that there are some racist twats who adhere to the SNP and the nationalist cause. Having a knife waved in your face and being told to "fuck off back home you English bastard" was both inaccurate and somewhat worrying (though the allegation that I was trying to get off with a particular redhead was perfectly true).
That said, even I wouldn't call the SNP themselves a racist organisation. There are certainly some thorough-going racist twats within the group, but not large numbers.
No, I haven't decided which way to vote in the independence referendum. I'm sure that it is galling to some of the Saltire-daubed hordes, but I do actually get a vote in the matter.
He was at the forefront of the fight against UFO nonsense (some would say too far, he refused to believe in any life outside the Earth).
Reference please?
I've never heard that suggestion concerning Moore's beliefs. It would be true to say that we have no evidence as yet of the existence of life off the Earth, but that doesn't mean that it's impossible. And if it can happen once (it did ; we exist), then in a large universe it is pretty unlikely that it happened precisely once.
the record for the longest running TV presenter on a show.
Do you think that that record is likely to ever be broken?
Actually, I retract the question : unless our species goes extinct within the next century (not a high likelihood outcome - a few percent probability), then I'd expect that eventually lifespans would increase considerably. Though whether those humanoids have things that are identifiably similar to "TV shows" or "presenters"...
I propose we bury it in LA County, specifically Hollywood - earthquakes be damned.
Probably for similar reasons, I've been suggesting for decades that the best place for the UK's nuclear waste repository would be under the Houses of Parliament.
The only way that one can have confidence that the politicians will pay adequately to maintain a repository is if the politicians are the ones who WILL die first, and that they KNOW it.
Politicians probably see it differently. But not being human, they don't get a vote.
and the gamma emissions would ruin your day if you actually tried to build a bomb with it.
. . . . which is why you get someone else to build the bomb for you.
No, seriously. Design your chemistry equipment and machining operations using small quantities or lanthanides ; double-check that it works ; change the feedstock to use your "hot" material and hire some illegal immigrants to pour chemicals and drain vessels. When they die, bury the bodies somewhere quiet.
People who are going to build home-made nuclear weapons are unlikely to have high moral standards otherwise.
Actually, scrub the "home-made" in that previous sentence.
Our planet will continue to exist for about 5 billion years
There is considerable doubt about that, in the details. whether the Sun's expansion to a red giant will actually destroy the Earth is unsure. (It's not doubted that the planet will be roasted during this period.) When the Sun will expand to a red giant is considerably less certain, and it may be in as little as a couple of billion years.
Whether the Earth will survive that long... is less sure. Some modelling of the orbits of the inner planets carried out a few years ago (I should be able to find the reference if you're really interested) showed that there is a possibility for Venus and Mercury to get into a locked resonance which then involves Mars, from which point, Mars gets pulled into an Earth-crossing orbit and things get very messy until Jupiter gets involved and throws a planet or several out of the system. That happened in a few percent of their runs, IIRC.
In the nearer term I recently heard that Chiron (the large comet / minor planet between Saturn and Uranus) has an unstable orbit, and that it might become a short-period comet in a mere few hundred thousand years. While that's unlikely to actually destroy the Earth, having a 200km-diameter comet falling apart in the inner solar system is likely to have... unpleasant... consequences on Earth when the debris lands.
But by then, we should have got global warming under control. Or be extinct ; one or the other.
About 6-7 years ago, this was addressed by modelling by, IIRC, Canup-et-al from Colorado's SWRI. Feel free to read around the subject.
I enjoyed slapping my skull to dig several-year-old stuff out of long-term storage into working memory. My memory, on the other hand, doesn't like to be asked to justify it's existence.
If someone has insuffucient metaphorical testicles to put their own/.ID to their comments, then the really don't deserve more attention than a fart in the wind.
It is what "AC"-dom expects. And the gutless cowards deserve the contempt that accompanies their pathetic limp-dick-edness.
Braben (his huge contributions not withstanding) has to ask if his new game matches the original, or the new equivalent work-a-like, Oolite.
I played Elite in both solid and wire-frame versions from floppy. Braben's target is Oolite ; he has to beat that, not match it, to meet his prior status.
Or, after reading the NDA, Write Your Own Fucking Contract.
I don't know how/ if law works outside Europe, but you are employed by contract, and you have an explicit right to a written, signed copy of that contract. And that is what governs your relation with your employers (what isn't covered by statutory requirements which you cannot sign away).
('Schools that piloted the laptops found that students stayed engaged nad [sic] organized whiel [sic] boosting creativity,' according to the district's Success Stories),
[...]
In the past, the Lake Washington School District served as a Poster Child of sorts for Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group."
I'm envisaging one of those posters of some starving Ethiopian waif begging for edukashun dollarz. Is that the impression you get. Or... could it be... a school administrator so enamoured of the Ribbon interface on their Orifice2012 that they couldn't find the button for starting the spell checker?
I'm not sure what you're getting at. For the chemistry at the surface of a planet, then yes, you couldn't care less what's in the core ; but if you care about little things like having an atmosphere, then the core matters, because you need the mass to provide the gravity.
The composition of the Earth (and of all planets studied in any great detail) can be described to a reasonably good approximation by taking a nucleosynthesis distribution (i.e., what is produced when a supernova goes "bang" with around 10^50 J) and then removing all material with a boiling point below a value "X". If X <= 4K, then you get a gas giant like Jupiter (or another star). If 4 < X <= 100 (still in Kelvin), you'll lose most of the hydrogen and helium but get lots of water, carbon dioxide, methane and ammonia to form icy planetesimals (but smaller and smaller, because hydrogen / helium are more common than "ices"). If 100 < X <= [several hundred], you'll start losing the "ices" and getting increasingly rocky planets (but also a lot smaller, because "ices" are more common than "rock"). And for X > several thousand K, you boil away to vapour on any geologically significant timescale.
Surface elements do get segregated all the time. That's what the whole of "economic geology" is about - how metal (and non-metal) elements get concentrated, where, when , why, and how to find such deposits, and how to most efficiently exploit them. But it seemed that you were asking for a planet that was going to have lots of halogens, but relatively little of other "volatiles". You can't have that, because the processes that segregate elements during planetary formation are essentially physical ones (distillation / condensation in hard vacuum), not chemical ones.
So what would happen would be that your halogens would all rapidly react with metals in space to form salts (e.g. ferrous chloride), all of which are "rocky". That's going to happen in the tail processes of the supernova as the debris is flying away and cooling. Later (millions or billions of years later, when you're assembling planets from the debris, you're going to get more-or-less the same distribution of elements in all of your planets.
Which isn't to say that all planets are going to be the same. Just look at the inner solar system. But compositionally, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are all quite similar. The atmospheres are compositionally unimportant. (Earth's atmosphere is equivalent to approximately 10m of water over the entire surface, which I make to be around 5.1Ã--10^18kg, or about one millionth of the Earth's total mass. Venus is around 100 times richer in atmosphere, Mars about one hundredth as rich.)
Could you generate a planet with (say) a chlorine atmosphere? OK, here's a scenario : build a rocky planet with most of the metals safely wrapped up in several thousand kilometres thickness of silicates (to separate the nasty reactive metals from the nasty reactive chlorine atmosphere) ; now bombard your planet with "ice" asteroids to give it oceans like ours ; now bombard your planet with an asteroid of (I calculate) 106.785km radius composed of chlorine. Cue a planet with a chlorine atmosphere for Captain Kirk's green-skinned beastiality partners. One tiny problem - where did you get the chlorine asteroid from? That's probably the whole of the solar system's supply of chlorine, in one asteroid.
It's an interesting problem, but you come back to the basic reason that our biochemistry uses the elements that it does. We use the common elements in our environment for our bulk biochemistry and we only use the rare elements for fiddly little details. An early biochemistry that started by depending on (say) molybdenum and iodine for vital processes would maybe have stumbled on, randomly evolving until a variant developed which could use (say) iron in place of molybdenum and chlorine in place of iodine (both substitutions of a rare element for a more common one) , at which point the comparative abundance of the new substitutions would have allowed that variant to massively dominate over the rare-element species.
Slashdot Mirror
The gun-nuts of America are working on getting this pitiably poor record of massacres up to standard. there'll be a new massacre along soon, just as soon as someone gets hacked-off enough with life to take a new crack at the record.
I haven't heard of the UK's "999" being phased out, nor have I had the experience of accidentally dialling it while trying to unlock a phone. However, I have heard of cases where an excavator (American : "backhoe" ; UK : J.C.B. ; archaeologist's "big yellow trowel") has gone through a large phone cable, and while the repairs were being carried out hundreds of calls went to the emergency switchboard because of "make", [pause], "make", [pause], "make", "break", "make" sequences as te wires were reconnected "hot".
Yes, pulse dialling does still work. Pulse telephones do still exist, and do still work.
I suspect that someone has come up with a fix for this, since I've not heard of a repeat of the event since the early 2000s. But it is a distinct problem with "112" as an emergency number. Similarly however, the pulse train for "999" or "911" is considerably longer than that for "112". In short ... there isn't a simple, obvious solution.
No, the proper response is to nuke her from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Unfortunately gosh-darned anti-proliferation regulations restrict the availability of orbiting nukes to the cop in the mall.
... is to go and see what "Jesus & Mo" have got to say about it. http://www.jesusandmo.net/
Haven't the Iranians discovered the "ship" yet? "Delivery" is not the same as "rapid delivery".
Nope, I don't see that. Show at least some of your working.
You never changed wheels on a daisywheel printer to do itallics? "Line Printer" and "Dot Matrix Printer" may have been synonymous at your place of work in the dim and distant past, but that doesn't mean that your place of work was correct.
A properly malfunctioning line printer could spit it's chain through a wall. Daisywheels could spray "leaves" all over the room, and dot matrices are for poofs.
... for which it was optimised.
(I had contractors blaming their equipment's poor performance on frequency variations in the remote site's power supply ; once I told them that I was running a frequency sensor with a USB oscilloscope, they came up with a different story.)
And the military being able to get hold of enough military-grade chipsets when they need them.
My precise point.
As I understand it, during several of the recent Gulf Wars the military have had to use lots of civilian GPS systems because their suppliers couldn't crank out the military-grade systems fast enough, or at a low-enough cost. There is no reason to believe that the logistics will be any better for the future Gulf Wars.
Bloody Slashcode and it's inability to handle normal characters. Who the fuck thought it would be a good idea to restrict the character set to just ASCII?
Yes.
Simultaneously.
The wheel is a MÃbius band.
That said, even I wouldn't call the SNP themselves a racist organisation. There are certainly some thorough-going racist twats within the group, but not large numbers.
No, I haven't decided which way to vote in the independence referendum. I'm sure that it is galling to some of the Saltire-daubed hordes, but I do actually get a vote in the matter.
Reference please?
I've never heard that suggestion concerning Moore's beliefs. It would be true to say that we have no evidence as yet of the existence of life off the Earth, but that doesn't mean that it's impossible. And if it can happen once (it did ; we exist), then in a large universe it is pretty unlikely that it happened precisely once.
Do you think that that record is likely to ever be broken?
Actually, I retract the question : unless our species goes extinct within the next century (not a high likelihood outcome - a few percent probability), then I'd expect that eventually lifespans would increase considerably. Though whether those humanoids have things that are identifiably similar to "TV shows" or "presenters" ...
Probably for similar reasons, I've been suggesting for decades that the best place for the UK's nuclear waste repository would be under the Houses of Parliament.
The only way that one can have confidence that the politicians will pay adequately to maintain a repository is if the politicians are the ones who WILL die first, and that they KNOW it.
Politicians probably see it differently. But not being human, they don't get a vote.
. . . . which is why you get someone else to build the bomb for you.
No, seriously. Design your chemistry equipment and machining operations using small quantities or lanthanides ; double-check that it works ; change the feedstock to use your "hot" material and hire some illegal immigrants to pour chemicals and drain vessels. When they die, bury the bodies somewhere quiet.
People who are going to build home-made nuclear weapons are unlikely to have high moral standards otherwise.
Actually, scrub the "home-made" in that previous sentence.
A lot of it is glass shards. Very fine, as you say and very, very angular.
Americans, that is ; Though we do have "vaccine deniers" on this side of the pond, they are considered to be dribbling oxygen-thieves. Not even
There is considerable doubt about that, in the details. whether the Sun's expansion to a red giant will actually destroy the Earth is unsure. (It's not doubted that the planet will be roasted during this period.) When the Sun will expand to a red giant is considerably less certain, and it may be in as little as a couple of billion years.
Whether the Earth will survive that long ... is less sure. Some modelling of the orbits of the inner planets carried out a few years ago (I should be able to find the reference if you're really interested) showed that there is a possibility for Venus and Mercury to get into a locked resonance which then involves Mars, from which point, Mars gets pulled into an Earth-crossing orbit and things get very messy until Jupiter gets involved and throws a planet or several out of the system. That happened in a few percent of their runs, IIRC.
In the nearer term I recently heard that Chiron (the large comet / minor planet between Saturn and Uranus) has an unstable orbit, and that it might become a short-period comet in a mere few hundred thousand years. While that's unlikely to actually destroy the Earth, having a 200km-diameter comet falling apart in the inner solar system is likely to have ... unpleasant ... consequences on Earth when the debris lands.
But by then, we should have got global warming under control. Or be extinct ; one or the other.
About 6-7 years ago, this was addressed by modelling by, IIRC, Canup-et-al from Colorado's SWRI. Feel free to read around the subject. I enjoyed slapping my skull to dig several-year-old stuff out of long-term storage into working memory. My memory, on the other hand, doesn't like to be asked to justify it's existence.
If someone has insuffucient metaphorical testicles to put their own /.ID to their comments, then the really don't deserve more attention than a fart in the wind.
It is what "AC"-dom expects. And the gutless cowards deserve the contempt that accompanies their pathetic limp-dick-edness.
I played Elite in both solid and wire-frame versions from floppy. Braben's target is Oolite ; he has to beat that, not match it, to meet his prior status.
Or, after reading the NDA, Write Your Own Fucking Contract.
I don't know how/ if law works outside Europe, but you are employed by contract, and you have an explicit right to a written, signed copy of that contract. And that is what governs your relation with your employers (what isn't covered by statutory requirements which you cannot sign away).
But always, RTFC before signing. Always.
FTFY
I'm envisaging one of those posters of some starving Ethiopian waif begging for edukashun dollarz. Is that the impression you get. Or ... could it be ... a school administrator so enamoured of the Ribbon interface on their Orifice2012 that they couldn't find the button for starting the spell checker?
[self ... checks spelling]
The composition of the Earth (and of all planets studied in any great detail) can be described to a reasonably good approximation by taking a nucleosynthesis distribution (i.e., what is produced when a supernova goes "bang" with around 10^50 J) and then removing all material with a boiling point below a value "X". If X <= 4K, then you get a gas giant like Jupiter (or another star). If 4 < X <= 100 (still in Kelvin), you'll lose most of the hydrogen and helium but get lots of water, carbon dioxide, methane and ammonia to form icy planetesimals (but smaller and smaller, because hydrogen / helium are more common than "ices"). If 100 < X <= [several hundred], you'll start losing the "ices" and getting increasingly rocky planets (but also a lot smaller, because "ices" are more common than "rock"). And for X > several thousand K, you boil away to vapour on any geologically significant timescale.
Surface elements do get segregated all the time. That's what the whole of "economic geology" is about - how metal (and non-metal) elements get concentrated, where, when , why, and how to find such deposits, and how to most efficiently exploit them. But it seemed that you were asking for a planet that was going to have lots of halogens, but relatively little of other "volatiles". You can't have that, because the processes that segregate elements during planetary formation are essentially physical ones (distillation / condensation in hard vacuum), not chemical ones.
So what would happen would be that your halogens would all rapidly react with metals in space to form salts (e.g. ferrous chloride), all of which are "rocky". That's going to happen in the tail processes of the supernova as the debris is flying away and cooling. Later (millions or billions of years later, when you're assembling planets from the debris, you're going to get more-or-less the same distribution of elements in all of your planets.
Which isn't to say that all planets are going to be the same. Just look at the inner solar system. But compositionally, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are all quite similar. The atmospheres are compositionally unimportant. (Earth's atmosphere is equivalent to approximately 10m of water over the entire surface, which I make to be around 5.1Ã--10^18kg, or about one millionth of the Earth's total mass. Venus is around 100 times richer in atmosphere, Mars about one hundredth as rich.)
Could you generate a planet with (say) a chlorine atmosphere? OK, here's a scenario : build a rocky planet with most of the metals safely wrapped up in several thousand kilometres thickness of silicates (to separate the nasty reactive metals from the nasty reactive chlorine atmosphere) ; now bombard your planet with "ice" asteroids to give it oceans like ours ; now bombard your planet with an asteroid of (I calculate) 106.785km radius composed of chlorine. Cue a planet with a chlorine atmosphere for Captain Kirk's green-skinned beastiality partners. One tiny problem - where did you get the chlorine asteroid from? That's probably the whole of the solar system's supply of chlorine, in one asteroid.
It's an interesting problem, but you come back to the basic reason that our biochemistry uses the elements that it does. We use the common elements in our environment for our bulk biochemistry and we only use the rare elements for fiddly little details. An early biochemistry that started by depending on (say) molybdenum and iodine for vital processes would maybe have stumbled on, randomly evolving until a variant developed which could use (say) iron in place of molybdenum and chlorine in place of iodine (both substitutions of a rare element for a more common one) , at which point the comparative abundance of the new substitutions would have allowed that variant to massively dominate over the rare-element species.