Actually, in my experience, it's the sales / marketing / management who're considerably more likely to pass a Turing test than the coders, network dudes and so on (let's just admit to them being "nerds", for most normal values of "nerd"). Because, bizarre as it may seem, the liars, thieves and scoundrels that inhabit the S & MÂ parts of the world make their living by successfully lieing to and thieving from normal human beings. And that normally means fooling the normal human beings that the liar, thief or scoundrel is actually a real human being.
That amounts to passing the Turing test repeatedly, and is a selection pressure that the nerds don't face more than a few times (interview, breeding... speeding ticket?)
Where would the news, current affairs, documentaries, panel discussions, politics or theatre go if you wasted the radio channel time on music. You might have to make a second radio channel!
I'm pretty sure I saw the same problem on my Acer laptop until I fried it last week. The laptop, not the bug. Ctrl+Alt+F1 got me to a terminal where I could log in, and then... I can't remember if I had to shut down, or if I could re-enter the X session.
That machine was on Ubuntu-11 (Gibbering Gibbon or Masturbating Macaque, I can't bear to remember) with the standard desktop in place instead of the heap of shit that came in with the downgrade from 10 to 11.
Depth of investigation for a porosity tool is 10-20cm (varies with company, individual source and the PEF of the lithology. There is significant attenuation of signal with thick (2-3mm) barytes-rich mud cake, or a stand-off of more than a few cm. That's why LWD porosity (and density) sensors are on an upset on the collar, and on wireline they're on an eccentric knuckled part of the tool-string, offset by a caliper arm.
When you're QC-ing logs, you need to plot up the standoff. If they don't provide that curve, there is a smell of extremely dead rodent.
Resistivity tools can have depths of investigation up to several metres. If you believe some of the geosteering claims... up to 10m. Take a large pinch of halite.
[That anyone who loses a source should go to jail.]
I don't think it's too harsh at all. There are complex procedures for handling sources, with a lot of accompanying paperwork, because they ARE pretty dangerous, and IT IS NOT OBVIOUS that they are dangerous while they are doing you harm. They can kill you (it's difficult, but not impossible) and they can fairly easily injure you, but unlike a red-hot lump of coal, you can't see or feel the harm. Put it in your mouth and you won't feel an immediate urge to spit it out (yes, they are swallowable).
If some of the people handling the sources are not the sharpest knives in the drawer ("Co-Co" Ian, I'm thinking of you!), that is why source-handling courses are strict and thorough. If you really are dumb enough to not understand the courses, then you really SHOULD NOT BE HANDLING THEM. ("Co-Co", a classmate of mine at university, while held in derision by many of his colleagues, and definitely not a razor-sharp intellect, is still a 2-1 honours graduate and he does understand that the procedures are there for a good reason ; his breaking of procedure is through incompetence, failure of planning and inadequate memory, not utter stupidity.)
I'd go a step further : if a source gets lost like this, then not only should the person responsible go to jail, but the SUPERVISOR who assembled the crew responsible for the source should go to jail too. Someone fucked up on the rig (or road) clearly ; but someone CHOSE that crew to work together and didn't take proper account of the human factors within the crew. Which, unfortunately for "Co-Co", would mean that he'd struggle to find work, despite being a certified radiation worker. Which is a shame, because he's a nice guy. But if his colleagues who know his work better than I do, don't trust him, then he really shouldn't be juggling those sources.
Management don't give a shit about stuff until they are personally afraid of (1) getting caught and (2) paying a real penalty.
At a trade union conference once we had a presentation from a member of the (UK Government) Health and Safety Executive about their continuing campaign to try to push down the number of LOC incidents (Loss Of Containment - leaks of kilos or tonnes of flammable hydrocarbons) in the UK oilfield. That morning, the English courts had just jailed two directors of a building company who had caused the death of one of their workers. So I asked the talking head, "How do you feel about jailing directors." He tried to keep a straight face, and be politically correct, but you could tell that he (and the rest of the HSE "troops") liked the idea of jailing senior management for their failings. I assume that the government have sacked some of them, because still very few directors are in jail for killing their staff (many more are in jail for tax fraud). And LOCs continue to happen more frequently.
As I indicated up-thread, I don't think that (drilling logging) sources are screamingly dangerous (some NDT sources OTOH, are much more dangerous!). But they are definitely hazardous enough to warrant care and attention to detail. I know people who'd refuse to take a source-handling course (and thus become required to handle sources) because they think they're too dangerous. I'd do such a course if required (it's not ; not quite my game ; but I might plausibly change jobs). Then again, I'd also SCUBA dive solo, but with two independent air systems. I'm quite happy to accept risk, but I'm definitely aware that there is risk there.
Eartj will remain for a lot longer than the human race will... we are merelly destroying ourselves, not the planet we live in
In ancient times, the Conquering King said to the Conquered King "Look, my troops are burning your city to the ground!" The Conquered King retorted "Look, your troops are burning YOUR city to the ground!"
I think the original had Croesus (Mr "As rich as...") playing Conquered, but the story is probably older than that.
The sources used in wireline / LWD logging are moderately dangerous - I'd not carry one in my pocket - but not that bad. It's not like they're going to flay your flesh if you approach them closer than a kilometre.
When I have to do a site survey to check for background radiation (before doing pre- and post- job calibrations, before doing core-gamma), it's generally hard to tell where the transit container had sat on the catwalk just a couple of hours previously.
If you were talking about a source for radiography / NDT, then they can be a lot hotter (your comment is ambiguous, "testing" covers a lot of sins). But even so, for a flagrant routine abuser of the source-handling rules of my acquaintance, it still took years of him breaking the rules, leaving his radiation badge in the locker room, working un-logged overtime... He eventually died of cancer. But he'd built up the company and made 20-odd million quid selling it a couple of years before he died. The enquiries into his death lead to a considerable number of changes in the source-handling rules in the UK.
But even back in the bad old days of the 1980s, you'd not have got away with moving a source in an "unsecured canister" ; the source goes from the tool into the transit container (about 15kilos, mostly of lead) ; the transit container goes into the bunker (about 4 tonnes of steel and barytes-loaded cement, with an acoustic transponder, buoy and about 100m of free-running 1-tonne SWL buoyant line), then the bunker gets craned back to the radiation storage area. And when the source goes home (for calibration), the bunker goes over the side onto the boat (hence the anti-sinking provisions). When sources are transported around on road (there is some onshore oil here too), the same bunkers are used because they've got to be fit for the journey from harbour up to several hundred miles by road to the field base. Besides, trucks do go off bridges from time to time.
I had to do some of the paperwork for moving sources around onshore in Africa earlier this year. Explosives too. That required one truck for the sources (and explosives ; the sources bunker is proof against more explosives than inside the explosives bunker, even without the intervening bunker walls), and a second truck for the half-dozen soldiers. Then, because of the fuel supply problems, a third truck with fuel for the journey. And finally, once the bunkers had got to the site, the keys could be hand-carried to the site. Those are rules mostly demanded by America, so I assume that the same rules apply within America too?
It's such a pain in the arse moving sources these days (under USA political rules, not radiation safety rules) that all of the MWD companies are developing electronically controlled neutron sources that are "cold" until turned on, and go cold again an hour or so after being turned off. We still have to use radioactive sources for the bulk density though.
Which reminds me - I've got several pieces of uranium and thorium-rich minerals in the rock collection, and a Geiger counter to repair!
If we could assemble all electronics with gold plated connectors the world would have a lot less shorts, fires, computer failures, etc.
Hmmm, almost completely the opposite of my experience.
Just how is introducing a better conductor where a conductor SHOULD be is going to prevent a short circuit ( the presence of a low resistance path between points which should have an extremely high resistance between them - up to the breakdown electric field of the dielectric medium)?
Electrical fires, the ones that I've had to put out (and on occasions, have started myself, by abusing equipment shamelessly) are generally the result of deliberate or accidental abuse of the equipment, leading to excessive current draw and then overheating of the flex leading to the equipment. THAT is why every electrical circuit on installed to our standards (I don't know where you are, or what standards your electricians are meant to work to) has a fuse or circuit breaker installed on it. The fuse (or circuit breaker) is NOT there to protect the equipment ; it's purpose is to stop the cable overheating (both the flexible consumer cable for portable equipment, and the cabling within walls). I have seen one fire trying to start (I found the circuit breaker and killed the circuit before it got going) at a connector, but on examination the pin of the plug hadn't been tightened up sufficiently, had worked loose, and the cable was in intermittent contact with the pin ; gold plating wouldn't have helped that, I'm afraid - it needed competent installation. (That circuit breaker was a non-RCD 50A breaker feeding a cable rated for 26A and a 40A shower ; the amateur electrician who wired up that hotel extension was a dangerous idiot who did not understand what the fuck he was doing. He'd also installed his own gas heater, and I'm pretty sure it was giving us carbon monoxide poisoning. We moved the fuck out that evening, and reported the twat to the local fire department.)
Computer failures.... well, you might be on better ground here. Most of my wiring work (a dozen instrumentation cabins reading around 100 sensors apiece, plus maintenance of same, most circuits being in normally-explosive atmospheres) has been with analogue signals (1-10V 4-wire and 4-20mA loops mostly) and some digital signals (up to a few hundred hertz), and there, appropriate use of good quality connectors does save a ship-load of hassle, by reducing contact noise. Inside a computer... well I've built enough industrial computers to have no illusion about the importance of clamping your connectors down, tight, locking your cards into the cages. If you don't, you are going to get trouble you don't need. But once you've done that... gold plating isn't going to make a huge difference. Silver would be better, conduction wise, and soft enough that the contacts will be good. Any competent instrument technician cleans contacts before making them up, so who gives a shit about corrosion? It's a piece of marketing bullshit.
There are perfectly good reasons for gold-plating - principally to reduce contact noise in analogue circuits and I'd include it for frequently-operated contacts (keyboard switches, limit switches, position indicating switches). But the reasons you cite are not good reasons for specifying gold-plating over competent installation. A gold-plated death-trap remains a death trap.
Many industrial diamonds are manufactured, not mined, but by no means all. Natural diamond can easily be twice the hardness of artificial diamond (and therefore up to five or six times the hardness of, say, synthetic corundum). Toughness is another issue - which is not the same as hardness.
PDC (polycrystalline diamond compact) drilling bits are common and popular - probably "dominant" - in deep rock drilling, but for extremely hard formations "natural diamond" drill bits are often preferred. I've run one natural diamond bit for 10 days on-bottom, drilling alternating granite and sandstone. It looked almost like new when we had to pull it (other tools had broken). The PDC we replaced it with lasted just a couple of days and died on the next granite.
The cost of verifying the quality is that of several seconds work and about a hundred beers at a bar (£300~350 here) of resistance meter. What you get charged is something different. (Bear in mind that you also need to pay for the tester's experience and understanding ; not necessarily cheap. I'm not a gemmologist or jeweller, but I know enough about mineralogy to realise that it's not as simple as it looks.)
There are a huge number of scammers in the "cash-for-gold" game. Use the high street and get competing quotes from the 3 oldest jewellers in town, who have a local reputation to maintain. Then, if you can beat that price, go for it.
If you're in the UK, the next time I'm melting down lead for diving weights, I'll melt out some of the diamond-coated tungsten carbide blocks from my existing weights. I've got a couple of kilos, containing maybe a gramme or two of diamond.
(For rock drilling, tungsten-carbide "cutters" are coated with synthetic diamond to create "Poly-crystalline Diamond Compacts" or "PDC" bits ; the cutters are then rigidly mounted in a machined steel "matrix" that channels the flow of drilling fluid and cuttings away from the working face of the bit. When these cutters break off, or the matrix comes in contact with the rock and is torn to dust, the "cutters" (a.k.a "compacts" ; I think different companies use different names ; bit selection is a someone-else problem) can be left loose on the bottom of the hole, and tend to destroy the next bit sent down the hole (change out cost ~$200,000 in machinery and personnel rental ; bits are a trivial $30,000 to $150,000), so "junk baskets" are generally run to try to collect the fragments. I have to extract the cutters from the rest of the junk, count them, and we try to work out if we've got everything out of the hole. I used to keep the pieces, as being interesting materials. And at 1.5 times the density of lead alone, they're good additions to my diving weights.)
FYI, the diamond is grown in situ on the surface of the WC cutters. The processes used vary, if you believe the manufacturer's blurb, but are variants of vapour deposition. The diamond isn't available separately.
The four C's. Cut, Color, Clarity, and Carat Weight.
... are only relevant for the dull and boring "decorative" or jewellery diamond industry. These factors are completely irrelevant for the far more interesting diamonds which contain inclusions that can tell us about the deep history of the planet.
Oh, what's this in the corner of my wallet? A 0.5 carat diamond. Meh.
I'm a geologist. To me, diamonds are terribly interesting and valuable. I can't see why people ruin them by cutting them up, destroying their idoemorphic crystal forms and fascinating growth textures and replacing them with flat polished planes. A complete waste.
Going back to the original subject... I thought from the headline that this might be Popigai. When the confirmation of the structure as an astrobleme ("astrobleme" is correct ; TFS is wrong) came through in the mid-'90s, presence of micro-diamond was one of the cited pieces of evidence. I did wonder then if this could be from the basement. Seems so. But there were enough other indications of extreme strains and high pressures that the diagnosis didn't rely on the micro-diamond.
I still want to see a kimberlite eruption. From a suitably large distance.
Some microwave frequencies are (well) absorbed by (liquid) water. "Microwave" is a fairly broad church of electromagnetic radiation.
What makes microwave ovens useful and the potential of these weapons ideas interesting is the fact that living organisms are, as Bender would put it, bags of dirty water with occasionally lumps of soft rock. We are such dirty water because water is a common material in our environment (what do you build *anything* from? You build it from something that is common in the appropriate environment. In Scotland, we build houses out of stone and small amounts of dead trees; in England, you build houses out of baked mud and larger amounts of dead trees; in New England you build houses out of dead trees and small amounts of minerals ; on Earth, you build life out of dirty water and small amounts of minerals. "D'oh ! ")
Unfortunately, the environmental water makes it hard to target the dirty water which comprises your target audience. Bit of a problem that.
I'd not be terribly surprised if they'd made a version that is strongly absorbed by the pigment melanin - just as a technology demonstrator. Then you could incinerate people of African descent, badly burn people of Chinese and Indo-Pakistani-Arab descent, hurt gingers and freckly gimps, and not harm rednecks at all. That would be very popular. Then the politically correct parts of the Army bureaucracy would bury the project. (WikiLeaks probably has the files already, for when Assange's death-by-public-torture is started.)
Oh, hang on - they've already done a Laser (not Maser) version of such a device - they use it for burning warts and skin cancers.
Didn't we have that conversation a few years ago with the fuss over the iPood?
It was an Australian camping company's shit-hole shovel, with a compact folding design and a receptacle for arse-wipe paper. All in all, a good piece of design. So, Apple are obviously going to produce their own copycat design, aren't they?
(Incidentally, the Scum (one of Murdoch's arse-wipe UK newspapers) for once failed to live down to their normal standard of reporting in the story that ElReg link to from the main story above ; they didn't pay the poor girl to pose topless and covered in shit. Or, perhaps they did, but had a rare attack of taste.)
Following the demands of our corporate sponsors, may I introduce you to our new range of 21st century children. Trained throughout their formative years to be good corporate citizens, these children can be relied on to (1) not ask questions they're not told to ask ; (2) swallow on demand (your demand, and you do know what I imply) ; (3) buy buy buy when the stimulus is sent through authorised channels ; (4) pay pay pay on demand (your demand).
We, the corporate sponsors of Nu-Educashun(TM); , can certify these children to be free from all disturbing thoughts and ideas, and you can decide what your future customers will consider to be "disturbing" ! (Rates per meme per child are available from our marketing department, on sanguine signature of an eternal non-disclosure agreement. Reduced rates for orders of over a million child minds.) Our list of corporate sponsors includes many of the world's biggest corporations, so get in there before your competitors cut you off at the pass by having us indoctrinate your next generation of potential customers before they get into the marketplace.
Special rate in this election year for political parties!!
I was wondering what it's recent history had been. The last time I knew anyone who worked there, it was a UK company. But that was a good few years ago.
Apple may have responsibility for all sorts of evilnesses, but what their customers choose to do with their hardware isn't one of their legitimate concerns.
I heard that someone once watched kiddy porn on their Apple device, then went out and raped a granny with their iSomething. Clearly that is Steve Jobs fault. We'd better exhume his ass and have him hung drawn and quartered. From orbit. It's the only way to be sure. (Or was it the "Waz" iSteve who died recently ; I've forgotten. Still, it's close enough for the execution industry.)
The mouse and keyboard paradigm survives because it works really well. Touch as an adjunct to that is awesome.
... as my favourite computing device of all time, the Psion 5, ably demonstrated.
They stopped making the Psion 5 series in about 2000 ; you can't even get them from ebaY now (There were a couple of technical problems - rather delicate screens and a flexible cable that dies after a few 10s of thousands of openings - that have steadily eaten the ebaY supply of unwanted gifts etc.)
What is this thing called progress? Can we have some, please?
I can't see the leap of logic from where we were to a "business decision". What on earth would I want to get involved in business for? That's a Someone Else's Problem.
Slashdot Mirror
That amounts to passing the Turing test repeatedly, and is a selection pressure that the nerds don't face more than a few times (interview, breeding ... speeding ticket?)
Where would the news, current affairs, documentaries, panel discussions, politics or theatre go if you wasted the radio channel time on music. You might have to make a second radio channel!
That machine was on Ubuntu-11 (Gibbering Gibbon or Masturbating Macaque, I can't bear to remember) with the standard desktop in place instead of the heap of shit that came in with the downgrade from 10 to 11.
Ah, I bet that you whistled-up fax machines and told them to print 100 blank pages when you were a kid.
I get paid to know about these things. Shocking, but true!
When you're QC-ing logs, you need to plot up the standoff. If they don't provide that curve, there is a smell of extremely dead rodent.
Resistivity tools can have depths of investigation up to several metres. If you believe some of the geosteering claims ... up to 10m. Take a large pinch of halite.
[That anyone who loses a source should go to jail.]
I don't think it's too harsh at all. There are complex procedures for handling sources, with a lot of accompanying paperwork, because they ARE pretty dangerous, and IT IS NOT OBVIOUS that they are dangerous while they are doing you harm. They can kill you (it's difficult, but not impossible) and they can fairly easily injure you, but unlike a red-hot lump of coal, you can't see or feel the harm. Put it in your mouth and you won't feel an immediate urge to spit it out (yes, they are swallowable).
If some of the people handling the sources are not the sharpest knives in the drawer ("Co-Co" Ian, I'm thinking of you!), that is why source-handling courses are strict and thorough. If you really are dumb enough to not understand the courses, then you really SHOULD NOT BE HANDLING THEM. ("Co-Co", a classmate of mine at university, while held in derision by many of his colleagues, and definitely not a razor-sharp intellect, is still a 2-1 honours graduate and he does understand that the procedures are there for a good reason ; his breaking of procedure is through incompetence, failure of planning and inadequate memory, not utter stupidity.)
I'd go a step further : if a source gets lost like this, then not only should the person responsible go to jail, but the SUPERVISOR who assembled the crew responsible for the source should go to jail too. Someone fucked up on the rig (or road) clearly ; but someone CHOSE that crew to work together and didn't take proper account of the human factors within the crew. Which, unfortunately for "Co-Co", would mean that he'd struggle to find work, despite being a certified radiation worker. Which is a shame, because he's a nice guy. But if his colleagues who know his work better than I do, don't trust him, then he really shouldn't be juggling those sources.
Management don't give a shit about stuff until they are personally afraid of (1) getting caught and (2) paying a real penalty.
At a trade union conference once we had a presentation from a member of the (UK Government) Health and Safety Executive about their continuing campaign to try to push down the number of LOC incidents (Loss Of Containment - leaks of kilos or tonnes of flammable hydrocarbons) in the UK oilfield. That morning, the English courts had just jailed two directors of a building company who had caused the death of one of their workers. So I asked the talking head, "How do you feel about jailing directors." He tried to keep a straight face, and be politically correct, but you could tell that he (and the rest of the HSE "troops") liked the idea of jailing senior management for their failings. I assume that the government have sacked some of them, because still very few directors are in jail for killing their staff (many more are in jail for tax fraud). And LOCs continue to happen more frequently.
As I indicated up-thread, I don't think that (drilling logging) sources are screamingly dangerous (some NDT sources OTOH, are much more dangerous!). But they are definitely hazardous enough to warrant care and attention to detail. I know people who'd refuse to take a source-handling course (and thus become required to handle sources) because they think they're too dangerous. I'd do such a course if required (it's not ; not quite my game ; but I might plausibly change jobs). Then again, I'd also SCUBA dive solo, but with two independent air systems. I'm quite happy to accept risk, but I'm definitely aware that there is risk there.
In ancient times, the Conquering King said to the Conquered King "Look, my troops are burning your city to the ground!" The Conquered King retorted "Look, your troops are burning YOUR city to the ground!"
I think the original had Croesus (Mr "As rich as ...") playing Conquered, but the story is probably older than that.
When I have to do a site survey to check for background radiation (before doing pre- and post- job calibrations, before doing core-gamma), it's generally hard to tell where the transit container had sat on the catwalk just a couple of hours previously.
If you were talking about a source for radiography / NDT, then they can be a lot hotter (your comment is ambiguous, "testing" covers a lot of sins). But even so, for a flagrant routine abuser of the source-handling rules of my acquaintance, it still took years of him breaking the rules, leaving his radiation badge in the locker room, working un-logged overtime ... He eventually died of cancer. But he'd built up the company and made 20-odd million quid selling it a couple of years before he died. The enquiries into his death lead to a considerable number of changes in the source-handling rules in the UK.
But even back in the bad old days of the 1980s, you'd not have got away with moving a source in an "unsecured canister" ; the source goes from the tool into the transit container (about 15kilos, mostly of lead) ; the transit container goes into the bunker (about 4 tonnes of steel and barytes-loaded cement, with an acoustic transponder, buoy and about 100m of free-running 1-tonne SWL buoyant line), then the bunker gets craned back to the radiation storage area. And when the source goes home (for calibration), the bunker goes over the side onto the boat (hence the anti-sinking provisions). When sources are transported around on road (there is some onshore oil here too), the same bunkers are used because they've got to be fit for the journey from harbour up to several hundred miles by road to the field base. Besides, trucks do go off bridges from time to time.
I had to do some of the paperwork for moving sources around onshore in Africa earlier this year. Explosives too. That required one truck for the sources (and explosives ; the sources bunker is proof against more explosives than inside the explosives bunker, even without the intervening bunker walls), and a second truck for the half-dozen soldiers. Then, because of the fuel supply problems, a third truck with fuel for the journey. And finally, once the bunkers had got to the site, the keys could be hand-carried to the site. Those are rules mostly demanded by America, so I assume that the same rules apply within America too?
It's such a pain in the arse moving sources these days (under USA political rules, not radiation safety rules) that all of the MWD companies are developing electronically controlled neutron sources that are "cold" until turned on, and go cold again an hour or so after being turned off. We still have to use radioactive sources for the bulk density though.
Which reminds me - I've got several pieces of uranium and thorium-rich minerals in the rock collection, and a Geiger counter to repair!
Hmmm, almost completely the opposite of my experience.
Just how is introducing a better conductor where a conductor SHOULD be is going to prevent a short circuit ( the presence of a low resistance path between points which should have an extremely high resistance between them - up to the breakdown electric field of the dielectric medium)?
Electrical fires, the ones that I've had to put out (and on occasions, have started myself, by abusing equipment shamelessly) are generally the result of deliberate or accidental abuse of the equipment, leading to excessive current draw and then overheating of the flex leading to the equipment. THAT is why every electrical circuit on installed to our standards (I don't know where you are, or what standards your electricians are meant to work to) has a fuse or circuit breaker installed on it. The fuse (or circuit breaker) is NOT there to protect the equipment ; it's purpose is to stop the cable overheating (both the flexible consumer cable for portable equipment, and the cabling within walls). I have seen one fire trying to start (I found the circuit breaker and killed the circuit before it got going) at a connector, but on examination the pin of the plug hadn't been tightened up sufficiently, had worked loose, and the cable was in intermittent contact with the pin ; gold plating wouldn't have helped that, I'm afraid - it needed competent installation. (That circuit breaker was a non-RCD 50A breaker feeding a cable rated for 26A and a 40A shower ; the amateur electrician who wired up that hotel extension was a dangerous idiot who did not understand what the fuck he was doing. He'd also installed his own gas heater, and I'm pretty sure it was giving us carbon monoxide poisoning. We moved the fuck out that evening, and reported the twat to the local fire department.)
Computer failures .... well, you might be on better ground here. Most of my wiring work (a dozen instrumentation cabins reading around 100 sensors apiece, plus maintenance of same, most circuits being in normally-explosive atmospheres) has been with analogue signals (1-10V 4-wire and 4-20mA loops mostly) and some digital signals (up to a few hundred hertz), and there, appropriate use of good quality connectors does save a ship-load of hassle, by reducing contact noise. Inside a computer ... well I've built enough industrial computers to have no illusion about the importance of clamping your connectors down, tight, locking your cards into the cages. If you don't, you are going to get trouble you don't need. But once you've done that ... gold plating isn't going to make a huge difference. Silver would be better, conduction wise, and soft enough that the contacts will be good. Any competent instrument technician cleans contacts before making them up, so who gives a shit about corrosion? It's a piece of marketing bullshit.
There are perfectly good reasons for gold-plating - principally to reduce contact noise in analogue circuits and I'd include it for frequently-operated contacts (keyboard switches, limit switches, position indicating switches). But the reasons you cite are not good reasons for specifying gold-plating over competent installation. A gold-plated death-trap remains a death trap.
PDC (polycrystalline diamond compact) drilling bits are common and popular - probably "dominant" - in deep rock drilling, but for extremely hard formations "natural diamond" drill bits are often preferred. I've run one natural diamond bit for 10 days on-bottom, drilling alternating granite and sandstone. It looked almost like new when we had to pull it (other tools had broken). The PDC we replaced it with lasted just a couple of days and died on the next granite.
There are a huge number of scammers in the "cash-for-gold" game. Use the high street and get competing quotes from the 3 oldest jewellers in town, who have a local reputation to maintain. Then, if you can beat that price, go for it.
Why swear when you can just answer the questions in a variety of languages until the machine's brain explodes. The machine can't tell the difference.
(For rock drilling, tungsten-carbide "cutters" are coated with synthetic diamond to create "Poly-crystalline Diamond Compacts" or "PDC" bits ; the cutters are then rigidly mounted in a machined steel "matrix" that channels the flow of drilling fluid and cuttings away from the working face of the bit. When these cutters break off, or the matrix comes in contact with the rock and is torn to dust, the "cutters" (a.k.a "compacts" ; I think different companies use different names ; bit selection is a someone-else problem) can be left loose on the bottom of the hole, and tend to destroy the next bit sent down the hole (change out cost ~$200,000 in machinery and personnel rental ; bits are a trivial $30,000 to $150,000), so "junk baskets" are generally run to try to collect the fragments. I have to extract the cutters from the rest of the junk, count them, and we try to work out if we've got everything out of the hole. I used to keep the pieces, as being interesting materials. And at 1.5 times the density of lead alone, they're good additions to my diving weights.)
FYI, the diamond is grown in situ on the surface of the WC cutters. The processes used vary, if you believe the manufacturer's blurb, but are variants of vapour deposition. The diamond isn't available separately.
... are only relevant for the dull and boring "decorative" or jewellery diamond industry. These factors are completely irrelevant for the far more interesting diamonds which contain inclusions that can tell us about the deep history of the planet.
Oh, what's this in the corner of my wallet? A 0.5 carat diamond. Meh.
I'm a geologist. To me, diamonds are terribly interesting and valuable. I can't see why people ruin them by cutting them up, destroying their idoemorphic crystal forms and fascinating growth textures and replacing them with flat polished planes. A complete waste.
Going back to the original subject ... I thought from the headline that this might be Popigai. When the confirmation of the structure as an astrobleme ("astrobleme" is correct ; TFS is wrong) came through in the mid-'90s, presence of micro-diamond was one of the cited pieces of evidence. I did wonder then if this could be from the basement. Seems so. But there were enough other indications of extreme strains and high pressures that the diagnosis didn't rely on the micro-diamond.
I still want to see a kimberlite eruption. From a suitably large distance.
Some microwave frequencies are (well) absorbed by (liquid) water. "Microwave" is a fairly broad church of electromagnetic radiation.
What makes microwave ovens useful and the potential of these weapons ideas interesting is the fact that living organisms are, as Bender would put it, bags of dirty water with occasionally lumps of soft rock. We are such dirty water because water is a common material in our environment (what do you build *anything* from? You build it from something that is common in the appropriate environment. In Scotland, we build houses out of stone and small amounts of dead trees; in England, you build houses out of baked mud and larger amounts of dead trees; in New England you build houses out of dead trees and small amounts of minerals ; on Earth, you build life out of dirty water and small amounts of minerals. "D'oh ! ")
Unfortunately, the environmental water makes it hard to target the dirty water which comprises your target audience. Bit of a problem that.
I'd not be terribly surprised if they'd made a version that is strongly absorbed by the pigment melanin - just as a technology demonstrator. Then you could incinerate people of African descent, badly burn people of Chinese and Indo-Pakistani-Arab descent, hurt gingers and freckly gimps, and not harm rednecks at all. That would be very popular. Then the politically correct parts of the Army bureaucracy would bury the project. (WikiLeaks probably has the files already, for when Assange's death-by-public-torture is started.)
Oh, hang on - they've already done a Laser (not Maser) version of such a device - they use it for burning warts and skin cancers.
It was an Australian camping company's shit-hole shovel, with a compact folding design and a receptacle for arse-wipe paper. All in all, a good piece of design. So, Apple are obviously going to produce their own copycat design, aren't they?
(Incidentally, the Scum (one of Murdoch's arse-wipe UK newspapers) for once failed to live down to their normal standard of reporting in the story that ElReg link to from the main story above ; they didn't pay the poor girl to pose topless and covered in shit. Or, perhaps they did, but had a rare attack of taste.)
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Our list of corporate sponsors includes many of the world's biggest corporations, so get in there before your competitors cut you off at the pass by having us indoctrinate your next generation of potential customers before they get into the marketplace.
Special rate in this election year for political parties!!
If only it weren't true.
I was wondering what it's recent history had been. The last time I knew anyone who worked there, it was a UK company. But that was a good few years ago.
I heard that someone once watched kiddy porn on their Apple device, then went out and raped a granny with their iSomething. Clearly that is Steve Jobs fault. We'd better exhume his ass and have him hung drawn and quartered. From orbit. It's the only way to be sure. (Or was it the "Waz" iSteve who died recently ; I've forgotten. Still, it's close enough for the execution industry.)
They stopped making the Psion 5 series in about 2000 ; you can't even get them from ebaY now (There were a couple of technical problems - rather delicate screens and a flexible cable that dies after a few 10s of thousands of openings - that have steadily eaten the ebaY supply of unwanted gifts etc.)
What is this thing called progress? Can we have some, please?
I thought that it was two wrecked power grids, not one? A 50 Hz standard one and an American- standard one.
So, you failed that class then?
I can't see the leap of logic from where we were to a "business decision". What on earth would I want to get involved in business for? That's a Someone Else's Problem.
Jesus could write? Unlikely.