These drugs are all dangerous and have side effects which the companies would prefer not to mention.
Drug companies would claim that this applies to all substances, and then cite Paraclesius' dictum from about 500 years ago that "all things are a poison, the matter is in the dose" (I forget the exact quote, which was probably in Latin anyway). But some substances are worse than others, and DHMO is a case in point. This chemical imitation of a naturally occurring material has a terrible safety record. Every cancer victim - and I do mean every victim - whose case has been investigated, has been found to have been using DHMO either as a component of their medication package or in an off-label use. It's a terrible perversion of a natural compound which can be had just by taking it from the environment, but the chemical companies want us to spend huge amounts on after it's been filtered, distilled, stained with other chemicals then bleached or steamed clean. Some chemical companies even make it by "direct synthesis" from the elements (this is a technology NASA apparently use, at gigantic pork-barrel expenses)! It's all part of a conspiracy of silence. Everyone in the medical arena is trying to cover up this compound's terrible effects, except the homeopaths, who would never offer homeopathic DHMO, even if it were diluted to the extent that not one molecule of the original DHMO were present in the whole accursed bottle.
Try researching DHMO and you'll find that it's bad reputation has been successfully cleared from the internet. It's terrible stuff.
2009, energy and mechanics analysis of 14 dinosaurs indicates possibility of warm-blooded
In 2009, something was reported that supported a position that a large majority of people in the field had accepted was probably correct in 1989... impressive.
I was watching a crab hunt a rat last night, and I was thinking... "Darwin would have found this fascinating." It's only another example of a principle that has been generally accepted for 150 years.
What's the other one... another open door. I'll read it if I have time and inclination.
You say there's a debate. So where are your references strongly supporting the case that (non-avian) dinosaurs were poikilothermic and ectothermic? That's the area that would deliver interesting results.
But the evidence that all our favourite childhood dinosaurs were warm blooded is very recent, many in the last two years;
Wow ; that's some latency you've got there. You wrote that post in what? 1979? And it's taken 30-odd years to get through the "tubes" to appear on Slashdot. Impressive connection you've got there.
(I am a geologist, and like many of my colleagues, I've been paying attention to the "hot or not" debate for all of these decades, since I was a geology student in senior school. And Bob Bakker may be an ass, but that doesn't necessarily make him either entirely right or entirely wrong.)
Can I borrow your time machine? There's an empty Archaeopteryx egg preserved in an airfall tuff somewhere, and I want that chick!
Not everybody, which is why I checked before working too hard on a joke about not gaining the power to climb walls and squirt webs, but instead to smell capricious and fuck anything that moves and some things that don't move.
Suppose an alga with a gene containing an "unnatural" aminoacid escapes the enclosure and start multiplying (thus producing more of that unnatural aminoacid).
Woah there!
Your second phrase requires an organism significantly different to the one described in your first phrase.
Specifically you are assuming that the use of a novel amino acid (or any other particular molecule) necessarily implies that that organism has the entire set of biochemical pathways and control genetics to manufacture that molecule from scratch.
Since you're talking about an engineered organism, then it takes deliberate and quite substantial effort to fit those new biochemical pathways into your organism.
I'm trying to think of a car analogy. OK, here's one. It's a century ago ; you have a steam-powered car that burns a slurry of coal dust (from the county next door) in vegetable oil (from the farmer over the hill). It works ; it does things ; great ; fine ; marvellous. Now you engineer a change and add an engine that has combustion take place in the expansion cylinders of your steam engine, and need no external boiler. BUT, it requires a processed consumable which has to be imported from a mistrustful monarchy on the other side of the world. You then make all sorts of incremental changes to your vehicle with an "internal combustion engine", but you still have no mechanism in your usage environment for manufacturing the essential new fuel. The fuel has become an external dependency.
Substitute C.elegans for the steam car ; the new amino acid for the petroleum... and your new organism has a problem analogous to developing the entire hydrocarbon industry, from seismic prospecting to an infrastructure for distributing the processed chemical. And it's got to do this in the teeth of intense competition from it's immediate neighbours. (Remember Darwin's point that your closest competitors are most likely to be your closest relatives, because both their needs and their capabilities are most similar to yours.)
An alternative viewpoint... say the design of the new bio-laser powered shark derived with this wonderful new amino acid technology does contain all the biochemistry necessary to manufacture the amino acids... but it requires molybdenum in gram/day quantities. Great ; you again have hard-to-get round dependencies built into your new organism. Pat on the back!
(I was toying with pink flamingos as an analogy. They get their pink colour from crustacean shell pigments manufactured by their food (shrimps). Feed them on budgie food and they could be perfectly healthy, but not pink.)
FYI : molybdenum is a bioactive metal, and might actually be an essential human nutrient. It's no great problem to fall into these dependencies accidentally.
Though IMO the real issue is with the ethernet gear rather than the serial gear. They decided to use the same connectors as phone systems yet afaict they didn't require ethernet equipment to survive connection to a phone line.
Fair point - I'd forgotten that RJ-45s were originally phone equpment, at least in some other countries. I can't think of having seen one on a phone that wasn't an IP phone... nope ; still can't. But I can remember seeing RJ-11s on American vessels, which caused no end of trouble, in both directions.
So, I guess RJ-45s were for esoteric things like multiple line telephones, or receptionist's mini-switchboards?
I think you'll find out that it was the Poles who found out that the Enigma code system could be easily broken (for many values of "easy"). They gave the recipe to the British, via IIRC the French during the "Phony War" (which wasn't very phony, for the Poles).
With most neo-Nazis the distinction is that it's the people with brown skin who are stealing the jobs from the people with white skin, nothing more subtle than that.
Try working in the Middle East, or Africa some time. People with one shade of brown skin are perfectly capable of being deeply prejudiced against people with a different shade of brown skin. Or, for that matter, against people with an identical shade of brown skin and a different but intelligible dialect. Or a whiter shade of brown skin. Or people with the same shade of skin and the same dialect, but from the wrong side of the village.
It is a sad but true fact that Homo sapiens (so-called) seems to be genetically or socially pre-disposed to be afraid of (and therefore hostile to) "the other". And if there is no visible ground for distinction, one will be invented.
Anyone want to watch "West Side Story" in a slightly different light?
Bottom of the barrel staff are cheap. Add the cost of (say) 2.5 fried bar code scanners per barrel-scraping per year, plus the wasted time (the barrel-scraping's time ; your time ; the POS-out-of-service time) to the cost of the barrel-scrapings. Then compare it to the cost of you writing appropriate manuals, the company training X people per store/ city/ state/ hemisphere/ whatever to do the installations properly...
I'm sorry, did you just morph into being a cross between Cost Accountant and Human Remains Mangler? Well that's one way into management. Enjoy the descent, because you're not going to come back uponce you start on that slippery slope.
Good luck, BTW, in changing that system for one that suits your design ethic better. You are already in a business where quantity is far more important than quality, so if you're worrying about quality issues like this, then you're probably in the wrong business (for you).
Ignoring that, it's still silly to use such a connector, because it's so easy to short (the pins are too close and it's too easy to get something conductive to bridge them).
People have been successfully using this sort of equipment for longer than I've been alive.
I've sucessfully used this sort of equipment on a number of occasions after having been told precisely "there were never any manuals ; figure it out yourself ; multi-meter is over there".
The equipment isn't a problem.
So, if the equipment isn't a problem, and the presence or absence of a manual isn't a problem... perhaps the problem is in the skill set of the technicians or end-users doing the installations. Since you've identified a problem, and you have worked out the ultimate cause of the problem, then you can deliver your manager an estimate of the cost of this documentation/ training failure and an estimate of the costs of rectifying this. Or of not rectifying this.
Ball is in your court. Train your people better (which means that you WTFM(*) yourself, because you seem to understand the issue). Or replace the equipment with something else. Or live with the costs. Give your supervisor the information to make an informed rational management decision (ha!) on the matter.
I hated installing those cables. But once I understood the problem, looked at the alternatives, did the sums... and got on with doing the job because it was the lowest cost solution, while WTFM.
It could have been worse - the customers might have wanted the colour display, which involved 4 cables, which had to take the shortest route (over the sea) in armoured quad-coax, and which was IIRC £60/day more expensive. "Fun" is not an appropriate word.
"No" doesn't earn (or, in a sane universe, deserve) up-moderation.
I've dealt with many people of "very fixed opinions" over the years, and while there is almost never any use in wasting fingertip skin and electrons answering the questions for them, there is often a useful, from my point of view "desirable" by product of informing and educating the silent audience.
In this case, it seems there was a genuine question, and my CCD (Creation Cretin Detector) fired off a bit too sensitively. Sorry about that. Happens sometimes.
So, your PhD(religion) source has had his (or her) credibility seriously dented. I'll count that as a positive result.
Literature... Ah, that can definitely wait until after supper...
Literature relating to this specific subject.
Well, as an interested (but light-pollution hampered) amateur astronomer, I've known about the Martian meteorites for longer than I care to remember. Looking at MacKay et al's 1996 "Martian fossils" paper and references therein (McKay, D. et al. 1996. Search for Past Life on Mars: Possible Relic Biogenic Activity in Martian Meteorite AL84001. Science: 273. 924-930.) will give you a paper trail into how the identity of the Martian meteorites was established, and into the transfer mechanisms. (Sorry, but I assume that you've got access to a library. It takes time and costs money, but all study does. A good correspondence university science course will likely include good-value online access to "the literature". There are plenty.) I recall spending significant time working on the early evolution of the solar system by following the paper trail from some recent record-breaking-old CAI (calcium-aluminium inclusions) within chondritic meteorites... but I don't have the reference to hand. Or do I ? [hooks up pocket reference library... for the 5th time today... oh fuck off windows fucking media fucking player I don't want you to search my hard drive! Work's machine ; I can't change some things on it including this heap of shit. [bitch, moan]... found it : JAN D. KRAMERS 2007, Hierarchical Earth accretion and the Hadean Eon Journal of the Geological Society, London, Vol. 164, pp. 3â"17 Nothing spectacular, but a recent synoptic overview of formation of the Earth with plenty of references into the astronomy/ planetary science of the solar nebula.
Indeed. And with a wife who's not a native English speaker, I'm used to helping her to get her idiom right (at her insistence ; step-daughter insists on not being corrected, because I'm old and don't speak her version of English anyway).
MRSA is exactly as dangerous as Staphylococcus was before the invention of antibiotics.
MRSA is "Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus"
Methicillin is a member of the class of chemicals (naturally-occurring or artificial, it doesn't matter which) called "antibiotics".
Which makes the tautology in your statement as plain as it is true.
There have almost certainly been people dying of MRSA for hundreds or thousands of years, but nobody noticed because many more people died from a myriad of other strains of SA and no one had reason to differentiate the victims of MRSA from other victims of SA. Now, for a couple of generations, fewer people have died of most of the SA strains, which makes the MRSA victims stand out a little more, err, by being dead.
Most people don't realise that this is exactly how evolution works - differential survival of variations. But that's exactly what is happening here.
If you look at a standard pack of cards, well shuffled, then the odds of pulling two jokers out of the pack at random is not high. But if you modify the pack by successively removing all cards with a number on them (in this analogy, penicillin-susceptible SA), then all the cards with kings on them (vancomycin-susceptible SA, for an example [spelling?]), then all the cards with queens on them (flucoxacillin-susceptible SA), then all cards with two-eyed jacks on them (methicillin-susceptible SA).... you're left with a relatively high chance of drawing a couple of jokers from the modified pack. Or equivalently, getting MRSA.
Genetic gambling. Love it or loathe it, but you can't not play the game. No, seriously, you can not not play the game.
.
(Some people take "MRSA" as "Multiply-Resistant" SA"; that doesn't affect the argument.)
Use of telephone connectors (RJ-45, RJ-11, probably others too) for carrying serial data has a long, venerable and perfectly respectable history. Given that you've a high-6-digit UID, it's quite possible that you've never seen it, yet, but it has been common in the past and still is fairly common. And if the system is properly documented, it's absolutely no problem what so ever. (You do RTFM before you complete unpacking your new device, don't you?)
Actually, there is a fair chance that you've got such a device on your desktop computer. If your keyboard has a detachable lead and is an AT or ATX (or PS/2) connector rather than USB, then there's a fair chance that the lead is connected to the keyboard chassis by... an RJ-11. Which is carrying... serial data. Even if the keyboard is an AT one (DIN-5 connector on the motherboard end) it's still a serial device.
24V on a serial line... of course. What's unexpected about that? Read the spec for the commonest (not the only, the commonest) serial standard, RS-232, and you'll see that open circuit voltages of up to 25V are allowed. So, if you're designing anything new to do any sort of serial interfacing, then make damned good and sure to protect your inputs to at least that sort of level. (Look in your IC supply catalogues - you'll find line conditioner chips to that spec in a variety of widths, for precisely this purpose.)
Why big voltages tolerances like that?
Have you ever tried running data to a terminal in a service room with 3x1kVx1kA DC random-activity motor on one side, and two on the other, with the only access that doesn't go past the big motors and their big induced voltages involving rigging the cable over a 40m drop into dark lethal sea? and you've got to rig up, do your job and rig down again in 5 days during a storm when you can't get lifeboat cover? NOW you know that the demands of signal transmission in a warm dry office are not terribly demanding, and that is why USB isn't undisputed king.
I could play the "installed base" card too. The amount of important equipment out there that speaks low rate serial data is substantial. And if it isn't going to replaced in the next 20-year budget, you're going to meet it one day.
You state that you had direct experience of... and then gave a list of 3 secret police organisations.
So what you're saying now is that you have got direct (personal) experience of one political police force (I don't think you could call the police organisations "secret", even if many of their operatives are secret) and make the (not unreasonable) assumption that the others behave similarly.
What you originally wrote sounded like a list of the political police forces that you'd fallen foul of. An incredible list.
I dread to think. And since it's lunch time, and I do remember what the Kinsey report was about... I'll not follow that link until lunch is well and truely settled.
Oh goody, I like asking awkward questions, and I came up with this one out of whole cloth.
Old joke, you've probably heard it before: Physicist is converted to "God" in some way shape or form. Physicist specialises in studying turbulence. Someone comments that physicist is likely to ask "God" to explain turbulence to him when he ascends to the Pearly Gates (Bills Cockney cousin?). "Oh, no," replies the newly-converted physicist, "I wouldn't want to embarrass the chap at a first meeting."
Slashdot Mirror
Drug companies would claim that this applies to all substances, and then cite Paraclesius' dictum from about 500 years ago that "all things are a poison, the matter is in the dose" (I forget the exact quote, which was probably in Latin anyway). But some substances are worse than others, and DHMO is a case in point. This chemical imitation of a naturally occurring material has a terrible safety record. Every cancer victim - and I do mean every victim - whose case has been investigated, has been found to have been using DHMO either as a component of their medication package or in an off-label use. It's a terrible perversion of a natural compound which can be had just by taking it from the environment, but the chemical companies want us to spend huge amounts on after it's been filtered, distilled, stained with other chemicals then bleached or steamed clean. Some chemical companies even make it by "direct synthesis" from the elements (this is a technology NASA apparently use, at gigantic pork-barrel expenses)! It's all part of a conspiracy of silence. Everyone in the medical arena is trying to cover up this compound's terrible effects, except the homeopaths, who would never offer homeopathic DHMO, even if it were diluted to the extent that not one molecule of the original DHMO were present in the whole accursed bottle.
Try researching DHMO and you'll find that it's bad reputation has been successfully cleared from the internet. It's terrible stuff.
In 2009, something was reported that supported a position that a large majority of people in the field had accepted was probably correct in 1989 ... impressive.
I was watching a crab hunt a rat last night, and I was thinking ... "Darwin would have found this fascinating." It's only another example of a principle that has been generally accepted for 150 years.
What's the other one ... another open door. I'll read it if I have time and inclination.
You say there's a debate. So where are your references strongly supporting the case that (non-avian) dinosaurs were poikilothermic and ectothermic? That's the area that would deliver interesting results.
Come back, Archimedes Plutonium, all is forgiven!
Well, not all, but most.
Well some.
Actually, Archimedes old chap, we didn't exactly "forget" to send you an invite.
"Security!"
double bugger. "Slow down cowboy!"
Wow ; that's some latency you've got there. You wrote that post in what? 1979? And it's taken 30-odd years to get through the "tubes" to appear on Slashdot. Impressive connection you've got there.
(I am a geologist, and like many of my colleagues, I've been paying attention to the "hot or not" debate for all of these decades, since I was a geology student in senior school. And Bob Bakker may be an ass, but that doesn't necessarily make him either entirely right or entirely wrong.)
Can I borrow your time machine? There's an empty Archaeopteryx egg preserved in an airfall tuff somewhere, and I want that chick!
Not everybody, which is why I checked before working too hard on a joke about not gaining the power to climb walls and squirt webs, but instead to smell capricious and fuck anything that moves and some things that don't move.
Still has movie potential.
Woah there!
Your second phrase requires an organism significantly different to the one described in your first phrase.
Specifically you are assuming that the use of a novel amino acid (or any other particular molecule) necessarily implies that that organism has the entire set of biochemical pathways and control genetics to manufacture that molecule from scratch.
Since you're talking about an engineered organism, then it takes deliberate and quite substantial effort to fit those new biochemical pathways into your organism.
I'm trying to think of a car analogy.
OK, here's one.
It's a century ago ; you have a steam-powered car that burns a slurry of coal dust (from the county next door) in vegetable oil (from the farmer over the hill). It works ; it does things ; great ; fine ; marvellous. Now you engineer a change and add an engine that has combustion take place in the expansion cylinders of your steam engine, and need no external boiler. BUT, it requires a processed consumable which has to be imported from a mistrustful monarchy on the other side of the world.
You then make all sorts of incremental changes to your vehicle with an "internal combustion engine", but you still have no mechanism in your usage environment for manufacturing the essential new fuel. The fuel has become an external dependency.
Substitute C.elegans for the steam car ; the new amino acid for the petroleum ... and your new organism has a problem analogous to developing the entire hydrocarbon industry, from seismic prospecting to an infrastructure for distributing the processed chemical. And it's got to do this in the teeth of intense competition from it's immediate neighbours. (Remember Darwin's point that your closest competitors are most likely to be your closest relatives, because both their needs and their capabilities are most similar to yours.)
An alternative viewpoint ... say the design of the new bio-laser powered shark derived with this wonderful new amino acid technology does contain all the biochemistry necessary to manufacture the amino acids ... but it requires molybdenum in gram/day quantities. Great ; you again have hard-to-get round dependencies built into your new organism. Pat on the back!
(I was toying with pink flamingos as an analogy. They get their pink colour from crustacean shell pigments manufactured by their food (shrimps). Feed them on budgie food and they could be perfectly healthy, but not pink.)
FYI : molybdenum is a bioactive metal, and might actually be an essential human nutrient. It's no great problem to fall into these dependencies accidentally.
Spoilsport! Do you want to undermine the whole of Slashdot by insisting that people actually know what they're talking about?
Fair point - I'd forgotten that RJ-45s were originally phone equpment, at least in some other countries. I can't think of having seen one on a phone that wasn't an IP phone ... nope ; still can't. But I can remember seeing RJ-11s on American vessels, which caused no end of trouble, in both directions.
So, I guess RJ-45s were for esoteric things like multiple line telephones, or receptionist's mini-switchboards?
I think you'll find out that it was the Poles who found out that the Enigma code system could be easily broken (for many values of "easy"). They gave the recipe to the British, via IIRC the French during the "Phony War" (which wasn't very phony, for the Poles).
Try working in the Middle East, or Africa some time. People with one shade of brown skin are perfectly capable of being deeply prejudiced against people with a different shade of brown skin. Or, for that matter, against people with an identical shade of brown skin and a different but intelligible dialect. Or a whiter shade of brown skin. Or people with the same shade of skin and the same dialect, but from the wrong side of the village.
It is a sad but true fact that Homo sapiens (so-called) seems to be genetically or socially pre-disposed to be afraid of (and therefore hostile to) "the other". And if there is no visible ground for distinction, one will be invented.
Anyone want to watch "West Side Story" in a slightly different light?
There are corporations that you trust?
B. i. z. a. r. r. e.
You're already doing the cost-benefit analysis.
Bottom of the barrel staff are cheap. Add the cost of (say) 2.5 fried bar code scanners per barrel-scraping per year, plus the wasted time (the barrel-scraping's time ; your time ; the POS-out-of-service time) to the cost of the barrel-scrapings. Then compare it to the cost of you writing appropriate manuals, the company training X people per store/ city/ state/ hemisphere/ whatever to do the installations properly ...
I'm sorry, did you just morph into being a cross between Cost Accountant and Human Remains Mangler? Well that's one way into management. Enjoy the descent, because you're not going to come back uponce you start on that slippery slope.
Good luck, BTW, in changing that system for one that suits your design ethic better. You are already in a business where quantity is far more important than quality, so if you're worrying about quality issues like this, then you're probably in the wrong business (for you).
People have been successfully using this sort of equipment for longer than I've been alive.
I've sucessfully used this sort of equipment on a number of occasions after having been told precisely "there were never any manuals ; figure it out yourself ; multi-meter is over there".
The equipment isn't a problem.
So, if the equipment isn't a problem, and the presence or absence of a manual isn't a problem ... perhaps the problem is in the skill set of the technicians or end-users doing the installations. Since you've identified a problem, and you have worked out the ultimate cause of the problem, then you can deliver your manager an estimate of the cost of this documentation/ training failure and an estimate of the costs of rectifying this. Or of not rectifying this.
Ball is in your court. Train your people better (which means that you WTFM(*) yourself, because you seem to understand the issue). Or replace the equipment with something else. Or live with the costs. Give your supervisor the information to make an informed rational management decision (ha!) on the matter.
I hated installing those cables. But once I understood the problem, looked at the alternatives, did the sums ... and got on with doing the job because it was the lowest cost solution, while WTFM.
It could have been worse - the customers might have wanted the colour display, which involved 4 cables, which had to take the shortest route (over the sea) in armoured quad-coax, and which was IIRC £60/day more expensive. "Fun" is not an appropriate word.
.
(*) WTFM : Write TFM so others can RTFM.
I've dealt with many people of "very fixed opinions" over the years, and while there is almost never any use in wasting fingertip skin and electrons answering the questions for them, there is often a useful, from my point of view "desirable" by product of informing and educating the silent audience.
In this case, it seems there was a genuine question, and my CCD (Creation Cretin Detector) fired off a bit too sensitively. Sorry about that. Happens sometimes.
So, your PhD(religion) source has had his (or her) credibility seriously dented. I'll count that as a positive result.
Literature ... Ah, that can definitely wait until after supper ...
Literature relating to this specific subject.
Well, as an interested (but light-pollution hampered) amateur astronomer, I've known about the Martian meteorites for longer than I care to remember. Looking at MacKay et al's 1996 "Martian fossils" paper and references therein (McKay, D. et al. 1996. Search for Past Life on Mars: Possible Relic Biogenic Activity in Martian Meteorite AL84001. Science: 273. 924-930.) will give you a paper trail into how the identity of the Martian meteorites was established, and into the transfer mechanisms. (Sorry, but I assume that you've got access to a library. It takes time and costs money, but all study does. A good correspondence university science course will likely include good-value online access to "the literature". There are plenty.) I recall spending significant time working on the early evolution of the solar system by following the paper trail from some recent record-breaking-old CAI (calcium-aluminium inclusions) within chondritic meteorites ... but I don't have the reference to hand. Or do I ? [hooks up pocket reference library ... for the 5th time today ... oh fuck off windows fucking media fucking player I don't want you to search my hard drive! Work's machine ; I can't change some things on it including this heap of shit. [bitch, moan] ... found it : JAN D. KRAMERS 2007, Hierarchical Earth accretion and the Hadean Eon Journal of the Geological Society, London, Vol. 164, pp. 3â"17 Nothing spectacular, but a recent synoptic overview of formation of the Earth with plenty of references into the astronomy/ planetary science of the solar nebula.
But I've got to get on with paying work now.
Indeed. And with a wife who's not a native English speaker, I'm used to helping her to get her idiom right (at her insistence ; step-daughter insists on not being corrected, because I'm old and don't speak her version of English anyway).
MRSA is "Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus"
Methicillin is a member of the class of chemicals (naturally-occurring or artificial, it doesn't matter which) called "antibiotics".
Which makes the tautology in your statement as plain as it is true.
There have almost certainly been people dying of MRSA for hundreds or thousands of years, but nobody noticed because many more people died from a myriad of other strains of SA and no one had reason to differentiate the victims of MRSA from other victims of SA. Now, for a couple of generations, fewer people have died of most of the SA strains, which makes the MRSA victims stand out a little more, err, by being dead.
Most people don't realise that this is exactly how evolution works - differential survival of variations. But that's exactly what is happening here.
If you look at a standard pack of cards, well shuffled, then the odds of pulling two jokers out of the pack at random is not high. But if you modify the pack by successively removing all cards with a number on them (in this analogy, penicillin-susceptible SA), then all the cards with kings on them (vancomycin-susceptible SA, for an example [spelling?]), then all the cards with queens on them (flucoxacillin-susceptible SA), then all cards with two-eyed jacks on them (methicillin-susceptible SA) .... you're left with a relatively high chance of drawing a couple of jokers from the modified pack. Or equivalently, getting MRSA.
Genetic gambling. Love it or loathe it, but you can't not play the game.
No, seriously, you can not not play the game.
.
(Some people take "MRSA" as "Multiply-Resistant" SA"; that doesn't affect the argument.)
Actually, there is a fair chance that you've got such a device on your desktop computer. If your keyboard has a detachable lead and is an AT or ATX (or PS/2) connector rather than USB, then there's a fair chance that the lead is connected to the keyboard chassis by ... an RJ-11. Which is carrying ... serial data. Even if the keyboard is an AT one (DIN-5 connector on the motherboard end) it's still a serial device.
24V on a serial line ... of course. What's unexpected about that? Read the spec for the commonest (not the only, the commonest) serial standard, RS-232, and you'll see that open circuit voltages of up to 25V are allowed. So, if you're designing anything new to do any sort of serial interfacing, then make damned good and sure to protect your inputs to at least that sort of level. (Look in your IC supply catalogues - you'll find line conditioner chips to that spec in a variety of widths, for precisely this purpose.)
Why big voltages tolerances like that?
Have you ever tried running data to a terminal in a service room with 3x1kVx1kA DC random-activity motor on one side, and two on the other, with the only access that doesn't go past the big motors and their big induced voltages involving rigging the cable over a 40m drop into dark lethal sea? and you've got to rig up, do your job and rig down again in 5 days during a storm when you can't get lifeboat cover? NOW you know that the demands of signal transmission in a warm dry office are not terribly demanding, and that is why USB isn't undisputed king.
I could play the "installed base" card too. The amount of important equipment out there that speaks low rate serial data is substantial. And if it isn't going to replaced in the next 20-year budget, you're going to meet it one day.
You'll learn. Maybe.
Why would it be quoted in a foreign currency (USD)?
So what you're saying now is that you have got direct (personal) experience of one political police force (I don't think you could call the police organisations "secret", even if many of their operatives are secret) and make the (not unreasonable) assumption that the others behave similarly.
What you originally wrote sounded like a list of the political police forces that you'd fallen foul of. An incredible list.
I dread to think. And since it's lunch time, and I do remember what the Kinsey report was about ... I'll not follow that link until lunch is well and truely settled.
Old joke, you've probably heard it before:
Physicist is converted to "God" in some way shape or form. Physicist specialises in studying turbulence. Someone comments that physicist is likely to ask "God" to explain turbulence to him when he ascends to the Pearly Gates (Bills Cockney cousin?). "Oh, no," replies the newly-converted physicist, "I wouldn't want to embarrass the chap at a first meeting."
You bastard! You've made me piss myself laughing.
(At you, not with you.)
The samples and any analytical results obtained from them.
Now, now, there are lawyers about. Nit-picking pedantry is necessary.