How did you manage to get into the "bad books" of the STASI, the KGB and the Securitate all at the same time? By the time you've come to the attention of any one of them, your chances of travelling abroad were pretty limited, and with two of them paying attention you, you're even less likely to be venturing out of your home town.
I suspect that you're not looking for a serious answer, but I'll give you one nonetheless.
The early solar nebula is hypothesised to have had a significant gradient of isotopic compositions in consequence of it's thermal gradients, by the same sort of differential evaporation and acceleration processes that produce temperature-related isotopic gradients in terrestrial rainfall.
The effects are small, but variations in the isotope chemistry of meteorite material from different sources (Moon, Mars, Vesta) are reasonably well-explained by these effects. So, with a fairly good degree of confidence we (I am a geologist ; I'm using the English "we", not the "royal we") can be sure of the mean distance from the Sun that a particular meteorite was formed at.
The literature is out there. And in general it is composed of successively better approximations to the truth.
(The X-files script-writers made it catchier, but probably a bit over-confident.)
According to the approach taken by most scifi movie writers
Most? One, possibly two or three (I don't know how many scriptwriters worked on the "flux capacitor" movie (I'm not even sure if I've ever bothered to watch it through ; any of the 3. Or was it 4?)
, the origin of life was: we sent a capsule of microbes back in time, which then evolved into life as we know it. And, of course, the capsule was transported in a Delorean, and driven by an intelligent ape.
Now, to the extent of my knowledge, the black-body equivalent temperature of Hawking radiation is related in an inverse manner to the radius (or surface area, I suspect the latter for accuracy) of the black hole's event horizon, and the radius (surface area) is proportionally related to the energy content of the black hole.
So, when a black hole loses a quantum of energy via Hawking radiation, it's surface area/ radius decreases, and so the black-body temperature of the radiation will increase. As the black body temperature increases, on average the energy/quantum emitted increases, and the frequency between emissions increases.
So far, all so conventional. Hawking probably has his students do those lectures for the pre-school students.
But, as the black hole gets smaller, the energy per photon increases substantially. And eventually almost the last of the energy within the event horizon is going to go on the penultimate photon... leaving a black hole which "wants" to spit out it's last photon at very high energy (with a vanishingly small probability of it emitting something at an energy as low as extreme-gamma, say), but it may not have sufficient energy to produce that photon.
How steeply cusped are the equations behind this? Is it possible that eventually a black hole wouldn't have enough energy to radiate at the frequency required by it's event horizon's curvature. Or do things get "fuzzy" when you're talking about quanta with wavelengths smaller than the Planck Length?
Probably related... since high energy photons pack a lot of energy into a small wave packet... and energy has mass (or what did you call it up-thread... "it contributes to the space-time stress tensor", or somesuch)... then a photon above a certain energy will have enough energy packed into a smalll enough volume, that it would be it's own black hole. No?
I asked a Fermilab physicist this once. I never did get a reply.
One of the beta tests of the current interface (you can tell this is a joke already, can't you!), had an accurately-labelled "Submit" button. It read "Press here once you've checked your URLs, your spelling, and grammar and you're really sure that you want your public persona to be irrevocably associated with what you've written." But for some obscure reason, the UI people thought that might just possibly be intimidatingly accurate.
Personally, I've always read the word "Submit" as meaning "that's it ; it's gone ; you're committed".
Wouldn't it be wonderful if they included a button that allowed you to check the visual form of your posting without actually permanently putting it on public record above your public persona. They could call it "Preview". It would be almost like having the ability to view your post and "edit" it again before posting it permanently.
I realised - that last line implies that you could "post" something and it not be permanent. Oh, what hilarity.
He tells me. Honestly, it's like shooting a fish in a barrel. Twice. With an Elephant Gun. At point blank range. In the head.
Unfortunately, the excuse doesn't work when your boss also reads BOFH, is a solar physicist, and the project scientist for three the satellites mentioned in these articles.
I think the solution to your... dilemma... is in rearranging the last couple of lines. Unless, of course, your Boss already has his own elephant gun, double-barrelled and is standing just behind you.
slimy sewage is cleansed with peroxide and ultraviolet light
Peroxide and UV light are both extremely toxic and teratogenic artificial chemicals, and I insist on my little bunnykins (Jocasta and Aquapodes) not being exposed to anything but natural organic materials. Like Vibrio Cholerae and Salmonella typhi. As pure as nature intended.
Now that you've upset me, I'm going to have to take the little darlings to the beach to recover from the shock with some nice healthy sea breeezes and some sunbathing.
You dirty scientists trying to destroy the safety of the natural world with your dangerous chemicals. Dr Bob was right - always listen to your chiroproctologist on matters of bacteriology. And nuclear physics. Dr Bob knows his shit.
Oh, sorry, by the criteria you've stated, you can't have any sort of software in the device
I never said nor implied that
That was certainly the implication that I picked up ; hence the RAA (definition).
It comes down to patient safety and whether all electrical design and safety have been taken into account. The medical device manufacturer would have to certify any monitor (or any other commercial device) for compliance, cheap or not.
Again, I'm reading that as --no medical device manufacturer can ever say "plug in a COTS monitor with resolution between [this] and [that]" -- ; every time, they've got to specify their own non-commodity, not-off-the-shelf device. Which in the real world would probably mean that they have to buy a warehouse full of one batch from a factory somewhere, batch-test, then sell them on as certified monitors at horrendous costs.
Sounds insane, but also sounds credible.
War story :
When I started in industry, we did a lot of long-term monitoring (24x7x[several weeks] runs were, and remain, common) using 19in rackmount multi-channel chart recorders with multiple channels. 1% accuracy was more than sufficient. Cheap and dirty when the system was designed in the early 1980s. Come the early 1990s and we could not get suitable analogue chart recorders anywhere. We could get digital ink-jet ones, where you had to spend 5 minutes typing on a phone-style keypad to put up a comment "KD@1234.56m, and where the ink would run if the sweat from your brow dripped onto the paper, and the paper was so thin that the shift's log disintegrated into confetti the third time it was unfolded to be looked at. Crap designs, not suitable for the job, at 5 times the price. (And then the price of consumables!! Every design full of non-interchangeable consumables ; different models in the same family using different parts ; excellent business design, terrible to work with.)
The only suitable analogue recorders we could find were antiques (i.e. mid-1970s models) for the medical market. Which were eye-wateringly expensive, as I'm sure you can imagine. Until one of the holding companies went bust and, so the story I was told goes, one of our buyers found about a thousand of these recorders in a "fire sale" in some mid-Western-US middle-of-nowhere town and brought up enough to keep the company globally operating for another 4 or 5 years.
I still think the ink-on-paper recorders do a better job than the digital display screens. The mid-90s digital display in the corner of my office has just frozen - again ; third time today - and still plots 15 parameters illegibly on one grid and displays a maximum of 2 hours of operations history. Crap. but that's history.
(Incidentally, we're in the business of interpreting these displays ; there's no money in doing the monitoring itself, which is why typical global R+D budgets for these companies are in the 10s of thousands of euros. And why this job has Win2k terminals driving DOS-5 digital chart recorder applications and databases. There's no budget for developing anything new. Nor, TBH, any desire to.)
Cars alone cannot deal with the traffic of a large, dense city.
Of course they can - just keep on building more and more new road until there is no land between the roads for people to do unimportant things like living and running businesses on. At that point, you've reached maximum density and there is nothing more to do but to spread laterally.
Anyone who tells you differently is a liar. And no, I don't believe in Tokyo. Or Germany.
Sgd. for and on behalf of the GGGA (Global Gas Guzzler's Alliance), not that that pay cheque influences my opinions at all.
Ahhh, that would be about the time that Compuserve was invaded by hordes of knuckle-dragging AOLers, often complaining about not getting their "rebate"? I remember the wave of spittle and bile that washed through CIS around then, but I wasn't aware that it was driven by this sort of equipment.
None of those device names ring any bells at all. I'd already forsworn Sony by that point, and even so don't remember an "eVilla". "Audrey"? iOpener? SunRay? All complete blanks.
Ummm, at that time I was on a £17/month dial-up deal with a maximum online time of 2 hours (but no limit on dialling back in, so I just set up a dial-up/ NAT/ Firewall/ box in the cupboard and that kept the line going most of the time. So that was £408 approx every 2 years. Yes, I could see that there was some potential there for a tie-in deal to make a profit over all.
Anyway, I don't recall ever having seen one or heard of one. Not even in a junk pile at a computer fair.
I set off a false alarm the last time I flew, and got all the patting and stroking. But I couldn't figure out how much to tip for the service.
Well, since the sub-text of all the complaints that I see - and since it's an American problem I anticipate not seeing it first-hand - is that some people feel as if they're being treated as "two bit whores". So surely the appropriate price for their services is... two bits.
So, get your jollies, give them two "bits" and walk away, shaking your leg as if your rich aunt's small perverted dog has just been coming on your shoe. If they ask you what it's about, give them your best "cheeky bellhop" look, then a third "bit".
One of the 'bits' should be foreign, for maximum effect. Canadian or Mexican or whatever coins require a second look to distinguish them form native ones.
What a... pointless idea. Above a certain size of premises, you have a "night watchman" ; below that size, a policeman, fireman or emergency medic who needs entry uses an appropriate tool on an appropriate window, after using a megaphone and sirens for an appropriate number of seconds on the approach to the building. Far, far quicker than wondering where the fuck this "key box" is.
One day one of these "key safe" companies is going to be found to have had a crook in position, carefully passing on appropriate information to appropriate people for an appropriate amount of money, probably on a strict agreement that after performing the burglary and replacing the keys, then a brick be thrown through a window to distract attention.
Actually, it's probably been happening on a weekly basis for years since the idea first gained traction, and the companies in this business know it.
. I like what is considered by the general population as some truly horrendous tasting cheeses (blue, regiano etc) but imho sheep and goat's cheese is beyond edible.
A popular author has opined, through the mouth of a cheese-loving character so fromag-ophile you'd expect him to be French (if it weren't for the "asiatic look", the "Wu" surname, and the residence near Tehran), that:
One man's cheese is another man's rotten milk.
Your barf bucket is to the left.
Some people would consider that a good meal, in a bucket.
I wonder if the security staff - Masai - are getting their regular meal (milk curdled with cows blood), or just having the same as everyone else.
The 'golden mean' dimensions are a consequence of the definition, not part of it. AFAIK.
A-series papers all the same shape. A sheet of A(n) paper can be turned into two sheets of A(n+1) paper by dividing symmetrically. A(0) has an area of one square metre. That's it ; series defined for all possible values of "n". No mention of any mathematical constants (though they do pop out of the woodwork when you try to actually use the definitions).
And indeed, it's probably good that I don't make any attempt to remember the ratios, because the Wikipedia article you cite says that the ratio is 1:sqrt(2). But the geometry is as I described it, so I'll get the correct results by remembering that, next time I need to do it.
-Since all software is assumed to fail 100% of the time, and by implication all software failures will cause harm, then no medical devices can include software of any sort? Is that what you're saying?
What about a "cheap TTL monitor" would fail which medical standards and necessarily cause patient harm on failure. TTL (transistor-transistor logic, unless it means something else in this field) can include fairly substantial voltages, but proper (not necessarily expensive, just proper consumer-grade design) is perfectly capable of preventing the user from coming into contact with these voltages. I'd guess that anything above IP44 (Ingress Protection) would do, perhaps IP56 for "wet" patient care areas. Appropriate earthing. and isolations. Standard electrical/ electronic regulations, if adhered to, mean that when I'm using a keyboard, I'm not particularly bothered by the fact that an associated CRT monitor has tens of kilovolts inside it. It's not a significant hazard, which is easily controlled to present a low risk.
- "developed fast" certainly is associated with inadequate documentation, but not necessarily. Poor documentation is more strongly associated with "developed cheaply" than "developed fast". IMHO.
-"breezed through $CERTIFICATION" is pure hyperbole, and dismissed as such.
Again, not doubting your credentials, but what precisely is it about specifically Windows CE that would render it automatically unsuitable for the application in question? Or, by your implication, for use in any medical device? Compared to, for example, an embedded Linux on some small PLC? For the application described, hard real-time isn't necessary (take a reading ; calculate the amount of insulin needed ; prime the pump ; fire the pump ; after a few minutes, repeat), so if the system crashes and comes back up in a matter of only a few minutes, then it's not going to cause a problem as long as the code is appropriately resilient. (That's things like detecting repeated failures and raising an alarm, auditing the pump ; using some sort of system to verify the concentration of drug supplied to the pump... IANAmedical-device-designer, but this is up to the device and software designer, not the OS per se
Oh, sorry, by the criteria you've stated, you can't have any sort of software in the device. Because all software fails, and fails harmfully.
So, since by your statement, no medical devices can use software, if I rip apart (say) the emergency defibrillator on the wall beside my desk (I'm sharing an office with the rig's HSE guy), I'd not find a line of software inside it anywhere? Right.
but they were cheaper then the average desktop at the time
Certanly not in the UK ; I suspect not anywhere, unless you were buying them by the lorry-load. In which case, hardware costs fall well below the rest of your IT cost load.
and were designed to strictly surf the net.
More precisely the corporate INTRA-net, with the possibility of going out onto the INTER-net. During your lunch break. I never heard of anyone other than trade journalists contemplating them for domestic use.
I enjoy knocking people over with a landscape where you get to see 500 million years of geological activity, after climbing up a few million years of such activity. We're still looking at around twice that amount of time. That is a lot of time.
There is a geological term, "deep time" ; it's a gatekeeper to understanding geology in the same way that appreciating "astronomical distances" is to understanding astronomy. Which is why I repeatedly take aspirant geologists to sweat up that particular mountain, and look out on that landscape, and to take the kick in the head. Those who get it have got it, and those who don't get it end up mixing mud or turning drill pipe, but they're not worth training as geologists because they'd never be more than technicians. It's careers advice.
I'll rephrase that : I won't waste my time on training them ; the Boss can spend as much money as he wants to on them, but he's learned to take my advice.
It must have been an awe inspiring site to see the impact from the surface of the earth. Well, in a pressure suit anyway.;-)
For me, a decent telescope and a good deal of distance, thank you. A million miles sounds like a good excuse to get a better telescope.
What I can't figure out is the model they used for the gravitational effects. [SNIP] Such a gravitational system would be very dynamic so how such a stable apex could form for an object to assume an orbit of any kind is not spoken of in the paper.
No need to figure it out. Read the papers. They use simple Newtonian models iterated over many "particles", over many time steps, adding up to an awful lot of calculation. Then they move the initial conditions trivially and re-run the simulation. Lather, rinse, repeat. Some people use dedicated hardware to solve the multi-body problems fast (GRAPE being a family tree of Japanese super computers for precisely these problems as well as comparable galactic interactions etc. ; other people seem to use COTS supercomputers.)
Yes, the situations are very dynamic. What is a "Lagrange point" in one time step probably isn't when you project 100 million particle motions forward by a half-hour and re-calculate the overall gravitational field. So the "Lagrange points may not be "stable", but if they're moving in a regular manner through a constrained volume, then that volume may be disrupted less than non-Lagrange-ish regions, making them areas of net material relative accumulation. And you have to look at statistically significant numbers of runs to see which outcomes are more or less likely.
The science is published. I've given myself headaches reading and trying to understand it, and far be it from me to deny you that pleasure. [those pleasures]
Take British telecom (mentioned earlier in this thread) for example: A revenue of about 30 billion euro / year. A minor mistake should lead to 0.25% of 30 billion = 75 million euro.
And that's for small mistakes.
By comparison, a couple of years ago when Shell Expro had a major gas leak in a production platform leg, killing two and putting several hundred at risk (if the gas had exploded, then one of the platform's three legs would have collapsed, dropping the whole platform into the sea in a matter of seconds to minutes) ; their fine was on the order of £700,000 and was a national record high at the time. I'm not sure if it's been topped yet.
Oh, there were other issues involved ; they'd ignored improvement notices, the gas line had been patched repeatedly (with plastic sheeting and jubilee clips) ; their alarm and emergency response procedures fucked up big style. SNAFU.
Slashdot Mirror
How did you manage to get into the "bad books" of the STASI, the KGB and the Securitate all at the same time? By the time you've come to the attention of any one of them, your chances of travelling abroad were pretty limited, and with two of them paying attention you, you're even less likely to be venturing out of your home town.
The early solar nebula is hypothesised to have had a significant gradient of isotopic compositions in consequence of it's thermal gradients, by the same sort of differential evaporation and acceleration processes that produce temperature-related isotopic gradients in terrestrial rainfall.
The effects are small, but variations in the isotope chemistry of meteorite material from different sources (Moon, Mars, Vesta) are reasonably well-explained by these effects. So, with a fairly good degree of confidence we (I am a geologist ; I'm using the English "we", not the "royal we") can be sure of the mean distance from the Sun that a particular meteorite was formed at.
The literature is out there. And in general it is composed of successively better approximations to the truth.
(The X-files script-writers made it catchier, but probably a bit over-confident.)
Thanks for posting that. I'd nearly run out of shit paper.
Most? One, possibly two or three (I don't know how many scriptwriters worked on the "flux capacitor" movie (I'm not even sure if I've ever bothered to watch it through ; any of the 3. Or was it 4?)
Michael J.Fox is intelligent? Evidence, please.
Well understood.
Now, to the extent of my knowledge, the black-body equivalent temperature of Hawking radiation is related in an inverse manner to the radius (or surface area, I suspect the latter for accuracy) of the black hole's event horizon, and the radius (surface area) is proportionally related to the energy content of the black hole.
So, when a black hole loses a quantum of energy via Hawking radiation, it's surface area/ radius decreases, and so the black-body temperature of the radiation will increase. As the black body temperature increases, on average the energy/quantum emitted increases, and the frequency between emissions increases.
So far, all so conventional. Hawking probably has his students do those lectures for the pre-school students.
But, as the black hole gets smaller, the energy per photon increases substantially. And eventually almost the last of the energy within the event horizon is going to go on the penultimate photon ... leaving a black hole which "wants" to spit out it's last photon at very high energy (with a vanishingly small probability of it emitting something at an energy as low as extreme-gamma, say), but it may not have sufficient energy to produce that photon.
How steeply cusped are the equations behind this? Is it possible that eventually a black hole wouldn't have enough energy to radiate at the frequency required by it's event horizon's curvature. Or do things get "fuzzy" when you're talking about quanta with wavelengths smaller than the Planck Length?
Probably related ... since high energy photons pack a lot of energy into a small wave packet ... and energy has mass (or what did you call it up-thread ... "it contributes to the space-time stress tensor", or somesuch) ... then a photon above a certain energy will have enough energy packed into a smalll enough volume, that it would be it's own black hole. No?
I asked a Fermilab physicist this once. I never did get a reply.
One of the beta tests of the current interface (you can tell this is a joke already, can't you!), had an accurately-labelled "Submit" button. It read
"Press here once you've checked your URLs, your spelling, and grammar and you're really sure that you want your public persona to be irrevocably associated with what you've written."
But for some obscure reason, the UI people thought that might just possibly be intimidatingly accurate.
Personally, I've always read the word "Submit" as meaning "that's it ; it's gone ; you're committed".
Wouldn't it be wonderful if they included a button that allowed you to check the visual form of your posting without actually permanently putting it on public record above your public persona. They could call it "Preview". It would be almost like having the ability to view your post and "edit" it again before posting it permanently.
I realised - that last line implies that you could "post" something and it not be permanent. Oh, what hilarity.
I think the solution to your ... dilemma ... is in rearranging the last couple of lines. Unless, of course, your Boss already has his own elephant gun, double-barrelled and is standing just behind you.
Looking at you.
Reading /.
In
your
barrel.
Worked for Gilette.
Peroxide and UV light are both extremely toxic and teratogenic artificial chemicals, and I insist on my little bunnykins (Jocasta and Aquapodes) not being exposed to anything but natural organic materials. Like Vibrio Cholerae and Salmonella typhi. As pure as nature intended.
Now that you've upset me, I'm going to have to take the little darlings to the beach to recover from the shock with some nice healthy sea breeezes and some sunbathing.
You dirty scientists trying to destroy the safety of the natural world with your dangerous chemicals.
Dr Bob was right - always listen to your chiroproctologist on matters of bacteriology. And nuclear physics. Dr Bob knows his shit.
This post may contain sarcasm. Read with care.
Subject says it all.
That was certainly the implication that I picked up ; hence the RAA (definition).
Again, I'm reading that as --no medical device manufacturer can ever say "plug in a COTS monitor with resolution between [this] and [that]" -- ; every time, they've got to specify their own non-commodity, not-off-the-shelf device. Which in the real world would probably mean that they have to buy a warehouse full of one batch from a factory somewhere, batch-test, then sell them on as certified monitors at horrendous costs.
Sounds insane, but also sounds credible.
War story :
When I started in industry, we did a lot of long-term monitoring (24x7x[several weeks] runs were, and remain, common) using 19in rackmount multi-channel chart recorders with multiple channels. 1% accuracy was more than sufficient. Cheap and dirty when the system was designed in the early 1980s. Come the early 1990s and we could not get suitable analogue chart recorders anywhere. We could get digital ink-jet ones, where you had to spend 5 minutes typing on a phone-style keypad to put up a comment "KD@1234.56m, and where the ink would run if the sweat from your brow dripped onto the paper, and the paper was so thin that the shift's log disintegrated into confetti the third time it was unfolded to be looked at. Crap designs, not suitable for the job, at 5 times the price. (And then the price of consumables!! Every design full of non-interchangeable consumables ; different models in the same family using different parts ; excellent business design, terrible to work with.)
The only suitable analogue recorders we could find were antiques (i.e. mid-1970s models) for the medical market. Which were eye-wateringly expensive, as I'm sure you can imagine.
Until one of the holding companies went bust and, so the story I was told goes, one of our buyers found about a thousand of these recorders in a "fire sale" in some mid-Western-US middle-of-nowhere town and brought up enough to keep the company globally operating for another 4 or 5 years.
I still think the ink-on-paper recorders do a better job than the digital display screens. The mid-90s digital display in the corner of my office has just frozen - again ; third time today - and still plots 15 parameters illegibly on one grid and displays a maximum of 2 hours of operations history. Crap. but that's history.
(Incidentally, we're in the business of interpreting these displays ; there's no money in doing the monitoring itself, which is why typical global R+D budgets for these companies are in the 10s of thousands of euros. And why this job has Win2k terminals driving DOS-5 digital chart recorder applications and databases. There's no budget for developing anything new. Nor, TBH, any desire to.)
Of course they can - just keep on building more and more new road until there is no land between the roads for people to do unimportant things like living and running businesses on. At that point, you've reached maximum density and there is nothing more to do but to spread laterally.
Anyone who tells you differently is a liar. And no, I don't believe in Tokyo. Or Germany.
Sgd. for and on behalf of the GGGA (Global Gas Guzzler's Alliance), not that that pay cheque influences my opinions at all.
Have fun! And get out of Gilead while the getting is good.
None of those device names ring any bells at all. I'd already forsworn Sony by that point, and even so don't remember an "eVilla". "Audrey"? iOpener? SunRay? All complete blanks.
Ummm, at that time I was on a £17/month dial-up deal with a maximum online time of 2 hours (but no limit on dialling back in, so I just set up a dial-up/ NAT/ Firewall/ box in the cupboard and that kept the line going most of the time. So that was £408 approx every 2 years. Yes, I could see that there was some potential there for a tie-in deal to make a profit over all.
Anyway, I don't recall ever having seen one or heard of one. Not even in a junk pile at a computer fair.
I thought that Micro$oft were one of the US's biggest companies exporting huge-amounts of US-manufactured Fear (TM), Uncertainty(TM) and Doubt(TM).
Well, since the sub-text of all the complaints that I see - and since it's an American problem I anticipate not seeing it first-hand - is that some people feel as if they're being treated as "two bit whores". So surely the appropriate price for their services is ... two bits.
So, get your jollies, give them two "bits" and walk away, shaking your leg as if your rich aunt's small perverted dog has just been coming on your shoe. If they ask you what it's about, give them your best "cheeky bellhop" look, then a third "bit".
One of the 'bits' should be foreign, for maximum effect. Canadian or Mexican or whatever coins require a second look to distinguish them form native ones.
WTF is one of that?
[googles] http://www.knoxbox.com/
Ah, that's WTF is one of that.
What a ... pointless idea. Above a certain size of premises, you have a "night watchman" ; below that size, a policeman, fireman or emergency medic who needs entry uses an appropriate tool on an appropriate window, after using a megaphone and sirens for an appropriate number of seconds on the approach to the building. Far, far quicker than wondering where the fuck this "key box" is.
One day one of these "key safe" companies is going to be found to have had a crook in position, carefully passing on appropriate information to appropriate people for an appropriate amount of money, probably on a strict agreement that after performing the burglary and replacing the keys, then a brick be thrown through a window to distract attention.
Actually, it's probably been happening on a weekly basis for years since the idea first gained traction, and the companies in this business know it.
I wouldn't touch such a system myself.
A popular author has opined, through the mouth of a cheese-loving character so fromag-ophile you'd expect him to be French (if it weren't for the "asiatic look", the "Wu" surname, and the residence near Tehran), that :
Your barf bucket is to the left.
Some people would consider that a good meal, in a bucket.
I wonder if the security staff - Masai - are getting their regular meal (milk curdled with cows blood), or just having the same as everyone else.
A-series papers all the same shape. A sheet of A(n) paper can be turned into two sheets of A(n+1) paper by dividing symmetrically. A(0) has an area of one square metre. That's it ; series defined for all possible values of "n". No mention of any mathematical constants (though they do pop out of the woodwork when you try to actually use the definitions).
And indeed, it's probably good that I don't make any attempt to remember the ratios, because the Wikipedia article you cite says that the ratio is 1:sqrt(2). But the geometry is as I described it, so I'll get the correct results by remembering that, next time I need to do it.
What about a "cheap TTL monitor" would fail which medical standards and necessarily cause patient harm on failure. TTL (transistor-transistor logic, unless it means something else in this field) can include fairly substantial voltages, but proper (not necessarily expensive, just proper consumer-grade design) is perfectly capable of preventing the user from coming into contact with these voltages. I'd guess that anything above IP44 (Ingress Protection) would do, perhaps IP56 for "wet" patient care areas. Appropriate earthing. and isolations.
Standard electrical/ electronic regulations, if adhered to, mean that when I'm using a keyboard, I'm not particularly bothered by the fact that an associated CRT monitor has tens of kilovolts inside it. It's not a significant hazard, which is easily controlled to present a low risk.
- "developed fast" certainly is associated with inadequate documentation, but not necessarily. Poor documentation is more strongly associated with "developed cheaply" than "developed fast". IMHO.
-"breezed through $CERTIFICATION" is pure hyperbole, and dismissed as such.
Again, not doubting your credentials, but what precisely is it about specifically Windows CE that would render it automatically unsuitable for the application in question? Or, by your implication, for use in any medical device? Compared to, for example, an embedded Linux on some small PLC? For the application described, hard real-time isn't necessary (take a reading ; calculate the amount of insulin needed ; prime the pump ; fire the pump ; after a few minutes, repeat), so if the system crashes and comes back up in a matter of only a few minutes, then it's not going to cause a problem as long as the code is appropriately resilient. (That's things like detecting repeated failures and raising an alarm, auditing the pump ; using some sort of system to verify the concentration of drug supplied to the pump ... IANAmedical-device-designer, but this is up to the device and software designer, not the OS per se
Oh, sorry, by the criteria you've stated, you can't have any sort of software in the device. Because all software fails, and fails harmfully.
So, since by your statement, no medical devices can use software, if I rip apart (say) the emergency defibrillator on the wall beside my desk (I'm sharing an office with the rig's HSE guy), I'd not find a line of software inside it anywhere? Right.
Your munificence is appreciated.
Certanly not in the UK ; I suspect not anywhere, unless you were buying them by the lorry-load. In which case, hardware costs fall well below the rest of your IT cost load.
More precisely the corporate INTRA-net, with the possibility of going out onto the INTER-net. During your lunch break. I never heard of anyone other than trade journalists contemplating them for domestic use.
I enjoy knocking people over with a landscape where you get to see 500 million years of geological activity, after climbing up a few million years of such activity. We're still looking at around twice that amount of time. That is a lot of time.
There is a geological term, "deep time" ; it's a gatekeeper to understanding geology in the same way that appreciating "astronomical distances" is to understanding astronomy. Which is why I repeatedly take aspirant geologists to sweat up that particular mountain, and look out on that landscape, and to take the kick in the head. Those who get it have got it, and those who don't get it end up mixing mud or turning drill pipe, but they're not worth training as geologists because they'd never be more than technicians. It's careers advice.
I'll rephrase that : I won't waste my time on training them ; the Boss can spend as much money as he wants to on them, but he's learned to take my advice.
For me, a decent telescope and a good deal of distance, thank you. A million miles sounds like a good excuse to get a better telescope.
No need to figure it out. Read the papers. They use simple Newtonian models iterated over many "particles", over many time steps, adding up to an awful lot of calculation. Then they move the initial conditions trivially and re-run the simulation.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Some people use dedicated hardware to solve the multi-body problems fast (GRAPE being a family tree of Japanese super computers for precisely these problems as well as comparable galactic interactions etc. ; other people seem to use COTS supercomputers.)
Yes, the situations are very dynamic. What is a "Lagrange point" in one time step probably isn't when you project 100 million particle motions forward by a half-hour and re-calculate the overall gravitational field. So the "Lagrange points may not be "stable", but if they're moving in a regular manner through a constrained volume, then that volume may be disrupted less than non-Lagrange-ish regions, making them areas of net material relative accumulation. And you have to look at statistically significant numbers of runs to see which outcomes are more or less likely.
The science is published. I've given myself headaches reading and trying to understand it, and far be it from me to deny you that pleasure. [those pleasures]
Papers on http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~robin/rcpapers.html should give you a fair start. "TL;DR" is a credible but unhelpful (for you) response.
Ummm, submissive S+M guys called Sidney in Real Life(TM)?
By comparison, a couple of years ago when Shell Expro had a major gas leak in a production platform leg, killing two and putting several hundred at risk (if the gas had exploded, then one of the platform's three legs would have collapsed, dropping the whole platform into the sea in a matter of seconds to minutes) ; their fine was on the order of £700,000 and was a national record high at the time. I'm not sure if it's been topped yet.
Oh, there were other issues involved ; they'd ignored improvement notices, the gas line had been patched repeatedly (with plastic sheeting and jubilee clips) ; their alarm and emergency response procedures fucked up big style. SNAFU.