You see someone with a asymmetrical facial feature,
Let's start off with one point : YOU think in these ways ; don't claim it for anyone else who you don't have decades of close contact with (i.e., you might be able to make such assertions about your parents or a spouse, but even that isn't much better than 50:50 odds).
subtract points based on the degree of asymmetry.
s/You subtract/I subtract/
That symmetry is noticed is well-established ; whether "subtract" is a hard-wired response is not something that has (to my knowledge) been tested.
They don't have perfectly groomed hair? Subtract again.
s/You subtract/I subtract/
I am suspicious of people who pay excessive attention to their personal grooming ; I assume that it means they are distracting themselves dangerously form their actual work. (Obviously I don't work in retail sales, for which I thank my lucky stars every morning. After I thank my attention to work in school.)
Wear glasses? Subtract again.
s/You subtract/I subtract/
I see someone who pays attention to their personal safety. But you may never have had to deal with eye injuries in your working or personal life. Don't you claim to speak for me.
Bald? Subtract.
s/You subtract/I subtract/
You've probably just indicated your gender. It's reasonably well established that many women find bald men sexy ([PICARD VOICE]: Make it sooooo!). Having said that, Sinead "Skin'ead" O'Connor is very definitely worth a poke too, hair or no.
When you're speaking for yourself, acknowledge it.
Teeth? Subtract again. Now the cultural norm will dictate the severity of subtraction (example, teeth in UK vs USA)
Very much. Some crack-heads I know have very good teeth, others have terrible teeth ; some scum-of-the-earth salesmen have perfect teeth and are to be distrusted for it. But most trustworthy salesmen I know don't need to give a shit about their teeth (even assuming that they take their teeth to work with them).
Seriously, you're projecting your own prejudices onto other people. Which is morally questionable, as well as being practically likely to get you into trouble.
but nonetheless, its programmed into the DNA of humanity.
Paying attention to differences from your childhood (infancy, actually) norms is probably genetically fairly hard-wired. But what you consider "right" or "proper" (including in "proper" the French sense of "clean") is a socially conditioned thing, which is labile on a time scale of weeks if not shorter. When you come back to your current home from being abroad and speaking one of your other tongues for a while, doesn't it feel strange?
Well, those are reasonable (and reasoned) responses.
Question : given that the learning-curve investment in Package X is done and gone and won't come back, how reliable are the non-AutoCAD (ADSK? ; I am not a CAD user) versions of the 2-d file format ".DWG" (or is it ".DXF" ; it's so long since I looked at this product area)? i.e., could you reasonably be aggrieved if a.DWG created on one package opened wrongly on a different company's equivalent product?
The area I work in has 3 or 4 major software contenders, all of them with major differences in work-flow, and no interoperability between file formats. (I have seen people using 2-d CAD programs for producing our sort of product too, but not for a decade or so.) But on those not-uncommon occasions when I am hired to do my job, but to use a competitor's product, I generally find that the learning curve is steep, but not overwhelming. At the end of the day, to get from the data that yet-other companies produce (generally in ASCII files) to the sort of drawings that present the data to the client the way they want to see it, the general processes are similar, even if different packages handle the details differently.
Learning curves are significant. But the same applies to a different continent's law systems and working practices. Dealing with a different software package is just one more part of the learning curve.
So, Michael (?) Ryan, Boss of the much-maligned country-airport-to-rural-airport airline "Ryan Air", has found out how to milk leprechauns for their gold.
I agree with subject line. Other posts suggest that "RightHaven" are not entirely without merit too (suing content-scraping companies). So, I ask myself, "What does 'Democratic Underground' do that would justify me supporting them?", by using their product, so that they benefit and can legalistically push RightHaven to behave more appropriately. There is, as the saying goes, no such thing as "BAD advertising".
[Self, Googles]
Oh dear, they're a bunch of American political blurbers. I suppose I should have guessed. Well, nothing good to do for them but encourage them to get out while the getting is good.
He couldn't go very long without sampling his wife's lasagna, but he could go 10 years without sampling her vagina???
TFA doesn't say that. the article only describes one day's activity.
What I find bizarre is - the guy was on the run for 10 years from a sentence of under 4 years. Which is irrational. (Not of course, that I expect rationality from a criminal.)
... of how to degrade the piss-pots sufficiently to make DNA testing unsuccessful.
(Not that I'm planing a heist like this, of course.)
First thing, just to make life more difficult for the investigators would be all perps piss/ shit into the same pot, until it's full ; then any chemicals get added, and the container gets sealed. (This means that there is only one open bottle to knock over at any one time ; it also means that any undegraded fragments of DNA that make it through the chemical stewing to come, will be mixed from several perps, and it will just add to the DNA tech's difficulties.)
Now, what to do to degrade our piss & shit containers of usable DNA? Well, I'd start with opening up each and every cell to get at the DNA ; that'd start with some potent detergent to break up cell walls. You can just shove the chemicals (probably a dodecyl sulphonate salt) into the bottles as you're using them. After letting that fester for a day or so, most of the cells will be ruptured and their cell components exposed. That doesn't actually degrade the DNA - it's an initial step in DNA testing. So next would be to degrade the exposed DNA. And for that, I can't think of anything much better than an industrial-grade bleach. Mix it into your piss & shit bottle with the detergent as you close up the bottle and within a fairly short time your DNA tech is going to have a bottle that he's going to pass over to examine the next one.
If you wanted, you could try using some protease-rich detergent mix (examine your local range of "biological" washing powder) in to do both jobs. It may have the benefit of being practically untraceable (which can't be said for laboratory-grade reagents). A little experimentation would probably be in order.
This isn't rocket surgery, or brain science. Which in itself begs the question of why such obvious precautions weren't taken by an otherwise organised gang. Unless, of course... the bottles found at the scene were simply bottles found at the scene, containing DNA from red herrings.
Penicillin is the chemical archetype of a family of useful chemicals. Penicillium is a genus of moulds (yeasts ; my microbiology isn't good enough to closely query the distinction).
Job security at minor cost. I don't see any downsides.
What - you don't work in the non-Middle East oil industry. I'll see if I can find a phone number for someone who might be interested... try (01224) 574488 (Aberdeen Samaritans).
If you never download the waste of low-power seismic records, never listen to it, and don't give a shit if all musicians were to starve to death tomorrow, I'd still have to pay?
I can smell the suits for a rebate starting already.
That is a correlation, but insufficient (to my strictly limited amount of caring) to demonstrate a causal relationship.
I'm not disputing whether the the earthquake cluster is really associated with the water injector wells. However, the evidence you present is inadequate to demonstrate causality. At the minimum [SELF : dons his IAmAGeologist hat] you'd need to demonstrate a reasonably close temporal relationship between the quantity of water injected and the occurrence of earthquakes (there might be a a delay between onset of injection and onset of quakes). The quake data you should be able to get (if you care enough) from the USGS website. Where to get water injection data... I dunno - your problem.
Better, much better, would be to demonstrate that the quakes lay along fault lines (if unknown faults, then localising them to narrow planar or simply curved spaces would probably suffice for most observers). Good luck getting sub-surface fault mapping from the oil/gas companies...
Best would be to demonstrate that the earthquakes have a simple temporal relationship, along reasonably closely constrained fault planes, with the injection of water.
Proving things "beyond reasonable doubt" (criminal court, here) is a lot harder than proving things "on the balance of probabilities" (civil court, here), which is harder than simply demonstrating a correlation.
Hell, I deployed a bunch of ubuntu boxes in elementary schools for student use and purposely didn't tell anyone anything more than the logins just to see what would happen. They just figured it out, teachers and students alike
It was an uncommon day at my current workplace when no-one saw my Ubuntu desktop (on my personal machine, not the works machine) and then asked me what I thought of Windows 7. Not, I should say, because they thought I might know what Windows 7 was like, but because they thought that my (more-or-less-vanilla) Ubuntu desktop WAS a Windows 7 machine.
It didn't surprise me. Sad to say, it didn't surprise me in the slightest. At least one of them mistook my colleague's MacBookSomething for a Win7 box. I assume this means that few people have ever seen Windows 7 ; I don't recall having seen it.
Trust me, dd can really make a mess of things, if by intention or mistake.
Never! You don't say?
I was cloning one drive (A) to a larger one (B).
[SNIP WAR STORY]
I dd'd an empty drive over the populated one. How much harm could that possibly do, right?
The data content of a welding torch is near enough zero too, so running a welding torch over a platter is unlikely to cause significant harm.
I've done plenty of drive recoveries, with about an 80% success rate.
In the context of the rest of the war story, this isn't encouraging.
Two weeks and several recovery attempts, I had recovered about 25% of what I wanted.
Errr, how long did it take you to restore from the backup that you'd taken before doing your funny tricks?
(OK, yes, I see that, for some reason, you'd wanted to preserve the partition table etc. Can't quite see why you were wanting that, unless you were working on a live system. But whatever... even more so if it's a LIVE system than an offline system, you experiment and test your scripts on a sacrificial system before you approach your important system. Make your scratch monkey look more like your live monkey, not the other way around.) I'm sure that every sysadmin guide I've ever read said "Backup FIRST ; then do $FUNNY_SHIT"
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Hmmm. I didn't write that.
I'm going to read some BOFH ; that has an air of sensible unreality.
Any one else notice that the Greenbrier area is only 100 kilometres or so from the New Madrid Quake fault zone?
That is about the only question that I had on the topic, and it's neatly answered, thank you.
The other stuff I've heard of... small farmers and small towns being gang-sodomised by the oil industry and then being told to pay for the lubricant to stop the oil company's corporate cock getting sore? That is normal practise in that most capitalist of industries, oil. Gas is no different, because it is the same industry run by the same people. And none of this is news.
I don't claim to understand the exact science behind it, but apparently this is not as likely. And, also apparently, it happened too fast for many people's liking.
There is a small amount of discomfort amongst geologists (IAAG, though not specialising in this field) that between the "Late Heavy Bombardment" (between around 4200 million years ago and 3800 million years ago) and the oldest probable fossil organisms (3500 million years ago ; Schopf's Apex Chert ; Google it) are quite close together.
But with this being an active area of research, the discomfort is not great. Possibly Schopf's "fossils" are actually evidence of a pre-biotic mechanism for producing cellular but abiotic structures. Quite plausibly the LHB wasn't a succession of planet-sterilizing events, but merely ones that boiled off the top 1km of the oceans and heated the rest to 350K (77degC), allowing a small proportion of biotic systems that could live at 350K to survive (hmmm, sounds like some basal extremophile Archaea, hmmm). Without using for any particularly "special pleading", that 300 million year gap into which biogenesis needs to fit could easily be 500 million or 800million.
and even to a geologist, 300 million years is not exactly a finger-snap of time. Hell's teeth, I'm planning a road trip with a mini-bus full of colleagues to spend a long weekend looking for 3 * 300Myr old fossils (Torridonian phosphate nodules) while lubricated by 0.00000004 * 300Myr old whiskies.
So, to say that it "happened too fast for some people's liking" is over-egging the pudding a lot. "Mild discomfort" is probably over-egging the pudding a bit.
Next time I'm testing whiskies with an OOL researcher, I'll see how big a wince the issue of the size of the LHB-Schopf gap raises ; my bet would be that it wouldn't even cause a flicker of an eyelid.
I am not saying it's that way, mind. Just that, from what I know, external seeding solves the problem in a nicer way.
Sorry, no, it's not a nicer solution.
Astrophysics and nuclear physics are simpler systems than biological systems, and are correspondingly better understood. Unless you're wanting to play with some quite weird astrophysics, then the amount of "metals" (in the astrophysics sense, elements Z>=3) in the universe at 4.6Gyr before present was noticeably greater than at 5, 6, 7, 8 Gyr before present. All plausible predecessors to our terrestrial life would have used much the same set of metals - CHONP(S). So, if the early Earth were to have been seeded with life from somewhere else, then that somewhere else would have had to develop life with a smaller inventory of "metals" to work with. That's less material for forming "life" (however defined) from, as well as less material for forming planets (asteroids, whatever...) to form that life on.
Panspermia is a less effective solution to the problem of the origin of life on Earth than paying off one credit card with another, higher interest rate, credit card is a solution to financial problems.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the universe is an even less forgiving task master than a loan shark.
Well the scientist had that view some decades ago, but they seem to say today that those ammonia acids simply can't have formed on earth spontaneously. Even the scientist showing how amino acids form,cant remember name early-mid 1900, has changed his opinion about that part.
Today he's of the opinion that we are planted by aliens. The biologic soup theorist.
ÐÐÐÐÑÐÌнÐÑ ÐÐÐÌноÐÐÑ ÐzÐÐÌÑÐн (Ð ÐнÐÐÐÑÐÐÐ, BLOODY STUPID NON-Unicode SLASHDOT! : "Oparin" hasn't held many opinions for the thirty-odd years since his death. Nor has Fred Hoyle for the couple of decades or so since his death. Chandra Wickramasinghe at Cardiff is still beating a drum for panspermia, and producing very poor quality arguments for it, but he is still trying to use the conventional scientific methodology.
On the other hand, the very large majority of researchers into the origin of life follow some variant of the "biological soup" theory ; many debates are in progress over whether the soup was hot or cold ; over how dilute it was, and whether it was concentrated by evaporation or by adsorption ; if adsorption was involved, what was the substrate (clays, or metal-sulphide grains, or even if you follow my ex-professor of igneous petrology and feldspar chemistry, feldspar corrosion pits) ; and one other big debate is whether metabolism or heredity came first? Many different, inter-related and not mutually exclusive debates.
What did you think didn't work? Oh yes, formation of amino acids (which you call "ammonia acids", a contradiction in terms unless you're thinking of liquid ammonia as the solvent), which you seem to think "can't have formed on earth spontaneously". Almost no-one serious on the subject gives a loud fart about the question, because there is ample evidence that there would have been significant amounts deposited from meteorites and cometary debris (note the "and" there, not an "or"), as well as probably significant amounts generated on the Earth (Miller-Urey experiments, and many variants since ; many plausible models for early Earth's atmosphere produce some mixtures of amino acids under plausible conditions). Supply of some amino acids on early Earth does not appear to have been a significant problem. However, any realistic model for early Earth would have to have dealt with a problem of concentrating amino acids (and other biologically significant molecules) to a significant degree, and as I said above, there are multiple plausible ideas about how that might have happened.
Just a reminder : this is an actively developing area of real research. There are multiple lines of research being pursued actively, by multiple teams in multiple laboratories, addressing multiple different questions in the field. Some of the lines being worked on are probably wrong ; others may be right. And that is approximately where consensus ends. Welcome to research ; the library is over there [waves hand] ; if you have anything to say, feel free to do so, but be prepared for other people to take your argument apart and hand the tattered remains of it back to you to see if you can make a better one.
Now will they stop consumers from purchasing PlayStations over the internet and having them shipped overseas?
If it passes from the part of the world that is not in the EU to the part of the world that is in the EU, then that is an IMPORT to the EU.
In theory, individual shipments from (say) a Singapore shipper to an EU country will also be subject to inspection and seizure. The seizure may be permanent (if the item is deemed unsafe/ illegal for sale in the EU - porn or sub-standard electrical equipment, Tasers, etc) and possibly lead to criminal charges for the importer ; or it may be temporary (likely in a case like this ; the recipient will receive a note that amounts to a receipt, which can be used to reclaim an item when the injunction is lifted) ; there may be duties to be applied on import.
In theory, this also applies to what arrives in people's baggage on a boat or a plane. (Or on a train from Russia or Turkey, but I've not experienced that myself) I actually have a friend who brought a UK-keyboard laptop in Singapore (on his way back from work in KL), and had both the laptop AND the receipt in his briefcase when searched in the "GREEN CHANNEL" at HellRow customs. It cost him something like £150 in duty, but because he "genuinely believed" that he had "nothing to declare", he didn't get prosecuted for treason (tax evasion ; same crime).
Why would I have my home computer connected to the Internet while I'm away from home?
So that you can access the data stored on it.
Why is that better than carrying my home computer with me?
Perhaps you live in a developing nation, then. My apologies, I assumed you were in the U.S., where any Real Geek has a full-time internet connection (at least a DSL line) and a smartphone with an ssh client,and frequent access to wireless hotspots while on the road.
No, I live in the developed world, with DSL at home ; I do have a smartphone, but am looking to trade up to a dumb phone ; I don't trust wireless connections because I know that I don't know enough about them to fully secure them. So I don't use them either while travelling (where I REALLY don't know what's on the far side of a wireless link) or at home. (This is an easy choice to make, and no real loss. Particularly if it's 15 years since you wired your house for ethernet.)
This isn't bleeding edge. I often use my three-year-old Centro to log in to my home PC and review old e-mail with Alpine.
You're right that it's not bleeding edge ; I've been doing it for around 15 years, initially starting with my archive (and mail reader application) on ZIP discs, and later moving up to putting them on the big USB hard drive. Not, as you say, bleeding edge.
I don't even want to think about the concept of sex in zero gravity. The end result could be the most expensive mess you've ever made.
I just closed the tab on the story about the idiot who was conned out of $200,000 (not sure which country's dollars) for some "online girlfriend" ; The coincidence of prices and stories is highly amusing.
*Sigh* No flames, but if I may say so, a bit of investigation wouldn't have hurt, either.
I read the GP as deliberately appearing misinformed, and making a separate point : that ".ly" domains nominally belong to Lybia, but by being outside their physical domain, are practically out of the control of the Lybian government. The varying reports of partial/ intermittent access to some networks in some regions of Lybia simply make the same point better.
I suspect that increasing numbers of countries are going to start making stipulations that domains under their TLD are going to be hosted and authoritatively-name-served within the borders of that state. Which might make life slightly awkward for the likes of Western Samoa.
So, who does control the.com domain, really? (This is a rhetorical question.)
If you can't ssh into your home computer, please turn in your geek card.
Why would I have my home computer connected to the Internet while I'm away from home? It's not as if I can be assured of having any internet connection when I'm away, and if my next job comes off OK, the connection I'll have will amount to one 256kb link shared between about 10 users. That's worse than I've had at home for 15 years. BFD.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's start off with one point : YOU think in these ways ; don't claim it for anyone else who you don't have decades of close contact with (i.e., you might be able to make such assertions about your parents or a spouse, but even that isn't much better than 50:50 odds).
s/You subtract/I subtract/
That symmetry is noticed is well-established ; whether "subtract" is a hard-wired response is not something that has (to my knowledge) been tested.
s/You subtract/I subtract/
I am suspicious of people who pay excessive attention to their personal grooming ; I assume that it means they are distracting themselves dangerously form their actual work. (Obviously I don't work in retail sales, for which I thank my lucky stars every morning. After I thank my attention to work in school.)
s/You subtract/I subtract/
I see someone who pays attention to their personal safety. But you may never have had to deal with eye injuries in your working or personal life. Don't you claim to speak for me.
s/You subtract/I subtract/
You've probably just indicated your gender. It's reasonably well established that many women find bald men sexy ([PICARD VOICE]: Make it sooooo!). Having said that, Sinead "Skin'ead" O'Connor is very definitely worth a poke too, hair or no.
When you're speaking for yourself, acknowledge it.
Very much. Some crack-heads I know have very good teeth, others have terrible teeth ; some scum-of-the-earth salesmen have perfect teeth and are to be distrusted for it. But most trustworthy salesmen I know don't need to give a shit about their teeth (even assuming that they take their teeth to work with them).
Seriously, you're projecting your own prejudices onto other people. Which is morally questionable, as well as being practically likely to get you into trouble.
Paying attention to differences from your childhood (infancy, actually) norms is probably genetically fairly hard-wired. But what you consider "right" or "proper" (including in "proper" the French sense of "clean") is a socially conditioned thing, which is labile on a time scale of weeks if not shorter. When you come back to your current home from being abroad and speaking one of your other tongues for a while, doesn't it feel strange?
Question : given that the learning-curve investment in Package X is done and gone and won't come back, how reliable are the non-AutoCAD (ADSK? ; I am not a CAD user) versions of the 2-d file format ".DWG" (or is it ".DXF" ; it's so long since I looked at this product area)? i.e., could you reasonably be aggrieved if a .DWG created on one package opened wrongly on a different company's equivalent product?
The area I work in has 3 or 4 major software contenders, all of them with major differences in work-flow, and no interoperability between file formats. (I have seen people using 2-d CAD programs for producing our sort of product too, but not for a decade or so.) But on those not-uncommon occasions when I am hired to do my job, but to use a competitor's product, I generally find that the learning curve is steep, but not overwhelming. At the end of the day, to get from the data that yet-other companies produce (generally in ASCII files) to the sort of drawings that present the data to the client the way they want to see it, the general processes are similar, even if different packages handle the details differently.
Learning curves are significant. But the same applies to a different continent's law systems and working practices. Dealing with a different software package is just one more part of the learning curve.
So, Michael (?) Ryan, Boss of the much-maligned country-airport-to-rural-airport airline "Ryan Air", has found out how to milk leprechauns for their gold.
I'm not sure if I should be worried or excited.
Does unicorn shit work for fuelling airplanes?
[Self, Googles]
Oh dear, they're a bunch of American political blurbers. I suppose I should have guessed. Well, nothing good to do for them but encourage them to get out while the getting is good.
TFA doesn't say that. the article only describes one day's activity.
What I find bizarre is - the guy was on the run for 10 years from a sentence of under 4 years. Which is irrational. (Not of course, that I expect rationality from a criminal.)
(Not that I'm planing a heist like this, of course.)
First thing, just to make life more difficult for the investigators would be all perps piss/ shit into the same pot, until it's full ; then any chemicals get added, and the container gets sealed. (This means that there is only one open bottle to knock over at any one time ; it also means that any undegraded fragments of DNA that make it through the chemical stewing to come, will be mixed from several perps, and it will just add to the DNA tech's difficulties.)
Now, what to do to degrade our piss & shit containers of usable DNA? Well, I'd start with opening up each and every cell to get at the DNA ; that'd start with some potent detergent to break up cell walls. You can just shove the chemicals (probably a dodecyl sulphonate salt) into the bottles as you're using them. After letting that fester for a day or so, most of the cells will be ruptured and their cell components exposed. That doesn't actually degrade the DNA - it's an initial step in DNA testing. So next would be to degrade the exposed DNA. And for that, I can't think of anything much better than an industrial-grade bleach. Mix it into your piss & shit bottle with the detergent as you close up the bottle and within a fairly short time your DNA tech is going to have a bottle that he's going to pass over to examine the next one.
If you wanted, you could try using some protease-rich detergent mix (examine your local range of "biological" washing powder) in to do both jobs. It may have the benefit of being practically untraceable (which can't be said for laboratory-grade reagents). A little experimentation would probably be in order.
This isn't rocket surgery, or brain science. Which in itself begs the question of why such obvious precautions weren't taken by an otherwise organised gang. Unless, of course ... the bottles found at the scene were simply bottles found at the scene, containing DNA from red herrings.
Penicillin is the chemical archetype of a family of useful chemicals. Penicillium is a genus of moulds (yeasts ; my microbiology isn't good enough to closely query the distinction).
What - you don't work in the non-Middle East oil industry. I'll see if I can find a phone number for someone who might be interested ... try (01224) 574488 (Aberdeen Samaritans).
I can smell the suits for a rebate starting already.
Subject says it all. Totally predictable and unsurprising.
I'll take your word for it, since you've obviously used it so extensively. Personally, I've never used it, so I wouldn't know.
If you do it right.
Which may take several attempts.
Invest in a high-speed video camera.
Enjoy.
Moving the origin of life further back in time through panspermia just makes the problem of actually understanding the origin of life harder.
Paying off one loan by taking out another, higher interest, loan makes actually paying off the original loan harder.
Panspermia is superficially attractive, but ultimately gets you in worse trouble.
That is a correlation, but insufficient (to my strictly limited amount of caring) to demonstrate a causal relationship.
I'm not disputing whether the the earthquake cluster is really associated with the water injector wells. However, the evidence you present is inadequate to demonstrate causality. At the minimum [SELF : dons his IAmAGeologist hat] you'd need to demonstrate a reasonably close temporal relationship between the quantity of water injected and the occurrence of earthquakes (there might be a a delay between onset of injection and onset of quakes). The quake data you should be able to get (if you care enough) from the USGS website. Where to get water injection data ... I dunno - your problem.
Better, much better, would be to demonstrate that the quakes lay along fault lines (if unknown faults, then localising them to narrow planar or simply curved spaces would probably suffice for most observers). Good luck getting sub-surface fault mapping from the oil/gas companies ...
Best would be to demonstrate that the earthquakes have a simple temporal relationship, along reasonably closely constrained fault planes, with the injection of water.
Proving things "beyond reasonable doubt" (criminal court, here) is a lot harder than proving things "on the balance of probabilities" (civil court, here), which is harder than simply demonstrating a correlation.
It was an uncommon day at my current workplace when no-one saw my Ubuntu desktop (on my personal machine, not the works machine) and then asked me what I thought of Windows 7. Not, I should say, because they thought I might know what Windows 7 was like, but because they thought that my (more-or-less-vanilla) Ubuntu desktop WAS a Windows 7 machine.
It didn't surprise me. Sad to say, it didn't surprise me in the slightest. At least one of them mistook my colleague's MacBookSomething for a Win7 box. I assume this means that few people have ever seen Windows 7 ; I don't recall having seen it.
Boring ; I'd read that BOFH last week from a work's computer.
Never! You don't say?
[SNIP WAR STORY]
The data content of a welding torch is near enough zero too, so running a welding torch over a platter is unlikely to cause significant harm.
In the context of the rest of the war story, this isn't encouraging.
Errr, how long did it take you to restore from the backup that you'd taken before doing your funny tricks? (OK, yes, I see that, for some reason, you'd wanted to preserve the partition table etc. Can't quite see why you were wanting that, unless you were working on a live system. But whatever ... even more so if it's a LIVE system than an offline system, you experiment and test your scripts on a sacrificial system before you approach your important system. Make your scratch monkey look more like your live monkey, not the other way around.) I'm sure that every sysadmin guide I've ever read said "Backup FIRST ; then do $FUNNY_SHIT"
Hmmm. I didn't write that.
I'm going to read some BOFH ; that has an air of sensible unreality.
That is about the only question that I had on the topic, and it's neatly answered, thank you.
The other stuff I've heard of ... small farmers and small towns being gang-sodomised by the oil industry and then being told to pay for the lubricant to stop the oil company's corporate cock getting sore? That is normal practise in that most capitalist of industries, oil. Gas is no different, because it is the same industry run by the same people. And none of this is news.
There is a small amount of discomfort amongst geologists (IAAG, though not specialising in this field) that between the "Late Heavy Bombardment" (between around 4200 million years ago and 3800 million years ago) and the oldest probable fossil organisms (3500 million years ago ; Schopf's Apex Chert ; Google it) are quite close together.
But with this being an active area of research, the discomfort is not great. Possibly Schopf's "fossils" are actually evidence of a pre-biotic mechanism for producing cellular but abiotic structures. Quite plausibly the LHB wasn't a succession of planet-sterilizing events, but merely ones that boiled off the top 1km of the oceans and heated the rest to 350K (77degC), allowing a small proportion of biotic systems that could live at 350K to survive (hmmm, sounds like some basal extremophile Archaea, hmmm). Without using for any particularly "special pleading", that 300 million year gap into which biogenesis needs to fit could easily be 500 million or 800million. and even to a geologist, 300 million years is not exactly a finger-snap of time. Hell's teeth, I'm planning a road trip with a mini-bus full of colleagues to spend a long weekend looking for 3 * 300Myr old fossils (Torridonian phosphate nodules) while lubricated by 0.00000004 * 300Myr old whiskies.
So, to say that it "happened too fast for some people's liking" is over-egging the pudding a lot. "Mild discomfort" is probably over-egging the pudding a bit.
Next time I'm testing whiskies with an OOL researcher, I'll see how big a wince the issue of the size of the LHB-Schopf gap raises ; my bet would be that it wouldn't even cause a flicker of an eyelid.
Sorry, no, it's not a nicer solution.
Astrophysics and nuclear physics are simpler systems than biological systems, and are correspondingly better understood. Unless you're wanting to play with some quite weird astrophysics, then the amount of "metals" (in the astrophysics sense, elements Z>=3) in the universe at 4.6Gyr before present was noticeably greater than at 5, 6, 7, 8 Gyr before present. All plausible predecessors to our terrestrial life would have used much the same set of metals - CHONP(S). So, if the early Earth were to have been seeded with life from somewhere else, then that somewhere else would have had to develop life with a smaller inventory of "metals" to work with. That's less material for forming "life" (however defined) from, as well as less material for forming planets (asteroids, whatever ...) to form that life on.
Panspermia is a less effective solution to the problem of the origin of life on Earth than paying off one credit card with another, higher interest rate, credit card is a solution to financial problems.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the universe is an even less forgiving task master than a loan shark.
ÐÐÐÐÑÐÌнÐÑ ÐÐÐÌноÐÐÑ ÐzÐÐÌÑÐн (Ð ÐнÐÐÐÑÐÐÐ, BLOODY STUPID NON-Unicode SLASHDOT! : "Oparin" hasn't held many opinions for the thirty-odd years since his death. Nor has Fred Hoyle for the couple of decades or so since his death. Chandra Wickramasinghe at Cardiff is still beating a drum for panspermia, and producing very poor quality arguments for it, but he is still trying to use the conventional scientific methodology.
On the other hand, the very large majority of researchers into the origin of life follow some variant of the "biological soup" theory ; many debates are in progress over whether the soup was hot or cold ; over how dilute it was, and whether it was concentrated by evaporation or by adsorption ; if adsorption was involved, what was the substrate (clays, or metal-sulphide grains, or even if you follow my ex-professor of igneous petrology and feldspar chemistry, feldspar corrosion pits) ; and one other big debate is whether metabolism or heredity came first? Many different, inter-related and not mutually exclusive debates.
What did you think didn't work? Oh yes, formation of amino acids (which you call "ammonia acids", a contradiction in terms unless you're thinking of liquid ammonia as the solvent), which you seem to think "can't have formed on earth spontaneously". Almost no-one serious on the subject gives a loud fart about the question, because there is ample evidence that there would have been significant amounts deposited from meteorites and cometary debris (note the "and" there, not an "or"), as well as probably significant amounts generated on the Earth (Miller-Urey experiments, and many variants since ; many plausible models for early Earth's atmosphere produce some mixtures of amino acids under plausible conditions). Supply of some amino acids on early Earth does not appear to have been a significant problem. However, any realistic model for early Earth would have to have dealt with a problem of concentrating amino acids (and other biologically significant molecules) to a significant degree, and as I said above, there are multiple plausible ideas about how that might have happened.
Just a reminder : this is an actively developing area of real research. There are multiple lines of research being pursued actively, by multiple teams in multiple laboratories, addressing multiple different questions in the field. Some of the lines being worked on are probably wrong ; others may be right. And that is approximately where consensus ends. Welcome to research ; the library is over there [waves hand] ; if you have anything to say, feel free to do so, but be prepared for other people to take your argument apart and hand the tattered remains of it back to you to see if you can make a better one.
If it passes from the part of the world that is not in the EU to the part of the world that is in the EU, then that is an IMPORT to the EU.
In theory, individual shipments from (say) a Singapore shipper to an EU country will also be subject to inspection and seizure. The seizure may be permanent (if the item is deemed unsafe/ illegal for sale in the EU - porn or sub-standard electrical equipment, Tasers, etc) and possibly lead to criminal charges for the importer ; or it may be temporary (likely in a case like this ; the recipient will receive a note that amounts to a receipt, which can be used to reclaim an item when the injunction is lifted) ; there may be duties to be applied on import.
In theory, this also applies to what arrives in people's baggage on a boat or a plane. (Or on a train from Russia or Turkey, but I've not experienced that myself) I actually have a friend who brought a UK-keyboard laptop in Singapore (on his way back from work in KL), and had both the laptop AND the receipt in his briefcase when searched in the "GREEN CHANNEL" at HellRow customs. It cost him something like £150 in duty, but because he "genuinely believed" that he had "nothing to declare", he didn't get prosecuted for treason (tax evasion ; same crime).
Why is that better than carrying my home computer with me?
No, I live in the developed world, with DSL at home ; I do have a smartphone, but am looking to trade up to a dumb phone ; I don't trust wireless connections because I know that I don't know enough about them to fully secure them. So I don't use them either while travelling (where I REALLY don't know what's on the far side of a wireless link) or at home. (This is an easy choice to make, and no real loss. Particularly if it's 15 years since you wired your house for ethernet.)
You're right that it's not bleeding edge ; I've been doing it for around 15 years, initially starting with my archive (and mail reader application) on ZIP discs, and later moving up to putting them on the big USB hard drive. Not, as you say, bleeding edge.
I just closed the tab on the story about the idiot who was conned out of $200,000 (not sure which country's dollars) for some "online girlfriend" ; The coincidence of prices and stories is highly amusing.
I read the GP as deliberately appearing misinformed, and making a separate point : that ".ly" domains nominally belong to Lybia, but by being outside their physical domain, are practically out of the control of the Lybian government. The varying reports of partial/ intermittent access to some networks in some regions of Lybia simply make the same point better.
I suspect that increasing numbers of countries are going to start making stipulations that domains under their TLD are going to be hosted and authoritatively-name-served within the borders of that state. Which might make life slightly awkward for the likes of Western Samoa.
So, who does control the .com domain, really? (This is a rhetorical question.)
Why would I have my home computer connected to the Internet while I'm away from home? It's not as if I can be assured of having any internet connection when I'm away, and if my next job comes off OK, the connection I'll have will amount to one 256kb link shared between about 10 users. That's worse than I've had at home for 15 years. BFD.