If our society weren't so enthused with the centralized collection of as much data as possible about its citizens,
"our"? - speak for yourself, probably-American!
"society"? - are you sure it's an across the whole of society problem, or largely confined to one sector of society?
Most (not all, but most) of the drive and support for such programmes seems to come from a relatively small range of business and governmental bodies. That's not society as a whole, that's just a small number of (admittedly powerful) special interests.
We need policies and laws that restrict such databases to collecting and maintaining records to the minimum required for their primary purpose only.
Data Protection Act of 1980+something covers a lot of this terrain.
Finally I see a good use for a baseball bat - beating the balls of MS GUI "designers" repeatedly while screaming at them "die you miserable fucking bastards, just fuck off and die and stop making people's lives harder and shittier"
In the unlikely event that there are any women who have whored themselves down from crack'ho to "MS GUI designer", then I'd have to modify the use of the baseball bat, probably involving 10cm nails. But to be honest, I'd expect most women to have more self respect than to lower themselves that far.
Oh, I'm glad that I dumped Windoze.
That reminds me... portable LibreOffice yet? Seems so ; need that for the memory stick for work.
It's depressing (to me) that in an allegedly "news for nerds" forum, it took something in the region of 100 comments to get to this point.
I make it a 1400 ohm resistor if the original author lives in most of the world, or 300-odd if he's in North America. Or if he wants, the equivalent length of heating tape (which would probably cost a lot more, unless he was doing a thorough-going rewire for some other reason).
Online auctions would be a PITA if the buyer had to go the post office, get a money order, send it off, wait a week for seller to receive it, wait another couple of weeks for it to clear, then wait another week for the item to arrive.
What is this about waiting for a postal order to "clear"? They are, to all intents and purposes, cash. Just take them into the post office with some proof of identity that matches the name on the P.O. (if it's crossed), and walk away with the cash.
Or... are you possibly in a country that seceded from Britain before the Post Office was formed.
That would be a great way to slow down the Internet.
I doubt that it would have a significant effect most of the time ; a higher priority would be assigned within browsers to pre-fetching DNS data as a page was being downloaded and rendered. The user would barely see anything. (Yes, I do know that the Internet =/= the WWW ; but for the large majority of users that false equation is believed true.)
You know what's sorry about this? I've read and re-read Known Space / Kzinti stories so many times that this stuff is lodged in my head and emerges whenever someone makes the slightest reference to it.
For certain (i.e., over 40 years) Xenon has had a significant known chemistry. (Radon is too rare and ephemeral to bother working with.) Krypton I'm pretty sure has a known chemistry. Argon, I'm fairly sure I've heard reports of chemical interactions in the last decade or so. Neon? I honestly don't know ; but I'll bet that people are working on it. Helium next.
If they do business in the US, they are subject to US law, just as if a US bank does business in luxemburg they are subject to luxemburg law.
But Luxembourg aren't a sovereign nation like the United States, they're just a bunch of towel-headed foreigners in a tax-free malaria-ridden swamp. So it's obvious that they can't have any important banking laws.
(Please check your sarcasm meter : it should be trumpeting loudly.)
Well, the specifics of this particular case don't matter, so lets say that one has travel documents and the other doesn't (say, one travelled illegally and later managed to get the other person appropriate documents).
You, as a database implementor may choose to work out these possible cases, and 746,032 other different possibilities, enumerate them, and check your work, document the reasoning for each case... and then you wonder why your Boss has fired you for not actually producing a line of database code this month.
I'm saying that sometimes (quite often), it is a waste of time trying to produce a perfect solution to a complex problem, when you can get your job done with a much simpler solution that may not be globally applicable.
Remember, we are NOT talking here about setting out to produce a perfect UPI algorithm ; we're talking about a way of identifying this year's cohort of examination candidates and distinguishing them from each other (and also from other similar people, perhaps over several years). Sometimes, and this is one, perfection is possibly unattainable and much more likely, not worth the effort.
Actually, this is the sort of question which should be carefully ruled out in the process of specifying the software to be delivered ; it shouldn't appear on the to-do list of a coder at all. And if a coder trips over such a strategic case, then with little more effort than we've put into it, they should document what the ambiguity in the specification is, punt it upstairs to a manager to take to the client, and get on with the next part of the specification. Managers do have their uses (and mine was complaining about being told to do his job a couple of days ago ; poor bunny).
Most people get them at birth, which is likely to give time for any such problems to be sorted out.
The comment I was replying to said:
They probably all have (or could get) an NHS number.
This implies (quite correctly) that not everyone is assigned an NHS number at (or before) birth. For example, having both been born some thousands of kilometres from Britain, neither my wife nor daughter were assigned an NHS number at birth. Actually, only around 1% of the population get assigned an NHS number at birth, and almost all of those are residents of Britain or have some expectation of living there at some time.
Are there ever any glitches with US SSNs?
Does the Sun rise in the East? Where is the ursine toilet facility? Would Ian Paisley (pere or fils) have an entertainingly colourful apoplectic fit if elected to the papacy?
I'm sure there are problems in that system. If I ever talk about these things to another American who is likely to return to America, maybe I'll ask if they know of any examples.
The challenge is designing database validation to handle all possible variations, not in getting a unique number.
That's probably compatible with what I was saying. But if you, as a project manager, had to fund months of research into what all the possible variations are, then spend years ("ha ha, but serious") dealing with court cases about people concerned with how your department seemed to be implementing a UPI which could result in major breaches of privacy... would you want to fight other people's battles with your budget, or would it be quicker to come up with a scheme that provides a "Unique-for-our-purposes-and-all-other-Departments-can-go-hang Personal Identifier".
Your budget ; your choice.
Oh, by the way, if your get sued for mis-use of public funds by following your UPI dream, kiss your career goodbye.
They probably all have (or could get) an NHS number.
It took my wife and (step-)daughter around 6 months each to get their NHS numbers, after several different fuck-ups each. That's perfectly long enough to potentially have tripped up an exam system that relied on them. Then there are likely to be a number of people who on religious/ stupidity grounds decline to make use of the NHS (I think of an American retard I knew at university who thought that using a NHS doctor service provided by the university as part of his tuition fees would make him a communist, and therefore probably pregnant ; oh, we had fun with that dribbling idiot).
For overseas candidates the travel document number (typically the passport number) would do the job,
Passport number would have worked in my case ; but with some 60-odd nationalities in this town's school system, the possibility is non-zero for getting a clash between (for example) a Samoan and a Iranian passport number that refer to different dates of birth.
Sometimes it's easier to compile your own "Unique-enough-for-my-purposes"-Personal-Identifier than to try to work out all the possibilities that you'd have to provide special cases for. And if you have to have an appeals or clash-checking system of any sort... well the benefits of not doing it yourself are largely gone irrevocably.
What if they start doing staffer work for $20 a day?
Put enough of these in front of Bill Clinton and he'd find something to keep his cigars humidified with.
And I'm sure that the other party's Senators (Representatives? Who apart from Americans would care?) would themselves find ways to abuse such free gifts. It's in the nature of being a politician.
OK, caffeine-induced reading failures don't cause me existential angst. I'll go back to arguing pandimensional solipsism with Marvin the Paranoid Android now.
So, the core rotates 1degree faster than the surface every million years. That's not much.
That's not how I read the abstract. I got it that the outer (liquid) core is rotating about 1deg/yr more slowly than the mantle (and the lithosphere, above the asthenosphere), but that the inner (solid) appears to be both accreting material radially (at around 1mm/yr or 1km/Myr) AND rotating faster than the adjacent part of the outer (liquid) core by about 1*10^-6 deg/yr or 1deg/Myr.
With the outer core being liquid, and having different rotation rates at top and bottom, then there will be shear across it, and therefore motion and turbulence. This will not cause heart attacks in the common room.
So...this suggests that the solid core and the solid crust are linked together very closely, so that the core tracks the crust almost perfectly. I find this somewhat hard to believe, given that there is a few hundred miles of not-very-viscous liquid iron/nickel between the inner core and the plastic mantle...
Your disbelief in this interpretation seems well founded, considering that the rotation of the inner core with respect to the mantle is (according to the figures in the abstract) around 999,999 millionths of a degree per year. No, wait a moment, that doesn't work...
OK, now you've made me re-read the abstract. What I'm getting on a third reading is that short-term estimates of the super-rotation of the inner core w.r.t the mantle and lithosphere ("solid Earth") is around 1deg/yr (which has been reported several times in the recent past, from seismic tomography) BUT the anisotropic structure also reported for the inner core is incompatible with this, because with a net radial growth rate of around 1mm/yr (from thermodynamics) would mean that [whatever it is that's causing the anisotropy] was laid down in very thin layers with a layer of the [reverse property] laid over the [forward property] just 180-odd mm up in the pile. Additionally, they can use the magnitude of the anisotropy in arrival times of the PKIKP-PKiKP break in slope to estimate the depth within the inner core that the anisotropy reaches to, which illuminates the question of whether this structure built up over around 70 similar rotations, or over nearly 200,000 similar rotations.
It's not an easy abstract, in not an easy subject. I remember having this sort of headache over previous papers on seismic tomography (including some of the cited "1deg/yr" papers when they were originally published). Which probably suggests that it's a new field (well, we all knew that ; how much of this stuff was covered in your seismology courses at college? It certainly post-dates mine!) and people are still trying to figure out WTF is actually going on. It's rather like worshipping a new god : people keep on getting hit by bolts of lightning on the alter until they learn that they've got to rub the woad into the virgin's navel widdershins, not turnwise (as the last god wanted ; and it's so difficult to get a reliable supply virgins these days).
hell, whoever's testing could just install their 30-day trial and not even have to buy it.
But... it's a fairly safe assumption that the people doing the study were doing it for some commercial purpose (even it were only trapping of advertising victim's eyeball-seconds). So that would render them ineligible for most non-commercial-use versions of most software that I've read the EULAs for (yes, someone does read the damned things, even if incompletely and inconsistently ; [Henry 6 P2, A4S2, get it said and done]). And some other EULAs I've seen have explicitly banned installation of unpaid versions for the process of comparison, reporting etc.
Surely it is wrong to use software in contravention of the terms and conditions it is licensed for. Isn't that what part of the recent (and recurring) row about unlicensed (or license-contravening) use of GPL software components is about?
re eliminated by the defense because we were in jobs that required close attention to details,
those prosecutor should be fired, as they are working against the citizen, sadly they will probably be promoted.
Errr, please tell me this is a joke. I'm not sure that I can stand living in a world that contains organisms that can say things like that except as a joke.
Thousands of rigs have operated there for many years with no problems. After Deepwater Horizon I'm sure all of the companies involved realize there's no net cost savings in skimping on safety.
ROFLMAO. Have you ever had anything to do with the drilling industry? Obviously not. I've had nearly 200 colleagues killed in the duration of my career in the North Sea, and having started to widen my career into North American basins, I've had to include memorials for another hundred dead Canadians (mostly) in the last couple of weeks. Nobody ever, in any industry, anywhere, gave a single under-powered fart (let alone a good shit) about "net cost savings", because nobody ever believes that they're going to get caught by this particular transgression of best-practice.
Exactly how much of the 615,000 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico seafloor was affected?
The proportion would be far higher than if you took into account that eventually (over a period of some tens of thousands of years, not that that matters if you're looking to downplay the impact of the spill ; how are your BP shares recovering?), the water will be dispersed through the whole of the ocean basins of the planet. So you can dilute the effects across that much greater a volume on that basis.
Of course, if you wanted to provide a more appropriate description of the distribution, you might wish to mention the proportion of the seabed covered within one mile of the well centre, the proportion within two miles, the proportion within three miles... until the proportion fell below the detection limits of your measurement technology(-ies). But might that provide unpleasant answers for you?
Also reflect on the fact that around half the oil evaporated quite soon after the spill.
You have some data to back up this assertion? Something like the composition of the hydrocarbon charge in the Macondo prospect, the temperature profile over the area in the appropriate time (has the oil left the surface yet? I wasn't bothered to listen to the American news while I was over there earlier this week.), ventilation effects... and even then you'd be pushing the data really hard to get a +/- 50% estimate of the changes. That's taking no account of the unknown amount of oil that actually came out of the hole.
Does converting liquid toxic hydrocarbon pools on the surface of the sea into a less-visible but no less toxic clouds in the air which then drift through populated areas actually do anyone any benefit?
People who live in one country are trying to dictate what happens in another country, to the likely detriment of that other country.
This would be an absolute gift to the Nats. Both the Scots Nats and the Welsh Nats.
For the more proximal issue of what would happen to computers if there was a move like this... most people would probably have to manually put in a bodge during the several years proposed trials and relate it to "Greenwich Mean Time" (by then utterly notional, as it wouldn't be the time in Greenwich, ever). While I don't know the ins and outs of NTP, I would anticipate that there is configuration file somewhere that defines the meanings of various abbreviations (GMT, BST, CET... etc) means in terms of offset from UTC, and whether a daylight saving time is implemented, and by how much, and what dates it applies to etc, etc, etc. So people who keep their NTP implementations up to date won't have any real problem, and people who don't keep their implementations up to date will have problems.
There would quite likely be an update to the ISO-3166 (IIRC) list of country names at the same time, with Scotland fairly likely to secede from Great Britain, and the United Kingdom to cease to exist. So people would need to get used to using.gb and.sco domains, etc. All in all, the clocks changing would be one of the smaller issues.
Besides, I thought everyone knew that Babylon 5 is the best show of all time.
I'm sorry, but you are both mistaken. Farscape was far superior to both.
Speaking from a position of limited insight (I've never been drunk and incapable enough to leave an episode of any of the Stargates running for more than a couple of minutes, never seen an episode of Babylon 5, despite having respected local nerds encourage me to watch it, and never having even been aware of whether Farscape has ever been broadcast in the same country and time zone as me.), I can say with surety that Firefly was a pretty damned fine SF series. A bit silly in parts (what isn't?), but pretty damned good overall.
I really should follow up on Peet the Pervert's recommendation for Babylon 5. When I've some time on my hands.
Are these encryption measures legal where you're going? Even if so, are the state the type who might see it as a reason throw you in jail on vague espionage charges?
Not just encryption measures. I was travelling to a not-very-hot, not-particularly-repressive country to work one time and I was planning to take my hand-held GPS, just for shits'n'giggles. But I had the burglars come round and take it instead, so I didn't. When I was there, I discovered that a nearby town had recently completed the conviction and sentencing of an American in the area for possession of a GPS. He got (reportedly) 5 years @ hard labour, though no one had any doubt that he'd have been quietly thrown out of the country after a few months, once the fuss had died down. Note that he wasn't charged with espionage or anything sinister like that (that's a 9mm trepanning, on sight, no trial), it was simply possession of this dangerous technology in that region of that country. An offence of strict commission. No extenuating circumstances could possibly exist.
I was glad that I didn't have a GPS to take with me.
I understand wanting to maintain your privacy as a matter of principal, but ultimately you're the one choosing to go to their country.
Shock horror! Foreigners could possibly have the right to make their own rules for their own area? What sort of heretical un-American activity are you involved in. McCarthy would be spinning in his grave if he could hear you talk (unless you're not an American, at which point McCarthy would learn to say "Meh!").
Shikaku has enumerated a perfectly reasonable scenario.
when a kid gets a gravel knee, the first thing you do is check to make sure that all the gravel bits are out before you put a bandaid/bandage on!
One of my first memories (from around 20 years before MRI or CAT scanning were invented) is of my father using a pair of forceps to pull a cm-long piece of gravel out of my forehead, around a week after I'd learned a messy lesson about tobogganing down steep grassy banks onto the level ground of a gravel path (hidden under the snow, it must be said). Actually I have a stronger memory of staggering along the path back to my friend's house, seeing through a curtain of blood ; friend's Mum was a nurse, off duty, so she got me to A&E sharpish ("Accident & Emergency"). They simply didn't see the fragment that was deeply buried, and it's presence only became clear when that puncture wound continued to fester when the others were clearing up. Dad was changing the dressings one day, thought he could feel a lump, and got his forceps.
It can be hard to see all the little bits of shit in a wound.
Break some glass? Check to make sure all the glass bits are out of the cut!
There has been at least one case I've heard of where a patient had a (successful, several times) scheme of going to A&E with an "accidental glass cut" to get it treated, then a while later pushing glass fragments back into the wound (after sterilising them? Possibly, she was otherwise careful to avoid dangerous practices.), returning to the same A&E department claiming continued pain from the wound, and then making a claim for having been mis-treated at the first visit. IIRC, she got away with it several times at several locations, until the record-keeping caught up with her.
Since then, yes, even minor wounds are routinely X-rayed ; not to find missing fragments (which would have happened anyway, if the clinician suspected fragmentation), but to document that the wound is clear to keep the lawyers happy.
It's a sad, sad statement on the world.
Surely, you would apply this same logic to a stabbing in the head?
Why do you assume that the A&E centre had an X-ray machine?
I may live in the western world, but I've worked in places where the (unofficial) health advice is "If you can't drag your bleeding body to the airport and get your ass out of the country, crawl into an alley and die as a safer option than going to the hospital".
You may not enjoy thinking about living in a place like that and not having the option of dragging your bleeding body up the steps of the airplane. It's sobering.
Slashdot Mirror
"our"? - speak for yourself, probably-American!
"society"? - are you sure it's an across the whole of society problem, or largely confined to one sector of society?
Most (not all, but most) of the drive and support for such programmes seems to come from a relatively small range of business and governmental bodies. That's not society as a whole, that's just a small number of (admittedly powerful) special interests.
Data Protection Act of 1980+something covers a lot of this terrain.
In the unlikely event that there are any women who have whored themselves down from crack'ho to "MS GUI designer", then I'd have to modify the use of the baseball bat, probably involving 10cm nails. But to be honest, I'd expect most women to have more self respect than to lower themselves that far.
Oh, I'm glad that I dumped Windoze.
That reminds me ... portable LibreOffice yet? Seems so ; need that for the memory stick for work.
I make it a 1400 ohm resistor if the original author lives in most of the world, or 300-odd if he's in North America. Or if he wants, the equivalent length of heating tape (which would probably cost a lot more, unless he was doing a thorough-going rewire for some other reason).
What is this about waiting for a postal order to "clear"? They are, to all intents and purposes, cash. Just take them into the post office with some proof of identity that matches the name on the P.O. (if it's crossed), and walk away with the cash.
Or ... are you possibly in a country that seceded from Britain before the Post Office was formed.
I doubt that it would have a significant effect most of the time ; a higher priority would be assigned within browsers to pre-fetching DNS data as a page was being downloaded and rendered. The user would barely see anything. (Yes, I do know that the Internet =/= the WWW ; but for the large majority of users that false equation is believed true.)
You Grunt Ill Groan
* Publisher: Futura Publications; New edition edition (19 Mar 1987)
* Language English
* ISBN-10: 0708832288
And I can tell you for sure that in the mid-70s it was equally comic, even before I understood the essentially homoerotic nature of the sport.
Why is that a cause for sorrow?
I don't recall this technology. Citation please.
For certain (i.e., over 40 years) Xenon has had a significant known chemistry. (Radon is too rare and ephemeral to bother working with.) Krypton I'm pretty sure has a known chemistry. Argon, I'm fairly sure I've heard reports of chemical interactions in the last decade or so. Neon? I honestly don't know ; but I'll bet that people are working on it. Helium next.
OK : Wikipedia - The discovery of HArF was announced in 2000.... Krypton is able to react with fluorine to form KrF2 ... a crystalline product xenon hexafluoroplatinate ...
So, it sounds like, for the moment, you're OK with neon. But I'll bet there are people working on it, to prove you wrong.
Typical fucking septic.
But Luxembourg aren't a sovereign nation like the United States, they're just a bunch of towel-headed foreigners in a tax-free malaria-ridden swamp. So it's obvious that they can't have any important banking laws.
(Please check your sarcasm meter : it should be trumpeting loudly.)
Well, the specifics of this particular case don't matter, so lets say that one has travel documents and the other doesn't (say, one travelled illegally and later managed to get the other person appropriate documents).
You, as a database implementor may choose to work out these possible cases, and 746,032 other different possibilities, enumerate them, and check your work, document the reasoning for each case ... and then you wonder why your Boss has fired you for not actually producing a line of database code this month.
I'm saying that sometimes (quite often), it is a waste of time trying to produce a perfect solution to a complex problem, when you can get your job done with a much simpler solution that may not be globally applicable.
Remember, we are NOT talking here about setting out to produce a perfect UPI algorithm ; we're talking about a way of identifying this year's cohort of examination candidates and distinguishing them from each other (and also from other similar people, perhaps over several years). Sometimes, and this is one, perfection is possibly unattainable and much more likely, not worth the effort.
Actually, this is the sort of question which should be carefully ruled out in the process of specifying the software to be delivered ; it shouldn't appear on the to-do list of a coder at all. And if a coder trips over such a strategic case, then with little more effort than we've put into it, they should document what the ambiguity in the specification is, punt it upstairs to a manager to take to the client, and get on with the next part of the specification. Managers do have their uses (and mine was complaining about being told to do his job a couple of days ago ; poor bunny).
The comment I was replying to said :
This implies (quite correctly) that not everyone is assigned an NHS number at (or before) birth. For example, having both been born some thousands of kilometres from Britain, neither my wife nor daughter were assigned an NHS number at birth. Actually, only around 1% of the population get assigned an NHS number at birth, and almost all of those are residents of Britain or have some expectation of living there at some time.
Does the Sun rise in the East? Where is the ursine toilet facility? Would Ian Paisley (pere or fils) have an entertainingly colourful apoplectic fit if elected to the papacy?
I'm sure there are problems in that system. If I ever talk about these things to another American who is likely to return to America, maybe I'll ask if they know of any examples.
That's probably compatible with what I was saying. But if you, as a project manager, had to fund months of research into what all the possible variations are, then spend years ("ha ha, but serious") dealing with court cases about people concerned with how your department seemed to be implementing a UPI which could result in major breaches of privacy ... would you want to fight other people's battles with your budget, or would it be quicker to come up with a scheme that provides a "Unique-for-our-purposes-and-all-other-Departments-can-go-hang Personal Identifier".
Your budget ; your choice.
Oh, by the way, if your get sued for mis-use of public funds by following your UPI dream, kiss your career goodbye.
It took my wife and (step-)daughter around 6 months each to get their NHS numbers, after several different fuck-ups each. That's perfectly long enough to potentially have tripped up an exam system that relied on them. Then there are likely to be a number of people who on religious/ stupidity grounds decline to make use of the NHS (I think of an American retard I knew at university who thought that using a NHS doctor service provided by the university as part of his tuition fees would make him a communist, and therefore probably pregnant ; oh, we had fun with that dribbling idiot).
Passport number would have worked in my case ; but with some 60-odd nationalities in this town's school system, the possibility is non-zero for getting a clash between (for example) a Samoan and a Iranian passport number that refer to different dates of birth.
Sometimes it's easier to compile your own "Unique-enough-for-my-purposes"-Personal-Identifier than to try to work out all the possibilities that you'd have to provide special cases for. And if you have to have an appeals or clash-checking system of any sort ... well the benefits of not doing it yourself are largely gone irrevocably.
Put enough of these in front of Bill Clinton and he'd find something to keep his cigars humidified with.
And I'm sure that the other party's Senators (Representatives? Who apart from Americans would care?) would themselves find ways to abuse such free gifts. It's in the nature of being a politician.
OK, caffeine-induced reading failures don't cause me existential angst. I'll go back to arguing pandimensional solipsism with Marvin the Paranoid Android now.
That's not how I read the abstract. I got it that the outer (liquid) core is rotating about 1deg/yr more slowly than the mantle (and the lithosphere, above the asthenosphere), but that the inner (solid) appears to be both accreting material radially (at around 1mm/yr or 1km/Myr) AND rotating faster than the adjacent part of the outer (liquid) core by about 1*10^-6 deg/yr or 1deg/Myr.
With the outer core being liquid, and having different rotation rates at top and bottom, then there will be shear across it, and therefore motion and turbulence. This will not cause heart attacks in the common room.
Your disbelief in this interpretation seems well founded, considering that the rotation of the inner core with respect to the mantle is (according to the figures in the abstract) around 999,999 millionths of a degree per year. No, wait a moment, that doesn't work ...
OK, now you've made me re-read the abstract. What I'm getting on a third reading is that short-term estimates of the super-rotation of the inner core w.r.t the mantle and lithosphere ("solid Earth") is around 1deg/yr (which has been reported several times in the recent past, from seismic tomography) BUT the anisotropic structure also reported for the inner core is incompatible with this, because with a net radial growth rate of around 1mm/yr (from thermodynamics) would mean that [whatever it is that's causing the anisotropy] was laid down in very thin layers with a layer of the [reverse property] laid over the [forward property] just 180-odd mm up in the pile. Additionally, they can use the magnitude of the anisotropy in arrival times of the PKIKP-PKiKP break in slope to estimate the depth within the inner core that the anisotropy reaches to, which illuminates the question of whether this structure built up over around 70 similar rotations, or over nearly 200,000 similar rotations.
It's not an easy abstract, in not an easy subject. I remember having this sort of headache over previous papers on seismic tomography (including some of the cited "1deg/yr" papers when they were originally published). Which probably suggests that it's a new field (well, we all knew that ; how much of this stuff was covered in your seismology courses at college? It certainly post-dates mine!) and people are still trying to figure out WTF is actually going on. It's rather like worshipping a new god : people keep on getting hit by bolts of lightning on the alter until they learn that they've got to rub the woad into the virgin's navel widdershins, not turnwise (as the last god wanted ; and it's so difficult to get a reliable supply virgins these days).
But ... it's a fairly safe assumption that the people doing the study were doing it for some commercial purpose (even it were only trapping of advertising victim's eyeball-seconds). So that would render them ineligible for most non-commercial-use versions of most software that I've read the EULAs for (yes, someone does read the damned things, even if incompletely and inconsistently ; [Henry 6 P2, A4S2, get it said and done]). And some other EULAs I've seen have explicitly banned installation of unpaid versions for the process of comparison, reporting etc.
Surely it is wrong to use software in contravention of the terms and conditions it is licensed for. Isn't that what part of the recent (and recurring) row about unlicensed (or license-contravening) use of GPL software components is about?
Errr, please tell me this is a joke. I'm not sure that I can stand living in a world that contains organisms that can say things like that except as a joke.
ROFLMAO. Have you ever had anything to do with the drilling industry? Obviously not. I've had nearly 200 colleagues killed in the duration of my career in the North Sea, and having started to widen my career into North American basins, I've had to include memorials for another hundred dead Canadians (mostly) in the last couple of weeks. Nobody ever, in any industry, anywhere, gave a single under-powered fart (let alone a good shit) about "net cost savings", because nobody ever believes that they're going to get caught by this particular transgression of best-practice.
The proportion would be far higher than if you took into account that eventually (over a period of some tens of thousands of years, not that that matters if you're looking to downplay the impact of the spill ; how are your BP shares recovering?), the water will be dispersed through the whole of the ocean basins of the planet. So you can dilute the effects across that much greater a volume on that basis. ... until the proportion fell below the detection limits of your measurement technology(-ies). But might that provide unpleasant answers for you?
Of course, if you wanted to provide a more appropriate description of the distribution, you might wish to mention the proportion of the seabed covered within one mile of the well centre, the proportion within two miles, the proportion within three miles
You have some data to back up this assertion? Something like the composition of the hydrocarbon charge in the Macondo prospect, the temperature profile over the area in the appropriate time (has the oil left the surface yet? I wasn't bothered to listen to the American news while I was over there earlier this week.), ventilation effects ... and even then you'd be pushing the data really hard to get a +/- 50% estimate of the changes. That's taking no account of the unknown amount of oil that actually came out of the hole.
Does converting liquid toxic hydrocarbon pools on the surface of the sea into a less-visible but no less toxic clouds in the air which then drift through populated areas actually do anyone any benefit?
People who live in one country are trying to dictate what happens in another country, to the likely detriment of that other country.
This would be an absolute gift to the Nats. Both the Scots Nats and the Welsh Nats.
For the more proximal issue of what would happen to computers if there was a move like this ... most people would probably have to manually put in a bodge during the several years proposed trials and relate it to "Greenwich Mean Time" (by then utterly notional, as it wouldn't be the time in Greenwich, ever). While I don't know the ins and outs of NTP, I would anticipate that there is configuration file somewhere that defines the meanings of various abbreviations (GMT, BST, CET ... etc) means in terms of offset from UTC, and whether a daylight saving time is implemented, and by how much, and what dates it applies to etc, etc, etc. So people who keep their NTP implementations up to date won't have any real problem, and people who don't keep their implementations up to date will have problems.
There would quite likely be an update to the ISO-3166 (IIRC) list of country names at the same time, with Scotland fairly likely to secede from Great Britain, and the United Kingdom to cease to exist. So people would need to get used to using .gb and .sco domains, etc. All in all, the clocks changing would be one of the smaller issues.
Speaking from a position of limited insight (I've never been drunk and incapable enough to leave an episode of any of the Stargates running for more than a couple of minutes, never seen an episode of Babylon 5, despite having respected local nerds encourage me to watch it, and never having even been aware of whether Farscape has ever been broadcast in the same country and time zone as me.), I can say with surety that Firefly was a pretty damned fine SF series. A bit silly in parts (what isn't?), but pretty damned good overall.
I really should follow up on Peet the Pervert's recommendation for Babylon 5. When I've some time on my hands.
Not just encryption measures. I was travelling to a not-very-hot, not-particularly-repressive country to work one time and I was planning to take my hand-held GPS, just for shits'n'giggles. But I had the burglars come round and take it instead, so I didn't. When I was there, I discovered that a nearby town had recently completed the conviction and sentencing of an American in the area for possession of a GPS. He got (reportedly) 5 years @ hard labour, though no one had any doubt that he'd have been quietly thrown out of the country after a few months, once the fuss had died down. Note that he wasn't charged with espionage or anything sinister like that (that's a 9mm trepanning, on sight, no trial), it was simply possession of this dangerous technology in that region of that country. An offence of strict commission. No extenuating circumstances could possibly exist.
I was glad that I didn't have a GPS to take with me.
Shock horror! Foreigners could possibly have the right to make their own rules for their own area? What sort of heretical un-American activity are you involved in. McCarthy would be spinning in his grave if he could hear you talk (unless you're not an American, at which point McCarthy would learn to say "Meh!").
HERETIC !
BURN THE HERETIC!
One of my first memories (from around 20 years before MRI or CAT scanning were invented) is of my father using a pair of forceps to pull a cm-long piece of gravel out of my forehead, around a week after I'd learned a messy lesson about tobogganing down steep grassy banks onto the level ground of a gravel path (hidden under the snow, it must be said). Actually I have a stronger memory of staggering along the path back to my friend's house, seeing through a curtain of blood ; friend's Mum was a nurse, off duty, so she got me to A&E sharpish ("Accident & Emergency"). They simply didn't see the fragment that was deeply buried, and it's presence only became clear when that puncture wound continued to fester when the others were clearing up. Dad was changing the dressings one day, thought he could feel a lump, and got his forceps.
It can be hard to see all the little bits of shit in a wound.
There has been at least one case I've heard of where a patient had a (successful, several times) scheme of going to A&E with an "accidental glass cut" to get it treated, then a while later pushing glass fragments back into the wound (after sterilising them? Possibly, she was otherwise careful to avoid dangerous practices.), returning to the same A&E department claiming continued pain from the wound, and then making a claim for having been mis-treated at the first visit. IIRC, she got away with it several times at several locations, until the record-keeping caught up with her.
Since then, yes, even minor wounds are routinely X-rayed ; not to find missing fragments (which would have happened anyway, if the clinician suspected fragmentation), but to document that the wound is clear to keep the lawyers happy.
It's a sad, sad statement on the world.
Why do you assume that the A&E centre had an X-ray machine?
I may live in the western world, but I've worked in places where the (unofficial) health advice is "If you can't drag your bleeding body to the airport and get your ass out of the country, crawl into an alley and die as a safer option than going to the hospital".
You may not enjoy thinking about living in a place like that and not having the option of dragging your bleeding body up the steps of the airplane. It's sobering.