Wondered if you'd spot that. I had a lovely row one year with one of our technicians who insisted on building workstations (into portable laboratories) that could only be used effectively by right-handers. He insisted on continuing to do it that way, despite being shown that the majority of the staff who were going to be using the labs were left-handed. Nice guy, good friend, damned good technician, but a real pain in the arse about this particular point. Don't know why - I'll have to ask him next time I see him.
Well, unless I'm one of the ones who gets to leave in the event of a disaster. If that's the case, I'm all for it.
I think the point is that no one gets to leave in the event of a disaster, which is why we shouldn't all be here.
In the event that both people have missed the point... the point is that essentially everyone leaves BEFORE there is a disaster, going to MULTIPLE separate permanent habitations. Which would likely greatly reduce the likelihood of the very disaster that is otherwise inevitable, as well as greatly mitigating the consequences of that disaster.
I suppose that I'd better RTFA now, but I strongly suspect that Hawking is saying many of the things that I've been saying for decades (since at least a decade before my vasectomy). That's not a claim to Hawking-like intelligence on my behalf, but more a claim that neither of us are quite such dribbling idiots as a depressingly high proportion of the population. (The proportion of the population who find it shocking that half of the population are of below-average intelligence.)
I never said it wasn't easy. What isn't easy is doing a "mirror symmetric problem" with no practice.
Saying the alphabet backward is easy too, but that's because I practiced it.
You can write with pencil or pen? That'd be - if you're normal and writing in Latin script, with your left-hand, and moving from left to right. Mirror-symmetric problem : use your right hand and write from right to left. Or with your left hand from right to left. Or your right hand from left to right.
There's another 4 variants for writing upside down (so that the person across the table from you can read it).
After that, you've got a head start on learning the Russian or Semitic scripts.
(Before you ask : I was bored one summer, and noticed something in a book about Leonardo of Quirm.)
Tedious screed ; I think I'd understood the problem, the solution, and the problems with the proposed solutions by about the third paragraph, out of how many? Unintended Consequence : now I'm actually just sufficiently motivated to go and see what this "Digg" thing, which I've never in my life visited before, is actually like. To misquote someone - don't tell me not to go there unless you want me to become aware that there is a there to go to.
My jurisdiction happens to be the country that Wikileaks is located in, remember?
Hmm, no, I'd missed that point, or forgotten it.
So, you're in the country where the Wikileaks domains are registered (America, probably, for some of them at least)? Or the country where the legal entity is registered (Sweden, wasn't it?). Or the country where the keys for the Tor core service are located (probably neither of the above, and probably changes irregularly and unpredictably)? Or the countries where the Tor servers are located (almost certainly many different ones)? Or the countries where it's sources, editors and "journalists" operate (also multiple)? Or, for that matter, the countries where the funders are located.
The reason it can't be anonymous is because to grant it the freedom of the press (which goes above and beyond the normal freedom of speech) it needs to have an official editor that's legally responsible when it oversteps those freedoms(for instance when it libels someone).
Maybe in your jurisdiction. But unless your government is in the habit of invading or nuking other sovereign nations over legal disputes, then your government's jurisdiction ends at your government's borders.
Which is precisely Assuagues (however it's spelt!) point with Wikileaks.
Are you implying that there are more zip files floating around in workplace environments than there are rar files floating around bittorrent and other file sharing worlds?
Considering how many of those files on torrent sites are duplicates of each other, with negligible changes ("get your porn passwords from XXX.com" replaces with "get your pron passwords from XXY.com"), or contain the MP3 encodings of the same record, but with different mis-spellings in the play-list files... well, I think I would make that implication explicit. Yes, I do think that "the world of work" generates a huge amount of information, the majority of which is shunted around using quick'n'dirty compression algorithms, mainly ZIP.
I'm just doing a quick back-of-the-thumbnail estimate : the last month has been fairly normal and I've generated a report comprising around a gigabyte of mostly compressed data (DLIS logging records ; databases ; WRF images and PDFs of the same images for clients who can't run the WRF-viewer application ; reports and calculation workings in various "office" formats ; biggest single file is a DLIS of around 100MB, which could be readily split up into 20-odd similar records). That, if I understand the music industry correctly is equivalent to around 50 music tracks (@2Mb/MP£), which would be several albums @15 tracks/album ; I don't know if this is realistic, because I don't waste much attention on music). There are around 40 or 50 crews operating in this business in the North Sea region, so call that around 100 albums (coarse) equivalent, for this one region, for this one aspect of this one industry, for this one month. Meanwhile a data archiving company my wife works for would have been shunting another few tens of gigabytes into the archives, occasionally to be seen again when needed (court records, medical records like stacks of X-rays, oil well reports). On that fairly small sample, we're looking at something like several gigabytes data per working person per month. And most of it would be compressed in ZIP format - because it's quick, reasonably effective, and known by pretty-much every operating system in frequent use. I'll not include a former correspondent who as a minor part of his job was working on how to build a data pipeline that could handle several petabytes of data daily - data that had to be losslessly handled, because it was research data and they literally didn't know what they were going to be looking for. But that's a lot of data. I'll also not include my near-neighbour who digs holes in the road for a living - and produces hundreds of MB of images every week to document that they DID fill in that piece of road to specification. Whatever the format of the image files is, it's a safe bet that if the pictures are bundled up with the rest of the job's documentation into one file ("archived"), then it's more likely to be done in a Zip format file than in a RAR format file.
Nope,I think that if the impossible were achieved and all the output from "work" could be compared to all the content on the "torrent-o-sphere", you'd be surprised and find that the torrent-o-sphere is relatively unimportant. (I've just been looking for some information on line - it's that old thing called checking your facts before posting. It reminds me of the 2009 article that asserts that bittorrent accounts for "27-55%" of internet traffic "depending on geographical location". Which means that 45 to 73% of traffic is not bittorrent. I'll leave you to work out how that works with the 2009 date on the report, and the assertion in the same report that bit-torrent was losing influence to streaming media sites. The report was based on only a petabyte or so of data analysis, so likely didn't include any big systems.)
I wouldn't even consider winzip to be a contiguous archive format.
The question is not so much "how hard to tow to Africa" (substitute your water-poor region of choice), but more "how soft". Ice is a pretty soft material : to attach a line or several that would allow you to put significant tow onto the berg, you'd need to build and maintain a huge anchoring system on the upper surface of the ice (OK, technically you could do it on the lower surface, but you add all the difficulties of diving to the difficulties of water-softened ice). Then your many, many attachment points would need to go to many many tug boats, or be gathered into a smaller number of main tow lines going to a small number of larger tow boats. You'd need some sort of fairly active monitoring of the anchoring system, to detect anchors that are slipping, or areas of ice that are deforming. Quite what you'd do about a slipping anchor or deforming area of ice... that's a different, complex question.
Someone else mentioned that it might be easier to just build a lot of coastal desalination plants... may well be true. But desalination, even by reverse osmosis, is expensive in terms of equipment and energy.
Obviously the newspaper itself can't be anonymous, but their sources can be.
Hmmm, I see that "Obviously" and I think to myself "Is that obvious? Just what is it about a "newspaper" that precludes anonymity of publisher?"
IF your publication takes and charges for advertising, then you probably need to let anonymity slip a little to get paid. But note the initial "IF".
Probably the same point if you pay your journalists/ typesetters/ copy-editors, etc.
Consumable suppliers too. Obviously all links in the chain that are greatly more amenable to anonymisation and also are much less one-to-one relationships in the digital world.
We're already pretty close to anonymous publishing of "news" with the various forms of "blog". While it will continue to be suppressed by "the authorities", the samizdat form of news distribution will I'm sure continue in it's various digital offspring.
and a whole plethora of complicated enzymes stolen from chlorobacteria by one route or another
to convert the CO2 into glucose
There, FTFY. Oh, and it's been going on since approximately two and a half thousand million years ago. Hell, it predates the nuclear power plant at Oklo by around a billion years.
There's a reason why RAR is the most popular archive format, Is it? Your evidence, please? No, seriously. In the last month at work, I haven't seen a single RAR file. Some hundreds of zip files though. On the other hand, porn torrents seem to be quite often comprised of RAR files. The prevalence of different file formats in different environments is certainly variable, and probably is highly variable. So if you're going to make a claim like that, then you must have some pretty interesting evidence to support it.
Re:Don't f* with the IT guy like at restaurant you
on
Child Porn As a Weapon
·
· Score: 1
WTF!? Voluntary participant? How the hell can you be a voluntary participant under the age of consent?
Err, by consenting? Oh, sorry, are you one of those people that think that because the mores and legal opinions of your society say one thing, then every other society in the world, and the millions of people who have lived in the past under different rules in what is ostensibly "your" society, are of necessity wrong. Most western societies had an "age of consent" (if they had one at all) in the early to mid-teens until around a century ago.
A huge percentage of the kids in child porn are kidnapped and eventually murdered or sold as slaves.
Very unlikely. Most of them are being fucked etc where most children have always been fucked : in their own family homes, at the hands of their close relatives, and with or without the active co-operation of their parents. Oh, sorry, is that a little uncomfortable for you? Sorry, I'll get you some coarse sandpaper for your piles to make you more comfortable. Check out the statistics - the most dangerous people for any child are now and always have been it's parents. It's a little thing called opportunity, y'know.
(This isn't denying that there is trafficking of children, kidnapping, etc ; just that the numbers are against your assertion.)
I'm sure they have ultra sticky glues that can be powdered and mixed in space,
Why are you sure of that? My chemistry isn't great - probably only better than 95% of the non-chemists in the world - because I only have to use various bits of polymer and surface chemistry in my day-to-day work. But I do routinely have to work with specialists in polymer chemistry and I maintain a friendship with a former adhesives chemist. I'm not at all sure that "they" (whoever "they" are) have the sort of adhesives you describe, and I have an uncomfortable feeling that there are a number of good reasons why what you describe is going to be somewhere between very difficult and impossible.
So I'd be very interested to hear what your grounds for being sure about the existence of these materials is. I can think of a couple of million dollars that we might have saved this month with access to such technologies, and I salivate over getting a slice of that cake!
The guy that made it even thanked pirates for raising his movie's profile.. I sent the guy $20 over paypal and I know that there wasn't any hollywood accounting keeping it from him either.
Heretic! Burn the accountant-starving, artist-rewarding, pirate-supporting heretic! What memes did I forget? Is ANYONE thinking of the children (of the starved accountants, presumably, as the artist's and pirates seem to have something to support their offspring with)?
That reminds me to call back that (alleged) journalist who has (allegedly) seen my name on a WikiLeaks contributor list.
Communist! Pinko! Heretic! Burn the pinko Communist heretic!
There got that out of the system. USB connectors for pretty much anything that might want both power and data? You mean like the way the the EU has (allegedly - I should check because I'm likely to be in the market for a new phone soon) mandated that phones sold in Europe after a certain date should at a minimum charge through a standard micro-USB socket. I should check - but I'm going to do it the easy way : go to my phone shop and ask them. I can't say that I'm interested in perpetuating the connector wars, and I'm quite willing to wait. Let's see who breaks first - Nokia, the corporation, or Nokia, the phone at home? (Hmmm, allegedly the standard is being proposed by the ITU. Equally allegdly, the switch-over is expected RSN. Oh well, if I can be bothered to look at new phones, or if I need to, I'll ask.)
There seems to be a strong assumption that everyone is going to follow traffic laws...
With that thing on the road, you WILL.
If it's suitably equipped... either you WILL follow the traffic rules, or your descendant's won't need to worry about anything (including either death, or taxis)
(That is one of my worse puns of the week. I need to go home!)
Also it should be fun in intersections if the driver under the bus likes to go straight on and the bus takes a turn (or vice versa)
Not possible. See my other post for why this thing runs - to all intents and purposes - on rails. And yes, intersections would be a problem, so this system is essentially intended for roads without (or with very few) intersections.
This new Chinese "bus" (it sounds more like a kind of train) is no different there. But unlike trams and buses, it can go its own speed without blocking traffic.
Look closely at the pictures on the cited (and very thin) article and you'll see that the road-side wheels and legs of the device are on the non-road side of a crash barrier. Therefore the machine is constrained from moving more than a few metres from that crash barrier. I deduce, though the article doesn't mention it, that the vehicle is actually constrained to run on rails (or on some special, reserved-for-bigbus-and-not-available-for-any-other-sort-of-vehicle piece of road surface, which might as well be considered a tarmac rail). So, depending on your local terminology, it's a tram or trolley-bus or S-bahn or [whatever], albeit one which can pass over traffic jams. The traffic jams explain why there are crash barriers between the general traffic and the "legs" of this system : if a general-purpose vehicle can cross the area the legs use, then eventually someone will be trying to change lane late, or dodge a crash, or something. Cue crash barriers. The crash barriers also put their constraints on the system : for something like links between normal bus terminal, railway terminal and airport, this would be fine : lots of predictable people moving between A and B ; any intersections in the road network would involve either tunnels, flyovers, or something horribly complex involving crash barriers, gates and I-dread-to-think mechanisms to deal with vehicles stopped across the gates. Limited usefulness, but ingenious.
... in that) If I didn't do the bloody jobs myself, not one of their machines would have any sort of back up ; not one of them would have R'd Their F-ing Ms, or burned the appropriate discs. Oh well, the wife isn't a problem - all backed up (not that she knows it). The Daughter is going to have a nasty surprise when she discovers that I can't reach around the world and repair her computer in the middle of Australia. Oh dear. What a pity. Never mind.
Or, as Larry and Jerry (I think) put it "Just Think of it as Evolution In Action".
... this is only going to apply to people who have one of those routers that deliberately broadcast their MAC addresses over radio waves?
Or does the Google car also stop at your front door, open the letter box, feed a "snake camera" and a network jack in, hunt around, plug into a convenient socket, and then read the MAC address. Silly Google - there's a port in the garden shed, and it's easy to lift the hinge pins!
Concerned about privacy? Don't use a wireless network. It's not rocket science.
Poor Google - foiled by evil householder who put their network sockets at waist height along with the power sockets and light switches!
Oh, I just happened to have seen a report about squirrel fur being used for stuff like coats, and that was in Europe
Ah, coincidence then. Serendipity, as the Sri Lankans get accused of.
I can't say that I've seen squirrel fur specifically in Britain or Europe, though I did see it used for chapkas (round fur hats) on sale in Siberia. Nothing against that if the animals are being culled for some reasonable reason and the fur (and for that matter, meat) would otherwise go to waste. What you consider a "reasonable reason" is another question. A person's fancy? A forestry company's profit margin? A disease-control effort?
There is a complicating factor in Britain (and to a lesser extent in mainland Europe) : around 150 years ago someone(s) introduced American "Grey" squirrels to the island and to the continent, and they're steadily displacing the native "Red" squirrels through a combination of a slight breeding and food-range advantage plus an immunity (in the Greys) to an introduced virus. That opens up whole channels of complicated issues, which I'm sure you'd be familiar with if I'm correct in understanding that you're on Reunion.
Mmmmm, rabbit stew, mmmm. Going to have to get some bunny! Got your mum's recipe? Because I'm going to be visiting my Aged Parents soon, and Mum likes her bunny dishes too.
... Sounds to me as if WikiLeaks is doing exactly what I've been paying them to do. Well done WikiLeaks, have another £25. Cheaper entertainment than going to the cinema, and it makes me feel good too.
{off to PayPal, donation number 6_X_2_2______9_2_)
And I hope that the rednecked idiots have an apoplectic fit and drop dead. Preferably soiling themselves in the process.
No question marks in this one 1) Kill Boar 2) Irradiate it 3) Sell to German government 4) PROFIT!!!!111!!! -- rule number 1 of slashdot: ANY thread can be twisted into a bash of microsoft. no exceptions.
OK, how are you going to twist this story into a MS bashing?
[/Self : This should be good for a laugh if he can do it. And good for a laugh if he can't. Win-win!]
Slashdot Mirror
Wondered if you'd spot that.
I had a lovely row one year with one of our technicians who insisted on building workstations (into portable laboratories) that could only be used effectively by right-handers. He insisted on continuing to do it that way, despite being shown that the majority of the staff who were going to be using the labs were left-handed. Nice guy, good friend, damned good technician, but a real pain in the arse about this particular point. Don't know why - I'll have to ask him next time I see him.
Damn - I threw out the last tapes and platters from my PDP just a couple of days ago. Pffft - there goes a business opportunity.
P :
In the event that both people have missed the point ... the point is that essentially everyone leaves BEFORE there is a disaster, going to MULTIPLE separate permanent habitations. Which would likely greatly reduce the likelihood of the very disaster that is otherwise inevitable, as well as greatly mitigating the consequences of that disaster.
I suppose that I'd better RTFA now, but I strongly suspect that Hawking is saying many of the things that I've been saying for decades (since at least a decade before my vasectomy). That's not a claim to Hawking-like intelligence on my behalf, but more a claim that neither of us are quite such dribbling idiots as a depressingly high proportion of the population. (The proportion of the population who find it shocking that half of the population are of below-average intelligence.)
You can write with pencil or pen? That'd be - if you're normal and writing in Latin script, with your left-hand, and moving from left to right.
Mirror-symmetric problem : use your right hand and write from right to left. Or with your left hand from right to left. Or your right hand from left to right.
There's another 4 variants for writing upside down (so that the person across the table from you can read it).
After that, you've got a head start on learning the Russian or Semitic scripts.
(Before you ask : I was bored one summer, and noticed something in a book about Leonardo of Quirm.)
Tedious screed ; I think I'd understood the problem, the solution, and the problems with the proposed solutions by about the third paragraph, out of how many?
Unintended Consequence : now I'm actually just sufficiently motivated to go and see what this "Digg" thing, which I've never in my life visited before, is actually like.
To misquote someone - don't tell me not to go there unless you want me to become aware that there is a there to go to.
Hmm, no, I'd missed that point, or forgotten it.
So, you're in the country where the Wikileaks domains are registered (America, probably, for some of them at least)? Or the country where the legal entity is registered (Sweden, wasn't it?). Or the country where the keys for the Tor core service are located (probably neither of the above, and probably changes irregularly and unpredictably)? Or the countries where the Tor servers are located (almost certainly many different ones)? Or the countries where it's sources, editors and "journalists" operate (also multiple)?
Or, for that matter, the countries where the funders are located.
Maybe in your jurisdiction. But unless your government is in the habit of invading or nuking other sovereign nations over legal disputes, then your government's jurisdiction ends at your government's borders.
Which is precisely Assuagues (however it's spelt!) point with Wikileaks.
Considering how many of those files on torrent sites are duplicates of each other, with negligible changes ("get your porn passwords from XXX.com" replaces with "get your pron passwords from XXY.com"), or contain the MP3 encodings of the same record, but with different mis-spellings in the play-list files ... well, I think I would make that implication explicit. Yes, I do think that "the world of work" generates a huge amount of information, the majority of which is shunted around using quick'n'dirty compression algorithms, mainly ZIP.
I'm just doing a quick back-of-the-thumbnail estimate : the last month has been fairly normal and I've generated a report comprising around a gigabyte of mostly compressed data (DLIS logging records ; databases ; WRF images and PDFs of the same images for clients who can't run the WRF-viewer application ; reports and calculation workings in various "office" formats ; biggest single file is a DLIS of around 100MB, which could be readily split up into 20-odd similar records). That, if I understand the music industry correctly is equivalent to around 50 music tracks (@2Mb/MP£), which would be several albums @15 tracks/album ; I don't know if this is realistic, because I don't waste much attention on music).
There are around 40 or 50 crews operating in this business in the North Sea region, so call that around 100 albums (coarse) equivalent, for this one region, for this one aspect of this one industry, for this one month. Meanwhile a data archiving company my wife works for would have been shunting another few tens of gigabytes into the archives, occasionally to be seen again when needed (court records, medical records like stacks of X-rays, oil well reports).
On that fairly small sample, we're looking at something like several gigabytes data per working person per month. And most of it would be compressed in ZIP format - because it's quick, reasonably effective, and known by pretty-much every operating system in frequent use.
I'll not include a former correspondent who as a minor part of his job was working on how to build a data pipeline that could handle several petabytes of data daily - data that had to be losslessly handled, because it was research data and they literally didn't know what they were going to be looking for. But that's a lot of data. I'll also not include my near-neighbour who digs holes in the road for a living - and produces hundreds of MB of images every week to document that they DID fill in that piece of road to specification. Whatever the format of the image files is, it's a safe bet that if the pictures are bundled up with the rest of the job's documentation into one file ("archived"), then it's more likely to be done in a Zip format file than in a RAR format file.
Nope,I think that if the impossible were achieved and all the output from "work" could be compared to all the content on the "torrent-o-sphere", you'd be surprised and find that the torrent-o-sphere is relatively unimportant. (I've just been looking for some information on line - it's that old thing called checking your facts before posting. It reminds me of the 2009 article that asserts that bittorrent accounts for "27-55%" of internet traffic "depending on geographical location". Which means that 45 to 73% of traffic is not bittorrent. I'll leave you to work out how that works with the 2009 date on the report, and the assertion in the same report that bit-torrent was losing influence to streaming media sites. The report was based on only a petabyte or so of data analysis, so likely didn't include any big systems.)
Who mentioned
The question is not so much "how hard to tow to Africa" (substitute your water-poor region of choice), but more "how soft". Ice is a pretty soft material : to attach a line or several that would allow you to put significant tow onto the berg, you'd need to build and maintain a huge anchoring system on the upper surface of the ice (OK, technically you could do it on the lower surface, but you add all the difficulties of diving to the difficulties of water-softened ice). Then your many, many attachment points would need to go to many many tug boats, or be gathered into a smaller number of main tow lines going to a small number of larger tow boats. You'd need some sort of fairly active monitoring of the anchoring system, to detect anchors that are slipping, or areas of ice that are deforming. Quite what you'd do about a slipping anchor or deforming area of ice ... that's a different, complex question.
Someone else mentioned that it might be easier to just build a lot of coastal desalination plants ... may well be true. But desalination, even by reverse osmosis, is expensive in terms of equipment and energy.
Hmmm, I see that "Obviously" and I think to myself "Is that obvious? Just what is it about a "newspaper" that precludes anonymity of publisher?"
We're already pretty close to anonymous publishing of "news" with the various forms of "blog". While it will continue to be suppressed by "the authorities", the samizdat form of news distribution will I'm sure continue in it's various digital offspring.
and a whole plethora of complicated enzymes stolen from chlorobacteria by one route or another
There, FTFY.
Oh, and it's been going on since approximately two and a half thousand million years ago. Hell, it predates the nuclear power plant at Oklo by around a billion years.
There's a reason why RAR is the most popular archive format,
Is it? Your evidence, please?
No, seriously.
In the last month at work, I haven't seen a single RAR file. Some hundreds of zip files though. On the other hand, porn torrents seem to be quite often comprised of RAR files. The prevalence of different file formats in different environments is certainly variable, and probably is highly variable. So if you're going to make a claim like that, then you must have some pretty interesting evidence to support it.
Err, by consenting?
Oh, sorry, are you one of those people that think that because the mores and legal opinions of your society say one thing, then every other society in the world, and the millions of people who have lived in the past under different rules in what is ostensibly "your" society, are of necessity wrong. Most western societies had an "age of consent" (if they had one at all) in the early to mid-teens until around a century ago.
Very unlikely. Most of them are being fucked etc where most children have always been fucked : in their own family homes, at the hands of their close relatives, and with or without the active co-operation of their parents.
Oh, sorry, is that a little uncomfortable for you? Sorry, I'll get you some coarse sandpaper for your piles to make you more comfortable.
Check out the statistics - the most dangerous people for any child are now and always have been it's parents. It's a little thing called opportunity, y'know.
(This isn't denying that there is trafficking of children, kidnapping, etc ; just that the numbers are against your assertion.)
Why are you sure of that?
My chemistry isn't great - probably only better than 95% of the non-chemists in the world - because I only have to use various bits of polymer and surface chemistry in my day-to-day work. But I do routinely have to work with specialists in polymer chemistry and I maintain a friendship with a former adhesives chemist. I'm not at all sure that "they" (whoever "they" are) have the sort of adhesives you describe, and I have an uncomfortable feeling that there are a number of good reasons why what you describe is going to be somewhere between very difficult and impossible.
So I'd be very interested to hear what your grounds for being sure about the existence of these materials is. I can think of a couple of million dollars that we might have saved this month with access to such technologies, and I salivate over getting a slice of that cake!
Heretic! Burn the accountant-starving, artist-rewarding, pirate-supporting heretic!
What memes did I forget? Is ANYONE thinking of the children (of the starved accountants, presumably, as the artist's and pirates seem to have something to support their offspring with)?
That reminds me to call back that (alleged) journalist who has (allegedly) seen my name on a WikiLeaks contributor list.
Communist! Pinko! Heretic! Burn the pinko Communist heretic!
There got that out of the system.
USB connectors for pretty much anything that might want both power and data? You mean like the way the the EU has (allegedly - I should check because I'm likely to be in the market for a new phone soon) mandated that phones sold in Europe after a certain date should at a minimum charge through a standard micro-USB socket.
I should check - but I'm going to do it the easy way : go to my phone shop and ask them. I can't say that I'm interested in perpetuating the connector wars, and I'm quite willing to wait. Let's see who breaks first - Nokia, the corporation, or Nokia, the phone at home?
(Hmmm, allegedly the standard is being proposed by the ITU. Equally allegdly, the switch-over is expected RSN. Oh well, if I can be bothered to look at new phones, or if I need to, I'll ask.)
Bugger! Not enough slashes on slashdot!
Not possible. See my other post for why this thing runs - to all intents and purposes - on rails. And yes, intersections would be a problem, so this system is essentially intended for roads without (or with very few) intersections.
Look closely at the pictures on the cited (and very thin) article and you'll see that the road-side wheels and legs of the device are on the non-road side of a crash barrier. Therefore the machine is constrained from moving more than a few metres from that crash barrier.
I deduce, though the article doesn't mention it, that the vehicle is actually constrained to run on rails (or on some special, reserved-for-bigbus-and-not-available-for-any-other-sort-of-vehicle piece of road surface, which might as well be considered a tarmac rail).
So, depending on your local terminology, it's a tram or trolley-bus or S-bahn or [whatever], albeit one which can pass over traffic jams. The traffic jams explain why there are crash barriers between the general traffic and the "legs" of this system : if a general-purpose vehicle can cross the area the legs use, then eventually someone will be trying to change lane late, or dodge a crash, or something. Cue crash barriers.
The crash barriers also put their constraints on the system : for something like links between normal bus terminal, railway terminal and airport, this would be fine : lots of predictable people moving between A and B ; any intersections in the road network would involve either tunnels, flyovers, or something horribly complex involving crash barriers, gates and I-dread-to-think mechanisms to deal with vehicles stopped across the gates.
Limited usefulness, but ingenious.
... in that)
If I didn't do the bloody jobs myself, not one of their machines would have any sort of back up ; not one of them would have R'd Their F-ing Ms, or burned the appropriate discs. Oh well, the wife isn't a problem - all backed up (not that she knows it). The Daughter is going to have a nasty surprise when she discovers that I can't reach around the world and repair her computer in the middle of Australia.
Oh dear.
What a pity.
Never mind.
Or, as Larry and Jerry (I think) put it "Just Think of it as Evolution In Action".
... this is only going to apply to people who have one of those routers that deliberately broadcast their MAC addresses over radio waves?
Or does the Google car also stop at your front door, open the letter box, feed a "snake camera" and a network jack in, hunt around, plug into a convenient socket, and then read the MAC address.
Silly Google - there's a port in the garden shed, and it's easy to lift the hinge pins!
Concerned about privacy? Don't use a wireless network. It's not rocket science.
Poor Google - foiled by evil householder who put their network sockets at waist height along with the power sockets and light switches!
Ah, coincidence then. Serendipity, as the Sri Lankans get accused of.
I can't say that I've seen squirrel fur specifically in Britain or Europe, though I did see it used for chapkas (round fur hats) on sale in Siberia. Nothing against that if the animals are being culled for some reasonable reason and the fur (and for that matter, meat) would otherwise go to waste. What you consider a "reasonable reason" is another question. A person's fancy? A forestry company's profit margin? A disease-control effort?
There is a complicating factor in Britain (and to a lesser extent in mainland Europe) : around 150 years ago someone(s) introduced American "Grey" squirrels to the island and to the continent, and they're steadily displacing the native "Red" squirrels through a combination of a slight breeding and food-range advantage plus an immunity (in the Greys) to an introduced virus. That opens up whole channels of complicated issues, which I'm sure you'd be familiar with if I'm correct in understanding that you're on Reunion.
Mmmmm, rabbit stew, mmmm. Going to have to get some bunny! Got your mum's recipe? Because I'm going to be visiting my Aged Parents soon, and Mum likes her bunny dishes too.
... Sounds to me as if WikiLeaks is doing exactly what I've been paying them to do.
Well done WikiLeaks, have another £25. Cheaper entertainment than going to the cinema, and it makes me feel good too.
{off to PayPal, donation number 6_X_2_2______9_2_)
And I hope that the rednecked idiots have an apoplectic fit and drop dead. Preferably soiling themselves in the process.
Well, you set the challenge yourself :
OK, how are you going to twist this story into a MS bashing?
[/Self : This should be good for a laugh if he can do it. And good for a laugh if he can't. Win-win!]