More specifically, our history of respecting treaties with weaker parties... ref the American Indians.
Don't be so harsh on yourself - some of us come from countries that fought wars to defend our corporation's right to sell addictive narcotics to less-developed countries.
Oh, and we sold a lot of slaves. (Largely to Americans, it must be said.)
Despite Branson being an irritating beardy nirk, I do have a modicum of respect for him, and in this palaver he has generally done the sensible thing of shutting up about things that he doesn't really understand.
The CAA have for quite some time (since 16th April) posted reasons for the discouragement of flying in volcanic ash, which cites this PDF from a 1993 publication. Which boils down to "ash fucks engines, windows, instruments and paintwork and can generally fuck your plane out of the sky". So, for a long time (since 1993, if not earlier) the advice has been "don't do that".
Now, there's a general question of why the engine manufacturers, instrument manufacturers, and aircraft manufacturers didn't long ago get their communal posteriors in gear and come up with some more nuanced guidelines than "don't do it". Maybe something like "don't do it at more than one part in 10^15 of ash suspended in air for more than 10 hours of accumulated flight time before stripping down all the engines and replacing the pitot air-speed sensors" (numbers are for illustration only). And the general question has a general answer, "no one considered that the question was important enough to deserve more attention".
There's also a failure of communication here too - us geologists have long (centuries) known that Iceland is a hotbed of volcanic activity, and we didn't think to slap the CAA (and international equivalents) around the face and ask them some awkward "what if?" questions. But then, we don't generally get the CAA calling us and asking what the consequences of a loaded jumbo jet crashing into a volcano would be. The two fields don't really impinge on each other. Except with a CFIT (when the Terrain normally survives better than whatever does the Controlled Flight Into it; "CFIT" is aviation lingo for "Controlled Flight Into Terrain", but dressed up so as not to scare the paying sheep in the passenger cabin), or as we now know, with a volcano erupting close enough to a major airways nexus for the ash cloud to affect it.
Hmmm, a question occurs : were there any aviation bans associated with the Grimsvotn eruption of 1996/8? No reports that I know of. What about the Grimsvotn eruption of 2004? Ah, 59 flights cancelled from Schipol and numerous more diverted. That's an unprecedented new meaning of "unprecedented". I'm slightly surprised to read that report myself - I've known that Grimsvotn has been erupting irregularly for over a decade (it's on the to-do list if I can persuade the wife to come on holiday to Iceland ; but don't tell her!) ; I hadn't heard about the flight impacts until just now. But then, I'm a rock-doctor, not a joy-stick jockey. I had been feeling slightly contrite that my subject (Earth) and my colleagues (rock-doctors) may possibly have not given sufficient reasonable warning to the aviation industry (apart from throwing planes out of the sky, burying military and civilian airbases, etc, etc), but it look as if the Earth has been throwing lumps of rock at planes over the north Atlantic for years. That puts the ball squarely back in the aviation industry's court over why they hadn't foreseen this eventuality.
Oh well. News item : Humans get given plenty of warning of natural events, and humans don't pay the blindest bit of attention. Well, that's unprecedented (in the new meaning, see above). Sudbury. Manicougain. Nordlingen. Toba. Vesuvius (multiple times). Laki. Krakatoa (west of Java). Tunguska. Galunggung (and it's associated Gliding Club). Nevado de Ruiz. Redoubt. Hurricanes ad nauseam preceding Katrina. Grimsv
I don't claim to understand the business speak. But hey, I don't care to run a business either.
So, there are billions of "leeches" out there who were trying to download your terabytes of Amiga software? Huh? I can only imagine that they had something against you personally (or the site), because I don't believe that there are billions of Amiga users out there, and I can't conceive of someone being idiotic enough to download terabytes of information and then do it all again because they haven't backed up their copy of the data you provided. So... what were they doing? Continually re-running the same download of the same terabytes of data to try to force you off the net?
Nope, don't understand. I'm not even sure what I don't understand. Any way, SEP (Someone Else's Problem). I'll get on with drilling (ha!) my oil well.
I think the "explosive" type of volcano that can hurl concentrations of ash into the air is just one specific type.
In case the comments already posted on SlashDot haven't already convinced you, you are wrong. There are many types of volcano that can produce these hazards, and a single particular volcano can (and almost invariably does) change eruption style considerable during the course of a single eruption.
I am definitely not a volcanologist or a geologist.
I am (a geologist ; FGS, if you know what that means) ; for more information, look for another post (not yet written) in this topic.
Programmers who are confident they have control of their personal situation write more secure code than programmers in doubt.
Hmmm, Interesting hypothesis.
How would you test it?
(I'd look at the number/ frequency / severity of bugs reported (big project!) and try to correlate that with "work at home" / "work in near-home rent-an-office" / "work in company site with personal office" / "work in cubicle rats maze". But I've only got a very small sample of programmers to observe and correlate against - none of who write anything that would be relevant for remote access even if it were possible.)
What, in Europe they don't have abductions?? They don't need to transmit and negotiate return of the hostages when we get in touch?
In Soviet Socialist Europe , Aliens don't abduct you. In Soviet Socialist Europe, you abduct Aliens.
Umm, actually, the Aliens drive into Groningen town square, crack a few Amstels, puff a little blow in the cafe, and hey, if there's any anal probing to be done (what is an anus in your species anyway? Do Aliens have one?), well, there's a by-the-hour hotel just round the corner from the church... The Aliens get back home, late, dishevveled, and their samples of cow are cooked, covered in slightly spicy sauce and wrapped in bread. The three genders of stay-at-home-Alien are Not Amused and the would-be-abducting Alien spends the night on the sofa.
My memories of Groningen are rather vague. But fun. "Amsterdam of the North"
Surely it'd be less costly to build a chain link fence around the site than dig a giant moat?
It's quite a substantial site, so that'd be quite a 2.PI().substantial length of fence, and they'd need to make it rabbit-proof, which requires regular maintenance. Might well be cheaper to dig the moat, in the long term. How much does a one-off rental of a digger and driver cost compared to weekly visits by a guy who can fix fences? Oh, they'd have to deal with any invaders after the winter too.
Perhaps the Dutch just have a thing about dykes!
Only the lesbians. And some of the bi-curious women. And most of the men (given half a chance to watch). OK ; they do.
Ah, just outside Groningen (the place that non-Dutch can only pronounce correctly by spitting fresh phlegm at their audience). Fond memories of going window shopping in the Penis-Strasse. Amstel. What was that a particular odour from the shop opposite the main church?
they're going to desalinate the Red Sea to provide water to communities instead of using the Jordan River.
Almost certainly that's not what they're going to do.
Leaving aside the political benefits of beggaring your neighbour by taking all the water you can from the river that forms your mutual border, the basic geography is against desalinating Red Sea water and shipping it to the north of Israel and the Palestinian West Bank : the Red Sea only contacts the southernmost extremity of Israel. If the Israelis want to supply northern Israel with desalinated seawater, it'd be considerably cheaper to build the desalination plant somewhere on the Mediterranean coast - around Haifa or a bit south of there. Pipelines aren't cheap, and are vulnerable, so you minimise the length of them. (Obviously this'd leave the population of the Palestinian state up shit creek ; but that's policy anyway.) If some desperate fool wants to farm the Negev, then build a desalination plant on the Red Sea coast, or possibly a Red-Dead canal (it is downhill, mostly) and your desalination plant at the Dead end of that ; surplus water goes into the Dead Sea, and up into the atmosphere.
Hmm, I've never heard of the Palestinians targetting the drinking water infrastructure of their Israeli opressors. I wonder why? (It may be that the Israelis suppress reporting.)
It sounds as if the site that you ran (I note you use the past tense) was a roaring success, which would presumably be why you're not still doing it. It was a site which was a member of the set (mathematical sense) of sites that didn't want customers. It was also, from your description, a member of the set (ditto) of sites that detected and blocked Ad-blocking visitors.
It is my contention (the one that you didn't understand) that the two sets of sites overlap to a large extent. There are other ways of trying to drive away customers, but it would seem from your example that using tools to prevent people blocking adverts is definitely one way of driving customers to other sites. Thank you for illustrating my point.
As for bandwidth charges, "leeches" (so kind of you to run websites for haemivorous invertebrates ; what did you advertise to them?), etc... sounds to me like your business model didn't work. That's fine ; I hope that you got out of the failure before it dragged you into the financial depths, have learned from your mistake(s), and are trying Plan 'B'.
FWIW, I don't have any problem with paying to support services that I find useful or appropriate. Yahoo Corp (whoever their corporate overlordship are this week) get money from me for one set of services, and I adblock everything they send me without a second of moral qualms ; various clubs and professional bodies get hundreds of dollars of my membership money per year, and if they started advertising anything other than their bookshops in the members-only areas, you can be assured that I'd be onto the phone of "t'committeee" pretty damned quick. On my Hotmail spam-trap account I used to use the signature "Wasting Microsoft's Resources for fun and disprofit." (after Hotmail sold out to MS, of course). And finally, for whatever reason, SlashDot offer me the option to disable advertising, though I don't normally do that. But with that execrable "Slashroulette" thing, that was enough for me to put in a rule on my own computer dumping all advertising (*.swf) from SlashDot and their corporate overlords. Obviously SlashDot are considering following the website that you used to run down the same path to fame, fortune and household-name status.
Who was that insane TV executive who proposed criminal charges a couple of years ago for people who used video recorders etc to avoid watching adverts? Have the shrinks managed to get him back to reality yet?
Mr Stagnitto claims to have a Slashdot UID in the low 5 digits.
Why would you find a low-5d UID implausible? I got one for free when I joined. OK - you were probably having more fun sucking your mothers tit that day than I had signing up to SlashDot. But don't you get more fun out of SlashDot today than you do out of sucking your mother's tit?
Did they ever? No, seriously, did anyone ever put parachutes on planes for anyone other than the designated crew of aviators (includes radio op., gunner, bomb aimer, etc.)? I can't think of a reason to do it, except to instil a false sense of security. And that's pretty dodgy thinking - I'd be much more reassured by the flight crew throwing their parachutes out of the window as they start to taxi than I would be reassured by being told to pay special attention to the trolley-dolly's demonstration about how to put on your parachute.
That thing which appears in a couple of movies about the USAF having an "evacuation capsule" for their President when he/she is flying... is that movie bull, real, or we-can-tell-you-but-then-we'd-have-to-kill-you,from-orbit-with-nukes-CLASSIFIED ? It always struck me as pretty dodgy.
Even before things descended to the level of poking fun at RyanAir, I don't think that anyone one was proposing giving away a liferaft. Those things are expensive!
"Disembarking early, sir? Would you like to consider our life-raft rental service. It's very competitively priced. We can also provide insurance against you not surviving your disembarkation, and against not being found for 3 weeks." Besides, I wouldn't be surprised to find that no (reputable) airline owns any liferafts. They're probably all rented because they need regular servicing. That's certainly the case for vessels - liferaft rental, service agreement and all paperwork from a one-stop-shop - you've got to be a really big player to find it worthwhile to run (and certify) your own liferaft servicing service.
For example, my company has the technology to cure AIDS, but we can't get the time of day from any granting agencies, because they will only fund vaccine research.
Find a billionaire who has AIDS. I'm sure if your proposal is sound, they'll be willing to pony up the money. Hell, even if it's not sound, they still might given they're likely desperate for a cure.
No, no, no, no.
1. Find a billionaire (caveat : who has children (caveat : that he gives a shit about)). 2. Get the child(ren) infected with AIDS. 3. Send your marketing department around to the billionaire. (It doesn't matter if the child hasn't told the father that they've got AIDS ; you can always be the bearer of glad tidings. Or you can find another marketing shill to do the dirty work.) 4 ??? 5. Profit!
"Blackmail" is such an ugly word. I much prefer "extortion".
Computers might make your technological profession possible ; my technological profession (which is almost certainly utterly essential to the existence of your technological profession) uses computers as tools for communication and calculation. But essentially I can throw the computer over the side into the sea and do my job with the MkI eyeball, the MkI fingertip, the MkI brain and the Mk23 year-of-experience. Oh, I'd also use the Mk2 Sharp Pencil for communication, along with papyrus or some similar innovation. Computers are tools to achieve results.
There should be sufficient audio facilities to provide a pleasant working environment for the programmer.
On the not-implausible assumption that you're an American, I'll assume that these facilities include your Second-Amendment-guaranteed rights to machine-gun the mother-fucker next to you for that incomprehensible crap that he considers "pleasant". If you want noise in my working environment, you'd better have some extremely effective headphones. Effective at keeping your noise in.
To answer the original question : everyone is different ; get a budget for the task and a floor area ; allocate some of it to internal divisions of the working area (movable sound-absorbing room dividers, perhaps something floor to ceiling depending on the building's construction?), then give the rest of the budget to the people that you're entrusting with your much more valuable task. If they can't come to a decision about this without people in adjoining towns getting hit by the shrapnel, then perhaps the team isn't right. At which point, you've got a much bigger issue. (Elaboration : not only is everyone different, but one person is likely to be different at one end of the year from the other ; flexibility.)
"Forms of life we've never seen may well be atermal." means "Forms of life we've never seen may well not depend on temperature"
That's still a pretty... odd... concept.
Of the one biochemistry that we're familar with ("CHON"-based, Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen ; nucleic acids as polymeric information carriers and amino acid polymeric chains as catalytic molecules), all forms require the presence of liquid water for active life (growth, reproduction) ; unsurprisingly then these life forms are restricted to a pretty narrow range of temperatures for activity - between about 260 and 400 Kelvin. While their chemistry requires the presence of liquid water, I don't see them ever getting to much lower temperatures because you can't remain liquid at much lower temperatures with anything even vaguely resembling pure water (there's a minor caveat for really strong ammoniacal solutions - that may take the bottom of the temperature range down by ten, or at a real stretch twenty Kelvin). Going to higher temperatures and the thermal instability of the molecules involved becomes unsupportable well below the temperature/ pressure regime at which "liquid water" ceases to become a valid concept and you're using critical or supercritical solvents. Let's be generous and say that ultimately you can get "our" system up to 450 K, given a high enough pressure (I've never heard of evidence of any life-like activity that high, even in "black smokers" and the like ; but I'm a geologist, not a biologist with a thing for hyperthermophilic bugs). 250 to 450 Kelvin is not a particularly wide range of temperatures ; it's not even an octave. Significant areas of our planet go to lower (to about 200 K) and higher (approaching 1900 K) temperatures. In our planetary system, lower temperatures are very common on planetary surfaces and higher temperatures are common in planetary interiors ; but both of these broad areas are likely to be inaccessible to "our" biochemistry.
Theoretically, you could look at biochemistries with different solvents. Ammonia is credible ; carbon dioxide would be difficult because of it's narrow range of temperatures and pressures where it's a stable liquid ; methane/ ethane is interesting. But each and any such system that could be developed is going to be moderately constrained by existing in the temperature (and pressure) regime where it's main solvent is liquid. In the Star Trek universe it might be credible to have organisms that can survive having their main solvent boiling within their cells ; but I don't see how that could happen in real life.
Could a biochemistry be based on something other than "CHON"? It would be unwise to say that it's impossible, but they are the most abundant of what the astronomers call "metals" (anything that is not hydrogen or helium, and one of "CHON" is hydrogen!) and they hold that position for very simple, powerful reasons of nuclear physics. So if there are a million different biochemistries in our galaxy, it's a fair bet that 999,000 of them are CHON-based (the other thousand-odd I leave to allow for more sulphuric biochemistries than ours). Silicon does have some interesting polymeric chemistry (nesosilicates, nektosilicates and the like ; fascinating and important materials that I do study intently for my employment), but it's nowhere near as complex as the chemistry based on carbon.
I really fail to see what you could mean by an "athermal" form of life. Outside the likes of Star Trek.
Meaning what, exactly? I'm not sure that the concept is even possible. Everything has a temperature, even if it's zero Kelvin. What do you think that you mean by "athermal"?
By and large, I don't mind taking fingerprints and DNA from people who have been convicted in a court of law.
Generally the fingerprints, DNA etc etc are taken from someone who has been accused or suspected of a crime, in order to be used in a trial which may or may not lead to a conviction. I think that you mean the retention of fingerprint data, DNA data, etc, but I'm not 100% sure.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't be so harsh on yourself - some of us come from countries that fought wars to defend our corporation's right to sell addictive narcotics to less-developed countries.
Oh, and we sold a lot of slaves. (Largely to Americans, it must be said.)
Like the flammable gas recorder on the bench behind me.
Oh well, we'll have to develop something better. Or buy a BIG box of floppies.
Despite Branson being an irritating beardy nirk, I do have a modicum of respect for him, and in this palaver he has generally done the sensible thing of shutting up about things that he doesn't really understand.
The CAA have for quite some time (since 16th April) posted reasons for the discouragement of flying in volcanic ash, which cites this PDF from a 1993 publication. Which boils down to "ash fucks engines, windows, instruments and paintwork and can generally fuck your plane out of the sky".
So, for a long time (since 1993, if not earlier) the advice has been "don't do that".
Now, there's a general question of why the engine manufacturers, instrument manufacturers, and aircraft manufacturers didn't long ago get their communal posteriors in gear and come up with some more nuanced guidelines than "don't do it". Maybe something like "don't do it at more than one part in 10^15 of ash suspended in air for more than 10 hours of accumulated flight time before stripping down all the engines and replacing the pitot air-speed sensors" (numbers are for illustration only). And the general question has a general answer, "no one considered that the question was important enough to deserve more attention".
There's also a failure of communication here too - us geologists have long (centuries) known that Iceland is a hotbed of volcanic activity, and we didn't think to slap the CAA (and international equivalents) around the face and ask them some awkward "what if?" questions.
But then, we don't generally get the CAA calling us and asking what the consequences of a loaded jumbo jet crashing into a volcano would be. The two fields don't really impinge on each other. Except with a CFIT (when the Terrain normally survives better than whatever does the Controlled Flight Into it; "CFIT" is aviation lingo for "Controlled Flight Into Terrain", but dressed up so as not to scare the paying sheep in the passenger cabin), or as we now know, with a volcano erupting close enough to a major airways nexus for the ash cloud to affect it.
Hmmm, a question occurs : were there any aviation bans associated with the Grimsvotn eruption of 1996/8? No reports that I know of.
What about the Grimsvotn eruption of 2004? Ah, 59 flights cancelled from Schipol and numerous more diverted. That's an unprecedented new meaning of "unprecedented".
I'm slightly surprised to read that report myself - I've known that Grimsvotn has been erupting irregularly for over a decade (it's on the to-do list if I can persuade the wife to come on holiday to Iceland ; but don't tell her!) ; I hadn't heard about the flight impacts until just now. But then, I'm a rock-doctor, not a joy-stick jockey. I had been feeling slightly contrite that my subject (Earth) and my colleagues (rock-doctors) may possibly have not given sufficient reasonable warning to the aviation industry (apart from throwing planes out of the sky, burying military and civilian airbases, etc, etc), but it look as if the Earth has been throwing lumps of rock at planes over the north Atlantic for years. That puts the ball squarely back in the aviation industry's court over why they hadn't foreseen this eventuality.
Oh well. News item : Humans get given plenty of warning of natural events, and humans don't pay the blindest bit of attention.
Well, that's unprecedented (in the new meaning, see above). Sudbury. Manicougain. Nordlingen. Toba. Vesuvius (multiple times). Laki. Krakatoa (west of Java). Tunguska. Galunggung (and it's associated Gliding Club). Nevado de Ruiz. Redoubt. Hurricanes ad nauseam preceding Katrina. Grimsv
I don't claim to understand the business speak. But hey, I don't care to run a business either.
So, there are billions of "leeches" out there who were trying to download your terabytes of Amiga software? Huh? I can only imagine that they had something against you personally (or the site), because I don't believe that there are billions of Amiga users out there, and I can't conceive of someone being idiotic enough to download terabytes of information and then do it all again because they haven't backed up their copy of the data you provided. So ... what were they doing? Continually re-running the same download of the same terabytes of data to try to force you off the net?
Nope, don't understand. I'm not even sure what I don't understand. Any way, SEP (Someone Else's Problem). I'll get on with drilling (ha!) my oil well.
In case the comments already posted on SlashDot haven't already convinced you, you are wrong. There are many types of volcano that can produce these hazards, and a single particular volcano can (and almost invariably does) change eruption style considerable during the course of a single eruption.
I am (a geologist ; FGS, if you know what that means) ; for more information, look for another post (not yet written) in this topic.
Heretic!
burn the heretic!
Hmmm, Interesting hypothesis.
How would you test it?
(I'd look at the number/ frequency / severity of bugs reported (big project!) and try to correlate that with "work at home" / "work in near-home rent-an-office" / "work in company site with personal office" / "work in cubicle rats maze". But I've only got a very small sample of programmers to observe and correlate against - none of who write anything that would be relevant for remote access even if it were possible.)
In Soviet Socialist Europe , Aliens don't abduct you. In Soviet Socialist Europe, you abduct Aliens.
Umm, actually, the Aliens drive into Groningen town square, crack a few Amstels, puff a little blow in the cafe, and hey, if there's any anal probing to be done (what is an anus in your species anyway? Do Aliens have one?), well, there's a by-the-hour hotel just round the corner from the church ...
The Aliens get back home, late, dishevveled, and their samples of cow are cooked, covered in slightly spicy sauce and wrapped in bread. The three genders of stay-at-home-Alien are Not Amused and the would-be-abducting Alien spends the night on the sofa.
My memories of Groningen are rather vague. But fun. "Amsterdam of the North"
It's quite a substantial site, so that'd be quite a 2.PI().substantial length of fence, and they'd need to make it rabbit-proof, which requires regular maintenance. Might well be cheaper to dig the moat, in the long term. How much does a one-off rental of a digger and driver cost compared to weekly visits by a guy who can fix fences?
Oh, they'd have to deal with any invaders after the winter too.
Only the lesbians.
And some of the bi-curious women.
And most of the men (given half a chance to watch).
OK ; they do.
Ah, just outside Groningen (the place that non-Dutch can only pronounce correctly by spitting fresh phlegm at their audience). Fond memories of going window shopping in the Penis-Strasse. Amstel. What was that a particular odour from the shop opposite the main church?
Almost certainly that's not what they're going to do.
Leaving aside the political benefits of beggaring your neighbour by taking all the water you can from the river that forms your mutual border, the basic geography is against desalinating Red Sea water and shipping it to the north of Israel and the Palestinian West Bank : the Red Sea only contacts the southernmost extremity of Israel. If the Israelis want to supply northern Israel with desalinated seawater, it'd be considerably cheaper to build the desalination plant somewhere on the Mediterranean coast - around Haifa or a bit south of there. Pipelines aren't cheap, and are vulnerable, so you minimise the length of them. (Obviously this'd leave the population of the Palestinian state up shit creek ; but that's policy anyway.)
If some desperate fool wants to farm the Negev, then build a desalination plant on the Red Sea coast, or possibly a Red-Dead canal (it is downhill, mostly) and your desalination plant at the Dead end of that ; surplus water goes into the Dead Sea, and up into the atmosphere.
Hmm, I've never heard of the Palestinians targetting the drinking water infrastructure of their Israeli opressors. I wonder why? (It may be that the Israelis suppress reporting.)
Shhh, if you mention such words without expressions of indignation and fear of socialism, you're going to wake up the right-wing nut-jobs.
It sounds as if the site that you ran (I note you use the past tense) was a roaring success, which would presumably be why you're not still doing it.
It was a site which was a member of the set (mathematical sense) of sites that didn't want customers.
It was also, from your description, a member of the set (ditto) of sites that detected and blocked Ad-blocking visitors.
It is my contention (the one that you didn't understand) that the two sets of sites overlap to a large extent. There are other ways of trying to drive away customers, but it would seem from your example that using tools to prevent people blocking adverts is definitely one way of driving customers to other sites. Thank you for illustrating my point.
As for bandwidth charges, "leeches" (so kind of you to run websites for haemivorous invertebrates ; what did you advertise to them?), etc ... sounds to me like your business model didn't work. That's fine ; I hope that you got out of the failure before it dragged you into the financial depths, have learned from your mistake(s), and are trying Plan 'B'.
FWIW, I don't have any problem with paying to support services that I find useful or appropriate. Yahoo Corp (whoever their corporate overlordship are this week) get money from me for one set of services, and I adblock everything they send me without a second of moral qualms ; various clubs and professional bodies get hundreds of dollars of my membership money per year, and if they started advertising anything other than their bookshops in the members-only areas, you can be assured that I'd be onto the phone of "t'committeee" pretty damned quick. On my Hotmail spam-trap account I used to use the signature "Wasting Microsoft's Resources for fun and disprofit." (after Hotmail sold out to MS, of course). And finally, for whatever reason, SlashDot offer me the option to disable advertising, though I don't normally do that. But with that execrable "Slashroulette" thing, that was enough for me to put in a rule on my own computer dumping all advertising (*.swf) from SlashDot and their corporate overlords. Obviously SlashDot are considering following the website that you used to run down the same path to fame, fortune and household-name status.
Who was that insane TV executive who proposed criminal charges a couple of years ago for people who used video recorders etc to avoid watching adverts? Have the shrinks managed to get him back to reality yet?
Why would you find a low-5d UID implausible? I got one for free when I joined.
OK - you were probably having more fun sucking your mothers tit that day than I had signing up to SlashDot. But don't you get more fun out of SlashDot today than you do out of sucking your mother's tit?
Did they ever? No, seriously, did anyone ever put parachutes on planes for anyone other than the designated crew of aviators (includes radio op., gunner, bomb aimer, etc.)?
I can't think of a reason to do it, except to instil a false sense of security. And that's pretty dodgy thinking - I'd be much more reassured by the flight crew throwing their parachutes out of the window as they start to taxi than I would be reassured by being told to pay special attention to the trolley-dolly's demonstration about how to put on your parachute.
That thing which appears in a couple of movies about the USAF having an "evacuation capsule" for their President when he/she is flying ... is that movie bull, real, or we-can-tell-you-but-then-we'd-have-to-kill-you,from-orbit-with-nukes-CLASSIFIED ? It always struck me as pretty dodgy.
Even before things descended to the level of poking fun at RyanAir, I don't think that anyone one was proposing giving away a liferaft. Those things are expensive!
"Disembarking early, sir? Would you like to consider our life-raft rental service. It's very competitively priced. We can also provide insurance against you not surviving your disembarkation, and against not being found for 3 weeks."
Besides, I wouldn't be surprised to find that no (reputable) airline owns any liferafts. They're probably all rented because they need regular servicing. That's certainly the case for vessels - liferaft rental, service agreement and all paperwork from a one-stop-shop - you've got to be a really big player to find it worthwhile to run (and certify) your own liferaft servicing service.
No, no, no, no.
1. Find a billionaire (caveat : who has children (caveat : that he gives a shit about)).
2. Get the child(ren) infected with AIDS.
3. Send your marketing department around to the billionaire. (It doesn't matter if the child hasn't told the father that they've got AIDS ; you can always be the bearer of glad tidings. Or you can find another marketing shill to do the dirty work.)
4 ???
5. Profit!
"Blackmail" is such an ugly word. I much prefer "extortion".
Computers might make your technological profession possible ; my technological profession (which is almost certainly utterly essential to the existence of your technological profession) uses computers as tools for communication and calculation. But essentially I can throw the computer over the side into the sea and do my job with the MkI eyeball, the MkI fingertip, the MkI brain and the Mk23 year-of-experience. Oh, I'd also use the Mk2 Sharp Pencil for communication, along with papyrus or some similar innovation.
Computers are tools to achieve results.
On the not-implausible assumption that you're an American, I'll assume that these facilities include your Second-Amendment-guaranteed rights to machine-gun the mother-fucker next to you for that incomprehensible crap that he considers "pleasant".
If you want noise in my working environment, you'd better have some extremely effective headphones. Effective at keeping your noise in.
To answer the original question : everyone is different ; get a budget for the task and a floor area ; allocate some of it to internal divisions of the working area (movable sound-absorbing room dividers, perhaps something floor to ceiling depending on the building's construction?), then give the rest of the budget to the people that you're entrusting with your much more valuable task. If they can't come to a decision about this without people in adjoining towns getting hit by the shrapnel, then perhaps the team isn't right. At which point, you've got a much bigger issue.
(Elaboration : not only is everyone different, but one person is likely to be different at one end of the year from the other ; flexibility.)
Ummm, box of bolts.
Who cares?
And, WHY?
It's only going to be another box of bolts that may (or may not) live down to their advaertising/ Yawwwn.
8 hours waiting for the lift to work today ; expecting another 8 hours tomorrow.
It is so, so different to a week of fog.
Not.
I've already forgotten who/etc ....
Site that doesn't want customers?
Site that thinks time-waste-removal tools are "Verboten" for the customer-sheeple?
Two identical sets? Thought so.
There are people who don't AdBlock? Why not??
That's still a pretty ... odd ... concept.
Of the one biochemistry that we're familar with ("CHON"-based, Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen ; nucleic acids as polymeric information carriers and amino acid polymeric chains as catalytic molecules), all forms require the presence of liquid water for active life (growth, reproduction) ; unsurprisingly then these life forms are restricted to a pretty narrow range of temperatures for activity - between about 260 and 400 Kelvin. While their chemistry requires the presence of liquid water, I don't see them ever getting to much lower temperatures because you can't remain liquid at much lower temperatures with anything even vaguely resembling pure water (there's a minor caveat for really strong ammoniacal solutions - that may take the bottom of the temperature range down by ten, or at a real stretch twenty Kelvin). Going to higher temperatures and the thermal instability of the molecules involved becomes unsupportable well below the temperature/ pressure regime at which "liquid water" ceases to become a valid concept and you're using critical or supercritical solvents. Let's be generous and say that ultimately you can get "our" system up to 450 K, given a high enough pressure (I've never heard of evidence of any life-like activity that high, even in "black smokers" and the like ; but I'm a geologist, not a biologist with a thing for hyperthermophilic bugs).
250 to 450 Kelvin is not a particularly wide range of temperatures ; it's not even an octave. Significant areas of our planet go to lower (to about 200 K) and higher (approaching 1900 K) temperatures. In our planetary system, lower temperatures are very common on planetary surfaces and higher temperatures are common in planetary interiors ; but both of these broad areas are likely to be inaccessible to "our" biochemistry.
Theoretically, you could look at biochemistries with different solvents. Ammonia is credible ; carbon dioxide would be difficult because of it's narrow range of temperatures and pressures where it's a stable liquid ; methane/ ethane is interesting. But each and any such system that could be developed is going to be moderately constrained by existing in the temperature (and pressure) regime where it's main solvent is liquid.
In the Star Trek universe it might be credible to have organisms that can survive having their main solvent boiling within their cells ; but I don't see how that could happen in real life.
Could a biochemistry be based on something other than "CHON"?
It would be unwise to say that it's impossible, but they are the most abundant of what the astronomers call "metals" (anything that is not hydrogen or helium, and one of "CHON" is hydrogen!) and they hold that position for very simple, powerful reasons of nuclear physics. So if there are a million different biochemistries in our galaxy, it's a fair bet that 999,000 of them are CHON-based (the other thousand-odd I leave to allow for more sulphuric biochemistries than ours). Silicon does have some interesting polymeric chemistry (nesosilicates, nektosilicates and the like ; fascinating and important materials that I do study intently for my employment), but it's nowhere near as complex as the chemistry based on carbon.
I really fail to see what you could mean by an "athermal" form of life. Outside the likes of Star Trek.
Meaning what, exactly? I'm not sure that the concept is even possible. Everything has a temperature, even if it's zero Kelvin.
What do you think that you mean by "athermal"?
Generally the fingerprints, DNA etc etc are taken from someone who has been accused or suspected of a crime, in order to be used in a trial which may or may not lead to a conviction.
I think that you mean the retention of fingerprint data, DNA data, etc, but I'm not 100% sure.