Nicely written for an AC. Only one significant alteration:
Katla, by contrast, is a much larger volcanic center and has historically had much bigger eruptions, hence the worry if that one blows too.
"WHEN" it blows, not "IF". Another eruption of Katla is a racing certainty ; when it happens is much more open to question. It seems from historical records that there's a high probability that it'll go in the next few months to years. Which will make life interesting.
Slight coating of ash on the car yesterday morning ; haven't looked today.
The aliens looking for us might likely be viewed with the same amount of ridicule that SETI researchers receive from the general scientific community on this world.
You mean , "not a lot" (of ridicule). Most of the various scientists that I work with regularly consider SETI to be interesting, unusual, probably pretty important, but also unlikely to yield results. However, the implications of results (positive or negative) are very big, so it's worth a modest input of resources, both financial and intellectual.
I remember when the news of ALH84001 broke in the popular press. I was due to drive down to visit my family that day, and had plenty of thinking time to digest the press reports. The simile that I proposed to my father (another scientist) that evening was that the story was potentially as important as the Copernicus/ Kepler/ Galileo debunking of geocentricism. (We then sat down, read the formal papers, digested them, and found ourselves unconvinced.)
SETI isn't considered a joke, at least in the circles that I move in. It may be a long shot, but long shots are sometimes worth backing.
In all other species such population growth rapidly consumes the available resourse then promptly drops of the proverbial cliff. It's only in the last century that our technology and population have reached the point where it's plausible that we could wipe ourselves out with nuclear war or environmental vandalisim.
While I'm pretty worried about the effects that humans are having on their environment, I doubt that we're going to drive ourselves extinct. I do anticipate that the global human population in 2100 is likely to be closer to the population in 1900 than to the population in 2000 (which implies on the order of 5 gigadeaths more than gigabirths in the intervening decades ; whatever). Whether the survivors of the crash will be able to redevelop a technological civilisation I'm not sure - the second time around there are going to be far fewer readily-exploitable mineral and energy resources (I'm a geologist in the oil business ; finding such resources is my day job, and it's not easy. In a century... well, that'll be someone else's problem.) Whether your descendants (I'm assuming that you remain a breeding member of the human species) will be using radio communications in 2200... big question. And that's one of the big unknowns in the Drake Equation. But with a sample size of one, at the moment, all you can do is look for more data.
Why not pigs. In general pigs are often used because their structure is much more like a human. Also they know stress much more like humans and can even die from that same stress.
There is a for-profit organisation involved. What is being reported is a series of experiments on sheep ; that doesn't mean that experiments weren't carried out on pigs, it simply means that any such experiments aren't being reported here. Call me cynical, but as pigs are the normal first-call as human-analogues then I suspect that either the pigs were tried and gave results that Taser Corporation didn't like, or the medical director deliberately chose a sub-optimal analogy so that any adverse results could be discarded. I'm not a lawyer, but I can think down to their level when necessary.
it's already been suggested that any signal that has perfect compression would be indistinguishable from black body radiation.
Hmmm, I think that I understand where you think that you're coming from, but I'm not sure. Would you care to elaborate a bit. (I don't think that you're correct, more like "not even wrong", but I'm not quite sure what you think that you're saying, so I'm not sure where to start correcting you.)
Also, don't plasma screens suffer from screen burn-in? Why is this guy running basically static images for hours on two 46" plasma screens?
I don't know (or particularly care) about burn in, but what did occur to me was "how well is the screen going to internally dissipate and relocate heat when they are stood up on end?" I know that a non-trivial number of screens are mounted upside-down (when hung from ceilings, etc), but I don't recall having ever seen a consumer TV mounted in "portrait mode". I wonder if the screen's designers anticipated them being used in this orientation.
Whatever. SF has been full of "picture walls" for decades ; one step closer. Still bloody expensive, given that the number of windowless homes (or offices) is still pretty small. And by the time that the high-consuming population reaches sufficient density for these systems to become common, we (you) are likely to have more pressing problems.
Hell, even Buddhists and Atheists sometimes kill over questions like this,
Speak for yourself... oh, hang on you're neither a Buddhist nor an Atheist by your own admission. So, your evidence for this quite ludicrous assertion is... ?
and my own religion is full of aggressive nutcases (Yes, I'm a
[Religion name not cited, being irrelevant] This statement is tautologous. All "religions" are full of "aggressive nutcases", in the same way that all bags full of used condoms are full of used condoms.
A Canadian judge will not likely be able to compel a Libian ISP to disclose your identity.:)
Which Libyan ISP are you using? Can I access it from Europe?
(Actually, I'll check with Matt in the office tomorrow and see if he used a local ISP when he was working in Libya last year. I'll get back to ya!)
Re:You must be that "other guy" that ran OS/2 also
on
Is OS/2 Coming Back?
·
· Score: 1
What the hell is "bringing OS/2 back" going to acheive? [SNIP] How does "resurrecting" OS/2 on top of a linux kernel and a modern file system even make sense? What are you actually resurrecting?
How much COBOL code is still in use in the business world? Quite a lot. OS2 was relatively popular in the financial world, and they are very, very conservative people. (I used to do a regular trade setting up machines to triple-boot DOS 6.22, OS/2 and Win98 for a friend with an accounting business. I don't know or care how he squared the licensing issues, but his business customers wanted those environments on one machine, and this was the solution he worked with. Nice back-pocket money for me ; kept him in regular income until he retired.)
If this is true (no opinion offered on this point ; it's not incredible), then I could see this as being IBM cutting away at the consideration of MS by a significant tranche of businesses. If you've got a stack of applications specific to your business that are built on an OS/2 platform, and IBM can offer you a platform that duplicates the OS/2 environment so that you can continue to use your known application suite without having to re-develop and re-debug them... you're going to consider it. And in the red corner is the local MS shop offering to re-write your entire stack over a two-to-five year period.
It may no longer be true that "no-one ever got the sack for buying IBM", but IBM still have plenty of pretty savvy business and marketing people. Once people are happy with (let's call it...) OS/3 as an environment for their OS/2 applications, then having a Linux architecture underneath would allow the rest of IBM's business consultancy services to leverage that architecture. That sounds good for IBM in short and long terms.
If he were alive, I wouldn't be surprised if he'd had a special 6ft-deep oblong jaccuzi built next to the "dial a quote" phone.
[Rings] [Sagan] Hello, Carl Sagan rent-a-quote line?.... A university teaching UFOlogy? You're kidding me!... You're serious. Damn, and these are my good trousers. Oh well. ["Splooosh!" sound effect] [Sagan] Ok, I'm in the grave [glub] and [glub] now [glub] I'm [glub] spinning. [Sagan, dizzily] This was funny the first time.
The main criticism of alleged non-human creation of crop circles is that while evidence of these origins, besides eyewitness testimonies, is essentially absent, many are definitely known to be the work of human pranksters and others can be adequately explained as such
You've mentioned the "eyewitness" word without the obligatory reminder that eyewitness evidence is pretty much the worst type of evidence of all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_circle
Any alien using crop circles to spam their new "indie" album is using a medium hopelessly contaminated by human pranksters, and is probably so stupid as to not be worth contacting.
"Cheap" is certainly not a word that I associate with Maplin. But... well, let's see what BitsBox charges for a resistor:
0.25W Carbon Resistor x1 Item Number CR1 Value: 10M £0.04 Postage & Packing: £1.50 GBP Total Amount: £1.54 GBP
The corresponding price from Maplin is £0.20
I think that you missed my point about walking down the road to the local store. It is literally five minutes walk.
It's best to go to BitsBox - personal service, cheap delivery, good prices, and a reasonable range of stuff beginners would need.
Bitsbox, 94 Pierce Avenue, Olton, Solihull, B92 7JZ. UK That'd be fine if I ever moved to Solihull, which is vanishingly unlikely (I grew up next to the Midlands, and if I ever move again, it'll be out of Britain. Nothing particularly against Solihull. Well, not a lot.) The equation is rather different if you've further to travel, but there is a lot to be said for being able to browse. Which reminds me - I've got to build a 300V power supply to replace a MoD battery, all to fit into the form factor of a PP9-ish cell (astable of some sort, stepped up through a transformer and rectified). Does your online supplier provide the dimensions of the transformers they sell?
No transformers at Bitsbox. As the Meerkat would say "Simples!"
Which reminds me - I've still got to decide whether to use the MoD-supplied PSU circuit (which uses discrete components), or whether to hack up something off a 555. Choices, choices. Well, the device hasn't had power since 1974, so waiting until the weekend isn't going to kill anything that's not dead already.
He chose to be interviewed on Al Jazeera, which is watched by 50-100 million households. He chose to be interviewed on Al Jazeera, which is watched by 50-100 million terr'ist, filthy, Muslim, households.
FTFY Obviously, choosing to be interviewed by a news organisation which has in the past taken an unAmerican point of view is in and of itself proof of being a terr'ist. Call the "wet work" department, they've got a customer.
like, say, keeping protesters away from special events
like, say, keeping witnesses away from special events
FTFY
People can protest as much as they like - what the authorities don't like is when their suppression of protest is reported upon. This leads to mistrust of the authorities, and that is not tolerable.
I think he meant for UKers maplin is the place NOT to go just as pcworld is the place NOT to go for comp stuff.
That's fine if you know what you're doing and know other places to go. The poster knows that he doesn't know what he's doing or where to go. Maplin have the gigantic advantage over any online store that you can go in and browse. Pretty fast, he'll grow out of Maplin for some things, then for other things... then he'll have started to build up his network. I buy most of my gadgetry from Dabs, and have got stuff from RS and Farnell in the past. But all of them have at least a 20-hour delivery delay, which the 5 minute walk to Maplin doesn't have. Whether Maplin have what I need... is another question.
I see the same, and it sometimes infuriates me so much that I put aside my tree-surgery practical homework, stand on the dashboard and "Do the Funky Gibbon" at the offending hands-free driver.
Slightly more seriously - given the number of pedestrians with a mobile camera (with or without phone capabilities), what we need is automatic issuing of tickets to the drivers as long as a pedestrian can produce enough photos to clearly identify the vehicle and the offence. For encouragement, and to forestall complaints from the drivers that "it's just a way of the council raising revenue", the money from the fine should go to the reporting pedestrian.
Caveats : only photos from a pedestrian - the camera angles should make it impossible to have been taken from a car ; admin fee for the council/ police department processing the allegation ; if the motorist wants to dispute the allegation, that's fine, but at risk of the full costs plus an undiscounted fine (exactly as for parking tickets) ; fine goes to the vehicle's registered keeper, and it's up to them to pass it on to the person driving, or pay up themselves ; penalty points on the driving license as per normal ; untaxed vehicle - short trip to the crusher.
Yes, it would turn every unemployed scrote on a street corner into an anti-driver grass, capable of earning a good living from a bad junction. So you'd probably better put the second (and subsequent) ticket per complainer through the tax man. But otherwise, so what? Unemployed people earning taxed money by performing a public safety service. How many more buttons do you want to push?
(Yes, I do have a handsfree for my mobile. Moving it to another vehicle takes about 2 seconds.)
Rearrange subject words. Phones are already far too smart for me to be bothered with ; making them more complicated isn't going to increase the likelihood of them being considered, purchased or used.
Remember those early digital watches that included a 4-function calculator? (OK, that's all the 6-digit SlashID crowd ruled out. "Whatever.") Remember how ridiculous they were, particularly for non-smokers. Obviously the lesson still hasn't been learned. Or there is (yet) another generation of people in development jobs who think that they don't need to learn the lessons of the past because they're so clearly less stupid than the Neanderthals of the 1980s.
What we got here is an asshole trying to impose his mental illness (bodyphobia) upon us and upon wikipedia
I don't claim to know what Larry Sanger's detailed motivation is, but I think that it's extremely unlikely to be "bodyphobia". I've had online dealings with Larry in the past, and he's always seemed pretty sane and intelligent to me. In the Slashdot population, he'd probably be in the top 10% on both counts, which would probably put him in the top <5% of the general population on both counts (accepting caveats about WTF is "sanity", or "intelligence"?). My guess is that he's covering arse against any future personal liability for the contents of Wikipedia (he is one of the small group of people who set it up ; if someone in the "nutjob" category were to try to legally assault the whole concept, he'd be one of the prime targets), and possibly trying to bring some specific piece of parochial legislation into contempt by taking it to a ridiculous extreme. Anyway, if the witch-hunt of the uninformed gets too bad, I'll have no hesitation about shaking down the sofa-bed for Larry. Time limit at his honour.
Slashdot Mirror
Nicely written for an AC. :
Only one significant alteration
"WHEN" it blows, not "IF".
Another eruption of Katla is a racing certainty ; when it happens is much more open to question. It seems from historical records that there's a high probability that it'll go in the next few months to years. Which will make life interesting.
Slight coating of ash on the car yesterday morning ; haven't looked today.
You mean , "not a lot" (of ridicule).
Most of the various scientists that I work with regularly consider SETI to be interesting, unusual, probably pretty important, but also unlikely to yield results. However, the implications of results (positive or negative) are very big, so it's worth a modest input of resources, both financial and intellectual.
I remember when the news of ALH84001 broke in the popular press. I was due to drive down to visit my family that day, and had plenty of thinking time to digest the press reports. The simile that I proposed to my father (another scientist) that evening was that the story was potentially as important as the Copernicus/ Kepler/ Galileo debunking of geocentricism. (We then sat down, read the formal papers, digested them, and found ourselves unconvinced.)
SETI isn't considered a joke, at least in the circles that I move in. It may be a long shot, but long shots are sometimes worth backing.
Dragon's Egg, by Robert Forward.
ISBN-10: 034543529X
ISBN-13: 978-0345435293
Highly recommended by many SF cognoscenti. YMMV, but it's worth a read.
While I'm pretty worried about the effects that humans are having on their environment, I doubt that we're going to drive ourselves extinct. I do anticipate that the global human population in 2100 is likely to be closer to the population in 1900 than to the population in 2000 (which implies on the order of 5 gigadeaths more than gigabirths in the intervening decades ; whatever). Whether the survivors of the crash will be able to redevelop a technological civilisation I'm not sure - the second time around there are going to be far fewer readily-exploitable mineral and energy resources (I'm a geologist in the oil business ; finding such resources is my day job, and it's not easy. In a century ... well, that'll be someone else's problem.) ... big question. And that's one of the big unknowns in the Drake Equation. But with a sample size of one, at the moment, all you can do is look for more data.
Whether your descendants (I'm assuming that you remain a breeding member of the human species) will be using radio communications in 2200
There is a for-profit organisation involved. What is being reported is a series of experiments on sheep ; that doesn't mean that experiments weren't carried out on pigs, it simply means that any such experiments aren't being reported here.
Call me cynical, but as pigs are the normal first-call as human-analogues then I suspect that either the pigs were tried and gave results that Taser Corporation didn't like, or the medical director deliberately chose a sub-optimal analogy so that any adverse results could be discarded. I'm not a lawyer, but I can think down to their level when necessary.
Hmmm, I think that I understand where you think that you're coming from, but I'm not sure. Would you care to elaborate a bit. (I don't think that you're correct, more like "not even wrong", but I'm not quite sure what you think that you're saying, so I'm not sure where to start correcting you.)
I don't know (or particularly care) about burn in, but what did occur to me was "how well is the screen going to internally dissipate and relocate heat when they are stood up on end?" I know that a non-trivial number of screens are mounted upside-down (when hung from ceilings, etc), but I don't recall having ever seen a consumer TV mounted in "portrait mode". I wonder if the screen's designers anticipated them being used in this orientation.
Whatever. SF has been full of "picture walls" for decades ; one step closer. Still bloody expensive, given that the number of windowless homes (or offices) is still pretty small. And by the time that the high-consuming population reaches sufficient density for these systems to become common, we (you) are likely to have more pressing problems.
Fricasseed? Or peeled and boiled?
Where's my copy of Dean Swift's cookbook?
Speak for yourself ... oh, hang on you're neither a Buddhist nor an Atheist by your own admission. So, your evidence for this quite ludicrous assertion is ... ?
[Religion name not cited, being irrelevant] This statement is tautologous. All "religions" are full of "aggressive nutcases", in the same way that all bags full of used condoms are full of used condoms.
Which Libyan ISP are you using? Can I access it from Europe?
(Actually, I'll check with Matt in the office tomorrow and see if he used a local ISP when he was working in Libya last year. I'll get back to ya!)
How much COBOL code is still in use in the business world? Quite a lot.
OS2 was relatively popular in the financial world, and they are very, very conservative people. (I used to do a regular trade setting up machines to triple-boot DOS 6.22, OS/2 and Win98 for a friend with an accounting business. I don't know or care how he squared the licensing issues, but his business customers wanted those environments on one machine, and this was the solution he worked with. Nice back-pocket money for me ; kept him in regular income until he retired.)
If this is true (no opinion offered on this point ; it's not incredible), then I could see this as being IBM cutting away at the consideration of MS by a significant tranche of businesses. If you've got a stack of applications specific to your business that are built on an OS/2 platform, and IBM can offer you a platform that duplicates the OS/2 environment so that you can continue to use your known application suite without having to re-develop and re-debug them ... you're going to consider it. And in the red corner is the local MS shop offering to re-write your entire stack over a two-to-five year period.
It may no longer be true that "no-one ever got the sack for buying IBM", but IBM still have plenty of pretty savvy business and marketing people. Once people are happy with (let's call it ...) OS/3 as an environment for their OS/2 applications, then having a Linux architecture underneath would allow the rest of IBM's business consultancy services to leverage that architecture. That sounds good for IBM in short and long terms.
I wonder what the equivalent of "asdf" is on a Chinese keyboard? Or a Hindi one?
No he's not - he's dead.
If he were alive, I wouldn't be surprised if he'd had a special 6ft-deep oblong jaccuzi built next to the "dial a quote" phone.
[Rings] .... A university teaching UFOlogy? You're kidding me! ... You're serious. Damn, and these are my good trousers. Oh well.
[Sagan] Hello, Carl Sagan rent-a-quote line?
["Splooosh!" sound effect]
[Sagan] Ok, I'm in the grave [glub] and [glub] now [glub] I'm [glub] spinning.
[Sagan, dizzily] This was funny the first time.
You've mentioned the "eyewitness" word without the obligatory reminder that eyewitness evidence is pretty much the worst type of evidence of all.
Any alien using crop circles to spam their new "indie" album is using a medium hopelessly contaminated by human pranksters, and is probably so stupid as to not be worth contacting.
Shocked! I'm shocked I tell you! Who'd have thought it was possible.
(how about - anyone who has worked with Korean corporations?)
"Cheap" is certainly not a word that I associate with Maplin. But ... well, let's see what BitsBox charges for a resistor :
The corresponding price from Maplin is £0.20
I think that you missed my point about walking down the road to the local store. It is literally five minutes walk.
Bitsbox, 94 Pierce Avenue, Olton, Solihull, B92 7JZ. UK
That'd be fine if I ever moved to Solihull, which is vanishingly unlikely (I grew up next to the Midlands, and if I ever move again, it'll be out of Britain. Nothing particularly against Solihull. Well, not a lot.)
The equation is rather different if you've further to travel, but there is a lot to be said for being able to browse.
Which reminds me - I've got to build a 300V power supply to replace a MoD battery, all to fit into the form factor of a PP9-ish cell (astable of some sort, stepped up through a transformer and rectified). Does your online supplier provide the dimensions of the transformers they sell?
No transformers at Bitsbox. As the Meerkat would say "Simples!"
Which reminds me - I've still got to decide whether to use the MoD-supplied PSU circuit (which uses discrete components), or whether to hack up something off a 555. Choices, choices. Well, the device hasn't had power since 1974, so waiting until the weekend isn't going to kill anything that's not dead already.
You've spotted the conspiracy. So long, it's been nice knowing you.
Bloody things give me a headache too.
I thought that Never Twice the Same Colour got shit-canned back in the 1950s except in some countries.
FTFY
Obviously, choosing to be interviewed by a news organisation which has in the past taken an unAmerican point of view is in and of itself proof of being a terr'ist. Call the "wet work" department, they've got a customer.
FTFY
People can protest as much as they like - what the authorities don't like is when their suppression of protest is reported upon. This leads to mistrust of the authorities, and that is not tolerable.
That's fine if you know what you're doing and know other places to go. The poster knows that he doesn't know what he's doing or where to go. Maplin have the gigantic advantage over any online store that you can go in and browse. ... then he'll have started to build up his network. ... is another question.
Pretty fast, he'll grow out of Maplin for some things, then for other things
I buy most of my gadgetry from Dabs, and have got stuff from RS and Farnell in the past. But all of them have at least a 20-hour delivery delay, which the 5 minute walk to Maplin doesn't have. Whether Maplin have what I need
I see the same, and it sometimes infuriates me so much that I put aside my tree-surgery practical homework, stand on the dashboard and "Do the Funky Gibbon" at the offending hands-free driver.
Slightly more seriously - given the number of pedestrians with a mobile camera (with or without phone capabilities), what we need is automatic issuing of tickets to the drivers as long as a pedestrian can produce enough photos to clearly identify the vehicle and the offence. For encouragement, and to forestall complaints from the drivers that "it's just a way of the council raising revenue", the money from the fine should go to the reporting pedestrian.
Caveats : only photos from a pedestrian - the camera angles should make it impossible to have been taken from a car ; admin fee for the council/ police department processing the allegation ; if the motorist wants to dispute the allegation, that's fine, but at risk of the full costs plus an undiscounted fine (exactly as for parking tickets) ; fine goes to the vehicle's registered keeper, and it's up to them to pass it on to the person driving, or pay up themselves ; penalty points on the driving license as per normal ; untaxed vehicle - short trip to the crusher.
Yes, it would turn every unemployed scrote on a street corner into an anti-driver grass, capable of earning a good living from a bad junction. So you'd probably better put the second (and subsequent) ticket per complainer through the tax man. But otherwise, so what? Unemployed people earning taxed money by performing a public safety service. How many more buttons do you want to push?
(Yes, I do have a handsfree for my mobile. Moving it to another vehicle takes about 2 seconds.)
Rearrange subject words.
Phones are already far too smart for me to be bothered with ; making them more complicated isn't going to increase the likelihood of them being considered, purchased or used.
Remember those early digital watches that included a 4-function calculator? (OK, that's all the 6-digit SlashID crowd ruled out. "Whatever.") Remember how ridiculous they were, particularly for non-smokers. Obviously the lesson still hasn't been learned. Or there is (yet) another generation of people in development jobs who think that they don't need to learn the lessons of the past because they're so clearly less stupid than the Neanderthals of the 1980s.
I don't claim to know what Larry Sanger's detailed motivation is, but I think that it's extremely unlikely to be "bodyphobia". I've had online dealings with Larry in the past, and he's always seemed pretty sane and intelligent to me. In the Slashdot population, he'd probably be in the top 10% on both counts, which would probably put him in the top <5% of the general population on both counts (accepting caveats about WTF is "sanity", or "intelligence"?).
My guess is that he's covering arse against any future personal liability for the contents of Wikipedia (he is one of the small group of people who set it up ; if someone in the "nutjob" category were to try to legally assault the whole concept, he'd be one of the prime targets), and possibly trying to bring some specific piece of parochial legislation into contempt by taking it to a ridiculous extreme.
Anyway, if the witch-hunt of the uninformed gets too bad, I'll have no hesitation about shaking down the sofa-bed for Larry. Time limit at his honour.
My bet is he'll be at Google before the end of the month.
FTFY
OK, he may want to take more than 3 weeks leave. Next month.