I just said that to the wife in my best Parisian accent. I'm getting lucky tonight!
I take it that your wife is not Parisian, or French. and speaks no French. Possibly has never heard French spoken. And that your version of a Parisian accent involves licking your eyebrows.
Through some of the most politically unstable regions of the world. What could possibly go wrong?
Are you talking about the route to the north or to the south of the Caspian. North of the Caspian it would be a relatively simple task most of the way of adding high-speed lines in parallel with the existing railway routes. (No ; I'm not talking about the Trans-Siberian Railway, because it doesn't exist. Despite me having travelled several legs of it's non-existence.) Going south of the Caspian... much bigger task. As a political idea - that would be a bigger win ; but in terms of getting on a train in Beijing and getting off it 2 days later (less corrections for time zone) in Warsaw, then the northern route would be the way to bet.
The world would be a much safer place if all these secret agencies *lost* their funding.
Oh man, are you so dead. Dead, diced, buried in soft peat for 18 years and finally DNA tested to reveal that you were an Albanian illegal immigrant all along. Remember that family you used to have? Well don't worry about them, the remaining ones don't remember you. As they say in Texas "Dead man walking!"
Doesn't look particularly craterish to me, on eastern or western margins. There is a known crater in the area (http://maps.google.com/?ll=67.5,172.08&z=9), and the area is hardly unexplored, so I doubt that you've picked up anything remarkably new. I don't see anything terribly interesting on OneGeology either, structural units clearly continuous across the district.
After setting up shooting ranges on the township perimeter.
If it all pans out wonderfully, then the world has a new set of basic laws of physics ; if it all goes horribly wrong, then trainee cannon fodder for Iran get some target practice, and the rest of the world get a lovely example for persuading the kids to do their science homework, "or you die!"
Also, never underestimate the fact of self-preservation,
Which 100% of people fail at during 100% of any two consecutive centuries you care to choose.
when encountered in a life threatening situation, people tend to do the right thing and move away from danger.
Sure they are, and sure they do. The fuck do people "do the right thing" in a life-threatening situation ; they tend to either continue doing what they were doing 20 minutes ago (because they fail to recognise or deny that they are in a life-threatening situation), or they run in circles, scream and shout.
There is a fucking good reason that people who make a living of going into life-threatening situations do lots and lots of drill : "people" (in the sense of, run-of-the-mill, bog-standard, people) are fucking dangerous to themselves and to other people in dangerous situation, because most people don't have the foggiest fucking idea of what the fuck to do.
People are self-regulating when it comes to life and death.
Too true : enough of them die, and there is no more of that gene-collection ; meanwhile, the people who have taken the "I'll be elsewhere" response to risk are just out-breeding the brave fools all over the place.
Which planet were you living on this week, and how did you get into this universe?
A full body scanner that is designed to scan for the HIV virus particles. As the scanner scans lasers are fired at the virus particles that don't damage the surrounding tissue but destroy disable the virus.
What feature of the virus particles are you going to detect that distinguishes them from other organic matter? If it's radiation (either absorbtion or emission, or even fluorescence)... what wavelengths? If it's particles, which particles? What sort of false-positive and false-negative rates would you consider acceptable? Or unacceptable. Some limits, please. Or perhaps you're looking at applying some chemical tests - that's fine, we know plenty about the chemistry of HIV and HIV-infected human cells, so for pretty much any cell we can return an answer "Yes" or "No" to the question - is this cell infected with HIV. Of course, the tissue would need to be prepared - in the same sense that Dent-Arthur-Dent's brain needed to be prepared for the Mice ('diced', for the H2G2-challenged in the audience). This raises certain questions about how you intend to put the cells back together, which may not be impossible (Clerk's Third Law, IIRC), but is likely to be very difficult.
Concerning the lasers... since you're targeting individual virus particles, that's going to imply radiation of around 100nm (nano-metres, not nautical miles), which is in the ultraviolet. to be more precise, it's in the intervals variously referred to as "far", "C", "germicidal", "vacuum", "low", "super", and "extreme" UV. Something gives me the feeling that spraying a few billions of laser bolts in such ranges around inside the body may have unintended side effects. OK, call me a killjoy ; you can probably repair the damage when you're putting the diced bits of body back together.
I watched that "Alice-3d" movie a couple of days ago (not very impressed) and there was a line used several times about believing several impossible things before breakfast. Is it breakfast time yet?
Or a nano bots that are injected into the body and do nothing but search and destroy for the virus. Once the nano bots haven't destroyed anything for several months they simply go into a nasal passage and cause a running nose which is really them leaving the body safely.
Ah, now we're into slightly less impossible territory. But... again that question of identification looms. How are the nanobots going to identify the infected cells and free virus particles again? (Sorry, I've not had my dinner yet ; I'm being a killjoy, aren't I?) Come to think of it... how are they going to identify nasal mucosa from the inside? And a laser that is of the same approximate dimension as the radiation it lases... I'll have to pass that one on to a physics person. Rayleigh's Criterion will have something to say about the targeting accuracy.
They're some lovely ideas. I'm sure that there are a few thousand PhD theses to be completed in answering them. If you could finish your couple of thousand PhDs and get the compilation report onto my desk by... last Friday.
(Call it science fiction. Science fiction is good fun. But it is fiction. We can work towards it, but it's a long, long way away.)
It's more a cultural thing there than it is in the United States, or Europe, I'd imagine.
Possible, but I didn't see any "internet cafe" type places in the the couple of days I spent in Seoul last month. Admittedly, I don't speak or read Korean, so I might not had recognised the signs, literally. But I saw and recognised lots of other types of shops including plenty of computer/ phone/ tech types of shops, so I'm kind-of doubtful about how common they are. A room full of pasty-faced geeks looks pretty much the same in Britain, the Netherlands, Russia and Tanzania, so I'd have thought I'd have noticed them in Korea too. WTF.
Personally I think the best option would be to put an IEC on your extention then have short IEC leads for the different plug types.
That would work... but I think that it would be more volume and weight of kit to keep in the bag - alongside boots, hard hat, coveralls, reference materials, clothes for several different climate zones, tools, and something to read in those odd 10 minute breaks you get in your month or so at work. Part of the problem is when lots of gear arrives on the rig from shore which has IEC connectors for the local country... which are totally wrong for the rig. (I think the unidentified thing in my bag is from a west-African country that had the reverse problem - required the rig to have wiring for local standards, but then no-one could get any plugs to go into them. Typical.)
There could be times when you don't have access to a power socket - or your battery charger won't work in the power sockets (say you visit another continent).
You don't even need to visit another continent, just cross a border, or go to a work site that uses a different power socket type to what your charger is fitted with. Happens to me about once a month. (1) in your travel bag, pack a 2/4/6 way extension lead with a flying input lead for your "native" type of socket. (You can plug the various device you carry into it, to protect the pins from being mangled by airport baggage manglers.) (2) in the same bag, keep screw-on plugs for the socket styles you meet regularly (UK, Euro, US, Israel, and something I can't identify in my bag). Pack a screwdriver too (but you've carried one of those for years already. Haven't you.). (3) when you get to a place that needs a different plug to what's on your flying lead, change plugs.
The alternative is to spend dozens of "pint vouchers" on adaptors at the airport, which will invariably be for the wrong country, then having to hunt around at 9 in the evening to try to find the right connector in a shop selling pornography and chewing gum. Again.
I decline to believe that a human being is incapable of safely wiring a plug. It's a new "entrance exam" for being counted as a member of Homo sapiens sapiens electricio.
I may misunderstand the joke, but I thought that "Energiser" was the American brand under which Duracells were sold. Are sold. I realise this is going to distress the marketing zombies of both "Energiser" and "Duracell", but even after writing this, I couldn't really give a shite about which faceless multinational corporation owns another faceless multinational corporation.
Since Korea is one of the most-wired countries in the world, one has to ask WTF were these (jobless) people doing going to an internet cafe to play an online game? That's almost certain to be more expensive than doing it at home. I bet that there is something additional going on to what the article describes : maybe the parents wanted to get out of the apartment and away from the child, rather than just "going to play their online game". Almost certainly a very much more complex story than the article makes out.
Just another datum in favour of compulsory pre-conception parenthood testing and training.
A few slowly typed but well thought out lines are always going to be better than a page of garbage.
You must be new here... yes, it looks like you are. This is SlashDot, where un-considered off-the-cuff remarks are required 95% of the time. Which means that it has around twice the meaningful communication of the average forum. It's been like that for the last decade or so, so I doubt that you'll be able to drag it further into the darkness.
So maybe you could get smart and listen to scientists instead of industry. Or better yet, do the research yourself and become knowledgeable.
That is too much like hard work. You've got to give the poor ikkle-wikkle radiation-sensitives a solution that actually does work for them (like a 12V car battery up the ass) instead of requiring them to do some work ; the solution has got to be within the understanding of their poor radiation-frazzled minds without requiring anything more demanding than sucking on a nipple delivering milk ; and you've got to give them the answer that they want to hear, not something that is related to "the real world", or "common sense", or any of those other horrible bits of nay-saying industrial propoganda.
Poor little bunnies. Maybe euthanasia would be better for them. Rabbit pie, anyone?
Archaea, by definition, are a fundamentally old form of life that has done very nicely for a few billion years.
I think that you'll find that the Archaea are, by definition, a group of prokaryotes that have certain specific wall structures, biochemical oddities, and environmental preferences. Things that can be readily measured. "old" is not something that can be readily measured (unless you've got a time machine with a built in Automatic Paradox Resolution Wombat). It is proposed (though by no means universally accepted, even amongst biochemists and evolutionary scientists) that the Archaea are possibly the closest extant organisms to the first lifeforms. It is also proposed (and equally not universally accepted) that they're the only organisms that survived a Hadean (time period) major impact that killed off all the other lineages of organisms at that (unspecified) time, which explains their unusual set of environmental preferences and biochemical peculiarities. It is thirdly proposed (same caveat) that they're extremely deviant descendants of the organisms that generated the first eukaryotes (IIRC, this is on the basis of wall chemistry, their DNA processing machinery, and some peculiarities of the cytoskeletons). Carl Woese was careful when he first started to publish his "Tree of Life" work to indicate that ALL of Archaea, Eukaryotes and Eubacteria diverge in different directions from the "root" (mathematical sense) of the Tree of Life. And the designation of the Archaea predates Woese's work.
What if you are caching this page from an American server? Or Sweden?;-)
Then prepare to be invaded, have your government crushed and replaced by a corrupt kleptocracy and all your civil rights replaced with those of second-class serfs. Not as if you'd notice any significant change.
Oh, we'd have to sprinkle a few tons of depleted-uranium dust around the place too. That'll be nice.
Even better, write the stock holders about how the company they've invested their hard money on is blowing it on stupid schemes that don't work.
Yes, any company would be glad to send you a mailing list of their millions of stockholders.
You only need the name of one stockholder, which you can get in one of two general ways : research to find an existing stock holder, or become a stock holder yourself. Once you've found your stockholder, get them to ask suitably worded questions at the next AGM, OGM or EGM. You may need to have a certain minimum stockholding to get the right to ask awkward-bastard questions, and you may need more to force the questions to go into the annual report. That's the case in this country ; what the case is in yours, I don't know.
You probably should have gone into the BIOS and set the ISA bus speed down as low as possible.
You miss my point : the motherboard in question may well have had an internal ISA bus for connecting hard-wired peripherals to (it's a long time ago) ; but it had no ISA slots into which an ISA controller card for anything could be plugged. IIRC, there wasn't even an un-used space for a header to be soldered. It was intended to be a new generation motherboard for people who were confident that the way things were going to go was VL-bus, not this PCI piece of crap. If you see me jumping one way in a standards war, you know who the losing side is. If I'd been around when the question was live, I'd have got a BetaMax (I got a video in 1999; VHS). SCSI external bus was the obvious way to hook up my brand-new weeks-wages-worth of a CD burner? Of course. Luggable or Laptop? No contest. Pascal or C? Pascal.
I've stopped investing in new technologies until the standards war for their replacement is being fought. It's safer that way.
Oh, I did jump the right way once... Spend £100 on a copy of SCO's Xenix, or the Coherent Unix-alike, or think about it for another few weeks... just before some Finnish nut-job started to write his own Free Unix-alike.
Ah, you read the Wikipedia articles too. Well done. Yes, citation is needed, which is why I asked for information from someone on the ground. I've heard rumours over the years from various sources, but nothing particularly authoritative. I suspect that it's one of those ideas that were talked about in the past, but got quietly dropped in the Asian Financial Crises of (IIRC) 1998-2000. Does/. have any Singaporean correspondents?
Didn't know mud bricks had any hope lasting that long.
Various structures build of mud brick have survived in Iraq, Iran, Pakistan (Harrapa, Mohendro-Daro, spelling mistakes invented here!) and parts of the Andean coast for thousands of years with no maintenance over most of the last few thousand years. With reasonable maintenance... they'd be (potentially) immortal. As, to be honest, building in practically anything but wood would be.
Slashdot Mirror
I take it that your wife is not Parisian, or French. and speaks no French. Possibly has never heard French spoken. And that your version of a Parisian accent involves licking your eyebrows.
Are you talking about the route to the north or to the south of the Caspian. North of the Caspian it would be a relatively simple task most of the way of adding high-speed lines in parallel with the existing railway routes. (No ; I'm not talking about the Trans-Siberian Railway, because it doesn't exist. Despite me having travelled several legs of it's non-existence.) ... much bigger task. As a political idea - that would be a bigger win ; but in terms of getting on a train in Beijing and getting off it 2 days later (less corrections for time zone) in Warsaw, then the northern route would be the way to bet.
Going south of the Caspian
Oh man, are you so dead. Dead, diced, buried in soft peat for 18 years and finally DNA tested to reveal that you were an Albanian illegal immigrant all along. Remember that family you used to have? Well don't worry about them, the remaining ones don't remember you.
As they say in Texas "Dead man walking!"
Doesn't look particularly craterish to me, on eastern or western margins. There is a known crater in the area (http://maps.google.com/?ll=67.5,172.08&z=9), and the area is hardly unexplored, so I doubt that you've picked up anything remarkably new.
I don't see anything terribly interesting on OneGeology either, structural units clearly continuous across the district.
I don't know ; kids today, can't even snooze and drool at the same time.
After setting up shooting ranges on the township perimeter.
If it all pans out wonderfully, then the world has a new set of basic laws of physics ; if it all goes horribly wrong, then trainee cannon fodder for Iran get some target practice, and the rest of the world get a lovely example for persuading the kids to do their science homework, "or you die!"
Which 100% of people fail at during 100% of any two consecutive centuries you care to choose.
Sure they are, and sure they do. The fuck do people "do the right thing" in a life-threatening situation ; they tend to either continue doing what they were doing 20 minutes ago (because they fail to recognise or deny that they are in a life-threatening situation), or they run in circles, scream and shout.
There is a fucking good reason that people who make a living of going into life-threatening situations do lots and lots of drill : "people" (in the sense of, run-of-the-mill, bog-standard, people) are fucking dangerous to themselves and to other people in dangerous situation, because most people don't have the foggiest fucking idea of what the fuck to do.
Too true : enough of them die, and there is no more of that gene-collection ; meanwhile, the people who have taken the "I'll be elsewhere" response to risk are just out-breeding the brave fools all over the place.
Which planet were you living on this week, and how did you get into this universe?
You're talking a pile of ballast. In your pockets, tied to your shoes. Whatever. Ballast ; pure, simple ballast.
They don't need to know anything (they are, by your definition, stupid) ; they just need to suck and swallow on command.
[Jeez, do these SlashDudes know nothing? Including the value of money?]
What feature of the virus particles are you going to detect that distinguishes them from other organic matter? If it's radiation (either absorbtion or emission, or even fluorescence) ... what wavelengths? If it's particles, which particles?
What sort of false-positive and false-negative rates would you consider acceptable? Or unacceptable. Some limits, please.
Or perhaps you're looking at applying some chemical tests - that's fine, we know plenty about the chemistry of HIV and HIV-infected human cells, so for pretty much any cell we can return an answer "Yes" or "No" to the question - is this cell infected with HIV. Of course, the tissue would need to be prepared - in the same sense that Dent-Arthur-Dent's brain needed to be prepared for the Mice ('diced', for the H2G2-challenged in the audience). This raises certain questions about how you intend to put the cells back together, which may not be impossible (Clerk's Third Law, IIRC), but is likely to be very difficult.
Concerning the lasers ... since you're targeting individual virus particles, that's going to imply radiation of around 100nm (nano-metres, not nautical miles), which is in the ultraviolet. to be more precise, it's in the intervals variously referred to as "far", "C", "germicidal", "vacuum", "low", "super", and "extreme" UV. Something gives me the feeling that spraying a few billions of laser bolts in such ranges around inside the body may have unintended side effects. OK, call me a killjoy ; you can probably repair the damage when you're putting the diced bits of body back together.
I watched that "Alice-3d" movie a couple of days ago (not very impressed) and there was a line used several times about believing several impossible things before breakfast. Is it breakfast time yet?
Ah, now we're into slightly less impossible territory. But ... again that question of identification looms. How are the nanobots going to identify the infected cells and free virus particles again? (Sorry, I've not had my dinner yet ; I'm being a killjoy, aren't I?) Come to think of it ... how are they going to identify nasal mucosa from the inside? And a laser that is of the same approximate dimension as the radiation it lases ... I'll have to pass that one on to a physics person. Rayleigh's Criterion will have something to say about the targeting accuracy.
They're some lovely ideas. I'm sure that there are a few thousand PhD theses to be completed in answering them. If you could finish your couple of thousand PhDs and get the compilation report onto my desk by ... last Friday.
(Call it science fiction. Science fiction is good fun. But it is fiction. We can work towards it, but it's a long, long way away.)
Possible, but I didn't see any "internet cafe" type places in the the couple of days I spent in Seoul last month.
Admittedly, I don't speak or read Korean, so I might not had recognised the signs, literally. But I saw and recognised lots of other types of shops including plenty of computer/ phone/ tech types of shops, so I'm kind-of doubtful about how common they are. A room full of pasty-faced geeks looks pretty much the same in Britain, the Netherlands, Russia and Tanzania, so I'd have thought I'd have noticed them in Korea too. WTF.
That would work ... but I think that it would be more volume and weight of kit to keep in the bag - alongside boots, hard hat, coveralls, reference materials, clothes for several different climate zones, tools, and something to read in those odd 10 minute breaks you get in your month or so at work. ... which are totally wrong for the rig. (I think the unidentified thing in my bag is from a west-African country that had the reverse problem - required the rig to have wiring for local standards, but then no-one could get any plugs to go into them. Typical.)
Part of the problem is when lots of gear arrives on the rig from shore which has IEC connectors for the local country
You don't even need to visit another continent, just cross a border, or go to a work site that uses a different power socket type to what your charger is fitted with. Happens to me about once a month.
(1) in your travel bag, pack a 2/4/6 way extension lead with a flying input lead for your "native" type of socket. (You can plug the various device you carry into it, to protect the pins from being mangled by airport baggage manglers.)
(2) in the same bag, keep screw-on plugs for the socket styles you meet regularly (UK, Euro, US, Israel, and something I can't identify in my bag). Pack a screwdriver too (but you've carried one of those for years already. Haven't you.).
(3) when you get to a place that needs a different plug to what's on your flying lead, change plugs.
The alternative is to spend dozens of "pint vouchers" on adaptors at the airport, which will invariably be for the wrong country, then having to hunt around at 9 in the evening to try to find the right connector in a shop selling pornography and chewing gum. Again.
I decline to believe that a human being is incapable of safely wiring a plug. It's a new "entrance exam" for being counted as a member of Homo sapiens sapiens electricio.
I may misunderstand the joke, but I thought that "Energiser" was the American brand under which Duracells were sold. Are sold.
I realise this is going to distress the marketing zombies of both "Energiser" and "Duracell", but even after writing this, I couldn't really give a shite about which faceless multinational corporation owns another faceless multinational corporation.
Since Korea is one of the most-wired countries in the world, one has to ask WTF were these (jobless) people doing going to an internet cafe to play an online game? That's almost certain to be more expensive than doing it at home.
I bet that there is something additional going on to what the article describes : maybe the parents wanted to get out of the apartment and away from the child, rather than just "going to play their online game".
Almost certainly a very much more complex story than the article makes out.
Just another datum in favour of compulsory pre-conception parenthood testing and training.
Anrego (830717) * writes:
You must be new here ... yes, it looks like you are.
This is SlashDot, where un-considered off-the-cuff remarks are required 95% of the time. Which means that it has around twice the meaningful communication of the average forum. It's been like that for the last decade or so, so I doubt that you'll be able to drag it further into the darkness.
That is too much like hard work. You've got to give the poor ikkle-wikkle radiation-sensitives a solution that actually does work for them (like a 12V car battery up the ass) instead of requiring them to do some work ; the solution has got to be within the understanding of their poor radiation-frazzled minds without requiring anything more demanding than sucking on a nipple delivering milk ; and you've got to give them the answer that they want to hear, not something that is related to "the real world", or "common sense", or any of those other horrible bits of nay-saying industrial propoganda.
Poor little bunnies. Maybe euthanasia would be better for them. Rabbit pie, anyone?
I think that you'll find that the Archaea are, by definition, a group of prokaryotes that have certain specific wall structures, biochemical oddities, and environmental preferences. Things that can be readily measured. "old" is not something that can be readily measured (unless you've got a time machine with a built in Automatic Paradox Resolution Wombat).
It is proposed (though by no means universally accepted, even amongst biochemists and evolutionary scientists) that the Archaea are possibly the closest extant organisms to the first lifeforms. It is also proposed (and equally not universally accepted) that they're the only organisms that survived a Hadean (time period) major impact that killed off all the other lineages of organisms at that (unspecified) time, which explains their unusual set of environmental preferences and biochemical peculiarities. It is thirdly proposed (same caveat) that they're extremely deviant descendants of the organisms that generated the first eukaryotes (IIRC, this is on the basis of wall chemistry, their DNA processing machinery, and some peculiarities of the cytoskeletons).
Carl Woese was careful when he first started to publish his "Tree of Life" work to indicate that ALL of Archaea, Eukaryotes and Eubacteria diverge in different directions from the "root" (mathematical sense) of the Tree of Life. And the designation of the Archaea predates Woese's work.
Citation please. So I can go and drag that article, kicking and screaming, (back) into some sort of contact with reality.
Then prepare to be invaded, have your government crushed and replaced by a corrupt kleptocracy and all your civil rights replaced with those of second-class serfs. Not as if you'd notice any significant change.
Oh, we'd have to sprinkle a few tons of depleted-uranium dust around the place too. That'll be nice.
You only need the name of one stockholder, which you can get in one of two general ways : research to find an existing stock holder, or become a stock holder yourself.
Once you've found your stockholder, get them to ask suitably worded questions at the next AGM, OGM or EGM. You may need to have a certain minimum stockholding to get the right to ask awkward-bastard questions, and you may need more to force the questions to go into the annual report.
That's the case in this country ; what the case is in yours, I don't know.
You miss my point : the motherboard in question may well have had an internal ISA bus for connecting hard-wired peripherals to (it's a long time ago) ; but it had no ISA slots into which an ISA controller card for anything could be plugged. IIRC, there wasn't even an un-used space for a header to be soldered. It was intended to be a new generation motherboard for people who were confident that the way things were going to go was VL-bus, not this PCI piece of crap.
If you see me jumping one way in a standards war, you know who the losing side is. If I'd been around when the question was live, I'd have got a BetaMax (I got a video in 1999; VHS).
SCSI external bus was the obvious way to hook up my brand-new weeks-wages-worth of a CD burner? Of course.
Luggable or Laptop? No contest.
Pascal or C? Pascal.
I've stopped investing in new technologies until the standards war for their replacement is being fought. It's safer that way.
Oh, I did jump the right way once ... Spend £100 on a copy of SCO's Xenix, or the Coherent Unix-alike, or think about it for another few weeks ... just before some Finnish nut-job started to write his own Free Unix-alike.
Ah, you read the Wikipedia articles too. Well done. /. have any Singaporean correspondents?
Yes, citation is needed, which is why I asked for information from someone on the ground.
I've heard rumours over the years from various sources, but nothing particularly authoritative. I suspect that it's one of those ideas that were talked about in the past, but got quietly dropped in the Asian Financial Crises of (IIRC) 1998-2000.
Does
FTFY
Various structures build of mud brick have survived in Iraq, Iran, Pakistan (Harrapa, Mohendro-Daro, spelling mistakes invented here!) and parts of the Andean coast for thousands of years with no maintenance over most of the last few thousand years. With reasonable maintenance ... they'd be (potentially) immortal. As, to be honest, building in practically anything but wood would be.