You are aware that A Clockwork Orange was fiction, aren't you?
Never! I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you!
You mean that the messages I get from the Korova Bar every so often are a delusion of mine? And the occasional evening I spend there criticizing the owner's wiring (he's an electrician) and drinking surprisingly well-priced beer are also delusions.
If so, RLLs would be out, because the compression system would get in the way of direct bit placement on the platter.
Yes, and yes.
An old MFM or ESDI drive should do the job nicely. You should be able to shove the drive and controller into a 386 or 486 system, which should be able to load and run a linux system up to around the early 2.x kernels.
Who particularly cares about running X on it - you might as well just build the box headless and telnet into it.
Or, if the original questioner wants to get really close to the metal, dig out a PDP-11 or an early VAX from the local nerd-museum and learn how to drive the 14" platters of the dismountable hard drives. What were they RL-02s and/ or RL-05s ?
Also, you could probably get an adapter and use a 128MB CompactFlash card.
And the last time you saw a new 128MB CF card was... ?
(I occasionally trawl eBay for exactly these - for my PDA, which went out of production a decade ago. And when a "better", modern PDA can acheive a month's use on a pair of AAs, then I'll think about replacing it. I'm in no hurry.)
In some parts of the world, PO Boxes are not particularly cheap
From the Royal Mail website : "A PO Box® costs just £62.85 a year or £51.00 for six months." Not particularly cheap. Personally, at that sort of price I'd be tempted to persuade a big, old and ugly friend to give me a "care-of" service : all addresses "care of Big Ugly Bastard, [address]". Other providers... £192 per year, another company won't say, a local provider £240/year. Not exactly a cheap option.
I've stopped using YouTube for all my videos because of their copyright take down actions.
And have you told YouTube this? , and do YouTube give a flying fuck about not having your content?
How are YouTube meant to make any money, I wonder? Or is it simply that I've got an efficent-enough set of AdBlock filters that I don't notice the failed advertising.
Similarly with your credit card: if you're buying something you'd rather not be traced back to you, you can just pay cash.
At the moment.
Singapore, anyone ?: the country that is trying to abolish cash. Everything, repeat EVERYTHING, has to be brought on credit cards. At least, that's the story that I've heard, and I'd welcome comment from anyone who has actually lived or visited there. Of course, if the Singaporean authorities get their way, but people still want to use cash (when going whore-bashing, or buying drugs, for example), then the underworld will simply use some other currency ; in Singapore's case, probably from the surrounding Malaysia. If it were to be tried in Britain, then the Euro would probably become more readily exchangeable (in a large part of southern England, the Euro is already easy to use, and I'd expect it's also easy to spend in Ulster because of the land border) ; if it were tried in the US, then people would use either Canadian dollars, or Mexican pesos.
white lightening = moonshine = immature whiskey, right?
On this side of the pond, a "white lightening" is vodka and milk. Never bothered with it myself, but I remember one utter lunatic who was a devotee of them. Can remember his face, but not his name.
I kind of doubt it's possible to get to 190proof in a home still, and I know you can't buy that wretch.
190 proof in America ~=95% v/v ? Yeah, you could get to that with a well-made home still. Would take several passes or a very good fractionation head (which would be hard to disguise as anything else to a suitably-trained policeman), but you should be able to do it. My old still... hmmm, would probably take 4 passes, and I could build or dismantle the still to innocuous parts in about 5 minutes.
It's like Dr. House said, "If religious people could be reasoned with there would be no religious people."
I don't know who Dr house is, but the way I've heard it expressed before is "you can't reason someone out of a position that they did not arrive at by reasoning." I don't have a citation for that though. Edit : WikiQuote hints that it's Dean Swift, but they don't have a source for it. It does have the sound of a Swift-ism.
Mormons aren't creationists in the usual sense of the word.
They're not Christian in the usual sense of the word, either
That's one of the nicest things I've heard anyone say about the Mormons for a long time.
The last time I had them at the door, I was decorating and had a friend around to help. So as soon as I opened the door and saw who they were, I called out "Charlie, can you bring the rubbish bucket". Then I took the set of leaflets out of their hands, said 'thank you', threw them straight into the bucket, and shut the door on them. No need for any lip-flapping on their behalf ; no wear and tear on my ears either, and a full and frank exchange of views. One of my friends is far more tolerant : he'll invite them in and spend 2 or 3 hours debating science in general and palaeontology in particular with them. He's not going to be harmed by their idiocies ; they might actually be educated (most of them are woefully ignorant) ; and the time they spend in his living room is time they lose from their mission to confuse and upset average people. All-round win.
Well, I had to follow that link. And it's fun. I've had dealings with Ken Carpenter before, and like the guy ; picking up on a term like that sounds entirely up his street sense-of-humour-wise, and as vertebrate palaeontology isn't my particular specialism, I'm more than willing to follow his lead. Boringly : since sauropods typically have strongly ossified tail tendons (and correspondingly low tail flexibility), then it's very unlikely to have a thagomizer. The teeth were interesting though.
"RINO" being an acronym for "Republican In Name Only"? Which, if I understand American politics correctly means "someone pretending to be a lunatic right-winger", as opposed to someone who actually is a lunatic right winger. Which raises the question of why would someone pretend to be a lunatic? Well, that's America for you.
The key problem about the flare is the rate of production of transformers -- it would be literally months before much of the northern part of the US and Canada got power back.
Which part of the word "permanent" did you misunderstand?
Of course there is no way to scrub any part of your permanent record. That is what the word "permanent" in "permanent record" means.
There may be (and probably should be) a way to insert a preamble to a permanent record of the form "records between X and Y are compromised due to an identity theft event detailed at Z", but because it's possible for an ID theft victim to also be an axe murderer during the period of ID-theft, then it wouldn't be right to expunge a "permanent record" on the grounds of an ID theft.
Of course, people writing applications to use "permanent records" should include facilities to red-flag events given an "ID theft" preamble.
Israel basically doesn't care about what they've done to these people
Of course they don't ; they're only dual-nationality citizens and/ or visitors from friendly powers. It's not like they're anything important, like allies.
Stop wasting all those antibiotics on beefing up our cattle and giving a bunch of supergerms a tolerance for the stuff?
Nearly, but not quite. Before we can stop doing that (and have any significant effect), we need to invent a time machine and travel back to the mid- or early-1960s, then stop our present farmer's parents or grandparents feeding prophylactic antibiotics to their cattle. Not that that would make the task appreciably harder.
I tested with that algorithm, using a JavaScript implementation taken from the Fisher-Yates Wikpedia page,
I'm just off to RTFWP, but why should that stop me from questioning - wouldn't the posting of an implementation of an algorithm in language-X onto a Wikipedia page constitute "original research", and therefore require to be taken back down. (If it's not original, then it must be a copy of something from somewhere, which then becomes a copyright problem)?
OK, off to RTFWP... and sure enough, the algorithm implementations are there, and no source is cited. So, surely this is original research and should be struck out (along with all other similar examples).
According to some otherwise good SciFi (Stargate comes to mind)
Never seen an episode, or even more than about 5 minutes of an episode, so I can't comment.
even alien devices use Serial.
Why do you think that SETI programmes are looking for serial communications? And just what are Star Trek's "hailing frequencies" (answers in Hertz, please)?
I'm not as optimistic as you. RS232 will be around forever, but I'd bet the server/router/switch stuff standardizes on USB within 5 years.
Which would imply to me that the typical SlashDot IT worker will still be needing to deal with serial ports for 15 or 20 years yet. People working with lab equipment for a generation after that.
Your chemistry seems to have tripped up in the hallway there. Let me help you to pick things up again : Methanol is the common name for the methane member of the alcohol series of homologous compounds ; it has the formula CH3.OH (which can be expressed in various ways). Ethanol is the common name for the ethane member of the alcohol series of homologous compounds ; it has the formula CH3.CH2.OH (which can be expressed in various ways).
All members of the alcohol series of homologous compounds are toxic ; some are more toxic than others. The lethal dose of ethanol is slightly variable, figures of around 3450 mg to 7060 mg per kg of body weight are published (for mouse and rat respectively ; the lethal dose of methanol is cited as 1 mg per kg of body weight (http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1174890-overview). If you produced methanol and ethanol to the same standards of purity, their toxicities would remain as cited above ; toxicity is something that is inherent to the compound in question, not to the method of production. (Method of production can introduce other toxicities to that of the main production compound.)
"Industrial alcohol" is a common synonym for "denatured alcohol" ; in Britain it is commonly called "methylated spirits" to indicate that it is derived from (brewed) spirits mixed with methanol. (In fact, partial oxidation of ethane gas is a more common production method for both ethanol and methanol for industrial alcohols. The production of (mostly) ethanol by brewing also produces small amounts of many other compounds including the entire contents of the yeast that do the brewing, which makes it undesirable for chemical use.) Many other compounds can be used to "denature" alcohol that could otherwise be drinkable.
An effective denaturing compound would be one that is extremely difficult to remove from the ethanol that makes up the bulk of your product. Methanol is a good because it's chemical properties are similar (it's an alcohol, and only one step removed in the aliphatic series from the ethanol), and it's physical properties are very similar. Specifically, the boiling points are 65 and 79 centigrade respectively, which makes separation by distillation difficult. Not impossible, just difficult ; more difficult than making your pure ethanol by a different route. The big problem with using methanol to denature ethanol is that the denatured product is indistinguishable to the eye and taste bud from the un-denatured product, rendering the product easy to sell on as if it were pure ethanol. So other strong-tasting compounds or strongly-coloured compounds are added as markers for the denaturing. (In Britain, the norm is to use a purple dye in methylated spirits ; I've never experimented to try to remove the dye, but I'd be surprised if it was difficult ; but I know that that would not remove the more highly toxic methanol from the "meths") But the honest dishonest chemist doing this would know that they've only rendered the denatured alcohol palatable, not (relatively) safe to drink.
FYI : I used to run a home still, fed from various fruit wines that my brother-in-law made and which tasted horrible ; when I ran some of my product through analytic equipment (a GC, if anyone cares), then the methanol content was around 2ppm (parts per million). In the same batch of samples, along with my calibration standards I included another "unknown" mixture which showed itself to contain 5ppm of methanol. The second unknown was a commercial whisky ("Teachers", if anyone cares). This does not imply that was unsafe to drink - it's one of that countries better-selling brands ; merely that the methanol which had been produced in it's manufacture (probably by degradation of longer-chain conjoiners of the alcohol derived from the brewing, distillation or maturation processes) was at low enough concentration that its toxic effects would not become evident until after the drinker had consumed a more-than lethal dose of ethanol. Several tens or hundreds of times more than lethal. I still drink that commercial whisky (as long as there is nothing else around worth drinking, like paint-stripper, or coffee, or even dilute fish-piss).
"A magnitude 8.8 earthquake struck central Chile at 03:34 local time (07:34 CET) on Saturday 27 February 2010. The epicentre was 115 km north-northeast of the city of Concepción and 325 km south-west of the capital Santiago. The earthquake has caused significant casualties and damage in the country.
ESO expresses its deepest condolences to the families of the victims, and its sympathy and support for all those affected by the earthquake.
No casualties among ESO staff have been reported. At present, power cuts and network interruptions mean that communication may be limited. Disruption to staff travel plans within, to, and from Chile should be expected. We urge Visiting Astronomers with observations planned at ESO observatories to put their trips to Chile on hold until further notice. International flights to and from Santiago International Airport are currently either cancelled or diverted. Information about observing programmes will be provided at a later date.
Despite being the 7th strongest earthquake ever recorded worldwide, the ESO observatory sites did not suffer any damage, partly as they are engineered to withstand seismic activity and partly due to their distances from the epicentre. At La Silla, a power cut caused observations to stop during the night. Paranal Observatory, the APEX telescope and the ALMA Operations Support Facility and Array Operations Site were unaffected."
A 7.8 quake struck Antofagasta (120km north of the telescope site) in 1995 (http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso9517/).
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqarchives/epic/epic_circ.php allows you to get at historical quakes map up to 1994 ; 1973 to present and various other formats ; there has been plenty of data for planning quake likelihoods and the engineering responses that would be required.
Richter scale is a useful measure for geologists as it measures the approximate total energy released in the quake on a log scale.
The Richter Scale is a scale that was designed around a half-century ago around the readings of a particular model of seismograph deployed in southern California, and with various other technical details to do with distance to hypocentre etc which were also specific to it's origin. Since the 1970s (possibly the 1960s - IANA-historian of seismology), the preferred measure for comparison of earthquakes has been the moment-magnitude parameter, which (not accidentally) has approximately similar numerical values for quakes that overlapped. (Obviously the original models of seismograph are long since defunct, so direct comparison is probably not possible, and not likely to be helpful.) All of these scales are, as you say, logarithmic. If you see a professional seismologist on the TV, you'll almost certainly not see the "level-setting" footage and the other technical necessities of filming ; that stuff on the cutting-room floor will be the bit where the seismologist bemoan that the journalists really should stop talking about the Richter Scale, because it's as relevant these days as the Roman mille. If you do see a professional seismologist referring to the Richter Scale outside wordings like "approximately equivalent to X on the Richter Scale", then they've probably just given up on educating the bloody journalists, let alone the trampling masses.
Blu-Ray drives have pretty much the same stuff inside them but they cost much more. All else being equal they should only cost a couple of dollars extra to buy.
But if Blu-Ray drives offer no perceptible benefits, then what would be the benefit of spending those extra couple of shekels? And from what I've seen from my Blu-Ray wielding, HD-buying-into friend, there's no perceptible difference.
Mod parent down for being informed, reasonable and sane. These are not the traits that we wish to encourage in the land of/. !
Seriously, would anyone seriously expect that there were not such procedures in place. That any self-respecting engineer would have hung around to work on such projects when he (or she ; this is the 21st century after all) realised that they were being run in such a dangerously lackadaisical manner? No? So get real. It's a complex system, with some of the control software not quite perfect. Big Fucking Deal.
[Sigh.] No. Whether or not your phone can detect the presence of a readable signal from a cellphone base station (or several) doesn't depend on how strong the signal you're transmitting is, it depends on (surprise!) the strength of the base station signal at your location.
Slashdot Mirror
Never! I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you!
You mean that the messages I get from the Korova Bar every so often are a delusion of mine? And the occasional evening I spend there criticizing the owner's wiring (he's an electrician) and drinking surprisingly well-priced beer are also delusions.
Yes, and yes.
An old MFM or ESDI drive should do the job nicely. You should be able to shove the drive and controller into a 386 or 486 system, which should be able to load and run a linux system up to around the early 2.x kernels.
Who particularly cares about running X on it - you might as well just build the box headless and telnet into it.
Or, if the original questioner wants to get really close to the metal, dig out a PDP-11 or an early VAX from the local nerd-museum and learn how to drive the 14" platters of the dismountable hard drives. What were they RL-02s and/ or RL-05s ?
Been to a Stallman lecture? He uses one of the platters for his "St Ignutius" halo.
One of these : http://stallman.org/photos/st-ignucius/vatican/mid/mid_img_7594.jpg
not one of these : http://stallman.org/RMS_13_bendicindo.jpg
Not the VL-bus one that I invested in so long ago. That was the wages of my first international job.
Cutting Edge = Bleeding Edge.
MFM or EDSI, with controller card should do the trick.
And the last time you saw a new 128MB CF card was ... ?
(I occasionally trawl eBay for exactly these - for my PDA, which went out of production a decade ago. And when a "better", modern PDA can acheive a month's use on a pair of AAs, then I'll think about replacing it. I'm in no hurry.)
From the Royal Mail website : "A PO Box® costs just £62.85 a year or £51.00 for six months." ... £192 per year, another company won't say, a local provider £240/year. Not exactly a cheap option.
Not particularly cheap.
Personally, at that sort of price I'd be tempted to persuade a big, old and ugly friend to give me a "care-of" service : all addresses "care of Big Ugly Bastard, [address]".
Other providers
And have you told YouTube this? , and do YouTube give a flying fuck about not having your content?
How are YouTube meant to make any money, I wonder? Or is it simply that I've got an efficent-enough set of AdBlock filters that I don't notice the failed advertising.
At the moment.
Singapore, anyone ?: the country that is trying to abolish cash. Everything, repeat EVERYTHING, has to be brought on credit cards. At least, that's the story that I've heard, and I'd welcome comment from anyone who has actually lived or visited there.
Of course, if the Singaporean authorities get their way, but people still want to use cash (when going whore-bashing, or buying drugs, for example), then the underworld will simply use some other currency ; in Singapore's case, probably from the surrounding Malaysia. If it were to be tried in Britain, then the Euro would probably become more readily exchangeable (in a large part of southern England, the Euro is already easy to use, and I'd expect it's also easy to spend in Ulster because of the land border) ; if it were tried in the US, then people would use either Canadian dollars, or Mexican pesos.
On this side of the pond, a "white lightening" is vodka and milk. Never bothered with it myself, but I remember one utter lunatic who was a devotee of them. Can remember his face, but not his name.
190 proof in America ~=95% v/v ? ... hmmm, would probably take 4 passes, and I could build or dismantle the still to innocuous parts in about 5 minutes.
Yeah, you could get to that with a well-made home still. Would take several passes or a very good fractionation head (which would be hard to disguise as anything else to a suitably-trained policeman), but you should be able to do it. My old still
I don't know who Dr house is, but the way I've heard it expressed before is "you can't reason someone out of a position that they did not arrive at by reasoning."
I don't have a citation for that though.
Edit : WikiQuote hints that it's Dean Swift, but they don't have a source for it. It does have the sound of a Swift-ism.
That's one of the nicest things I've heard anyone say about the Mormons for a long time.
The last time I had them at the door, I was decorating and had a friend around to help. So as soon as I opened the door and saw who they were, I called out "Charlie, can you bring the rubbish bucket". Then I took the set of leaflets out of their hands, said 'thank you', threw them straight into the bucket, and shut the door on them. No need for any lip-flapping on their behalf ; no wear and tear on my ears either, and a full and frank exchange of views.
One of my friends is far more tolerant : he'll invite them in and spend 2 or 3 hours debating science in general and palaeontology in particular with them. He's not going to be harmed by their idiocies ; they might actually be educated (most of them are woefully ignorant) ; and the time they spend in his living room is time they lose from their mission to confuse and upset average people. All-round win.
Well, I had to follow that link. And it's fun. I've had dealings with Ken Carpenter before, and like the guy ; picking up on a term like that sounds entirely up his street sense-of-humour-wise, and as vertebrate palaeontology isn't my particular specialism, I'm more than willing to follow his lead.
Boringly : since sauropods typically have strongly ossified tail tendons (and correspondingly low tail flexibility), then it's very unlikely to have a thagomizer.
The teeth were interesting though.
"RINO" being an acronym for "Republican In Name Only"?
Which, if I understand American politics correctly means "someone pretending to be a lunatic right-winger", as opposed to someone who actually is a lunatic right winger.
Which raises the question of why would someone pretend to be a lunatic? Well, that's America for you.
And this is a problem because ... ?
Which part of the word "permanent" did you misunderstand?
Of course there is no way to scrub any part of your permanent record. That is what the word "permanent" in "permanent record" means.
There may be (and probably should be) a way to insert a preamble to a permanent record of the form "records between X and Y are compromised due to an identity theft event detailed at Z", but because it's possible for an ID theft victim to also be an axe murderer during the period of ID-theft, then it wouldn't be right to expunge a "permanent record" on the grounds of an ID theft.
Of course, people writing applications to use "permanent records" should include facilities to red-flag events given an "ID theft" preamble.
Of course they don't ; they're only dual-nationality citizens and/ or visitors from friendly powers. It's not like they're anything important, like allies.
Nearly, but not quite.
Before we can stop doing that (and have any significant effect), we need to invent a time machine and travel back to the mid- or early-1960s, then stop our present farmer's parents or grandparents feeding prophylactic antibiotics to their cattle. Not that that would make the task appreciably harder.
FTFA:
I'm just off to RTFWP, but why should that stop me from questioning - wouldn't the posting of an implementation of an algorithm in language-X onto a Wikipedia page constitute "original research", and therefore require to be taken back down. (If it's not original, then it must be a copy of something from somewhere, which then becomes a copyright problem)?
OK, off to RTFWP ... and sure enough, the algorithm implementations are there, and no source is cited. So, surely this is original research and should be struck out (along with all other similar examples).
Never seen an episode, or even more than about 5 minutes of an episode, so I can't comment.
Why do you think that SETI programmes are looking for serial communications? And just what are Star Trek's "hailing frequencies" (answers in Hertz, please)?
Which would imply to me that the typical SlashDot IT worker will still be needing to deal with serial ports for 15 or 20 years yet. People working with lab equipment for a generation after that.
Your chemistry seems to have tripped up in the hallway there. Let me help you to pick things up again :
Methanol is the common name for the methane member of the alcohol series of homologous compounds ; it has the formula CH3.OH (which can be expressed in various ways).
Ethanol is the common name for the ethane member of the alcohol series of homologous compounds ; it has the formula CH3.CH2.OH (which can be expressed in various ways).
All members of the alcohol series of homologous compounds are toxic ; some are more toxic than others. The lethal dose of ethanol is slightly variable, figures of around 3450 mg to 7060 mg per kg of body weight are published (for mouse and rat respectively ; the lethal dose of methanol is cited as 1 mg per kg of body weight (http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1174890-overview).
If you produced methanol and ethanol to the same standards of purity, their toxicities would remain as cited above ; toxicity is something that is inherent to the compound in question, not to the method of production. (Method of production can introduce other toxicities to that of the main production compound.)
"Industrial alcohol" is a common synonym for "denatured alcohol" ; in Britain it is commonly called "methylated spirits" to indicate that it is derived from (brewed) spirits mixed with methanol. (In fact, partial oxidation of ethane gas is a more common production method for both ethanol and methanol for industrial alcohols. The production of (mostly) ethanol by brewing also produces small amounts of many other compounds including the entire contents of the yeast that do the brewing, which makes it undesirable for chemical use.) Many other compounds can be used to "denature" alcohol that could otherwise be drinkable.
An effective denaturing compound would be one that is extremely difficult to remove from the ethanol that makes up the bulk of your product. Methanol is a good because it's chemical properties are similar (it's an alcohol, and only one step removed in the aliphatic series from the ethanol), and it's physical properties are very similar. Specifically, the boiling points are 65 and 79 centigrade respectively, which makes separation by distillation difficult. Not impossible, just difficult ; more difficult than making your pure ethanol by a different route. The big problem with using methanol to denature ethanol is that the denatured product is indistinguishable to the eye and taste bud from the un-denatured product, rendering the product easy to sell on as if it were pure ethanol. So other strong-tasting compounds or strongly-coloured compounds are added as markers for the denaturing. (In Britain, the norm is to use a purple dye in methylated spirits ; I've never experimented to try to remove the dye, but I'd be surprised if it was difficult ; but I know that that would not remove the more highly toxic methanol from the "meths") But the honest dishonest chemist doing this would know that they've only rendered the denatured alcohol palatable, not (relatively) safe to drink.
FYI : I used to run a home still, fed from various fruit wines that my brother-in-law made and which tasted horrible ; when I ran some of my product through analytic equipment (a GC, if anyone cares), then the methanol content was around 2ppm (parts per million). In the same batch of samples, along with my calibration standards I included another "unknown" mixture which showed itself to contain 5ppm of methanol. The second unknown was a commercial whisky ("Teachers", if anyone cares). This does not imply that was unsafe to drink - it's one of that countries better-selling brands ; merely that the methanol which had been produced in it's manufacture (probably by degradation of longer-chain conjoiners of the alcohol derived from the brewing, distillation or maturation processes) was at low enough concentration that its toxic effects would not become evident until after the drinker had consumed a more-than lethal dose of ethanol. Several tens or hundreds of times more than lethal. I still drink that commercial whisky (as long as there is nothing else around worth drinking, like paint-stripper, or coffee, or even dilute fish-piss).
"A magnitude 8.8 earthquake struck central Chile at 03:34 local time (07:34 CET) on Saturday 27 February 2010. The epicentre was 115 km north-northeast of the city of Concepción and 325 km south-west of the capital Santiago. The earthquake has caused significant casualties and damage in the country.
ESO expresses its deepest condolences to the families of the victims, and its sympathy and support for all those affected by the earthquake.
No casualties among ESO staff have been reported. At present, power cuts and network interruptions mean that communication may be limited. Disruption to staff travel plans within, to, and from Chile should be expected. We urge Visiting Astronomers with observations planned at ESO observatories to put their trips to Chile on hold until further notice. International flights to and from Santiago International Airport are currently either cancelled or diverted. Information about observing programmes will be provided at a later date.
Despite being the 7th strongest earthquake ever recorded worldwide, the ESO observatory sites did not suffer any damage, partly as they are engineered to withstand seismic activity and partly due to their distances from the epicentre. At La Silla, a power cut caused observations to stop during the night. Paranal Observatory, the APEX telescope and the ALMA Operations Support Facility and Array Operations Site were unaffected."
A 7.8 quake struck Antofagasta (120km north of the telescope site) in 1995 (http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso9517/).
Various other quakes in the area : http://www.eso.org/gen-fac/pubs/astclim/earthquake/his-paranal-58.html (Historic times to 2000.)
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqarchives/epic/epic_circ.php allows you to get at historical quakes map up to 1994 ; 1973 to present and various other formats ; there has been plenty of data for planning quake likelihoods and the engineering responses that would be required.
The Richter Scale is a scale that was designed around a half-century ago around the readings of a particular model of seismograph deployed in southern California, and with various other technical details to do with distance to hypocentre etc which were also specific to it's origin. Since the 1970s (possibly the 1960s - IANA-historian of seismology), the preferred measure for comparison of earthquakes has been the moment-magnitude parameter, which (not accidentally) has approximately similar numerical values for quakes that overlapped. (Obviously the original models of seismograph are long since defunct, so direct comparison is probably not possible, and not likely to be helpful.)
All of these scales are, as you say, logarithmic.
If you see a professional seismologist on the TV, you'll almost certainly not see the "level-setting" footage and the other technical necessities of filming ; that stuff on the cutting-room floor will be the bit where the seismologist bemoan that the journalists really should stop talking about the Richter Scale, because it's as relevant these days as the Roman mille. If you do see a professional seismologist referring to the Richter Scale outside wordings like "approximately equivalent to X on the Richter Scale", then they've probably just given up on educating the bloody journalists, let alone the trampling masses.
But if Blu-Ray drives offer no perceptible benefits, then what would be the benefit of spending those extra couple of shekels? And from what I've seen from my Blu-Ray wielding, HD-buying-into friend, there's no perceptible difference.
Yet.
It should certainly be enough to get you put onto a watch-list of some sort - with a 150-year expiry date on the surveillance order.
Mod parent down for being informed, reasonable and sane. These are not the traits that we wish to encourage in the land of /. !
Seriously, would anyone seriously expect that there were not such procedures in place. That any self-respecting engineer would have hung around to work on such projects when he (or she ; this is the 21st century after all) realised that they were being run in such a dangerously lackadaisical manner? No? So get real. It's a complex system, with some of the control software not quite perfect. Big Fucking Deal.
[Sigh.] No.
Whether or not your phone can detect the presence of a readable signal from a cellphone base station (or several) doesn't depend on how strong the signal you're transmitting is, it depends on (surprise!) the strength of the base station signal at your location.