You'll get a lot more points for something needing your time & effort (thought/preparation/execution), than just money (flowers/chocolates/etc.).
For an ex-girlfriend from university, after we'd bumped into each other again... one chocolate cake in the form of a stretch limosine ; one card with it bearing Dorothy Parker's "One Perfect Rose" ; delivered to the office mid-morning.
OK, I already knew that she liked Dot Parker. And that she was new in that office and wasn't terribly comfortable, and what better way to get a bit of bonding than passing round the cake with afternoon tea? And who had just passed her driving test? As you say, you get the brownie points for forethought and planning.
I really hope we get this electric car thing figured out soon because I am just about sick of following smoke belching vehicles every day.
Pedal faster ; overtake them, then sit in the correct position in your lane so that they've got to do a full overtaking manoeuvre if they want to pass you. Then get ahead of them again. Eventually, they'll get fed up of spending 10 or 20% of their income on a car that travels at the speed of a bike and get a bike too.
Hmm, on an Idle topic, about religion, I'm intrigued enough to actually change my settings and read the elfin comment. And RTFA - I'm qualified, and the summary doesn't say what countries the money will be paid for.
Hey, the fellows in netops asked me to clarify for you folks here's the story:
Remainder DELETED because it's boring.
Actually answering the elfin question is not proper SlashDot procedure, unlike endless carping about the non-existence of editorial fact checking which is obligatory. By answering the question in a reasonable and informative manner (incidentally showing the flaws in the moderation system, which currently has you as "informative", when you're obviously trolling), then you're showing that you've faked your usernumber to look like it's a tenth of mine (how'd you do that, BTW? Probably cheated by being here before me. Huh!) because you're obviously new here.
Networking in general is far more stable and easy to use in 10.5.
But, but, but... I thought that Apple systems "just worked". Heretic!.
Burn the heretic!!
Glad to see someone else who couldn't figure out what was meant to "just work" either. I never bothered to upgrade from 10.4 either. I just sold the machine (for nearly £100 more than I paid for it!)
Or how do you plan to get users like myself out of the United States and into a country without software patents?
Firstly we provide sufficient motivation for you to move, then we watch while you move (if you're sufficiently desirable a person for other countries to allow you in, of course). Finally, we watch from the sidelines as the US collapses.
Alternatively, you can stay on in America and try to fight the system from within. Good luck with that. At least you'll go somewhere more exotic than Cuba these days - Morocco, Egypt, probably others.
but most people I know who have wide experience of commercial dealing with Chinese (not to be confused with personal interactions with individuals and their families) have told me of a catalogue of dishonest, conspiratorial and treacherous activities.
And precisely how is this different to the behaviour of anyone else in "commercial dealing"? Being in a commercial environment means that your are morally, ethically and in many cases legally obliged to act in as deceitful, dishonest, conspiratorial and treacherous a manner as you need to in order to increase the amount of money that you make for yourself, or for your boss, or for your shareholders. Very often it's only the fear of being found out and losing sales to publicity that drives some degree of honesty (etc).
Haven't you lived in the Real World before this year?
The best part is the list of authors in the references
I find it hard to believe that those are completely randomly generated : "Anvil: Construction of context-free grammar." sounds to me very much like the sort of technique that could turn a "dictionary" (for a subject) and a source of random noise into this sort of paper. "Byzantine fault tolerance." is a lovely phrase ; I'll have to find a use for it. And I simply refuse to believe that "TANENBAUM , A." came out of the program randomly (but part of the dictionary may have included a list of names "in the field".
You go the the clinic and find, lo, that it's serious. You have cancer, diabetes or one of the thousands of chronic (and in the US, expensive) diseases that grace our textbooks^HPDAs.
The diseases are not cheap to treat outside the US, as you imply ; maybe not quite as expensive - the US model of "health care" does seem to inflate costs significantly - but they're still expensive to treat.
they are saying that a flawed structure ("partial occupancy") is harder than a perfect structure. Wild.
Perfectly normal ; in an imperfect structure there's fewer planes of symmetry to fracture. I'm just reading the paper now, and it looks as if the MSNBC article is deeply flawed - I'd guess that they've actually done some talking to the scientists but misunderstood what was being said. Well, give them half-marks for trying.
Where to start? Artificial diamond isn't (generally) made these days by crushing graphite ; it's typically a vapour deposition process going directly to diamond structure and never seeing a graphite structure. The article talks about the "hardness of diamond", as if it only has one hardness. Which is not correct. The hardness of diamond (and pretty much any other mineral) varies with crystallographic orientation, and by quite a substantial margin. The best-known example of the phenomenon is of course the mineral kyanite, under it;s alternative name of "disthene" (Greek-derived for "two strengths"), but the phenomenon is perfectly general. In diamond's case... it's been a while since I read up on it's detailed properties, but ISTR that the hardest faces are the {111} faces (forming the octahedral faces of natural crystals, not by coincidence also the slowest-growing face and bearing the highest density of carbon atoms per unit area ; all three properties go together) while something like a {001} form has a much lower strength. Still, an interesting result.
Honest question here: What does putting the first letter in brackets mean?
In this context, probably that the original context of the quote used "graphite", but for grammatical reasons in this sentence it needs a capital letter.
It's just the video I've seen of cave divers pushing their tanks through a squeeze makes me shiver.
You don't do it on every dive. Not even every second dive, unless you're particularly masochistic [GRIN]. But analyse : why do you find such scenes particularly disturbing? If you were doing the same manoeuvres with the same bottles (OK, yes they do add up to a small bomb ; but you've carried and set charges before, haven't you?) in the air, would that freak you? Of course not (that, by the way, is the reason that the British way of cave diving is to take cavers and teach them to dive, not to take divers and teach them to cave ; the cavers are less likely to freak over the diving than the divers are over the caving). So, is the water what freaks you? but you're not going to get away from your bottles, are you? You're going to keep a *very* firm grip on them - a "death grip", you could say. You are not going to over-stress yourself, because you know what that's going to do to your air consumption. You are not going to let your fears of the darkness and the water and the million tons of rock between you and air ruin your dive. If the time and air consumption is going wrong for the dive, you are going to turn round when you get to thirds. You are not going to be upset over one of your gags blocking - you've done a changeover between air systems in the last 5 minutes, haven't you? So you know that one system was working a breath ago, and the other system 5 minutes ago. That's why you do changeovers. How on earth are you going to get lost down there - you've kept a good firm grip on your lifeline (note - it's a lifeline, not a guideline ; the name reflects just how good a grip you keep on it). And besides, you've maintained a note of your survey as you've gone in on the dive, so even if the line has parted behind you, you've carried your notes with you. What else could go wrong? Light failure? Well, come on, you're a caver - you got bored with re-building your lamp in total darkness years ago. Which is why you're diving on triple or quintuple lamps (I met some Ukrainian divers once down Ireby Fell Main Drain - interesting kit, a torch mounted to the inside of each forearm instead of using the UK traditional 3-up of head lamps). Two independent air systems ; three (or more) independent lighting systems. Multiple independent navigation systems. There's only one "single point of failure", and that's inside your head. Which is why it's an interesting sport.
If I've convinced you to try it, don't.
I nearly drowned as a kid too. Didn't learn to swim until I was about 12. Before I started caving I'd had enough of the "OhShitOhShitOhShitThisTimeI'mReallyGonnaDie" moments rock climbing and ice climbing and suffering hypothermia and hitch-hiking the length of the country at 14 and getting lost in strange cities and I'd killed a guy through my own incompetence and getting arrested for political activities. The inside of my own head held no terrors for me.
Never made "Elite" though, we did all the missions and were still only "Very dangerous" IIRC.
Getting to 'elite' level would take a couple of days game-play on the version I had (PC ; would run from a single floppy and I think was a single file of about 80kb (well one file for the solid-rendered version, one for the wireframe version) ; machines have been ridiculously too fast for over a decade). As I recall, you wouldn't make Elite until you'd fought and destroyed several bounty hunters in Fer-de-Lance ships. Putting any sort of gun in the back window was the first important purchase to make. I eventually got bored with it - no challenge left once you'd loaded up on equipment. Trying to do trade in Anarchy systems was fun for a time ; trying to visit every single planet on a map got dull after a time. Then one day, I fell in with a Thargoid invasion fleet and got thoroughly creamed. So they became a project for a time. But I never met them again. [SIGH] Ah, memories! Where's that download site?
Very recently there have been people who went out for a day of caving and came back sans one member. See this story[http://cbs5.com/national/utah.cave.dealth.2.1337554.html]
Hmmm, interesting. Another "Neil Moss" event. "Film," as the jargon-file entry goes, "at eleven." There are a number of "Neil Moss" concrete lumps scattered through the caves of Britain and I would safely assume Europe too. That America has them too is no surprise. One of my fellow cave-diving trainees made the mistake of bringing some suspicious bones out of the cave once... to be told by the local police : "Put them back where you found them, son. We know who they are, and the family don't need yet another batch of paperwork and another partial funeral." [Names and locations deliberately omitted. Well known in the sport.]
FYI, There's NO FN WAY you'd get me to cave dive.
Hmmm, typical stage 2 response :
You're a newbie ; you don't know what cave diving is, and it doesn't arouse strong emotion.
You're a reasonably experienced caver ; you've seen the roof disappear into the sump ; you've done some free diving ; you've lain on your back in that crawl and noticed the grass stems stuck to the roof. "No effin way!", as you say.
You're an experienced caver ; the darkness beckons ; you are afraid, very afraid.
You settle the gag in your mouth and let the water close over your head. The fear is still there, but it's just one more thing to be managed along with air, buoyancy, temperature, survey and line,...
Being a little more precise, I think that you're hearing the darkness beckon, and you're about to go from stage 2 to stage 3. Or you're trying to square your public claims of "hardness" with your fear of the darkness. Don't worry ; fear is rational ; no-one who matters will think the less of you for declining the opportunity (apart possibly from yourself). What people won't thank you for would be not getting proper training if you decide to start to bubble, as you sound enough a member of the caving fraternity to get the contacts you need. If I see you down a cave somewhere, enjoy.
That reminds me - I've got to get rid of my bottles. (Out of test and very old, so not worth shipping.)
When I arrived on site, I noticed the passenger side windshield was blown outwards. You could clearly see the layer of safety glass in it. When I asked him if the passenger was alright, he responded "Oh that? No, I was alone. That was caused by the airbag". Sure enough, upon closer inspection, I could see where the top airbag flap on the top dashboard swung up and smashed into the windshield.
NOW do you understand the reason for those warning to put nothing, not a spot of paint, not a sticker, not a glue-on coffee-cup holder, over the burst panel for the airbags. Did you think that these warnings were put there for the extra few microgrammes of plastic that the lettering would use? They're actually a legally-compliant Darwin Award encouragement device. Not a terribly effective one, but an attempt.
My problem is the tests that are designed to screw you if you do them in a natural order.
Does your use of the term "natural order" not include "RTFM"? If it doesn't, then perhaps you've still failed to understand the point that your teachers have been trying to beat into your skull.
(Having said that, I don't recall any questions ever that have included the sort of logical games that you describe, except of course for tests of predicate calculus ; is this some local habit, or has education changed even more than I'd thought in the intervening decades?)
I was in this very plant a year or two ago and seem to recall them saying that not even filtering was good enough, they actually had to distill the water they got because filtering won't remove all impurities (enough for most practical purposes, but I think the reason they need absolutely pure is because pure H2O doesn't conduct electricity, but the slightest impurity will).
You've actually got it fairly comprehensively ass-about-tit : distillation (or it's modern equivalent, reverse osmosis) is a quick, dirty and cheap tool, and produces something that's generally good enough for undemanding applications like drinking, diluting battery acid, etc. But if you need to go to high purity (in the systems I used, for electrolysis to produce chromatographic-carrier grade hydrogen ; at Intel, I would guess for washing stages between layers of photoresist?) you then need to pass your "clean" water through a pair of ion-exchange resins. The first resin replaces all positive ions with hydronium ions ; the second resin replaces all negative ions with hydroxyl ions. And what you get out at the end is "ultra-pure" water, which will remain "ultra-pure" for an hour or two unless stored out of contact with the atmosphere. We used to check the quality of our UP water with a conductivity meter ; if the conductivity was too high, it went through the filters again ; if the filters didn't work after two passes, it was time for a new cartridge.
Distillation (or reverse osmosis) is a purely physical process (well, in theory), and is good for getting the big lumps of stuff out including the non-volatile elements. But things very specifically like ammonium ions, and nitrate ions can pass through both the distillation process and the osmotic membranes. So it's not a lot of use to do several stages of distillation back-to-back.
OK, then the reason for low power is that it's dangerous, not because there is a regulation.
This may come as a shock, but some regulations are actually based on chemical reality. In this case, the purpose of "IS" designs of sensors, communication systems, etc, is to restrict the amount of energy in a hazardous area to below the amount that can produce a spark in an explosive hydrogen-air mixture. (I can't remember if it's at LEL or UEL, but WTF - it's still around 20 micro-Joules if I recall correctly). Systems that are designed an installed to IS regulations can be run much more simply than other systems, which we typically called "power" systems. The differences are non-trivial - you need to use single or doubly-armoured cables, solid-walled conduit etc etc. They're a lot more bloody complex to install.
Why would this affect an emergency response system? I hear you ask? Because it is not a good idea to deal with a roof-collapse by turning it into a roof-collapse plus a gas explosion.
You're not the first person to get into confusion about this. The last time I was paying attention, the UK emergency services were being pressurised to use a single, common radio system. A fine and laudable idea, but the fire brigade pointed out that the systems being proposed were not designed to be non-sparking. Un-surprisingly, firefighters did not relish the idea of going into (for example) a gas leak investigation with a radio set that might produce a spark.
The last factor in the equation is L, the length of time a civilization broadcasts radio waves into space.
Which can be achieved in several ways - the civilisation could blow itself to smithereens, or just back to the stone age ("Keep banging the rocks together, guys!" to quote DNA) ; the civilization could move onto a less polluting transmission technology (as this article seems ot be discussing ; I heard the story from a different source) ; they could decide that they don't need this high-tech stuff and retire to a life of bucolic relaxation. But since Drake's intention was to quantify the degrees of ignorance that we have about the number of civilisations within reasonable reach of the Earth which we could hear. So the ones that are not using "eavesdroppable" technologies are excluded from the discussion at the start. Non-story, if you read the original articles Drake wrote back in the early 1960s. Which no-one does, more fool them.
I have known a number of people from "northern states" who seemed to have a fear of anything particularly strong tasting. Texans, however, seem to have no such problem!
The Texans that I've shared culinary experiences with seem to have a problem with the idea that you start good cooking with good ingredients, well prepared to show their strengths, and only use spices as a last resort to cover up the putrid taste of otherwise unfit-to-eat materials.
There are people in the U.K. willing to face the wrath of the power that be and ship over the CDs of all the radio dramas that the BBC did. Well worth the few extra $$.
There's some sort of export embargo?
Didn't know that.
Use the link to my SlashDot account (somewhere above this text, probably) and we can enter into a deep and meaningful relationship, which I hope will end up in both of us having to take a "year out" for tax purposes. (I'm not in the UK at the moment, but I'll be back soon. And I'm sure that DNA would approve. I was a listener to the first transmission of the radio series and brought my first tape recorder because of it to get the Sunday (?) repeat. (OK, I nagged Dad into giving me an early birthday present.)
The colour has worsened in recent versions, hasn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
For an ex-girlfriend from university, after we'd bumped into each other again ... one chocolate cake in the form of a stretch limosine ; one card with it bearing Dorothy Parker's "One Perfect Rose" ; delivered to the office mid-morning.
OK, I already knew that she liked Dot Parker. And that she was new in that office and wasn't terribly comfortable, and what better way to get a bit of bonding than passing round the cake with afternoon tea? And who had just passed her driving test?
As you say, you get the brownie points for forethought and planning.
Give me a second while I fill up the turkey baster .... and if you send the address, I'll get it in the post immediately.
Pedal faster ; overtake them, then sit in the correct position in your lane so that they've got to do a full overtaking manoeuvre if they want to pass you. Then get ahead of them again. Eventually, they'll get fed up of spending 10 or 20% of their income on a car that travels at the speed of a bike and get a bike too.
Hmm, on an Idle topic, about religion, I'm intrigued enough to actually change my settings and read the elfin comment. And RTFA - I'm qualified, and the summary doesn't say what countries the money will be paid for.
Remainder DELETED because it's boring.
Actually answering the elfin question is not proper SlashDot procedure, unlike endless carping about the non-existence of editorial fact checking which is obligatory.
By answering the question in a reasonable and informative manner (incidentally showing the flaws in the moderation system, which currently has you as "informative", when you're obviously trolling), then you're showing that you've faked your usernumber to look like it's a tenth of mine (how'd you do that, BTW? Probably cheated by being here before me. Huh!) because you're obviously new here.
1. Introduce internal changes for security reasons.
2. Demonstrate Google's evil intentions.
3. ????
4. Profit !
In SlashDoltLand, you don't google 1e100.net to find out what the story is about, but in Soviet Russia, Google 1e100.nets YOU!
Have I left out any SlashMemes? Oh yes,
I for one welcome our 1e100.netting overlords.
"dibona". That name rings a bell. Are you a lawyer or something? Dog food specialist?
You've obviously not slept with the same Finns that I have.
But, but, but ... I thought that Apple systems "just worked".
Heretic!.
Burn the heretic!!
Glad to see someone else who couldn't figure out what was meant to "just work" either. I never bothered to upgrade from 10.4 either. I just sold the machine (for nearly £100 more than I paid for it!)
Then you don't matter and might as well not exist.
What? Someone has been telling you differently? Who was that - your mother? And you believed her?
Firstly we provide sufficient motivation for you to move, then we watch while you move (if you're sufficiently desirable a person for other countries to allow you in, of course). Finally, we watch from the sidelines as the US collapses.
Alternatively, you can stay on in America and try to fight the system from within. Good luck with that. At least you'll go somewhere more exotic than Cuba these days - Morocco, Egypt, probably others.
And precisely how is this different to the behaviour of anyone else in "commercial dealing"?
Being in a commercial environment means that your are morally, ethically and in many cases legally obliged to act in as deceitful, dishonest, conspiratorial and treacherous a manner as you need to in order to increase the amount of money that you make for yourself, or for your boss, or for your shareholders. Very often it's only the fear of being found out and losing sales to publicity that drives some degree of honesty (etc).
Haven't you lived in the Real World before this year?
I find it hard to believe that those are completely randomly generated : "Anvil: Construction of context-free grammar." sounds to me very much like the sort of technique that could turn a "dictionary" (for a subject) and a source of random noise into this sort of paper.
"Byzantine fault tolerance." is a lovely phrase ; I'll have to find a use for it. And I simply refuse to believe that "TANENBAUM , A." came out of the program randomly (but part of the dictionary may have included a list of names "in the field".
The diseases are not cheap to treat outside the US, as you imply ; maybe not quite as expensive - the US model of "health care" does seem to inflate costs significantly - but they're still expensive to treat.
Perfectly normal ; in an imperfect structure there's fewer planes of symmetry to fracture.
I'm just reading the paper now, and it looks as if the MSNBC article is deeply flawed - I'd guess that they've actually done some talking to the scientists but misunderstood what was being said. Well, give them half-marks for trying.
Where to start? Artificial diamond isn't (generally) made these days by crushing graphite ; it's typically a vapour deposition process going directly to diamond structure and never seeing a graphite structure. ... it's been a while since I read up on it's detailed properties, but ISTR that the hardest faces are the {111} faces (forming the octahedral faces of natural crystals, not by coincidence also the slowest-growing face and bearing the highest density of carbon atoms per unit area ; all three properties go together) while something like a {001} form has a much lower strength.
The article talks about the "hardness of diamond", as if it only has one hardness. Which is not correct. The hardness of diamond (and pretty much any other mineral) varies with crystallographic orientation, and by quite a substantial margin. The best-known example of the phenomenon is of course the mineral kyanite, under it;s alternative name of "disthene" (Greek-derived for "two strengths"), but the phenomenon is perfectly general. In diamond's case
Still, an interesting result.
In this context, probably that the original context of the quote used "graphite", but for grammatical reasons in this sentence it needs a capital letter.
You don't do it on every dive. Not even every second dive, unless you're particularly masochistic [GRIN].
But analyse : why do you find such scenes particularly disturbing? If you were doing the same manoeuvres with the same bottles (OK, yes they do add up to a small bomb ; but you've carried and set charges before, haven't you?) in the air, would that freak you? Of course not (that, by the way, is the reason that the British way of cave diving is to take cavers and teach them to dive, not to take divers and teach them to cave ; the cavers are less likely to freak over the diving than the divers are over the caving).
So, is the water what freaks you? but you're not going to get away from your bottles, are you? You're going to keep a *very* firm grip on them - a "death grip", you could say.
You are not going to over-stress yourself, because you know what that's going to do to your air consumption. You are not going to let your fears of the darkness and the water and the million tons of rock between you and air ruin your dive.
If the time and air consumption is going wrong for the dive, you are going to turn round when you get to thirds.
You are not going to be upset over one of your gags blocking - you've done a changeover between air systems in the last 5 minutes, haven't you? So you know that one system was working a breath ago, and the other system 5 minutes ago. That's why you do changeovers.
How on earth are you going to get lost down there - you've kept a good firm grip on your lifeline (note - it's a lifeline, not a guideline ; the name reflects just how good a grip you keep on it). And besides, you've maintained a note of your survey as you've gone in on the dive, so even if the line has parted behind you, you've carried your notes with you.
What else could go wrong? Light failure? Well, come on, you're a caver - you got bored with re-building your lamp in total darkness years ago. Which is why you're diving on triple or quintuple lamps (I met some Ukrainian divers once down Ireby Fell Main Drain - interesting kit, a torch mounted to the inside of each forearm instead of using the UK traditional 3-up of head lamps).
Two independent air systems ; three (or more) independent lighting systems. Multiple independent navigation systems. There's only one "single point of failure", and that's inside your head.
Which is why it's an interesting sport.
If I've convinced you to try it, don't.
I nearly drowned as a kid too. Didn't learn to swim until I was about 12. Before I started caving I'd had enough of the "OhShitOhShitOhShitThisTimeI'mReallyGonnaDie" moments rock climbing and ice climbing and suffering hypothermia and hitch-hiking the length of the country at 14 and getting lost in strange cities and I'd killed a guy through my own incompetence and getting arrested for political activities. The inside of my own head held no terrors for me.
Getting to 'elite' level would take a couple of days game-play on the version I had (PC ; would run from a single floppy and I think was a single file of about 80kb (well one file for the solid-rendered version, one for the wireframe version) ; machines have been ridiculously too fast for over a decade). As I recall, you wouldn't make Elite until you'd fought and destroyed several bounty hunters in Fer-de-Lance ships. Putting any sort of gun in the back window was the first important purchase to make.
I eventually got bored with it - no challenge left once you'd loaded up on equipment. Trying to do trade in Anarchy systems was fun for a time ; trying to visit every single planet on a map got dull after a time. Then one day, I fell in with a Thargoid invasion fleet and got thoroughly creamed. So they became a project for a time. But I never met them again. [SIGH]
Ah, memories! Where's that download site?
Hmmm, interesting. Another "Neil Moss" event. "Film," as the jargon-file entry goes, "at eleven." There are a number of "Neil Moss" concrete lumps scattered through the caves of Britain and I would safely assume Europe too. That America has them too is no surprise. One of my fellow cave-diving trainees made the mistake of bringing some suspicious bones out of the cave once ... to be told by the local police : "Put them back where you found them, son. We know who they are, and the family don't need yet another batch of paperwork and another partial funeral." [Names and locations deliberately omitted. Well known in the sport.]
Hmmm, typical stage 2 response :
Being a little more precise, I think that you're hearing the darkness beckon, and you're about to go from stage 2 to stage 3. Or you're trying to square your public claims of "hardness" with your fear of the darkness. Don't worry ; fear is rational ; no-one who matters will think the less of you for declining the opportunity (apart possibly from yourself). What people won't thank you for would be not getting proper training if you decide to start to bubble, as you sound enough a member of the caving fraternity to get the contacts you need.
If I see you down a cave somewhere, enjoy.
That reminds me - I've got to get rid of my bottles. (Out of test and very old, so not worth shipping.)
NOW do you understand the reason for those warning to put nothing, not a spot of paint, not a sticker, not a glue-on coffee-cup holder, over the burst panel for the airbags.
Did you think that these warnings were put there for the extra few microgrammes of plastic that the lettering would use?
They're actually a legally-compliant Darwin Award encouragement device. Not a terribly effective one, but an attempt.
Does your use of the term "natural order" not include "RTFM"? If it doesn't, then perhaps you've still failed to understand the point that your teachers have been trying to beat into your skull.
(Having said that, I don't recall any questions ever that have included the sort of logical games that you describe, except of course for tests of predicate calculus ; is this some local habit, or has education changed even more than I'd thought in the intervening decades?)
You've actually got it fairly comprehensively ass-about-tit : distillation (or it's modern equivalent, reverse osmosis) is a quick, dirty and cheap tool, and produces something that's generally good enough for undemanding applications like drinking, diluting battery acid, etc. But if you need to go to high purity (in the systems I used, for electrolysis to produce chromatographic-carrier grade hydrogen ; at Intel, I would guess for washing stages between layers of photoresist?) you then need to pass your "clean" water through a pair of ion-exchange resins. The first resin replaces all positive ions with hydronium ions ; the second resin replaces all negative ions with hydroxyl ions. And what you get out at the end is "ultra-pure" water, which will remain "ultra-pure" for an hour or two unless stored out of contact with the atmosphere. We used to check the quality of our UP water with a conductivity meter ; if the conductivity was too high, it went through the filters again ; if the filters didn't work after two passes, it was time for a new cartridge.
Distillation (or reverse osmosis) is a purely physical process (well, in theory), and is good for getting the big lumps of stuff out including the non-volatile elements. But things very specifically like ammonium ions, and nitrate ions can pass through both the distillation process and the osmotic membranes. So it's not a lot of use to do several stages of distillation back-to-back.
This may come as a shock, but some regulations are actually based on chemical reality. In this case, the purpose of "IS" designs of sensors, communication systems, etc, is to restrict the amount of energy in a hazardous area to below the amount that can produce a spark in an explosive hydrogen-air mixture. (I can't remember if it's at LEL or UEL, but WTF - it's still around 20 micro-Joules if I recall correctly). Systems that are designed an installed to IS regulations can be run much more simply than other systems, which we typically called "power" systems. The differences are non-trivial - you need to use single or doubly-armoured cables, solid-walled conduit etc etc. They're a lot more bloody complex to install.
Why would this affect an emergency response system? I hear you ask? Because it is not a good idea to deal with a roof-collapse by turning it into a roof-collapse plus a gas explosion.
You're not the first person to get into confusion about this. The last time I was paying attention, the UK emergency services were being pressurised to use a single, common radio system. A fine and laudable idea, but the fire brigade pointed out that the systems being proposed were not designed to be non-sparking. Un-surprisingly, firefighters did not relish the idea of going into (for example) a gas leak investigation with a radio set that might produce a spark.
Which can be achieved in several ways - the civilisation could blow itself to smithereens, or just back to the stone age ("Keep banging the rocks together, guys!" to quote DNA) ; the civilization could move onto a less polluting transmission technology (as this article seems ot be discussing ; I heard the story from a different source) ; they could decide that they don't need this high-tech stuff and retire to a life of bucolic relaxation.
But since Drake's intention was to quantify the degrees of ignorance that we have about the number of civilisations within reasonable reach of the Earth which we could hear. So the ones that are not using "eavesdroppable" technologies are excluded from the discussion at the start.
Non-story, if you read the original articles Drake wrote back in the early 1960s. Which no-one does, more fool them.
Well, that depends on exactly where you de-orbited it. Here's a starting location : 38d53'22.08377"N 77d2'6.86378"W
The Texans that I've shared culinary experiences with seem to have a problem with the idea that you start good cooking with good ingredients, well prepared to show their strengths, and only use spices as a last resort to cover up the putrid taste of otherwise unfit-to-eat materials.
You beat me to it, curse you!
There's some sort of export embargo?
Didn't know that.
Use the link to my SlashDot account (somewhere above this text, probably) and we can enter into a deep and meaningful relationship, which I hope will end up in both of us having to take a "year out" for tax purposes. (I'm not in the UK at the moment, but I'll be back soon. And I'm sure that DNA would approve. I was a listener to the first transmission of the radio series and brought my first tape recorder because of it to get the Sunday (?) repeat. (OK, I nagged Dad into giving me an early birthday present.)
The colour has worsened in recent versions, hasn't it?