some mechanism for storing information from one "generation" to the next.
This is a pretty fair definition of what the term "genetic material" means.
So your statement Genetic material is not necessary for evolution. All that's needed is some mechanism for storing information from one "generation" to the next. parses to "Genetic material is not necessary for evolution. All that's needed is some Genetic material".
You're making the incorrect conflation that "Genetic material" means "DNA", or even "a complex of DNA, RNA and transcription ribozymes" ; it doesn't, it never has (except in grossly over-simplified descriptions written by people who haven't done their homework) and because of counter-examples it never will.
DNA (or the actual complex that is really used) is an example of a genetic material, but so is the pattern of sound waves transferred from one participant to another in a game of Chinese Whispers. Another example of a "genetic material" that transfers information with less than 100% fidelity is the piece of paper that I scribbled my at-microscope notes on 20 minutes ago, which I've just transcribed, with spelling corrections, into the lab notebook that I'd left in my locker.
I can only hope that one day Linux reaches this benchmark.
Oh, hang on. Just a second while I check my diary... Oh yes, "1994 : start working in geologging ; decide to put off buying a copy of Xenix to see what this new Linux thing looks like ; prepare for Holland jobs ; get rid of lodger ; Linux reaches version 1.0 ; Xmas and New Year on the Central." Two OS projects making version 1.0 in 16 years - that's even worse than Duke Nukem Forever.
If they stopped serving peanuts on planes they wouldn't have problems with elephants.
The problem isn't with foods that deliberately contain peanut (or any other specific allergen ; it's because many allergens are sufficiently potent for the sensitised person (that's the "environment" part of the "genetic plus environment" influences that other commentators refer to) to have an attack triggered by the amount of allergen provided by cross-contamination between food batches in a particular processing plant. So, if your production line makes a thousand servings of chicken satay on Saturday, a lamb korma on the Sunday, and egg sandwiches on the Monday, then the peanut contamination from the Saturday dish can (potentially) kill someone eating Monday's product.
The way that it is (currently) described on British packaging is that "this product has been manufactured in premises that cannot be guaranteed free of contamination by [allergen]". Which is a quite precise statement, which means precisely what it says, and not approximately what you might wish it to say.
Actually, that's a serious question. When I've heard these things being described, they're described as a "wipe down", implying at most, one air-stable wipe-on reagent and one on the "wipe cloth".
An antibody-based specific detector for TNT itself is (reasonably) credible. But of course, it wouldn't detect PETN, or black powder. Or (if I remember my chemistry) the RDX component of C5 "plastique".
My suspicion, based on records of people doing decades in jail for playing cards at the wrong time and place, is that these "swab" tests are for nitrates, possibly for organo-nitrates, but again that would miss the black powder. Sounds so much less high-tech than a "TNT-detector".
Slightly used, somewhat radioactive train set. Glows in the dark! Minimum bid $50.00
I'd bid for that. Unfortunately, I fear that it would probably cost a good deal more than 50 of any common currency unit. (I spent 30 "pint vouchers" on 2 copies of the Hornby [note] catalogue last year... and decided that while a trip back to childhood pleasures would be fun, I really couldn't justify it. Well, I couldn't justify it while sober.
Also unfortunately, and prosaically, I would be surprised if the lab didn't have a number of other setups which could readily benefit from regular repetitive motions (sorry, that one just slipped out). Obviously circular motion is a cinch now ; ellipsiodal motions can be done to a fair approximation with flexible track ; oscillatory motion would only need a couple of detectors and some glue logic to reverse directions. There's a good reason that "Meccano" was popular in labs through the world a few decades ago, and this is an extension of the pretty obvious. A few months ago I was watching a kid running away from it's mother at the bus stop (into the path of an oncoming bus) and before the mother caught the child, I'd sketched a design for an "emergency stop" for toddlers which is derived from £30 worth of radio-controlled toy motors. You'd be surprised what you can do if you apply a bit of sideways thinking to an unusual problem. Great Egg Race, anyone?
All of the sudden, there would be no need for Autodesk (or their ridiculous dongles and other assorted pap).
If you look from the other end of the telescope, seeing them as revenue-protection devices rather than as any sort of customer assistance device, then Autodesk's "dongles" suddenly look a lot less ridiculous. (Caveat - I haven't worked with Autodesk for over a decade, and then it was on a pirated (i.e. stolen) copy running on a DOS machine ; but at work we've been using revenue-protection devices for a lot longer than that. But we do go to significant efforts to make the process simple for the client - if they have problems with the installation, we'll happily send a technician to their site, where-ever they are in the world. And yes, we do mean "where-ever in the world". The charges are covered in the lease.)
Q: How long does a lawyer in a sealed box with poison gas bomb live? A: Who cares?
A 2:The cat.
Would you want to spend half of an eternity locked up with a lawyer? No. Neither would the cat (assuming that the cat is an intelligent rational being; their ready acquisition of staff instead of masters supports the idea that they are intelligent and rational). So, the cat would do something about the situation. This same logic has been used to show that (Schrodinger's) cat has learned how to travel in time. Presumably our new (old) time travelling feline overlords, (of whom I have been a welcoming devoted slave since before they will have had declared themselves) are also protecting us from the LHC universe-melting attempts.
You... want to buy a building? I can get you a great price.
In Dubai? Is it for scrap? Are the Chinese buying? I can't imagine what, apart from being given a fairly substantial lump of money, would give me any grounds to go back to the sunny, sub-tropical Emirates on a visit. And I simply can't comprehend the idea of actually living there. On an integer scale running from "zero" to "profound shithole", of scale length "one", Dubai (and Abu Dhabi ; I can't speak for Sharja. Yet.) do not score zero.
Those COBOL programmers would be rolling in their graves.
They would be... if they were dead. Or undead, by day. Or just had particularly odd sleeping habits. There are probably still a lot of people maintaining, and possibly even coding from new in COBOL.
I read on Wikipedia that: "The COBOL 2002 standard includes support for object-oriented programming and other modern language features."
I shudder. That sounds truly horrible. Can I have Object-Oriented Intercal for next Christmas?
It's funny the people warning us about one world (elected)government don't issue warnings about our (unelected)corporate overlords.
That's probably because they (the one-world-government-warning people) probably consider themselves to be likely members of the corporate overlord group, not of the boot-trampled masses. That's capitalism for you.
If I remember correctly, the dark matter kick got started when some astronomers decided to screw around with a huge telescope and just take random pictures of the sky. They saw some unexpected gravitational lensing and went from there.
It's not impossible that you're remembering correctly, and it's simply that your sources were hopelessly ill-informed to the extent that it's almost malicious.
some astronomers decided to screw around with a huge telescope
Yeah, like, that happens? I did a course in observational astronomy last year (www.open.ac.uk , look for course SXR208. £700-odd.) using student grade telescopes of the "serious amateur" range (14" and 16" SCTs ; including domes around £15,000 per instrument) and one of the first things that we learned to do was to manage our time at the telescope. you need to plan what your experiment is, work out a list of possible targets, decide which ones are going to be observable at all tonight, when each will be in the "horizon murk", when each will be in the scope's "dead zone" (where it can't steer without colliding the detector rack against the mount)... one to two hour's work per night before you even start trying to get dark-adapted. "Screwing around", yeah right.
A (possibly) confusing factor is that most observatories have some telescope time assigned for "director's discretionary time" (the terms vary between observatories). It's intended for the director's (and staff's) "pet projects", because they'd find some way of getting telescope time regardless, so you might as well document it and ensure that the time is used well. It's also used for "targets of opportunity", such as when a transient phenomenon is reported such as a supernova - short time slots are included between programmed activities to allow, for example, slewing onto an appropriate target and spending 20 minutes getting a spectrum with a light bucket ("huge telescope").
But "screwing around"... don't make me laugh.
More seriously, the project to understand the mass-distribution of galaxies, and galaxy clusters, goes back to IIRC the late 1930s when people first acquired the ability (with newer "light buckets" and better photographic emulsions) to take spectra of individual stars in external galaxies. As the first results came in, one star at a time, each one taking months of work, it just wasn't clear what was going on. But these perplexing results were enough to encourage people to stick with the work. The first comprehensive result, unsurprisingly, was for the Andromeda galaxy (M31) in 1970 (see the Wikipedia article for the reference), and to indicate the acceleration of techniques (and of "light buckets") in 1980 the same authors had 21 galaxies to work with.
Given that, the "screwing around" that you refer to lasted for over 40 years before it became a major research project, and a real "problem" for astronomy (several people had already got their PhDs working on the problem though, simply by demonstrating that there is a problem). (If you consider it to be a "problem" ; at the moment the problem is only that there is gravitating mass out there which has a distribution we can't explain, and which doesn't glow as strongly as the "normal" materials that we're familiar with. It only becomes a serious problem if you're hubristic enough to think that we know all that there is to know about all the different types of matter. As a keen amateur astronomer and a scientist, I can't think of anyone who I know who seriously thinks that our knowledge is that comprehensive.)
They saw some unexpected gravitational lensing and went from there.
Gravitational lensing was news, moderately big news, when I was an undergraduate in the mid-1980s. At the same time, the "galactic rotation curve problem" was a well-known, solidly established problem in the literature. You need to rearrange your cart and horse so
The vendor is unable to track down the problem, and also doesn't want to give out any source code. (I managed to sneak a peek at a few procedures, though, and I know why. It's a horrible mess of spaghetti - code and workarounds.)
Now there's a good reason for hiding your code - embarrassment.
(And yes, I do feel embarrassed about some of the things that I hack together to do my job. But since I'm paid as a user, not a developer, I don't feel too embarrassed.)
They got out and back OK, and apparently did a live slot from the rig on Korean TV yesterday morning (don't know for myself - there's only one TV I know of on the rig and that's normally stuck on Myanmar MTV or something equally enthralling). They went back yesterday - but by helicopter instead of by basket transfer into the boat. I don't think that they liked the experience. I know that they didn't like being told that a number of the "grey beards" had refused to take the boat transport option on the night they arrived.
It's almost nice (in some rather nasty sort of way) to see a publicity stunt backfire heavily. (I hope the guy gets over his injuries OK - but yes, he should have been wearing that "stinger suit".) The drilling rig that I'm on is being set-up for a publicity stunt with the New Years Eve celebrations. A film crew form shore is coming out to do "vox pops" on the rig at midnight. Unfortunately, the weather was too bad for their helicopters to come in... so they've come out on a boat with the intention of doing a "basket transfer" to the rig. Several of the older, grey-haired guys who were due to be going home on the helicopter have already decided that they'd rather work a few days extra instead of doing a boat transfer... and looking at the sea state, I think they've made the right decision. But the film crew... well, I hope that they have a camera running when they do the transfer, so that if something does go wrong, their next of kin have some film of their final moments to console themselves with. Oh well, they should be nearly finished their circuits of the rig for "background shots" soon, so they'll be coming alongside to transfer onboard. Me? I'm off to bed - got a derrick to climb in the pre-dawn light.
Carried to its logical conclusion, we'd all have to board planes naked (you could strangle someone with the elastic band from your underwear!), or even restrained (hands are weapons too!) in order to prevent terrorist actions on planes.
Strange - that's exactly the proposal I made over the breakfast table yesterday. Glad to see someone else in agreement with me. Then again, I know that I hate flying, and that I recognise that it's a luxury, not a necessity, and that in the near future (not the distant future) we're going to have to get used to paying it's real costs, not it's heavily tax subsidised costs. Goodbye flying, hello trains!
But the big question is, are the GPS companies liable for this?
Almost certainly not. Firstly - the GPS service is provided by the US military ; have fun trying to sue them without getting shot or invaded. Secondly, you'd have to demonstrate that the GPS signal had actually provided them with false information in some form, which led to their being in the "wrong place at the wrong time", which it almost certainly didn't. Thirdly, if there is fault anywhere, then it probably lays in the "shortest route" algorithms used in the mapping software modules in the GPS device, or in the mapping data itself. I'd finger the mapping data myself - it probably doesn't explicitly recognise road sections that can easily be blocked by snow. With the blithe confidence of near total ignorance of the field (except knowing that my GPS, unaffectionately known as "the talking deranged crack addict", has a map that includes a road less than 100m from my house, which has been blocked off from through-traffic for at least 19 years. No wonder I leave it at home, mostly) I'd suggest an algorithm like marking all road sections that go above 1000m (varies for local conditions) as having a toll operating from September to May with a fee of "up to your life". That should allow more appropriate routing decisions.
You pay an h1b worker generous wages even though there are literally thousands of qualified americans begging for work?
I was trying to remember what a H1b was in America - some sort of 'flu virus, I thought - but thanks for reminding me. It's badly-organised racism, pandering to the neo-facist majority of the American population. You judge people by where they come from, not by who they are, as a person. Racism.
Cigarettes are the currency of choice in most prisons... in a non-smoking system, what do they use? Or do I not want to know...
Charlie, Smack, Blow, Jellies...
If some trustee in the workshop has been imaginative, maybe even a bit of moonshine?
For the uninitiated, most prisons are hotbeds for illegal drugs, brought in by visitors and corrupt guards. The only item that competes is an illicit mobile phone or SIM card. (Don't bother complaining that this isn't how it "should" be ; deal with the fact that it is.)
Why would I want a perfectly good Linux machine to look like a Windows machine?
Camoflage?, O hyper-nova-triggering-FLT-communicating-overlord whom I greet. Actually, I'm moderately interested in doing this, out of a mixture of curiosity and malice. This "works" laptop will have to be going back to the office eventually covered in "biohazard" labels to signify it's virus-raddled state. It might be amusing to slap a "Ubuntu-95" distro onto a spare hard drive and see how long it takes the technical department to twig. (They might not notice - policy is to mount the drive on another machine, slurp the data areas to backup, then ghost back from the stored "build" image. They should notice when they try to put a 20GB image onto a 6GB hard drive. [G])
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This is a pretty fair definition of what the term "genetic material" means.
So your statement
Genetic material is not necessary for evolution. All that's needed is some mechanism for storing information from one "generation" to the next. parses to "Genetic material is not necessary for evolution. All that's needed is some Genetic material".
You're making the incorrect conflation that "Genetic material" means "DNA", or even "a complex of DNA, RNA and transcription ribozymes" ; it doesn't, it never has (except in grossly over-simplified descriptions written by people who haven't done their homework) and because of counter-examples it never will.
DNA (or the actual complex that is really used) is an example of a genetic material, but so is the pattern of sound waves transferred from one participant to another in a game of Chinese Whispers.
Another example of a "genetic material" that transfers information with less than 100% fidelity is the piece of paper that I scribbled my at-microscope notes on 20 minutes ago, which I've just transcribed, with spelling corrections, into the lab notebook that I'd left in my locker.
I can only hope that one day Linux reaches this benchmark.
Oh, hang on. Just a second while I check my diary ... Oh yes, "1994 : start working in geologging ; decide to put off buying a copy of Xenix to see what this new Linux thing looks like ; prepare for Holland jobs ; get rid of lodger ; Linux reaches version 1.0 ; Xmas and New Year on the Central." Two OS projects making version 1.0 in 16 years - that's even worse than Duke Nukem Forever.
The problem isn't with foods that deliberately contain peanut (or any other specific allergen ; it's because many allergens are sufficiently potent for the sensitised person (that's the "environment" part of the "genetic plus environment" influences that other commentators refer to) to have an attack triggered by the amount of allergen provided by cross-contamination between food batches in a particular processing plant. So, if your production line makes a thousand servings of chicken satay on Saturday, a lamb korma on the Sunday, and egg sandwiches on the Monday, then the peanut contamination from the Saturday dish can (potentially) kill someone eating Monday's product.
The way that it is (currently) described on British packaging is that "this product has been manufactured in premises that cannot be guaranteed free of contamination by [allergen]". Which is a quite precise statement, which means precisely what it says, and not approximately what you might wish it to say.
You got it. I'm now wondering who has that phone number (and in which countries.)?
What are they using for a "TNT detector"?
Actually, that's a serious question. When I've heard these things being described, they're described as a "wipe down", implying at most, one air-stable wipe-on reagent and one on the "wipe cloth".
An antibody-based specific detector for TNT itself is (reasonably) credible. But of course, it wouldn't detect PETN, or black powder. Or (if I remember my chemistry) the RDX component of C5 "plastique".
My suspicion, based on records of people doing decades in jail for playing cards at the wrong time and place, is that these "swab" tests are for nitrates, possibly for organo-nitrates, but again that would miss the black powder. Sounds so much less high-tech than a "TNT-detector".
I'd bid for that. Unfortunately, I fear that it would probably cost a good deal more than 50 of any common currency unit. (I spent 30 "pint vouchers" on 2 copies of the Hornby [note] catalogue last year ... and decided that while a trip back to childhood pleasures would be fun, I really couldn't justify it. Well, I couldn't justify it while sober.
Also unfortunately, and prosaically, I would be surprised if the lab didn't have a number of other setups which could readily benefit from regular repetitive motions (sorry, that one just slipped out). Obviously circular motion is a cinch now ; ellipsiodal motions can be done to a fair approximation with flexible track ; oscillatory motion would only need a couple of detectors and some glue logic to reverse directions.
There's a good reason that "Meccano" was popular in labs through the world a few decades ago, and this is an extension of the pretty obvious. A few months ago I was watching a kid running away from it's mother at the bus stop (into the path of an oncoming bus) and before the mother caught the child, I'd sketched a design for an "emergency stop" for toddlers which is derived from £30 worth of radio-controlled toy motors. You'd be surprised what you can do if you apply a bit of sideways thinking to an unusual problem. Great Egg Race, anyone?
If you look from the other end of the telescope, seeing them as revenue-protection devices rather than as any sort of customer assistance device, then Autodesk's "dongles" suddenly look a lot less ridiculous.
(Caveat - I haven't worked with Autodesk for over a decade, and then it was on a pirated (i.e. stolen) copy running on a DOS machine ; but at work we've been using revenue-protection devices for a lot longer than that. But we do go to significant efforts to make the process simple for the client - if they have problems with the installation, we'll happily send a technician to their site, where-ever they are in the world. And yes, we do mean "where-ever in the world". The charges are covered in the lease.)
A 2 :The cat.
Would you want to spend half of an eternity locked up with a lawyer?
No.
Neither would the cat (assuming that the cat is an intelligent rational being; their ready acquisition of staff instead of masters supports the idea that they are intelligent and rational). So, the cat would do something about the situation.
This same logic has been used to show that (Schrodinger's) cat has learned how to travel in time. Presumably our new (old) time travelling feline overlords, (of whom I have been a welcoming devoted slave since before they will have had declared themselves) are also protecting us from the LHC universe-melting attempts.
Well, actually, you'll find that they can be choosers. That is the problem. One of the problems.
Makes me hanker (a little) for my past days in PiHex.
101,112,412 is an interesting location.
Beats hitting the nail on the thumb.
[drum-roll, kaaa-ching!]
I'm sorry ; I'm sure it's not novel. But it just called out to me, and I was too weak to resist.
In Dubai? Is it for scrap? Are the Chinese buying?
I can't imagine what, apart from being given a fairly substantial lump of money, would give me any grounds to go back to the sunny, sub-tropical Emirates on a visit. And I simply can't comprehend the idea of actually living there.
On an integer scale running from "zero" to "profound shithole", of scale length "one", Dubai (and Abu Dhabi ; I can't speak for Sharja. Yet.) do not score zero.
They would be ... if they were dead. Or undead, by day. Or just had particularly odd sleeping habits.
There are probably still a lot of people maintaining, and possibly even coding from new in COBOL.
I read on Wikipedia that: "The COBOL 2002 standard includes support for object-oriented programming and other modern language features."
I shudder. That sounds truly horrible. Can I have Object-Oriented Intercal for next Christmas?
That's probably because they (the one-world-government-warning people) probably consider themselves to be likely members of the corporate overlord group, not of the boot-trampled masses. That's capitalism for you.
It's not impossible that you're remembering correctly, and it's simply that your sources were hopelessly ill-informed to the extent that it's almost malicious.
Yeah, like, that happens? I did a course in observational astronomy last year (www.open.ac.uk , look for course SXR208. £700-odd.) using student grade telescopes of the "serious amateur" range (14" and 16" SCTs ; including domes around £15,000 per instrument) and one of the first things that we learned to do was to manage our time at the telescope. you need to plan what your experiment is, work out a list of possible targets, decide which ones are going to be observable at all tonight, when each will be in the "horizon murk", when each will be in the scope's "dead zone" (where it can't steer without colliding the detector rack against the mount) ... one to two hour's work per night before you even start trying to get dark-adapted. "Screwing around", yeah right.
A (possibly) confusing factor is that most observatories have some telescope time assigned for "director's discretionary time" (the terms vary between observatories). It's intended for the director's (and staff's) "pet projects", because they'd find some way of getting telescope time regardless, so you might as well document it and ensure that the time is used well. It's also used for "targets of opportunity", such as when a transient phenomenon is reported such as a supernova - short time slots are included between programmed activities to allow, for example, slewing onto an appropriate target and spending 20 minutes getting a spectrum with a light bucket ("huge telescope").
But "screwing around" ... don't make me laugh.
More seriously, the project to understand the mass-distribution of galaxies, and galaxy clusters, goes back to IIRC the late 1930s when people first acquired the ability (with newer "light buckets" and better photographic emulsions) to take spectra of individual stars in external galaxies. As the first results came in, one star at a time, each one taking months of work, it just wasn't clear what was going on. But these perplexing results were enough to encourage people to stick with the work. The first comprehensive result, unsurprisingly, was for the Andromeda galaxy (M31) in 1970 (see the Wikipedia article for the reference), and to indicate the acceleration of techniques (and of "light buckets") in 1980 the same authors had 21 galaxies to work with.
Given that, the "screwing around" that you refer to lasted for over 40 years before it became a major research project, and a real "problem" for astronomy (several people had already got their PhDs working on the problem though, simply by demonstrating that there is a problem).
(If you consider it to be a "problem" ; at the moment the problem is only that there is gravitating mass out there which has a distribution we can't explain, and which doesn't glow as strongly as the "normal" materials that we're familiar with. It only becomes a serious problem if you're hubristic enough to think that we know all that there is to know about all the different types of matter. As a keen amateur astronomer and a scientist, I can't think of anyone who I know who seriously thinks that our knowledge is that comprehensive.)
Gravitational lensing was news, moderately big news, when I was an undergraduate in the mid-1980s. At the same time, the "galactic rotation curve problem" was a well-known, solidly established problem in the literature. You need to rearrange your cart and horse so
Some people! How many times do you have to leave a horse's head in their bed before they get the message and join the Societe Anonyme des Hippophages?
Now there's a good reason for hiding your code - embarrassment.
(And yes, I do feel embarrassed about some of the things that I hack together to do my job. But since I'm paid as a user, not a developer, I don't feel too embarrassed.)
They got out and back OK, and apparently did a live slot from the rig on Korean TV yesterday morning (don't know for myself - there's only one TV I know of on the rig and that's normally stuck on Myanmar MTV or something equally enthralling).
They went back yesterday - but by helicopter instead of by basket transfer into the boat. I don't think that they liked the experience. I know that they didn't like being told that a number of the "grey beards" had refused to take the boat transport option on the night they arrived.
It's almost nice (in some rather nasty sort of way) to see a publicity stunt backfire heavily. (I hope the guy gets over his injuries OK - but yes, he should have been wearing that "stinger suit".) ... so they've come out on a boat with the intention of doing a "basket transfer" to the rig. Several of the older, grey-haired guys who were due to be going home on the helicopter have already decided that they'd rather work a few days extra instead of doing a boat transfer ... and looking at the sea state, I think they've made the right decision. ... well, I hope that they have a camera running when they do the transfer, so that if something does go wrong, their next of kin have some film of their final moments to console themselves with.
The drilling rig that I'm on is being set-up for a publicity stunt with the New Years Eve celebrations. A film crew form shore is coming out to do "vox pops" on the rig at midnight. Unfortunately, the weather was too bad for their helicopters to come in
But the film crew
Oh well, they should be nearly finished their circuits of the rig for "background shots" soon, so they'll be coming alongside to transfer onboard.
Me? I'm off to bed - got a derrick to climb in the pre-dawn light.
Strange - that's exactly the proposal I made over the breakfast table yesterday. Glad to see someone else in agreement with me.
Then again, I know that I hate flying, and that I recognise that it's a luxury, not a necessity, and that in the near future (not the distant future) we're going to have to get used to paying it's real costs, not it's heavily tax subsidised costs. Goodbye flying, hello trains!
Almost certainly not.
Firstly - the GPS service is provided by the US military ; have fun trying to sue them without getting shot or invaded.
Secondly, you'd have to demonstrate that the GPS signal had actually provided them with false information in some form, which led to their being in the "wrong place at the wrong time", which it almost certainly didn't.
Thirdly, if there is fault anywhere, then it probably lays in the "shortest route" algorithms used in the mapping software modules in the GPS device, or in the mapping data itself. I'd finger the mapping data myself - it probably doesn't explicitly recognise road sections that can easily be blocked by snow.
With the blithe confidence of near total ignorance of the field (except knowing that my GPS, unaffectionately known as "the talking deranged crack addict", has a map that includes a road less than 100m from my house, which has been blocked off from through-traffic for at least 19 years. No wonder I leave it at home, mostly) I'd suggest an algorithm like marking all road sections that go above 1000m (varies for local conditions) as having a toll operating from September to May with a fee of "up to your life". That should allow more appropriate routing decisions.
I was trying to remember what a H1b was in America - some sort of 'flu virus, I thought - but thanks for reminding me.
It's badly-organised racism, pandering to the neo-facist majority of the American population. You judge people by where they come from, not by who they are, as a person. Racism.
NYC is in Japan? or South Korea?
Charlie, Smack, Blow, Jellies ...
If some trustee in the workshop has been imaginative, maybe even a bit of moonshine?
For the uninitiated, most prisons are hotbeds for illegal drugs, brought in by visitors and corrupt guards. The only item that competes is an illicit mobile phone or SIM card.
(Don't bother complaining that this isn't how it "should" be ; deal with the fact that it is.)
Camoflage?, O hyper-nova-triggering-FLT-communicating-overlord whom I greet.
Actually, I'm moderately interested in doing this, out of a mixture of curiosity and malice. This "works" laptop will have to be going back to the office eventually covered in "biohazard" labels to signify it's virus-raddled state. It might be amusing to slap a "Ubuntu-95" distro onto a spare hard drive and see how long it takes the technical department to twig. (They might not notice - policy is to mount the drive on another machine, slurp the data areas to backup, then ghost back from the stored "build" image. They should notice when they try to put a 20GB image onto a 6GB hard drive. [G])