Re:Most rocky planets should have lava tubes.
on
Caves of the Moon
·
· Score: 1
Expect any planet with high temperature basaltic volcanism to have lava tubes: Earth, Venus, Mars, Mercury, Moon, and Io. Venus' might be very long given the slow cooling rate of erupted lava. Lava tubes might even exist on icy bodies like Titan.
Boring, but true. Well, the basaltic magma bit ; I'm not so sure about cryovolcanism potentially leading to ice lava tube.
I'm sure I read this story several years ago. What I can't remember is if the lava tubes which the satellites could see into were on Mars or Venus. Oh, now it's coming back to me... pesky atmosphere - it was on Mars, and I think on Olympus Mons. But I'd bet they're present on Venus too (though the lower cooling rate in the hotter atmosphere might make it harder to keep the roof strong enough as the tube drains).
Whenever I get a new gadget, the first thing I do is always to write its name with a permanent pen on its power supply (usually black on black but it's still legible enough).
Spoilsport ! Doing things like that takes all the fun out of it.
I'm still looking for monophonic audio equipment. I've never been able to tell the difference between mono and stereo, and can't see the reason for paying for the doubled bandwidth, second amplifier etc. Total waste of time. But then again, we're talking about music, so we started at "total waste of time", and haven't gone anywhere uphill from there.
As the old, serious, joke goes, that's not even wrong. As TFA says, the party involved were martial artists on a money-raising stunt ; they were as much mountaineers as the man on the bottom of the East River in the concrete overcoat is a scuba diver.
The boss of the mountain rescue team (volunteers who shed more mountaineering experience with their nail trimmings than the Karate Kids had in their entire party), "This party were poorly prepared and felt it was OK to carry on to the summit rather than turn around and get him down the mountain,"
This is the sort of idiotic escapade that gives mountaineering in particular and outdoor sports in general a bad reputation. And it's not the fault of the sports, or the mountains, but of the idiotic Karate Children who carried up (but didn't carry down) this escapade.
(I bet some reporting of this somewhere is going to refer to "treacherous mountains" ; that makes as little sense as referring to a treasonable nail, despite the nail being directly responsible for regime change.)
"Of course, most potential users won't use them, and many will die. This I'm easy with - as long as they die without descendants"
Nah most of the time their descendants will die right there with them:-p
Unfortunate, but probably true, in a high proportion of cases. I'd like to think differently - I've never been a great fan of punishing the innocent for the sins of others. You'd like to think that people get a sudden attack of common sense when be-sprogging become a real possibility, but it seems not.
IMO a CO alarm is a good idea if you have any fuel burning equipment in a property.
Given the intelligence in the end user to check the function of the alarm regularly, and to retire the device when it's sensor expires. It is pleasant to see that the working lifetime of sensors has been increasing significantly since I last had to pay attention to the details of these devices. In the mid-1990s the prospect of getting the average user to replace a (moderately expensive) device at 2-3 year intervals was a non-starter ; but if they're up to 10-year lifetimes, then it's a lot more consumer friendly. Of course, most potential users won't use them, and many will die. This I'm easy with - as long as they die without descendants.
Personally, I gave up on casinos when I realized that they couldn't afford all that glitz and glamor unless they were winning a whole lot more than they were losing.
I would like to think that this means that you had got the gambling industry sussed before you were what - 10 years old ? OK, allow a little time to think about it - say 13?
What age are you allowed to go into casinos in your jurisdiction? 18, 21, or 948 (if accompanied by both parents) ?
What's more inherently professional about an email than a message on Facebook?
Facebook messages have a limit on how long they can be. A number of time in the few dozen messages that I've exchanged over Facebook, I've been merrily typing away to explain the solution to a particular problem to a colleague (or, in one case, to a friend who works for a competitor company) and I've sudd "%&^$^*&%$*^85
suddenly been cut off in mid-flow. I haven't yet cared enough to determine where (at what message length) the messages get truncated, but it's barely long enough to get through the "I think from your description that THIS is happening" part of the message ("THIS" can be quite long for non-trivial problems) and into the "what is happening behind the scenes" part of the message before "%&^$^*&%$*^85 it bloody well happens again. By which point, one is getting quite frustrated.
This may be sufficient if your professional life consists of "Wanna fuck? - Price is this - location is this", appropriate to the second oldest profession, but if you try communicating with the oldest profession, you need to describe the tool that you wish knapped, what source of flint you want, whether you also want the flakes kept so you can edge them for scrapers, and any of the other arcana of being a fl "%&^$^*&%$*^85
FLINT KNAPPER. Bloody hell, the damn thing isn't even good enough for someone still working in the stone age!
In short, unless your profession involves sex, or consumption of alcohol in large quantities (which is often associated with sex), then the level of discourse needed to solve non-trivial problems is outwith the design limits of Facebook. I deduce, I admit on the basis of limited experiment, that Facebook's marketing team knew that sex (and/ or alcohol) is likely to get the attention of more people than solution of complex problems, and designed their system appropriately. Which is fine - designed to address a particular issue, it has certain characteristics. But try to use it for a different job and it's not suitable by design.
To be honest, I doubt that it's adequate to arrange either sex or the consumption of alcohol more than a couple of days in advance and / or more than a few miles from the correspondent's home areas. The amount of information to decide on a venue, provide directions to the venue, negotiate a mutually convenient time... "%&^$^*&%$*^85
Point made?
Now, I've got things to do that involve neither sex nor alcohol, but instead involve complex information and money. And I'll be doing it by email, not by Facebook.
(At least Slashdot doesn't impose an arbitrary, small, limit on the size of postings. Though I'm probably getting near the normal "read remainder of comment" threshold.)
I thought it had something to do with time... Like, positrons were electrons going the other way in time, which is why they annihilate when they collide and produce a photon. Really the electron is hitting a photon and turning around in time. Likewise with pair production. Anyone know if this is right? I honestly think that quantum physics book was chock full of lies...
by Dragonslicer (991472)
If I remember correctly, that theory comes from Feynman diagrams.
As I recall, there was a half-way serious proposal by Wheeler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler) that the entire electron+positron (+/- photon? I'm not sure) count of the universe was simply one electron ricocheting forward and backward through time, occasionally meeting itself coming/ going, annihilating and spending part of it's voyage as a photon. I remember reading it... in one of Lawrence Krauss' books, perhaps? Sorry to be so vague - I made notes ; they're in my PDA ; my PDA won't boot; and the backup is on the server at home, which I won't see for a couple of weeks. Ah, Google helps. Search for "Wheeler electron positron "backwards in time" "
pretty soon we'll all be paying royalties for having living bodies, but then I remembered that I'm already paying taxes.
Don't worry - you'll have to start paying for your oxygen before too much longer too. They're just trying to work out how to handle non-payers in a way that will encourage them to start paying again.
However I can't imagine one of the most successful and server-dependent companies in the world having anything but the very best. The one guy above would have us think it runs on a room of clustered eMacs or something.
From what I've heard Google people saying about their hardware (mostly through SlashDot I think), they've looked at the cost quite closely and realised that with the number of boxes they have to run they'd get a significant number of hardware failures every minute of every day, even using the highest quality gear available at eye-watering prices. So they have no option but to design their software to transparently handle hardware failure. At which point, there's no benefit to eye-wateringly expensive gear when you'd still have to have automatic failover and multiply redundant equipment. Probably, the man who pulls the dead servers, PSUs etc from the racks and replaces them spends the rest of the day sweeping floors and may moonlight at a McJob. The tech who runs the diagnostics and passes the failed component to the repair shop or the recycling bin... maybe a bit more education (s/he may have to plug in multiple diagnostic leads before the computer says "shop" or "bin"). We're talking about an industrial-scale operation here. It doesn't need intelligence at most levels ; the intelligence has gone into the design of the system.
I had an unpleasant shock recently : I went into a computerised data acquisition lab at work (supplied by a 3rd-party company) to borrow their multimeter for 5 minutes. (I started my career in such labs, for that company.) To my astonishment, they're not allowed to have a multimeter. Or screwdrivers small enough to fit into the wiring terminals for the sensors, or the isolation barrier sets, or anything of that sort. An extremely depauperate toolbox indeed. When I was in the same units, doing the same job (nominally), I was expected to be able to fault-find the sensors and signal processing to at least board-level ; to be able to repair some board-level faults ; to completely replace any wiring system from A/D converter all the way out to the sensor (using appropriate explosion-proof rated cables, glands, JBs, isolation barriers and techniques), and to do the documentation necessary for any changes. And to do the actual job as well as maintenance of the equipment. These days absolutely all changes more complex than putting leads into sockets has to have a service technician come out to do the repairs. And I wondered why the modern breed of mudlogger doesn't understand his job and doesn't pay adequate attention to his data quality. Well, I know now. That's good. They're always going to need supervision. It shouldn't have been a surprise, I suppose. Last year I spent 3 days wondering how a different service provider in the same business could spend 3 days failing to get an RS-232 data link between their computers and a third company's computers. Not failing to get the computers to talk to each other, but failing to get the physical link cable to work.
[shakes head] No wonder they run out of essential consumables. If we were still allowed to use the word, I'd call it shocking incompetence. As it is, it's just grounds for a "RFI - Request For Improvement".
Please cite one paper that has not been effectively refuted showing non-avian dinosaurs surviving after the KT event.
I'd like to see one too. I don't expect to see one, but I'd like to see one.
As far as I can tell there aren't any. I previously cited on this thread a paper that refuted one prominent claim of a post-KT hadrosaur.
Reworked, or something more interesting?
Of course one can accurately claim that the asteroid/comet did not kill all the dinosaurs since the birds survived, but it is commonly understood that they aren't included in the hypothesis of KT extinction of dinosaurs.
BADD! One fight at a time. Please.
Now it is conceivable (perhaps even likely) that one or a few other clades of dinosaurs made it through the main KT extinction event as a disastrously depleted community (since the birds made it, and so did several clades of the reptilians, etc.), but which died out some time later. But if so, we have no convincing evidence of it yet. And, if so, the KT event still gets credit for doing the heavy lifting in sending them to extinction.
We still have no good idea of why the non-avian dinosaurs became extinct. Which is dissatisfying, but it means that there is another BIG and interesting question to answer. It's almost enough to make "gardening" (digging around in the crustal ephemera) interesting again.
Even the fossil record disproves the theory that an asteroid strike killed the dinosaurs. It took a few million years for them to die off after that event.
You're right, but for the wrong reasons. Relatively recent work has shown that there was around about 300,000 years between the Chicxulub impact and the micropalaeontological events that define the end of the Cretaceous and which correlate with the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. (Sorry for the wordiness, but precision is important.)
I'm impressed by the surgical precision of the scientists in their research into a 100-year window embedded in time roughly 65 million years ago.
Find an area where macrofossils (or microfossils) indicates that deposition was occurring at around (say) 1mm/year (which is very fast, but not unfeasible). Do very fine sampling on the appropriate interval (which you'll already have approximately located from your palaeontology work) and plot the amount of dinosterane (or whichever other biomarker(s) you're looking at) against the position in the sequence. If you've got a 100mm thick decrease in dinostearane, and your palynology indicates a mean deposition rate of 1mm/year, then you've got a century of depletion of dinoflagellates. Bob's your uncle. You can do this sort of work on core samples, or at the outcrop. It's a lot, lot cheaper to go back to the outcrop.
How can you have a policy that varies from airport to airport?
Because it's simpler than having a policy that varies from airline to airline, so that one desk will be operating a different policy to it's neighbour, and to what it was operating an hour earlier. Having a general policy with irregular exceptions is actually more complex than having no consistency at all. If you know that every trip is going to be an unpredictable nightmare, then you're put into the right frame of mind (dread and a desire to be somewhere else) from well in advance of departing for the airport until well after you've left your destination. What - you expected something else? Haven't you done your crash- and evacuation- training? Getting into a machine with a million moving parts to fly miles above the top of a fatal drop for hours on end should not be a relaxing experience.
Or what about Nokia's yearly phone sales (they don't have a single brand name, AFAIK)?
Their brand name? I think you'll find that it's "Nokia". Oh, you mean a single, dominant MODEL name? Why would they want to have only one model, and the vastly reduced market share that would go with that. Personally, whenever I've needed to use another company's mobile, I've never been able to get on with them. Always back to a Nokia, whichever seems most appropriate on price/performance at the moment. that way I don't have to waste time on reading manuals or learning a 47th different way of answering calls or typing text messages.
So let me get this straight - you think it's ok for vendors to prevent you importing their products in order to get them cheaper, but at the same time offshoring their workforce in order to get it cheaper?
How many US employees did Nintendo sack? No, seriously. I was under the impression that Nintendo have always had the large majority of their manufacturing in relatively high-productivity/ low-cost countries with no-one but the minimum of marketing and legal androids in low-productivity/ high-cost countries. This may be different for the design teams, who may or may not be in the company's home country. Wikipedia gives the company's workforce as being 4130 people. Perhaps you're mistaking "people who build Nintendo-branded hardware" for "people employed in any way, shape or form by Nintendo"?
I am trying to imagine the dilemma if they had used this Aluminum Oxide paint instead, how much would it cost them to scrape it all off?
Three points : 1) how much would they have to scrape off? Possibly only one (outside) wall to allow the radiation to penetrate into the chamber. 2) If this material worked (and I'm pretty dubious of the physics claims - significant attenuation between 100-odd GHz and 0 GHz, a range of 10^11 in frequency. Bit optimistic there.) , then you wouldn't necessarily need to paint the inside of the walls, just the outsides, where there are often service corridors, office spaces, staff changing rooms, store rooms, etc. 3) What even-ness of coverage would you need. To a first approximation, one wavelength should provide shielding (or at least attenuation), and for 2.4*10^11 Hz, that's 1.25m ; so, a single-doorway wouldn't necessarily allow radiation in (or out), but a double-doorway would likely. Also, a large window (in a domestic situation), would probably stop it working as a screen. Not good. Correspondingly, the process of removing externally-applied paint would only need to proceed a room at a time - this store-room, then that office - until there's sufficient signal in the auditorium.
Obviously, you could try applying the paint to external walls as-and-when they become available for re-painting (if they ever got painted ; why would you paint a wall that only staff will see?) and using a phone as a signal-strength meter until it decayed to the point of being unusable. Better - if you can arrange the pattern appropriately, only allow sufficient signal to illuminate the aisles.
which means morons that build in the river plains and river beds as in Istambul should be held accountable for what they did.
Some degree of culpability - quite a lot - attaches to the morons who do not do due diligence before buying (or leasing) premises. Of course, if more of the morons refused to buy such shit, then fewer people would try such scams, because they'd know they might get stuck with an unsalable lemon... Oh, who're we trying to kid? Idiots will continue to lose large amounts of money and occasionally large numbers of lives by not doing due diligence. Let's just hope that they kill themselves or their offspring before the next generation gets inseminated. It's less cruel in the long run.
It's hard to dig deep into rocks without some variety of explosive. It's pretty hard to plant explosives well.
Not untrue.
The Mars rovers have a rock-digging tool, the RAT: it regularly measures its dig depths in millimeters.
The RAT stands for "Rock Abrasion Tool" ; it's purpose is more like a geologist's hammer than a miner's shovel. They want it to abrade enough material off the surface to remove any weathering patina. As a side effect of achieving this, the tool also leaves a flat surface, and can abrade several millimetres for "serial sectioning". An additional purpose of the tool is to allow the other rover probes to examine the mineralogy of the rocks examined. As a geologist, I use my hammer much more for exposing a fresh surface of a rock than I do for excavating. Then I get out the hand lens and examine the fresh (and weathered) surface. The analogy is pretty close. I do occasionally use the hammer for grubbing a rock out of the ground, but the tool isn't very good for that.
Aside from political bickering between municipality officers and all related offices, that area IS IN a valley. Albeit it is not a deep one and it is higher than most of surrounding area, valleys are by definition prune to be flooded.
So... detecting that a location is in a valley is... rocket science? Difficult?
That is why river deltas are very favorable agricultural areas.
An excellent place to put flooding-tolerant crops. Data centres are not, to the best of my knowledge, flooding-tolerant crops.
My point is that, these are what you need to take into consideration when you are building a datacenter. Thus it is not important if it is an event that is not likely to happen again in my life time
Is one lifetime an adequate timescale to consider these things over? Obviously it depends on the expected lifetime of the building, of the technology. But as the rest of your comments show, a building can end up being used for longer than expected.
Some people lost their portable phone service, when they need it most.
Huh? There are warnings pasted all over mobile phone services in the UK that warn that they are not suitable for relying on in emergencies. Do people not believe such warnings? Probably not. Oh well, Darwin Award territory.
Other methods of making profit: 1. Charge reservations. Want a dedicated spot for your film crew when the floods happen next year? Pay me $x 2. Charge for advertising space. Want to advertise your construction business? Pay me $x
You're clearly a lot more experienced than me at this ruthless capitalism lark. Would you like some freshly-sliced peon with your paupers-blood cocktail?
And if the glass (the optical lens) itself is being detected (although TFA says it's the CCD being detected), then ALL optics would trigger it, including everyone's eyeglasses.
TFA is probably wrong (not that I've wasted time reading TFA... of course not ; this is SlashDot). I don't know if they've tried to patent this, but the principle is pretty obvious. Most (not all, but most) lens systems have one or more target-facing elements that are curves (almost always spherical, because they're easiest to make) that are symmetrical about the targeting axis. If you project a light beam perpendicularly at a spherical surface (actually, any surface, but let's stick to spheres because they're commonest), then whatever proportion of the light is reflected will return along the path of the original beam. So, going back to what was suggested concerning a bright IR flash, you fire the flash and look for reflections ; the brightest reflections are goign to be from flat surfaces with the specific alignment to be normal to beams from your light source, or from curved surfaces. For a relatively small surface, inside some sort of baffle (which is one way of looking at a lens in it's supporting structure), then the optical axis is going to be pointing fairly closely to the light source. I can see how you could make life more difficult for this system - an optical flat angled away from the camera's targeting axis, combined with partial silvering to reduce the light leaking back out of the lens. But you'd do it at the cost of weight, expense and optical quality. How much of a deterrent this would be to paparrazi is unclear - the big lenses they routinely use come in on price tags of months of work for Joanna Q Average (Joe Sixpack doesn't work hard enough and got fired.). But it would be a hassle.
And what about all the taillights (taillights include retroreflectors) of every car in the port's nearby parking lot? Epic fail!
That's potentially more of a problem. Most tail light I've seen for years have employed an array of moulded-plastic Corner Cube reflectors. These are designed to return impinging beams in their direction of origin, within similar field-of-view constraints to the surfaces of camera lenses. But consider the location being protected : it's a boat, a big boat. Already Abramovich will be in the habit of docking the boat so that the outdoor areas are less visible from general passers by - for the same reason that people park up in "Lover's Lane" for a sly shag. Parking areas are going to be high on the list of places that he already avoids. As for small boats in the harbour, the other side of the bay, etc... well these are precisely the areas that are going to be popular with paparazzi.
I gave non-trivial thought about how to design such a system myself - purely as a "I don't like CCTV watching me stagger out of the pub" plan. Pretty much the same results.
You could probably do a lot with AI to identify stationary targets, moving targets, appearing and disappearing targets. But he's probably already got that sort of stuff for his security people already. If he's got the money and the cause to fear the assassin's bullet, then he's probably already got most of what goes into this system. He's just given the security staff a "Fry CCD" button to go next to the "send round bribed police", "target machine gun" and "call in airstrike" buttons.
How well the CCD fryer actually works... I don't know. But a big fat fuck-off IR laser painting a target on a hillside by night could be just the thing that the goons, or the laser-guided missile, needs to get the right target.
Slashdot Mirror
Boring, but true. Well, the basaltic magma bit ; I'm not so sure about cryovolcanism potentially leading to ice lava tube.
I'm sure I read this story several years ago. What I can't remember is if the lava tubes which the satellites could see into were on Mars or Venus. Oh, now it's coming back to me ... pesky atmosphere - it was on Mars, and I think on Olympus Mons. But I'd bet they're present on Venus too (though the lower cooling rate in the hotter atmosphere might make it harder to keep the roof strong enough as the tube drains).
Spoilsport !
Doing things like that takes all the fun out of it.
I'm still looking for monophonic audio equipment. I've never been able to tell the difference between mono and stereo, and can't see the reason for paying for the doubled bandwidth, second amplifier etc. Total waste of time. But then again, we're talking about music, so we started at "total waste of time", and haven't gone anywhere uphill from there.
As the old, serious, joke goes, that's not even wrong.
As TFA says, the party involved were martial artists on a money-raising stunt ; they were as much mountaineers as the man on the bottom of the East River in the concrete overcoat is a scuba diver.
The boss of the mountain rescue team (volunteers who shed more mountaineering experience with their nail trimmings than the Karate Kids had in their entire party), "This party were poorly prepared and felt it was OK to carry on to the summit rather than turn around and get him down the mountain,"
This is the sort of idiotic escapade that gives mountaineering in particular and outdoor sports in general a bad reputation. And it's not the fault of the sports, or the mountains, but of the idiotic Karate Children who carried up (but didn't carry down) this escapade.
(I bet some reporting of this somewhere is going to refer to "treacherous mountains" ; that makes as little sense as referring to a treasonable nail, despite the nail being directly responsible for regime change.)
Unfortunate, but probably true, in a high proportion of cases. I'd like to think differently - I've never been a great fan of punishing the innocent for the sins of others. You'd like to think that people get a sudden attack of common sense when be-sprogging become a real possibility, but it seems not.
Given the intelligence in the end user to check the function of the alarm regularly, and to retire the device when it's sensor expires. It is pleasant to see that the working lifetime of sensors has been increasing significantly since I last had to pay attention to the details of these devices. In the mid-1990s the prospect of getting the average user to replace a (moderately expensive) device at 2-3 year intervals was a non-starter ; but if they're up to 10-year lifetimes, then it's a lot more consumer friendly.
Of course, most potential users won't use them, and many will die. This I'm easy with - as long as they die without descendants.
Ditto for Aberdeen.
Which might suggest that Cineworld may be relative newcomers to the cinema game, and be concentrating on out-of-town locations.
I would like to think that this means that you had got the gambling industry sussed before you were what - 10 years old ? OK, allow a little time to think about it - say 13?
What age are you allowed to go into casinos in your jurisdiction? 18, 21, or 948 (if accompanied by both parents) ?
Facebook messages have a limit on how long they can be. A number of time in the few dozen messages that I've exchanged over Facebook, I've been merrily typing away to explain the solution to a particular problem to a colleague (or, in one case, to a friend who works for a competitor company) and I've sudd
"%&^$^*&%$*^85
suddenly been cut off in mid-flow.
I haven't yet cared enough to determine where (at what message length) the messages get truncated, but it's barely long enough to get through the "I think from your description that THIS is happening" part of the message ("THIS" can be quite long for non-trivial problems) and into the "what is happening behind the scenes" part of the message before
"%&^$^*&%$*^85
it bloody well happens again. By which point, one is getting quite frustrated.
This may be sufficient if your professional life consists of "Wanna fuck? - Price is this - location is this", appropriate to the second oldest profession, but if you try communicating with the oldest profession, you need to describe the tool that you wish knapped, what source of flint you want, whether you also want the flakes kept so you can edge them for scrapers, and any of the other arcana of being a fl
"%&^$^*&%$*^85
FLINT KNAPPER. Bloody hell, the damn thing isn't even good enough for someone still working in the stone age!
In short, unless your profession involves sex, or consumption of alcohol in large quantities (which is often associated with sex), then the level of discourse needed to solve non-trivial problems is outwith the design limits of Facebook.
I deduce, I admit on the basis of limited experiment, that Facebook's marketing team knew that sex (and/ or alcohol) is likely to get the attention of more people than solution of complex problems, and designed their system appropriately. Which is fine - designed to address a particular issue, it has certain characteristics. But try to use it for a different job and it's not suitable by design.
To be honest, I doubt that it's adequate to arrange either sex or the consumption of alcohol more than a couple of days in advance and / or more than a few miles from the correspondent's home areas. The amount of information to decide on a venue, provide directions to the venue, negotiate a mutually convenient time ... "%&^$^*&%$*^85
Point made?
Now, I've got things to do that involve neither sex nor alcohol, but instead involve complex information and money. And I'll be doing it by email, not by Facebook.
(At least Slashdot doesn't impose an arbitrary, small, limit on the size of postings. Though I'm probably getting near the normal "read remainder of comment" threshold.)
by biryokumaru (822262)
by Dragonslicer (991472)
As I recall, there was a half-way serious proposal by Wheeler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler) that the entire electron+positron (+/- photon? I'm not sure) count of the universe was simply one electron ricocheting forward and backward through time, occasionally meeting itself coming/ going, annihilating and spending part of it's voyage as a photon. ... in one of Lawrence Krauss' books, perhaps?
I remember reading it
Sorry to be so vague - I made notes ; they're in my PDA ; my PDA won't boot; and the backup is on the server at home, which I won't see for a couple of weeks.
Ah, Google helps. Search for "Wheeler electron positron "backwards in time" "
Don't worry - you'll have to start paying for your oxygen before too much longer too. They're just trying to work out how to handle non-payers in a way that will encourage them to start paying again.
From what I've heard Google people saying about their hardware (mostly through SlashDot I think), they've looked at the cost quite closely and realised that with the number of boxes they have to run they'd get a significant number of hardware failures every minute of every day, even using the highest quality gear available at eye-watering prices. So they have no option but to design their software to transparently handle hardware failure. At which point, there's no benefit to eye-wateringly expensive gear when you'd still have to have automatic failover and multiply redundant equipment. ... maybe a bit more education (s/he may have to plug in multiple diagnostic leads before the computer says "shop" or "bin").
Probably, the man who pulls the dead servers, PSUs etc from the racks and replaces them spends the rest of the day sweeping floors and may moonlight at a McJob. The tech who runs the diagnostics and passes the failed component to the repair shop or the recycling bin
We're talking about an industrial-scale operation here. It doesn't need intelligence at most levels ; the intelligence has gone into the design of the system.
I had an unpleasant shock recently : I went into a computerised data acquisition lab at work (supplied by a 3rd-party company) to borrow their multimeter for 5 minutes. (I started my career in such labs, for that company.) To my astonishment, they're not allowed to have a multimeter. Or screwdrivers small enough to fit into the wiring terminals for the sensors, or the isolation barrier sets, or anything of that sort. An extremely depauperate toolbox indeed. When I was in the same units, doing the same job (nominally), I was expected to be able to fault-find the sensors and signal processing to at least board-level ; to be able to repair some board-level faults ; to completely replace any wiring system from A/D converter all the way out to the sensor (using appropriate explosion-proof rated cables, glands, JBs, isolation barriers and techniques), and to do the documentation necessary for any changes. And to do the actual job as well as maintenance of the equipment.
These days absolutely all changes more complex than putting leads into sockets has to have a service technician come out to do the repairs.
And I wondered why the modern breed of mudlogger doesn't understand his job and doesn't pay adequate attention to his data quality. Well, I know now.
That's good. They're always going to need supervision.
It shouldn't have been a surprise, I suppose. Last year I spent 3 days wondering how a different service provider in the same business could spend 3 days failing to get an RS-232 data link between their computers and a third company's computers. Not failing to get the computers to talk to each other, but failing to get the physical link cable to work.
[shakes head] No wonder they run out of essential consumables. If we were still allowed to use the word, I'd call it shocking incompetence. As it is, it's just grounds for a "RFI - Request For Improvement".
I'd like to see one too. I don't expect to see one, but I'd like to see one.
Reworked, or something more interesting?
BADD!
One fight at a time. Please.
We still have no good idea of why the non-avian dinosaurs became extinct. Which is dissatisfying, but it means that there is another BIG and interesting question to answer.
It's almost enough to make "gardening" (digging around in the crustal ephemera) interesting again.
You're right, but for the wrong reasons.
Relatively recent work has shown that there was around about 300,000 years between the Chicxulub impact and the micropalaeontological events that define the end of the Cretaceous and which correlate with the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. (Sorry for the wordiness, but precision is important.)
Find an area where macrofossils (or microfossils) indicates that deposition was occurring at around (say) 1mm/year (which is very fast, but not unfeasible). Do very fine sampling on the appropriate interval (which you'll already have approximately located from your palaeontology work) and plot the amount of dinosterane (or whichever other biomarker(s) you're looking at) against the position in the sequence. If you've got a 100mm thick decrease in dinostearane, and your palynology indicates a mean deposition rate of 1mm/year, then you've got a century of depletion of dinoflagellates. Bob's your uncle.
You can do this sort of work on core samples, or at the outcrop. It's a lot, lot cheaper to go back to the outcrop.
Because it's simpler than having a policy that varies from airline to airline, so that one desk will be operating a different policy to it's neighbour, and to what it was operating an hour earlier.
Having a general policy with irregular exceptions is actually more complex than having no consistency at all. If you know that every trip is going to be an unpredictable nightmare, then you're put into the right frame of mind (dread and a desire to be somewhere else) from well in advance of departing for the airport until well after you've left your destination.
What - you expected something else? Haven't you done your crash- and evacuation- training? Getting into a machine with a million moving parts to fly miles above the top of a fatal drop for hours on end should not be a relaxing experience.
Their brand name? I think you'll find that it's "Nokia".
Oh, you mean a single, dominant MODEL name?
Why would they want to have only one model, and the vastly reduced market share that would go with that.
Personally, whenever I've needed to use another company's mobile, I've never been able to get on with them. Always back to a Nokia, whichever seems most appropriate on price/performance at the moment.
that way I don't have to waste time on reading manuals or learning a 47th different way of answering calls or typing text messages.
How many US employees did Nintendo sack?
No, seriously.
I was under the impression that Nintendo have always had the large majority of their manufacturing in relatively high-productivity/ low-cost countries with no-one but the minimum of marketing and legal androids in low-productivity/ high-cost countries. This may be different for the design teams, who may or may not be in the company's home country.
Wikipedia gives the company's workforce as being 4130 people. Perhaps you're mistaking "people who build Nintendo-branded hardware" for "people employed in any way, shape or form by Nintendo"?
Speak up, Boy!
And Speak English while you're at it.
Three points :
1) how much would they have to scrape off? Possibly only one (outside) wall to allow the radiation to penetrate into the chamber.
2) If this material worked (and I'm pretty dubious of the physics claims - significant attenuation between 100-odd GHz and 0 GHz, a range of 10^11 in frequency. Bit optimistic there.) , then you wouldn't necessarily need to paint the inside of the walls, just the outsides, where there are often service corridors, office spaces, staff changing rooms, store rooms, etc.
3) What even-ness of coverage would you need. To a first approximation, one wavelength should provide shielding (or at least attenuation), and for 2.4*10^11 Hz, that's 1.25m ; so, a single-doorway wouldn't necessarily allow radiation in (or out), but a double-doorway would likely. Also, a large window (in a domestic situation), would probably stop it working as a screen. Not good. Correspondingly, the process of removing externally-applied paint would only need to proceed a room at a time - this store-room, then that office - until there's sufficient signal in the auditorium.
Obviously, you could try applying the paint to external walls as-and-when they become available for re-painting (if they ever got painted ; why would you paint a wall that only staff will see?) and using a phone as a signal-strength meter until it decayed to the point of being unusable. Better - if you can arrange the pattern appropriately, only allow sufficient signal to illuminate the aisles.
Some degree of culpability - quite a lot - attaches to the morons who do not do due diligence before buying (or leasing) premises. Of course, if more of the morons refused to buy such shit, then fewer people would try such scams, because they'd know they might get stuck with an unsalable lemon ...
Oh, who're we trying to kid? Idiots will continue to lose large amounts of money and occasionally large numbers of lives by not doing due diligence. Let's just hope that they kill themselves or their offspring before the next generation gets inseminated. It's less cruel in the long run.
Not untrue.
The RAT stands for "Rock Abrasion Tool" ; it's purpose is more like a geologist's hammer than a miner's shovel. They want it to abrade enough material off the surface to remove any weathering patina. As a side effect of achieving this, the tool also leaves a flat surface, and can abrade several millimetres for "serial sectioning". An additional purpose of the tool is to allow the other rover probes to examine the mineralogy of the rocks examined.
As a geologist, I use my hammer much more for exposing a fresh surface of a rock than I do for excavating. Then I get out the hand lens and examine the fresh (and weathered) surface. The analogy is pretty close. I do occasionally use the hammer for grubbing a rock out of the ground, but the tool isn't very good for that.
So ... detecting that a location is in a valley is ... rocket science? Difficult?
An excellent place to put flooding-tolerant crops. Data centres are not, to the best of my knowledge, flooding-tolerant crops.
Is one lifetime an adequate timescale to consider these things over? Obviously it depends on the expected lifetime of the building, of the technology. But as the rest of your comments show, a building can end up being used for longer than expected.
Huh? There are warnings pasted all over mobile phone services in the UK that warn that they are not suitable for relying on in emergencies. Do people not believe such warnings? Probably not. Oh well, Darwin Award territory.
You're clearly a lot more experienced than me at this ruthless capitalism lark. Would you like some freshly-sliced peon with your paupers-blood cocktail?
TFA is probably wrong (not that I've wasted time reading TFA ... of course not ; this is SlashDot). I don't know if they've tried to patent this, but the principle is pretty obvious. Most (not all, but most) lens systems have one or more target-facing elements that are curves (almost always spherical, because they're easiest to make) that are symmetrical about the targeting axis. If you project a light beam perpendicularly at a spherical surface (actually, any surface, but let's stick to spheres because they're commonest), then whatever proportion of the light is reflected will return along the path of the original beam.
So, going back to what was suggested concerning a bright IR flash, you fire the flash and look for reflections ; the brightest reflections are goign to be from flat surfaces with the specific alignment to be normal to beams from your light source, or from curved surfaces. For a relatively small surface, inside some sort of baffle (which is one way of looking at a lens in it's supporting structure), then the optical axis is going to be pointing fairly closely to the light source.
I can see how you could make life more difficult for this system - an optical flat angled away from the camera's targeting axis, combined with partial silvering to reduce the light leaking back out of the lens. But you'd do it at the cost of weight, expense and optical quality. How much of a deterrent this would be to paparrazi is unclear - the big lenses they routinely use come in on price tags of months of work for Joanna Q Average (Joe Sixpack doesn't work hard enough and got fired.). But it would be a hassle.
That's potentially more of a problem. Most tail light I've seen for years have employed an array of moulded-plastic Corner Cube reflectors. These are designed to return impinging beams in their direction of origin, within similar field-of-view constraints to the surfaces of camera lenses. ... well these are precisely the areas that are going to be popular with paparazzi.
But consider the location being protected : it's a boat, a big boat. Already Abramovich will be in the habit of docking the boat so that the outdoor areas are less visible from general passers by - for the same reason that people park up in "Lover's Lane" for a sly shag. Parking areas are going to be high on the list of places that he already avoids. As for small boats in the harbour, the other side of the bay, etc
I gave non-trivial thought about how to design such a system myself - purely as a "I don't like CCTV watching me stagger out of the pub" plan. Pretty much the same results.
You could probably do a lot with AI to identify stationary targets, moving targets, appearing and disappearing targets. But he's probably already got that sort of stuff for his security people already. If he's got the money and the cause to fear the assassin's bullet, then he's probably already got most of what goes into this system. He's just given the security staff a "Fry CCD" button to go next to the "send round bribed police", "target machine gun" and "call in airstrike" buttons.
How well the CCD fryer actually works ... I don't know. But a big fat fuck-off IR laser painting a target on a hillside by night could be just the thing that the goons, or the laser-guided missile, needs to get the right target.