I respectfully disagree. This is not a case and their data center was NOT on flood plains. That area of Istanbul is NOT prone to flooding.
It sounds as if you know the area well enough to have identified it - I don't recall the original article having enough information to locate it more precisely than "Istanbul", at which point I only have a very vague idea of the topography. So, there's something more complex going on in this particular case than simply being sited in a flood plain - which does nothing to make building in flood-prone area any more sensible.
Furthermore, it was the heaviest rainfall in the last 8 decades.
For my home address, I've chosen a place that is going to be secure from flooding on a millennial time scale. In fact, the highest likelihood of flooding in the next couple of centuries is going to be evenly split between the consequences of extreme global warming (I'd need around 50m of sea level rise to start getting worried) and if the Haltenbanke/Storegga slopes collapse again (which hasn't happened for some 9000 years ; about 30% chance of touching my home at peak, if it lives up to past performances). Since I live in a house that was built 70 to 80 years ago, I wouldn't find the prospect of getting flooded by an "80-year flood" too reassuring! It's not rocket surgery doing this. Or brain science. My employer's office... well, that's in a much more vulnerable area. Which is why the important stuff - the contents of the file server - gets backed up off site daily. The rest of it - who cares? I really should have a talk with the Boss-of-Bosses about this, but since he's a geologist too, I'm sure that he's done his calculations. I'm sure that we're in profit on the building already, so it's just a question of finding a sucker to sell it to, and suckers are still in ready supply. I'd guess that means Westhill for us next time we need to move to larger premises. As for Istanbul's history - well, don't forget that you're not talking to an American (not a normal experience on SlashDot, I know). I've got a choice of 4500-year-old stone monuments to drive to if I want to take lunch al-fresco, and a lot of the country's road system follows the lines laid down after the Roman invasion 1953 years ago. I'm sure the Roman drains of Istanbul will get fixed as soon as they've finished fixing the Roman drains of... err... Rome. That's been a source of complaints for only a couple of millenia now, so it should get fixed RSN. Or maybe, one needs to be really sceptical about any promises implicit in "infrastructure" and look for more fundamental things like "geography". Which makes your comment about "the real stupidity here was placing the data center one the first story of a building (and in an earthquake zone)" peculiar. Oh, hang on, by "first story" you mean "ground floor", not "first story"? Now it makes sense. Yes, it would have been sensible - and sufficient in this case - to have put the data centre on the first story (UK sense) of the building, and to have ensured that the power supply cables, data cables, UPS, emergency generator, etc are up on that 4m-above-ground-level level too, with only isolated power circuits going down into what we would call at work "the splash zone". Ohh, err. That makes me think. Unless my knowledge of the geography of the ceiling spaces at work is terribly wrong, there's a water pipe in the ceiling above the server room. I'll have to get someone to check that out, sharpish!
Istanbul, earthquake zone... this is not news ; this is history. If it worries you, leave and encourage your friends to leave. If you think the infrastructure needs improvement (and judging from Izmit/1999, well, you judge), then you've got a lovely carreer in politics ahead of you. Quakes [I'm assuming that you're Turkish and/ or resident in Turkey] Did you know that there is a serious proposition
Yet the news would always make a big deal about it washing away a bunch of trailer homes that were stupidly placed right on the bank of the river.
I feel the sympathy that you ooze. Have you found a good viewpoint where you can park up, crack a few tinnies and observe the bedraggled evacuees from a position of calculated safety? Free entertainment. Hey - an investment opportunity : find such a site, buy the appropriate few 10s of sq.m, then charge rental for the film crews when they come along. What's the rest of the meme... oh yeah : "... 6. Profit!" (Did I get it right? I'm still a beginner at this "ruthless capitalism" lark. Fun isn't it?)
...but obfuscated to thwart search engines. Just replace "[roman numeral]" by "arab numeral" (from 0 to 9 - the rest of hex numbers are unmolested).
That sounds like a challenge. So, I grab a string from the middle of your post - "FEF0B0AB" - and... either Google has been DCMA'd, or it hasn't indexed a page with that string in it. Oh, hang on, you said that you'd replaced "arab" 0 to 9 with "roman" equivalents, which can't be right because your post includes zeros, and "roman" numbers don't include a zero. So, your statement of what you've done is inconsistent with your data, and I suspect that there's some other problem too.
There is still a lot to be said for a low-tech approach that is not vulnerable to power blackouts, viruses, malware or spyware.
UPS,
Illegal (in my particular situation).
auto-starting generator,
It exists, and it's safe working load is fully assigned to emergency functions like the radio room, fire pumps, instrumentation, purge-air pump and emergency brake. Not available for other uses (without a significant re-design of the entire installation).
Linux, OpenOffice.org
Irrelevant, now that it's established that you don't have power.
I wasn't joking about the UPS being illegal. To be more precise, in the "flammable atmosphere commonly present in normal operations" environment where I work, devices must be either purged with gas-free air (driven from the emergency generator) or powered by a circuit which will shut them down completely if gas is detected. That means, no UPS (because it'd retain the ability to source a spark even after the supply was isolated), no batteries in your laptop (seriously! Take them out, now, or pack your bags and collect your unemployment slip.), no batteries in your calculator (you can get a flammable-atmosphere-safe 4-function calculator for about $200). Of course, that doesn't necessarily stop you (or the people under me) from doing their job. You use the raw instrumentation, and a note book, and a pencil, and a moderate amount of running around. Of course, the sprogs coming out of college today can't imagine doing their job without computers. But when it happens, they learn. Or they pack their bags and collect their unemployment slips.
It is, in theory, possible to continue operations using computers outside the gas zone. But in practice, that still requires either writing things down in a notebook (so the guy on the other 12-hour shift can take over), or inordinate amounts of running to and fro.
But, you feel free to continue thinking that you'll always be able to use a computer to do your job - it means that you're no threat to me, even if you're technically better qualified and a lot cheaper.
Feel free to try changing the rules. They're based on experience of over a century, starting in coal mines, and extending into chemical plant and other "flammable atmospheres" (including some agricultural operations). You'll not succeed.
And so, as politically incorrect as it may be, I sometimes question the wisdom of rebuilding a city that is largely below the water line of a huge river.
What's politically incorrect about it? I can see that it would be politically incorrect to say that it's stupid to rebuild this city but not stupid to rebuild that city, when the only significant difference is the countries that they're in. So, as a geologist (not that that matters much), I've always been happy to snort contempt at the London Barrage, and I snigger at the efforts to "save" Venice (if I were an Italian taxpayer, I might not be sniggering, but as a European taxpayer my personal liability for this white elephant is small enough to be sniggered at) ; why I don't snigger at such efforts in the Netherlands is that they've got centuries of investment in their dyke systems, and are in a much better position to continue their investments in a manageable manner. Whether downtown Dacca is going to gurgle, I don't know, but I rather fear it. Poor fuckers. I have heard on other fora enough bleating about Mississippi flooding to be considered a hard-hearted bastard for saying "let them tread water". Ditto for New Orleans. I'll be in Cairo in the not too distant future ; I would expect from their 5000+ years of Nilotic flooding that they know what they're in for, and I recall that the way was blazed up and out of the flood plain by the Pharaohs when they looked for a long-term home for their dead bones. There's nothing politically incorrect about saying "that's a fucking stupid place to build". The people listening may not want to hear you say that, but their desires don't make the place where they're building (or rebuilding) any the less fucking stupid a place to build. If they've asked for my advice as a geologist, then they'd better pay my fucking bill for telling them "that's a fucking stupid place to build". I don't work in that area of geology, "hydrology", and if I did then the question I'd be asked is more likely to be "how can I best mitigate or manage the flooding risk at this location?", or "what are my flood risks if I were to buy this property?" These are very different questions, and fully deserving of an appropriate answer. Accompanied by an invoice. See the comments about Netherlands above : the Cloggies have serious flooding risks and problems, and they face them square on, not ostrich-fashion.
Will this result in a new market where you can D/L different sounds for your car?
Quite plausibly. And probably with DRM too, to make it impossible for you to upload your own sounds, and to stop you from starting your car if the license fee hasn't been paid this week. "Ha ha, but serious."
Gives rice car a new meaning.
Life is to short to waste time finding out what "rice car" means already ; I take it that it's not a car composed entirely of small oval carbohydrate grains.
Drive downtown late friday night with a honda that sounds like a Murcielago 660 and see people look for the Ghost Car.
Two more bits of somewhere's culture that have completely passed me by. Oh dear, what a pity, never mind.
I think i like this idea. I think the most popular sound will be "fart".
The idea does have a certain appeal to it. I think that "orgasm" (m, f, both, together or separately) will rapidly displace that from the charts. Most people who are old enough to drive are old enough to have somewhat outgrown adolescent toilet humour. But that makes me realise... there will be an awful lot of parents ferrying their little bundle of joy around to the sound of a "Postman Pat"-mobile, or a Thomas-the-Tank-Engine chuffing. Pass the vomit bucket.
I personally minimize the risk by breathing bottled air, consisting of 80% Nitrogen, an inert and harmless gas.
May I recommend that you increase the partial pressure of your dinitrogen environment by moving to a higher pressure environment. The equivalent of 50m of seawater pressure would be adequate. "Inert"? Difficult to react would be much more accurate (I must look up the current state of noble gas chemistry; I think compounds of argon are now known, possibly neon, none I have heard of for helium. Yet.) "Harmless"? Everything is harmful, at a high enough dose. Paraclesius came out with that one about 500 years ago, and he hasn't been demonstrated to be wrong to date. Unless, of course, some SlashDotty knows better.
What has the NSA done for me lately? what do the know about me? What are their intentions for that information? Sorry I will take Google over the NSA any time.
I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.
Ah, so it's a low security secret then. Medium security being where you're told as you're being killed (this may make it prolonged and painful to be told complex medium security secrets, and begs the question of what happens if you die with the secret only partly told). High security obviously entails being killed before you're told what the secret is.
The question is not "Am I paranoid?" ; the question is "Am I paranoid enough?"
However these laws do not apply in parliment, "parlimentry privlage" means politicians can bullshit to their hearts content in the house.
Please, please, please tell me you're trolling.
GP is correct, though using the perjorative "bullshit" is probably unnecessary. If you are an MP, speaking in a quorate debate in the House of Commons, the laws of libel, defamation etc simply do not apply. Similarly, the official gazette reporting such statements, "Hansard", is utterly immune from those laws when reporting such statements. So, if the Right Honourable Mr Chinley Toothsworth alleged "on the floor" that Obama buggered Dubya on the night of moving into the White House, and Hansard reported it with the editorial comment that Dubya enjoyed it more than Obama, then the only person in danger of a lawsuit is the editor, as he's the only one not protected by "Parliamentary Privilege". [In self-protection I should say that it's fantastic to think that a closeted redneck moron is likely to enjoy being sodomised by anyone, let alone Obama ; this is clearly parody. Then again, having seen the closeted redneck morons in 'Deliverance'... ] I am not sure if full ParlyPrivilege also extends to breaking court orders to not publicly discuss certain matters (e.g., giving the names of terr'st suspects appealing against their house arrest) ; from occasional reporting of such threats, I rather think it does. I believe that the House of Lords enjoys similar ParlyPrivilege ; I'm not sure if it also applies to people giving evidence to official committees of Parliament. You need a lawyer to address those points.
But no, in short, the GP isn't trolling when describing the freedom of action that Parliamentary Privilege gives to MPs.
In part, it gives an MP the freedom to talk without fear of censure, save through the ballot box (or the car bomb) ; in part it stems from the assumption that all MPs (etc.) are "Right" and "Honourable" people.
People also used leather as armor, but so far no one has dug up a leather sword.
Substitute "feather" for "leather" and you get an even better example. ( http://dml.cmnh.org/2005May/msg00085.html is the first result that comes up through Google, though I clearly recall seeing it referenced in an ink-on-paper reference book too. That the same discussion was had in the same place a decade previously... http://dml.cmnh.org/1995Jan/msg00315.html... shouldn't be surprising. The palaeontologists have a long-standing interest in what properties of scales lead to the evolution of feathers.)
You'd somehow have to work out a closed system for a hard drive possibly leading to some sort of bladder to allow helium to leave and return the main hard drive chassis while not being vented to the outside world.
That's not a show-stopper. For a design to work from, look at a mechanical barograph. They contain a moderate size, thin-wall partial-vacuum chamber. As the external air pressure varies, the deformation of the can is picked up by a lever system and used to wiggle the pen. The same construction can be used to produce a package that allows you to contain a fluid around some space while having it stay in barometric equilibrium with the outside world. We use systems like this at work in the other direction to maintain computers that work while the whole package is suspended in 20,000 psi hot, corrosive fluids. It's not rocket science. Though similar systems are probably used in rocket science.
(BTW, I work in the oil industry, and I have no doubt what so ever about their standards of behaviour.) So, you're a gas station attendant? J/K:)
Assuming that you mean "till operator at a petrol station" by "gas station attendant" ("gas" is an American word, and no-one does more than turn on the pump from the console and take the money, which is hardly "attendance"), no, you're wrong. That's the retail industry, approximately evenly split between the supermarkets and the downstream petrol sales companies. I work in the upstream oil industry, searching for new reserves to exploit and performing detailed appraisal on them at the rigsite. And if the Boss's oft-forked tongue speaks straight, I'm going to add another 30 to 40 degrees of longitude to my CV in the near future. Oh great, another continental margin ticked off. I'll have to do a count up and see if I've worked half the world yet. May be getting close.
That 10$ a barrel will go up when the oil companies buy up all the technology to bump up the prices and protect their profits!
Ah, the sweet smell of capitalism working as it ought. (BTW, I work in the oil industry, and I have no doubt what so ever about their standards of behaviour.)
What if the article was published in Asian countries like India - which is predominantly English speaking, has a free press that loves anti-colonial articles and does not recognise British libel laws ?
If the article is read in Britain, then you can be sued in Britain. That doesn't mean that there has to be a regular importer of (say) the magazine to the UK, it's sufficient for one copy to be brought in by one person and shown to one other person in Britain.
Leaving aside that this looks like a pretty anonymous security desk/ reception area which could fron any sort of business, not just a data centre, the important point is, "what a fucking stupid place to build anything".
You can see from the window that this sort of flooding is nothing to be surprised at. The water is rising slowly and there's little apparent current, which implies that the site is a fair distance from the source of the rising river. Odds on, this is not a "flash flood", but a perfectly normal flood on the flood plain of a river. Rivers flood ; they flood onto their flood plains ; floods can be avoided by the simple process of not being where the water ends up. I.E. don't stay on flood plains when there's significant rainfall.
OK, so people who have brought property on flood plains don't like this because they're going to lose money ; a lot of money. But that's their own fault for being so stupid as to invest in property on a flood plain.
No fucking sympathy at all. Let the stupid bastards drown as they go bankrupt.
I was on holiday recently in Mallorca, and also looking at photos of other firend's holidays in Spain. Where other people see a nice wide park area running through the middle of a town, with a tiny stream in a broad concrete channel, they see a public park. But I see a flood channel designed to take flash flooding. Same landscape, different perceptions.
Last month, we had the worst local rainfall for over 30 years (I've only lived here for 26 years). The rain was hammering down solidly for nearly 3 days ; the ignition leads in my car started complaining. And the drains outside my house overflowed... and the water ran away downhill to cause flooding on the flood plain at the bottom of the hill. Well, that was a really difficult decision for me to make when I was house hunting, and it's paid off time and again already.
Learn some basic geography ; look at the shape of the landscape determined by the average climate of the last few thousand years. Then apply what you've learned and let someone else suffer the flooding.
Well, it would probably make sense to make touch-enabled interfaces more table-like and less wall-like. That is to say, to make them horizontal.
Whoa there, stop your wheel re-inventing for a few minutes. This is an old, old question which has been voted on and solved for far in excess of a century.
Look at any drawing, photograph or film of a drawing office (drafting office in some spellings?) before the middle or late 1970s. Lots of drawing boards being used in an analogue "Touch"-like interface all day every day by expensivly skilled professionals. The working surfaces are neither horizontal nor vertical, but generally between approximately 30 degrees to 60 degrees to the horizontal ; and they're individually adjustable. So you can set your drawing board up at an angle for you to draw things, then lay it flatter for several people to gather round and discuss aspects of your design. Oh, sorry, BuzzWord Bingo - that's "Collaborate".
Don't re-invent the wheel. And please Bog, hang the person who tries to patent the new interface paradigm ; hang them from the nearest lamp standard and pull them up slowly so they die slowly. Leave the body up on the wire "pour encourager les autres".
Would that recording from your camera be admissable
If it gets as far as court in any jurisdiction (including one that has rules on whether something is admissible or not), then it's failed. The purpose of dash-cams and such like is to starve lawyers to death by stopping cases before they get to court. The quality of evidence from a dash-cam is generally going to be sufficient to cause the guilty party to cave and cough up. Adding legal fees to the costs you're going to have to pay anyway is not rational. (That said, some people are not rational.)
This reduces the potential for mischief (and, in the case that the person simply misplaced the device, puts the onus on *him* to reverse the process), while still destroying the resale value of the stolen item.
You're assuming that a "bricked" Kindle, or any other piece of electronic hardware, has no resale value. This might (might!) be true if the thief or resetter (person who sells-on stolen property, "fence" in some languages) were a person with significant moral fibre, who would not sell on an impressive-looking lump of hardware to an unsuspecting purchaser if they knew that the device didn't actually work. In practice, after selling their granny and pimping their son, the typical thief or resetter would use the bricked device by either selling it to someone who didn't understand it's failings (e.g., only showing it as far as the boot screen, before it stops working), or by using it as a substitute after showing a working device. Needless to say, customer support and the complaints department are both referrals to Big Dod in the corner, and his crowbar that likes kneecaps.
Mission Impossible got the concept of bricking right 30+ years ago... "This analogue message transmission medium will self-destruct in 5 seconds...". They ought to make a film of that stuff.
How, in a world where explosives and pyrotechnics are (rightly) controlled materials, to implement "bricking" like that... I don't know. How about 3-level password failures : If you start your device and give it the wrong password, it wipes your account information and shuts down. Next time you give the wrong password, it wipes the library (not sure if Kindles in particular use DRM that would fall over about this ; DRM is a problem. But we knew that anyway.) ; third failure and it electronically buggers the battery - blows a one-time thermal fuse or something. Which wouldn't render it utterly valueless, but would seriously downgrade it. There would have to be escape routes, such as connecting the device to a desktop machine which knows (and can prove) it's own password. A bit fiddlier, but within the range of credibility.
DRM a problem sufficient to stop this? Don't use DRM. As the meerkats say, "Seemple".
I don't think anyone thinks it's [mice eating cheese] normal but from what my "experimentation" (mouse traps in the attic) seems to indicate, they certainly do like it. Of course, peanut butter works far better.
It's the fat content ; many species of mice habitually survive on a lot of seeds ; nuts are just large seeds ; nuts have quite high fat content (varies in detail, but broadly true ; "Brazil nuts are 18% protein, 13% carbohydrates, and 69% fat." ; "One ounce of English walnuts has 18.5 [about 66%?] grams of total fat and 2.6 grams of omega 3's [about 10%]"). Mice that like the taste of fatty foods will get better fed than those that don't and have more offspring ; cue evolution. Probably, mice that can smell fatty foods from a distance will be similarly selected. Until someone comes along and invents the mousetrap.
It's not specific to Ireland. It's also fairly common in Canada for Banks, Credit Card Companies, and Car financing companies to do a heavy sales pitch at universities during the first few weeks.
I'd be fairly surprised to find a contry which has both a higher education system and a banking system, which did not have an annual rush to sign up as many as possible of this year's crop of freshers.
OK, plausible circumstances where there wouldn't be a rush - if there's no once-per-year rush of people leaving compulsory education and moving into further education.If that's plausible. Which it's not, really.
the 'green' Germans want to replace two nuclear plants that emit no CO2
Running emissions of CO2 from a nuclear power plant are low, but the building and demolition costs (in terms of CO2 emitted making concrete and generating power to make steel, and other sundries) are non-trivial. Not as bad as the emissions from a coal-fires or oil-fired plant, which also has building and demolition costs, but non-trivial costs nonetheless.
with... car engines... running on natural gas
Volkswagen make car engines? Hah, next thing you'll be telling me is that the well-known maker of marine engines, Volvo-Penta are going to start a car and truck division too. Who'd-a-thunk that engineering companies casn make more than one type of engineering product? Natural gas - true. And so? "Natural gas" does not necessarily have to mean "fossil fuel". Any source of methane would do, including potentially, bio-mass, methane pumped from landfill.
which will probably have to be purchased from the Commies?
So? I thought that you Septics were into the ideas of trade, economic integration, etc. Or were you planning to sell us the natural gas from the US state of Iraq once you've finished your conquest?
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds as if you know the area well enough to have identified it - I don't recall the original article having enough information to locate it more precisely than "Istanbul", at which point I only have a very vague idea of the topography.
So, there's something more complex going on in this particular case than simply being sited in a flood plain - which does nothing to make building in flood-prone area any more sensible.
For my home address, I've chosen a place that is going to be secure from flooding on a millennial time scale. In fact, the highest likelihood of flooding in the next couple of centuries is going to be evenly split between the consequences of extreme global warming (I'd need around 50m of sea level rise to start getting worried) and if the Haltenbanke/Storegga slopes collapse again (which hasn't happened for some 9000 years ; about 30% chance of touching my home at peak, if it lives up to past performances). Since I live in a house that was built 70 to 80 years ago, I wouldn't find the prospect of getting flooded by an "80-year flood" too reassuring! ... well, that's in a much more vulnerable area. Which is why the important stuff - the contents of the file server - gets backed up off site daily. The rest of it - who cares? I really should have a talk with the Boss-of-Bosses about this, but since he's a geologist too, I'm sure that he's done his calculations. I'm sure that we're in profit on the building already, so it's just a question of finding a sucker to sell it to, and suckers are still in ready supply. I'd guess that means Westhill for us next time we need to move to larger premises. ... err ... Rome. That's been a source of complaints for only a couple of millenia now, so it should get fixed RSN.
It's not rocket surgery doing this. Or brain science.
My employer's office
As for Istanbul's history - well, don't forget that you're not talking to an American (not a normal experience on SlashDot, I know). I've got a choice of 4500-year-old stone monuments to drive to if I want to take lunch al-fresco, and a lot of the country's road system follows the lines laid down after the Roman invasion 1953 years ago. I'm sure the Roman drains of Istanbul will get fixed as soon as they've finished fixing the Roman drains of
Or maybe, one needs to be really sceptical about any promises implicit in "infrastructure" and look for more fundamental things like "geography". Which makes your comment about "the real stupidity here was placing the data center one the first story of a building (and in an earthquake zone)" peculiar.
Oh, hang on, by "first story" you mean "ground floor", not "first story"?
Now it makes sense.
Yes, it would have been sensible - and sufficient in this case - to have put the data centre on the first story (UK sense) of the building, and to have ensured that the power supply cables, data cables, UPS, emergency generator, etc are up on that 4m-above-ground-level level too, with only isolated power circuits going down into what we would call at work "the splash zone".
Ohh, err. That makes me think. Unless my knowledge of the geography of the ceiling spaces at work is terribly wrong, there's a water pipe in the ceiling above the server room. I'll have to get someone to check that out, sharpish!
Istanbul, earthquake zone ... this is not news ; this is history. If it worries you, leave and encourage your friends to leave. If you think the infrastructure needs improvement (and judging from Izmit/1999, well, you judge), then you've got a lovely carreer in politics ahead of you.
Quakes
[I'm assuming that you're Turkish and/ or resident in Turkey] Did you know that there is a serious proposition
I feel the sympathy that you ooze. Have you found a good viewpoint where you can park up, crack a few tinnies and observe the bedraggled evacuees from a position of calculated safety? Free entertainment. ... oh yeah :
Hey - an investment opportunity : find such a site, buy the appropriate few 10s of sq.m, then charge rental for the film crews when they come along.
What's the rest of the meme
"...
6. Profit!"
(Did I get it right? I'm still a beginner at this "ruthless capitalism" lark. Fun isn't it?)
That sounds like a challenge. ... either Google has been DCMA'd, or it hasn't indexed a page with that string in it.
So, I grab a string from the middle of your post - "FEF0B0AB" - and
Oh, hang on, you said that you'd replaced "arab" 0 to 9 with "roman" equivalents, which can't be right because your post includes zeros, and "roman" numbers don't include a zero. So, your statement of what you've done is inconsistent with your data, and I suspect that there's some other problem too.
Time to RTFA, I think.
Is that a bigend in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?
Illegal (in my particular situation).
It exists, and it's safe working load is fully assigned to emergency functions like the radio room, fire pumps, instrumentation, purge-air pump and emergency brake. Not available for other uses (without a significant re-design of the entire installation).
Irrelevant, now that it's established that you don't have power.
I wasn't joking about the UPS being illegal. To be more precise, in the "flammable atmosphere commonly present in normal operations" environment where I work, devices must be either purged with gas-free air (driven from the emergency generator) or powered by a circuit which will shut them down completely if gas is detected. That means, no UPS (because it'd retain the ability to source a spark even after the supply was isolated), no batteries in your laptop (seriously! Take them out, now, or pack your bags and collect your unemployment slip.), no batteries in your calculator (you can get a flammable-atmosphere-safe 4-function calculator for about $200).
Of course, that doesn't necessarily stop you (or the people under me) from doing their job. You use the raw instrumentation, and a note book, and a pencil, and a moderate amount of running around.
Of course, the sprogs coming out of college today can't imagine doing their job without computers. But when it happens, they learn. Or they pack their bags and collect their unemployment slips.
It is, in theory, possible to continue operations using computers outside the gas zone. But in practice, that still requires either writing things down in a notebook (so the guy on the other 12-hour shift can take over), or inordinate amounts of running to and fro.
But, you feel free to continue thinking that you'll always be able to use a computer to do your job - it means that you're no threat to me, even if you're technically better qualified and a lot cheaper.
Feel free to try changing the rules. They're based on experience of over a century, starting in coal mines, and extending into chemical plant and other "flammable atmospheres" (including some agricultural operations). You'll not succeed.
What's politically incorrect about it?
I can see that it would be politically incorrect to say that it's stupid to rebuild this city but not stupid to rebuild that city, when the only significant difference is the countries that they're in.
So, as a geologist (not that that matters much), I've always been happy to snort contempt at the London Barrage, and I snigger at the efforts to "save" Venice (if I were an Italian taxpayer, I might not be sniggering, but as a European taxpayer my personal liability for this white elephant is small enough to be sniggered at) ; why I don't snigger at such efforts in the Netherlands is that they've got centuries of investment in their dyke systems, and are in a much better position to continue their investments in a manageable manner.
Whether downtown Dacca is going to gurgle, I don't know, but I rather fear it. Poor fuckers.
I have heard on other fora enough bleating about Mississippi flooding to be considered a hard-hearted bastard for saying "let them tread water". Ditto for New Orleans.
I'll be in Cairo in the not too distant future ; I would expect from their 5000+ years of Nilotic flooding that they know what they're in for, and I recall that the way was blazed up and out of the flood plain by the Pharaohs when they looked for a long-term home for their dead bones.
There's nothing politically incorrect about saying "that's a fucking stupid place to build". The people listening may not want to hear you say that, but their desires don't make the place where they're building (or rebuilding) any the less fucking stupid a place to build. If they've asked for my advice as a geologist, then they'd better pay my fucking bill for telling them "that's a fucking stupid place to build".
I don't work in that area of geology, "hydrology", and if I did then the question I'd be asked is more likely to be "how can I best mitigate or manage the flooding risk at this location?", or "what are my flood risks if I were to buy this property?" These are very different questions, and fully deserving of an appropriate answer. Accompanied by an invoice. See the comments about Netherlands above : the Cloggies have serious flooding risks and problems, and they face them square on, not ostrich-fashion.
Quite plausibly. And probably with DRM too, to make it impossible for you to upload your own sounds, and to stop you from starting your car if the license fee hasn't been paid this week. "Ha ha, but serious."
Life is to short to waste time finding out what "rice car" means already ; I take it that it's not a car composed entirely of small oval carbohydrate grains.
Two more bits of somewhere's culture that have completely passed me by. Oh dear, what a pity, never mind.
The idea does have a certain appeal to it. ... there will be an awful lot of parents ferrying their little bundle of joy around to the sound of a "Postman Pat"-mobile, or a Thomas-the-Tank-Engine chuffing.
I think that "orgasm" (m, f, both, together or separately) will rapidly displace that from the charts. Most people who are old enough to drive are old enough to have somewhat outgrown adolescent toilet humour. But that makes me realise
Pass the vomit bucket.
May I recommend that you increase the partial pressure of your dinitrogen environment by moving to a higher pressure environment. The equivalent of 50m of seawater pressure would be adequate.
"Inert"? Difficult to react would be much more accurate (I must look up the current state of noble gas chemistry; I think compounds of argon are now known, possibly neon, none I have heard of for helium. Yet.)
"Harmless"? Everything is harmful, at a high enough dose. Paraclesius came out with that one about 500 years ago, and he hasn't been demonstrated to be wrong to date. Unless, of course, some SlashDotty knows better.
Ah, so it's a low security secret then. Medium security being where you're told as you're being killed (this may make it prolonged and painful to be told complex medium security secrets, and begs the question of what happens if you die with the secret only partly told). High security obviously entails being killed before you're told what the secret is.
The question is not "Am I paranoid?" ; the question is "Am I paranoid enough?"
GP is correct, though using the perjorative "bullshit" is probably unnecessary. ... ]
If you are an MP, speaking in a quorate debate in the House of Commons, the laws of libel, defamation etc simply do not apply. Similarly, the official gazette reporting such statements, "Hansard", is utterly immune from those laws when reporting such statements. So, if the Right Honourable Mr Chinley Toothsworth alleged "on the floor" that Obama buggered Dubya on the night of moving into the White House, and Hansard reported it with the editorial comment that Dubya enjoyed it more than Obama, then the only person in danger of a lawsuit is the editor, as he's the only one not protected by "Parliamentary Privilege".
[In self-protection I should say that it's fantastic to think that a closeted redneck moron is likely to enjoy being sodomised by anyone, let alone Obama ; this is clearly parody. Then again, having seen the closeted redneck morons in 'Deliverance'
I am not sure if full ParlyPrivilege also extends to breaking court orders to not publicly discuss certain matters (e.g., giving the names of terr'st suspects appealing against their house arrest) ; from occasional reporting of such threats, I rather think it does.
I believe that the House of Lords enjoys similar ParlyPrivilege ; I'm not sure if it also applies to people giving evidence to official committees of Parliament. You need a lawyer to address those points.
But no, in short, the GP isn't trolling when describing the freedom of action that Parliamentary Privilege gives to MPs.
In part, it gives an MP the freedom to talk without fear of censure, save through the ballot box (or the car bomb) ; in part it stems from the assumption that all MPs (etc.) are "Right" and "Honourable" people.
Substitute "feather" for "leather" and you get an even better example. ( http://dml.cmnh.org/2005May/msg00085.html is the first result that comes up through Google, though I clearly recall seeing it referenced in an ink-on-paper reference book too. That the same discussion was had in the same place a decade previously ... http://dml.cmnh.org/1995Jan/msg00315.html ... shouldn't be surprising. The palaeontologists have a long-standing interest in what properties of scales lead to the evolution of feathers.)
That's not a show-stopper. For a design to work from, look at a mechanical barograph. They contain a moderate size, thin-wall partial-vacuum chamber. As the external air pressure varies, the deformation of the can is picked up by a lever system and used to wiggle the pen. The same construction can be used to produce a package that allows you to contain a fluid around some space while having it stay in barometric equilibrium with the outside world.
We use systems like this at work in the other direction to maintain computers that work while the whole package is suspended in 20,000 psi hot, corrosive fluids.
It's not rocket science. Though similar systems are probably used in rocket science.
It is not exactly rocket surgery, is it? Or even "brain science".
Assuming that you mean "till operator at a petrol station" by "gas station attendant" ("gas" is an American word, and no-one does more than turn on the pump from the console and take the money, which is hardly "attendance"), no, you're wrong. That's the retail industry, approximately evenly split between the supermarkets and the downstream petrol sales companies. I work in the upstream oil industry, searching for new reserves to exploit and performing detailed appraisal on them at the rigsite. And if the Boss's oft-forked tongue speaks straight, I'm going to add another 30 to 40 degrees of longitude to my CV in the near future.
Oh great, another continental margin ticked off. I'll have to do a count up and see if I've worked half the world yet. May be getting close.
Ah, the sweet smell of capitalism working as it ought.
(BTW, I work in the oil industry, and I have no doubt what so ever about their standards of behaviour.)
If the article is read in Britain, then you can be sued in Britain. That doesn't mean that there has to be a regular importer of (say) the magazine to the UK, it's sufficient for one copy to be brought in by one person and shown to one other person in Britain.
(IANAL, but I think this is the case.)
Leaving aside that this looks like a pretty anonymous security desk/ reception area which could fron any sort of business, not just a data centre, the important point is, "what a fucking stupid place to build anything".
You can see from the window that this sort of flooding is nothing to be surprised at. The water is rising slowly and there's little apparent current, which implies that the site is a fair distance from the source of the rising river. Odds on, this is not a "flash flood", but a perfectly normal flood on the flood plain of a river.
Rivers flood ; they flood onto their flood plains ; floods can be avoided by the simple process of not being where the water ends up. I.E. don't stay on flood plains when there's significant rainfall.
OK, so people who have brought property on flood plains don't like this because they're going to lose money ; a lot of money. But that's their own fault for being so stupid as to invest in property on a flood plain.
No fucking sympathy at all. Let the stupid bastards drown as they go bankrupt.
I was on holiday recently in Mallorca, and also looking at photos of other firend's holidays in Spain. Where other people see a nice wide park area running through the middle of a town, with a tiny stream in a broad concrete channel, they see a public park. But I see a flood channel designed to take flash flooding. Same landscape, different perceptions.
Last month, we had the worst local rainfall for over 30 years (I've only lived here for 26 years). The rain was hammering down solidly for nearly 3 days ; the ignition leads in my car started complaining. And the drains outside my house overflowed ... and the water ran away downhill to cause flooding on the flood plain at the bottom of the hill. Well, that was a really difficult decision for me to make when I was house hunting, and it's paid off time and again already.
Learn some basic geography ; look at the shape of the landscape determined by the average climate of the last few thousand years. Then apply what you've learned and let someone else suffer the flooding.
Whoa there, stop your wheel re-inventing for a few minutes.
This is an old, old question which has been voted on and solved for far in excess of a century.
Look at any drawing, photograph or film of a drawing office (drafting office in some spellings?) before the middle or late 1970s. Lots of drawing boards being used in an analogue "Touch"-like interface all day every day by expensivly skilled professionals.
The working surfaces are neither horizontal nor vertical, but generally between approximately 30 degrees to 60 degrees to the horizontal ; and they're individually adjustable. So you can set your drawing board up at an angle for you to draw things, then lay it flatter for several people to gather round and discuss aspects of your design. Oh, sorry, BuzzWord Bingo - that's "Collaborate".
Don't re-invent the wheel. And please Bog, hang the person who tries to patent the new interface paradigm ; hang them from the nearest lamp standard and pull them up slowly so they die slowly. Leave the body up on the wire "pour encourager les autres".
By taking them to drink at the rivers of beer draining the slopes of the Beer Volcano, just next door to the Stripper Factory in Pastafarian heaven.
What do you mean - it's not real? But I thought all ... well, I thought ... well, maybe I didn't think at all.
If it gets as far as court in any jurisdiction (including one that has rules on whether something is admissible or not), then it's failed.
The purpose of dash-cams and such like is to starve lawyers to death by stopping cases before they get to court. The quality of evidence from a dash-cam is generally going to be sufficient to cause the guilty party to cave and cough up. Adding legal fees to the costs you're going to have to pay anyway is not rational. (That said, some people are not rational.)
You're assuming that a "bricked" Kindle, or any other piece of electronic hardware, has no resale value.
This might (might!) be true if the thief or resetter (person who sells-on stolen property, "fence" in some languages) were a person with significant moral fibre, who would not sell on an impressive-looking lump of hardware to an unsuspecting purchaser if they knew that the device didn't actually work.
In practice, after selling their granny and pimping their son, the typical thief or resetter would use the bricked device by either selling it to someone who didn't understand it's failings (e.g., only showing it as far as the boot screen, before it stops working), or by using it as a substitute after showing a working device. Needless to say, customer support and the complaints department are both referrals to Big Dod in the corner, and his crowbar that likes kneecaps.
Mission Impossible got the concept of bricking right 30+ years ago ... "This analogue message transmission medium will self-destruct in 5 seconds ...". They ought to make a film of that stuff.
How, in a world where explosives and pyrotechnics are (rightly) controlled materials, to implement "bricking" like that ... I don't know. How about 3-level password failures : If you start your device and give it the wrong password, it wipes your account information and shuts down. Next time you give the wrong password, it wipes the library (not sure if Kindles in particular use DRM that would fall over about this ; DRM is a problem. But we knew that anyway.) ; third failure and it electronically buggers the battery - blows a one-time thermal fuse or something. Which wouldn't render it utterly valueless, but would seriously downgrade it.
There would have to be escape routes, such as connecting the device to a desktop machine which knows (and can prove) it's own password. A bit fiddlier, but within the range of credibility.
DRM a problem sufficient to stop this? Don't use DRM. As the meerkats say, "Seemple".
It's the fat content ; many species of mice habitually survive on a lot of seeds ; nuts are just large seeds ; nuts have quite high fat content (varies in detail, but broadly true ; "Brazil nuts are 18% protein, 13% carbohydrates, and 69% fat." ; "One ounce of English walnuts has 18.5 [about 66%?] grams of total fat and 2.6 grams of omega 3's [about 10%]").
Mice that like the taste of fatty foods will get better fed than those that don't and have more offspring ; cue evolution.
Probably, mice that can smell fatty foods from a distance will be similarly selected. Until someone comes along and invents the mousetrap.
And that variant is?
I'd be fairly surprised to find a contry which has both a higher education system and a banking system, which did not have an annual rush to sign up as many as possible of this year's crop of freshers.
OK, plausible circumstances where there wouldn't be a rush - if there's no once-per-year rush of people leaving compulsory education and moving into further education.If that's plausible. Which it's not, really.
Running emissions of CO2 from a nuclear power plant are low, but the building and demolition costs (in terms of CO2 emitted making concrete and generating power to make steel, and other sundries) are non-trivial. Not as bad as the emissions from a coal-fires or oil-fired plant, which also has building and demolition costs, but non-trivial costs nonetheless.
Volkswagen make car engines? Hah, next thing you'll be telling me is that the well-known maker of marine engines, Volvo-Penta are going to start a car and truck division too. Who'd-a-thunk that engineering companies casn make more than one type of engineering product?
Natural gas - true. And so? "Natural gas" does not necessarily have to mean "fossil fuel". Any source of methane would do, including potentially, bio-mass, methane pumped from landfill.
So? I thought that you Septics were into the ideas of trade, economic integration, etc. Or were you planning to sell us the natural gas from the US state of Iraq once you've finished your conquest?