There's a Roger Zelazny novel where the protagonist inherits a trust fund that supports him so long as he's in college -- so he manages to keep changing his major, and doesn't gradate for over a decade.
Sounds like my former colleague Domhnuill, except it took "D'ol" only 9 years to graduate. And he didn't have a trust fund, just the student grants. And his main trick was getting elected to full-time student organisation posts (Union President, Representative Council, etc) and only had to pull the "change faculty" stunt twice. Eventually the university changed the rules to stop it happening again, but they couldn't change the rules that applied to him (no retroactive legislation). But he accidentally passed his finals one year and ended up in the jobs market. I think he's in marketing these days, but he was a reasonably good technician for a few years. Even if he couldn't remember how to calibrate a chromatograph after re-building it. Did Zelazny know D'ol ? Quite plausible.
We have the capacity to keep using fossil fuels for a couple of centuries still,
There is significant doubt about this. An article a couple of years ago in "Geoscientist" (the house journal of the Geological Society of London - written by geologists, for geologists, not for laymen. I've just looked, and it appears the article in question predates their content going online.) posed serious questions about the quality of the data collection that leads to claims that "we've got enough coal to last centuries". The same article also applies more statistical techniques to the rather less uncertain statistics of production (Do you want to get into a discussion about the distinction between proven and probable reserves? Arcane and tedious, as well as inherently uncertain.) and produces a talking point estimate that "peak coal" may be as soon as 2030 to 2050, with reserves and production unavoidably tailing off after then.
Anyway, we're only geologists. What the fuck would we know about rocks and their mining? Let's leave it to the economists to pull a few gigatonnes of coal out of their arseholes. They can do it while pissing oil and spouting bullshit.
Valentina Tereshkova (the first female cosmonaut) is on record as saying that she'd take the one-way trip. If I thought that something useful would come out of it, I might volunteer ("something useful" being one caveat ; details of scheduling being another). But I think it's really a false dichotomy.
No, I haven't RTFA. but I've enough respect for Lawrence Krauss to expect that he's addressed this point. Oh FSCK it, I'll just RTFA... Krauss makes good points, but to my mind the more significant problem is going to be that of the travelling. As Krauss says, the biggest problem is the in-flight radiation. And the only effective solution to that is mass. Which slows travel times (because it required energy for acceleration. So, one way or the other, we're going to have to get used to long, slow trips in massive space craft. Once you've decided that you're going to go down that route, the future becomes clear : use robotic craft to put a solar-powered engine onto a medium-sized comet ; put the comet into earth or lunar orbit ; carve off chunks for shielding and reaction mass, to go off hunting more comets/ asteroids. In the interim, you've got to develop the technologies of living in a closed environment to the point that you can close the ecology for a trip of a few years, with people on board. Once you're there, technologically, sending an exploration party on a 10-year round trip to Mars is just a high-tech space-borne latter-day version of the voyage of the Beagle. (Which made Charles Darwin's scientific reputation, for those who don't get the reference.)
No, it's not a risk-free option (IIRC, a couple of the Beagles sailors died in accidents and or disease). But life isn't risk-free. Oh, and incidentally, if the Beagle-3 happens to hear of an asteroid sterilizing Earth while they're away... well, they're already equipped to last another decade or so, so they've got a good deal of time to improve their technologies.
By the time that we can do a multi-year trip to Mars (one-way or two way), we'll be good enough at living in space to not need to worry about it being a one-way or two-way trip. The biggest remaining problem would be getting a return-to-orbit craft onto the ground. And that can be done robotically, until we're confident of the technology. Hell, land three return-to-orbit craft and use them to hold down the corners of the habitat.
(To clarify - I don't "do" music. It's a waste of time. If I want something to drown out the squawking of the children on the bus, or the drone of wheel-on-tarmac, or whatever other background noise is going on, I put in an audiobook. And there's nearly no repeat market for them - once you've heard it, you've heard it. Next book please.)
Polar bears don't eat penguins. Presumably because penguins live at the south pole and polar bears live at the north pole.
At the moment... Seriously, I've been moderately astonished at not hearing anyone suggest moving a breeding population of polar bears to Antarctica and several populations of penguins to the Arctic. It might not be the best idea ever, but as something to keep a breeding population of polar bears going...
gank = steal (including life). OK, got that. Don't see the point of inventing yet another new word. Oh well, if it's still around in a century, maybe it'll have proven it's utility. The same question stands for Klingon.
Do you need me to explain what it means to put a verb between asterisks, or can you look for it yourself?
Nope, I learned that on a horrible excuse for a word processor on a Beeb-micro when I was doing my degree. it means "make the daisy-wheel printer take even longer to print out your final copy and make it even louder by over-striking the characters between the asterisks. Of course, with a print job taking 3 or 4 days to come back and give you a date to go to the printing office on the other campus, you had to be bloody careful about checking your code to make sure you'd got it right.
Kids today. They're in for a nasty surprise when they discover that world stops working properly.
I think that's probably a sensible answer to my question, but I'm not terribly sure. "Mana"? "Karma" (something different to what I've got on SlashDot, whatever that is?)? "Shallow power curve" (it's hard to stall your car, but it doesn't accelerate terribly fast?) ? "Ganking" (is it legal, in private, between consenting adults? Or doe it require too many consenting adults to be private?)
Is that English, some arcane dialect of Albanian, or mispronounced Klingon?
But linguistic puzzlement aside, you're saying to use a common commodity as a unit of currency. In ancient Egypt, a day's labour would get you the value equivalent to (say) 3 loaves of bread and a gallon of beer ; in space, you get 2 day's worth of fuel for your ship.
Sounds workable at a first glance, but unless you have dictats in the game code that only certain "[game]company code" can generate new currency, then you're going to end up back in the same problem of random players generating "money" (= fuel, or bread, or beer, or whatever you're token of value is). And you'll end up back into having 3rd-world geeks wage-slaving for first-world real currency to produce in-game value. Gold farming, again.
Problem is... if you want to have credibly real in-game physics, then you're going to have to have some things like mineable resources, or orbital hydroponics stations that take in raw material like water-CO2-ice and trace elements and sell higher value rocket fuel and food, only taking in-game effort and sunlight to do it. Which is territory for gold farming and such like evils again.
First, because the man will have probably have to wear chilled underwear all day. Testicles do not dangle in zero gee, so they reach an unusually high temperature and fertility drops considerably.
That bollocks dangle in an attempt to maintain a lower temperature than the body is true (for most but not all mammals) ; but that's because the dangling will get them away from the body and out to "hanging down/ swinging free/ oscillating merrily" (to quote an old and rude song). To demonstrate that this is an issue, you'd have to provide evidence that free-balling men have a significantly higher fertility on average than non-free-ballers. Journal, volume and page please. (It's not that I don't believe that you're probably correct ; but I do doubt that the effect is powerful. Particularly since the temperature difference between balls hanging free in space and balls hanging in a pair of trousers is not likely to be large. "Significant" is the word.)
Second, at least according to the astronaut who spoke in college years ago, most if not all of the women in space were either past menopause, or had had hysterectomies.
I've never heard this before. Citable evidence please.
That wasn't just to avoid fertility issues: according to her, menstruation upon return to earth nearly killed the first Soviet female astronaut. She kept bleeding and required extensive medical support to survive.
I've never heard this before. Citable evidence please. Further, it's decidedly implausible as discussed after your next point.
It's been years since: perhaps NASA has learned some lessons to ease the problems, but hormonal swings of any sort among very busy, very overworked astronauts is asking to waste a lot of time and a lot of taxpayer money.
Which has been managed for decades by careful application of off-the-shelf contraceptive pills, to select the time that the women in question have their periods. B a l e n t i n a _ T e r e shh o v a _ _ (isn't it time that SlashCode got it's internationalisation together?) was part of a five-strong cadre of trainee female cosmonauts, so you can bet that they'd have been manipulated to be on different cycles, if this was thought to have been of any significance. (That word again!) So I think, simply on that basis, that it's unlikely that they'd have sent a woman up who was about to have her period. Again, that's if they thought that it was likely to be significant. OK, B a l e n t i n a _ T e r e shh o v a _ _ was the first, so maybe they wouldn't have known. But if it had been a discovery, then there is likely to have been mention of it.
Would they not have known about the possibility of excessive bleeding, presumably as a result of the high G of the descent? To quote the Wikipedia page, "Training included weightless flights, isolation tests, centrifuge tests, rocket theory, spacecraft engineering, 120 parachute jumps and pilot training". So, do you seriously think that the Russian army/ air force/ paratroop forces are unaware of the consequences of multi-G loads on the delicate female anatomy at that time of the month. Being married to one Russian lady, and having worked with several others, I find the concept of them accepting (let alone asking for) some sort of special consideration for being a delicate little lady... well, I'd rather that you put your balls into that particular spike-jawed vice ; I may not particularly attached to mine, but I foresee pain as the lovely little ladies realise what you're trying to suggest. Being female and being feminine does not mean being personally soft. The implication that they might not be "the right stuff" because they'd let something like their blood chemistry get the better of their wills... I really would recommend that you choose your audience for that sort of attitude with more care.
The story doesn't fly, on several levels. Citable evidence, please.
Given that Earth is teeny weeny and space is like totally big, it would seem it requires better (by several orders of magnitude) targeting to hit Earth than to hit not-Earth.
My sense of irony would like to be told that you typed that at the bottom of Meteor Crater, Arizona, or in either the city of Sudbury, Ontario or Nordlingen, Germany. But my sense of irony is used to not getting what it wants. In case you didn't know...
Meteor Crater is a meteor crater ;
Nordlingen is in the middle of a 20-odd km diameter meteor crater of some 25 million years age (I'd have to go and read one of the fine manuals I got when I visited there to get the exact age, but like meteor Crater, it's one of the locales that Shoemaker took the Apollo astronauts to while teaching them to be something resembling geologists) ;
Sudbury is in the centre of a several hundred-km diameter impact structure of pre-Grenvillian age - over a billion years ago.
Just because getting hit by large impactors doesn't happen very often on the Earth (in the timescale of historical memory), doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. For reference, it's happened at least twice to Jupiter in my lifetime, that people have noticed. It's probable that the same is true for you.
Oh, it's an AC post. Well, having opened a Reply window, I might as well anyway.
adopt a virtual gold standard.
Why gold? It's an interesting industrial metal (second best conductor ; most malleable ; reasonably corrosion-resistant), but not tremendously rare. As a mineral, it's pretty, and it's found in the native state. But when you're asteroid mining, you're going to be feeding it all into the grinding mill anyway.
There's a historical association with whatever the "gold standard" was. So?
So, if "gold" doesn't have any particular intrinsic value that makes it suitable as a currency standard (again, whatever that means), what would you choose for a currency standard?
The neighbours kids make great fertilizer for the lawn. you just need to pulverize the bones sufficiently. The way that a fall from a great enough height would do.
I need to order 4 sets and about 3 sq.m of new turf.
It's SlashDot that owes us (it's users) an apology, not you (or any other user) owing an apology to SlashDot for trying to use it.
(I'd be slightly mollified if SlashDot's masters mentioned the need for HTML entity coding in the "Allowed HTML" footer, with examples, but this seems too multi-cultural for SlashDot's California-Basement-Dwelling Overlords.
But, as far as I understand it, our abilities at finding exoplanets are generally limited to large Jupiter-sized planets with shorter periods.
You're not wrong, but you are being too... restraining.
True, the majority of the tools that we use, at the moment, for detecting exoplanets are tools that are biased towards finding large planets in close orbits, but that is changing slowly for several reasons. Firstly, the most effective technique (so far) relies on gravity to agitate the star in the line of sight ; this is obviously biased to detecting large planets (because they have a lot of gravitational mass) ; it is less obviously biased to stars of small mass (for the same reason) ; it has an implicit bias towards close orbits because a close orbit (short orbital period) gives a lot of repetitions of the signal in a short period of observation, allowing for lots of measurements of the spectrum at different phases, between re-calibrations of the spectrometer. Improving spectrometers are addressing the mass biases ; longer epochs (duration from start of measurement series to end of series) of observation are addressing the period bias. (This technique also has an orientation bias - a brown dwarf of 14Mj in a 23 hour orbit around (say) Proxima Centauri (closest star to the solar system) which is orbiting perpendicular to the line of sight would remain invisible to this technique for a long time to come. Let's call this hypothetical end-case "Sisimen" for convenience.) Another technique that is becoming common, and is likely to unleash a flood of data in the next couple of years, is simple occultation. This has biases for a large ratio of planetary diameter to stellar diameter (to give a high ratio of occultation), short periods (lots of repeated events to stack and improve the signal-noise ratio), and orientation to line of sight (related to the ratio of occultation). Still real biases, but appreciably different to the spectrometric biases. ("Sisimen" would also remain invisible to this technique.) The same technique has been applied, with lesser sensitivity, to large clouds of stars as part of the "MACHO" observation project of the last decade or so - I wonder if they have any possible targets that the French COROT satellite telescope is slated to observe? What other techniques are in the pipeline? I can't think of any off-hand, but I haven't done any research on this, so there may be other techniques in proposal. Which will have their own biases, but which biases will be controlled and where possible adjusted to differ (in detail) from the biases of existing techniques. It is a definite aim to extended the search for exoplanets to wider areas of the "M.sin(i),P" parameter space.
These are searches taking place at the border (port of entry/exit), right? That's your probable cause. The people there fall into 4 classes - citizens vs non-citizens and incoming vs outgoing. This is your truth table :
citizen + outgoing
they're trying to get out of the country. Must have been doing something and are now trying to escape. Search them.
non-citizen + outgoing
What were they doing in the country? Search them to find out.
citizen + incoming
They've had some reason to be outside the country for some reason ; they're unpatriotic at the minimum, and have probably been doing something illegal. Search them to find out what and stop them doing it. What possible attraction could exist outside our borders, which we are keeping safe. Better taser them too to welcome them back home.
non-citizen + incoming
Illegal immigrant, or someone planning to dig up our gold-plated pavements. Taser them then search them!
Or they banks give out small card readers that the online shopper sticks their bank pass into, types in his pin and a one time code to yield a one-time key to confirm the transaction. Wait....we've already got that! In some places anyway.
Indeed - the card reader from my bank-for-online-things (the UK's CoOperative Bank http://co-operativebank.co.uk/ ) is sitting under the table here. Had it 3 months now ; still not had a reason to use it.
Of course they can - as long as they're on separate machines. I mean, which part of "company" in "company laptop" is spelt the same as the "personal" in "personal data"? Nothing. That's why they can co-exist on separate machines.
It's not very difficult.
You take your laptop with you when you travel for work, in the same way that you take your own personal sex aids and toothbrush. Work's laptop gets couriered to your destination, or travels with you in a separate bag and gets put on expenses as excess baggage as and when necessary.
Oh, you're talking about the boss buying a laptop to your specification? And that make it not a company laptop... just how?
Safety on an oil rig should not be in software. It should be mechanical. [SNIP] The same goes for all last-line safety systems. They should be 100% mechanical, uninfluenced by these unreliable, capricious devices we call computers.
Speaking as someone who's been working offshore for over 20 years now, this is exactly what the people who do this for a living think too. We also see this week's "wonderful new system" fall over and die at regular intervals. Which is why we nod our heads when the sales idiots bring out something new, tell them that we'll run it, file bug reports until it breaks, then tell them to come out and fix it. Of course, they can't come out (no certs), and they haven't described or documented the system well enough to be understood by someone who hasn't been working with it for 3 years... so it never works again.
I did write a description of why I think it's going to be decades more before there's any reasonable chance of doing these things in an automated, remote-control, manner. But why should I? In the extremely unlikely event that it's next attempt in my specialisation works to a usable degree... all that it's going to do is be used by me to stop younger, less experienced people in my profession from getting experience. Which makes my career more secure. As for the improving systems threatening my career? Well, pretty unlikely from the ones I see regularly. They all have such glaring holes that they can't be relied on without being over-seen by someone experienced. Which make me secure. And with the lower-level systems killing-off the next generation of aspirants before they get the experience to be a threat... I'm happy.
The OP didn't say "impossible" ; he said "near impossible".
It definitely could have been made a lot more intuitive since it's supposed to allow almost anyone to run a site.
Strongly agreed - I've been trying to fit "learning Joomla" into my busy schedule for around a year now, and it's almost as intuitive as picking up a mouse in one hand and using it to manipulate a pointer on a screen several feet awat from the mouse. (Note : I learned computing by putting my coding sheets into the mail and getting the paper tape back a week later, for replay on the local terminal. I've never been a fan of mice.) To be honest, I'm wondering if I should just chuck Joomla and try something different. It's not as if I've used it for anything more than trying to learn what is probably going to be an important technology, but I really doubt that Joomla is going to be anything more than a footnote of "how not to do it" when the history is written. But... more urgent things to do.
But for the 37 million people in the US who live below the poverty line, he said, 'There is real suffering.'"
... and so they die, painfully, taking their children and families with them. This terrorises their poverty-stricken friends and neighbours into begging, borrowing or stealing (or drug-dealing) to make more money so that they can afford basic health care. All is for the best in the the best of all possible worlds. Capitalism rolls on. Film at eleven. Honestly, is anyone even surprised by this? This is one of the biggest socio-economic forces in the history of the world working exactly as expected. The only reason not to point out that Marx predicted this 150 years ago is that he was trumped about 40 years earlier by Malthus. I resisted the capitalist urge to buy a second edition of Malthus a couple of weeks ago. I had a better use for the £200, and I can get it cheaper on Project Gutenberg. But I did have to resist.
1 in 1000? i think you missed a few zero's on the end of that one.
Parent had his numbers correct even before he (presumably a "he" from/. demographics, but not necessarily) went away and got more numbers. To put it in context, assuming that 1 in 1000 is correct (and there could quite easily be environmental considerations that would change the exact numbers in different regions and societies), then this sort of abnormality is broadly as common as Trisomy-21 (maternal age dependant), neural tube defects (spina bifida etc), failure to close up the gill slits (a.k.a. orofacial clefts or "cleft palates" ; at least one of those in my close family), hypospadia (your cock-hole not being at the tip of your cock). But it's less common than heart defects (around 1 in 150 live births), and more common than triplet pregnancies (around 1 in 6000, but around 1 in 2000 births).
I was about to say that it's a dangerous thing being born, but of course these figures refer to it being dangerous to be conceived and to develop. I can't be bothered acquiring figures for deaths in childbirth (both for mother and child), because it's a SEP.
Slashdot Mirror
What would you need shoes for in custody? No shoes ; no shoe size.
Sounds like my former colleague Domhnuill, except it took "D'ol" only 9 years to graduate. And he didn't have a trust fund, just the student grants. And his main trick was getting elected to full-time student organisation posts (Union President, Representative Council, etc) and only had to pull the "change faculty" stunt twice.
Eventually the university changed the rules to stop it happening again, but they couldn't change the rules that applied to him (no retroactive legislation). But he accidentally passed his finals one year and ended up in the jobs market.
I think he's in marketing these days, but he was a reasonably good technician for a few years. Even if he couldn't remember how to calibrate a chromatograph after re-building it.
Did Zelazny know D'ol ? Quite plausible.
There is significant doubt about this. An article a couple of years ago in "Geoscientist" (the house journal of the Geological Society of London - written by geologists, for geologists, not for laymen. I've just looked, and it appears the article in question predates their content going online.) posed serious questions about the quality of the data collection that leads to claims that "we've got enough coal to last centuries". The same article also applies more statistical techniques to the rather less uncertain statistics of production (Do you want to get into a discussion about the distinction between proven and probable reserves? Arcane and tedious, as well as inherently uncertain.) and produces a talking point estimate that "peak coal" may be as soon as 2030 to 2050, with reserves and production unavoidably tailing off after then.
Anyway, we're only geologists. What the fuck would we know about rocks and their mining? Let's leave it to the economists to pull a few gigatonnes of coal out of their arseholes. They can do it while pissing oil and spouting bullshit.
Valentina Tereshkova (the first female cosmonaut) is on record as saying that she'd take the one-way trip.
If I thought that something useful would come out of it, I might volunteer ("something useful" being one caveat ; details of scheduling being another). But I think it's really a false dichotomy.
No, I haven't RTFA. but I've enough respect for Lawrence Krauss to expect that he's addressed this point. Oh FSCK it, I'll just RTFA ...
Krauss makes good points, but to my mind the more significant problem is going to be that of the travelling. As Krauss says, the biggest problem is the in-flight radiation. And the only effective solution to that is mass. Which slows travel times (because it required energy for acceleration. So, one way or the other, we're going to have to get used to long, slow trips in massive space craft.
Once you've decided that you're going to go down that route, the future becomes clear : use robotic craft to put a solar-powered engine onto a medium-sized comet ; put the comet into earth or lunar orbit ; carve off chunks for shielding and reaction mass, to go off hunting more comets/ asteroids.
In the interim, you've got to develop the technologies of living in a closed environment to the point that you can close the ecology for a trip of a few years, with people on board.
Once you're there, technologically, sending an exploration party on a 10-year round trip to Mars is just a high-tech space-borne latter-day version of the voyage of the Beagle. (Which made Charles Darwin's scientific reputation, for those who don't get the reference.)
No, it's not a risk-free option (IIRC, a couple of the Beagles sailors died in accidents and or disease). But life isn't risk-free. ... well, they're already equipped to last another decade or so, so they've got a good deal of time to improve their technologies.
Oh, and incidentally, if the Beagle-3 happens to hear of an asteroid sterilizing Earth while they're away
By the time that we can do a multi-year trip to Mars (one-way or two way), we'll be good enough at living in space to not need to worry about it being a one-way or two-way trip. The biggest remaining problem would be getting a return-to-orbit craft onto the ground. And that can be done robotically, until we're confident of the technology. Hell, land three return-to-orbit craft and use them to hold down the corners of the habitat.
No.
Next question?
(To clarify - I don't "do" music. It's a waste of time. If I want something to drown out the squawking of the children on the bus, or the drone of wheel-on-tarmac, or whatever other background noise is going on, I put in an audiobook. And there's nearly no repeat market for them - once you've heard it, you've heard it. Next book please.)
At the moment ... ...
Seriously, I've been moderately astonished at not hearing anyone suggest moving a breeding population of polar bears to Antarctica and several populations of penguins to the Arctic. It might not be the best idea ever, but as something to keep a breeding population of polar bears going
gank = steal (including life). OK, got that. Don't see the point of inventing yet another new word. Oh well, if it's still around in a century, maybe it'll have proven it's utility. The same question stands for Klingon.
Nope, I learned that on a horrible excuse for a word processor on a Beeb-micro when I was doing my degree. it means "make the daisy-wheel printer take even longer to print out your final copy and make it even louder by over-striking the characters between the asterisks. Of course, with a print job taking 3 or 4 days to come back and give you a date to go to the printing office on the other campus, you had to be bloody careful about checking your code to make sure you'd got it right.
Kids today. They're in for a nasty surprise when they discover that world stops working properly.
I think that's probably a sensible answer to my question, but I'm not terribly sure.
"Mana"?
"Karma" (something different to what I've got on SlashDot, whatever that is?)?
"Shallow power curve" (it's hard to stall your car, but it doesn't accelerate terribly fast?) ?
"Ganking" (is it legal, in private, between consenting adults? Or doe it require too many consenting adults to be private?)
Is that English, some arcane dialect of Albanian, or mispronounced Klingon?
But linguistic puzzlement aside, you're saying to use a common commodity as a unit of currency. In ancient Egypt, a day's labour would get you the value equivalent to (say) 3 loaves of bread and a gallon of beer ; in space, you get 2 day's worth of fuel for your ship.
Sounds workable at a first glance, but unless you have dictats in the game code that only certain "[game]company code" can generate new currency, then you're going to end up back in the same problem of random players generating "money" (= fuel, or bread, or beer, or whatever you're token of value is). And you'll end up back into having 3rd-world geeks wage-slaving for first-world real currency to produce in-game value. Gold farming, again.
Problem is ... if you want to have credibly real in-game physics, then you're going to have to have some things like mineable resources, or orbital hydroponics stations that take in raw material like water-CO2-ice and trace elements and sell higher value rocket fuel and food, only taking in-game effort and sunlight to do it. Which is territory for gold farming and such like evils again.
Scylla & Charybdis.
You just keep on protecting the purity of your precious bodily fluids.
That bollocks dangle in an attempt to maintain a lower temperature than the body is true (for most but not all mammals) ; but that's because the dangling will get them away from the body and out to "hanging down/ swinging free/ oscillating merrily" (to quote an old and rude song).
To demonstrate that this is an issue, you'd have to provide evidence that free-balling men have a significantly higher fertility on average than non-free-ballers. Journal, volume and page please. (It's not that I don't believe that you're probably correct ; but I do doubt that the effect is powerful. Particularly since the temperature difference between balls hanging free in space and balls hanging in a pair of trousers is not likely to be large. "Significant" is the word.)
I've never heard this before. Citable evidence please.
I've never heard this before. Citable evidence please.
Further, it's decidedly implausible as discussed after your next point.
Which has been managed for decades by careful application of off-the-shelf contraceptive pills, to select the time that the women in question have their periods. B a l e n t i n a _ T e r e shh o v a _ _ (isn't it time that SlashCode got it's internationalisation together?) was part of a five-strong cadre of trainee female cosmonauts, so you can bet that they'd have been manipulated to be on different cycles, if this was thought to have been of any significance. (That word again!) So I think, simply on that basis, that it's unlikely that they'd have sent a woman up who was about to have her period.
Again, that's if they thought that it was likely to be significant. OK, B a l e n t i n a _ T e r e shh o v a _ _ was the first, so maybe they wouldn't have known. But if it had been a discovery, then there is likely to have been mention of it.
Would they not have known about the possibility of excessive bleeding, presumably as a result of the high G of the descent? To quote the Wikipedia page, "Training included weightless flights, isolation tests, centrifuge tests, rocket theory, spacecraft engineering, 120 parachute jumps and pilot training". So, do you seriously think that the Russian army/ air force/ paratroop forces are unaware of the consequences of multi-G loads on the delicate female anatomy at that time of the month. ... well, I'd rather that you put your balls into that particular spike-jawed vice ; I may not particularly attached to mine, but I foresee pain as the lovely little ladies realise what you're trying to suggest. Being female and being feminine does not mean being personally soft. The implication that they might not be "the right stuff" because they'd let something like their blood chemistry get the better of their wills ... I really would recommend that you choose your audience for that sort of attitude with more care.
Being married to one Russian lady, and having worked with several others, I find the concept of them accepting (let alone asking for) some sort of special consideration for being a delicate little lady
The story doesn't fly, on several levels. Citable evidence, please.
Sex is not symbolic?
My sense of irony would like to be told that you typed that at the bottom of Meteor Crater, Arizona, or in either the city of Sudbury, Ontario or Nordlingen, Germany. ...
But my sense of irony is used to not getting what it wants.
In case you didn't know
Just because getting hit by large impactors doesn't happen very often on the Earth (in the timescale of historical memory), doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. For reference, it's happened at least twice to Jupiter in my lifetime, that people have noticed. It's probable that the same is true for you.
Oh, it's an AC post.
Well, having opened a Reply window, I might as well anyway.
Why gold? It's an interesting industrial metal (second best conductor ; most malleable ; reasonably corrosion-resistant), but not tremendously rare. As a mineral, it's pretty, and it's found in the native state. But when you're asteroid mining, you're going to be feeding it all into the grinding mill anyway.
There's a historical association with whatever the "gold standard" was. So?
So, if "gold" doesn't have any particular intrinsic value that makes it suitable as a currency standard (again, whatever that means), what would you choose for a currency standard?
The neighbours kids make great fertilizer for the lawn. you just need to pulverize the bones sufficiently. The way that a fall from a great enough height would do.
I need to order 4 sets and about 3 sq.m of new turf.
"Damned kids, get into my lawn!"
It's SlashDot that owes us (it's users) an apology, not you (or any other user) owing an apology to SlashDot for trying to use it.
(I'd be slightly mollified if SlashDot's masters mentioned the need for HTML entity coding in the "Allowed HTML" footer, with examples, but this seems too multi-cultural for SlashDot's California-Basement-Dwelling Overlords.
You're not wrong, but you are being too ... restraining.
True, the majority of the tools that we use, at the moment, for detecting exoplanets are tools that are biased towards finding large planets in close orbits, but that is changing slowly for several reasons.
Firstly, the most effective technique (so far) relies on gravity to agitate the star in the line of sight ; this is obviously biased to detecting large planets (because they have a lot of gravitational mass) ; it is less obviously biased to stars of small mass (for the same reason) ; it has an implicit bias towards close orbits because a close orbit (short orbital period) gives a lot of repetitions of the signal in a short period of observation, allowing for lots of measurements of the spectrum at different phases, between re-calibrations of the spectrometer. Improving spectrometers are addressing the mass biases ; longer epochs (duration from start of measurement series to end of series) of observation are addressing the period bias.
(This technique also has an orientation bias - a brown dwarf of 14Mj in a 23 hour orbit around (say) Proxima Centauri (closest star to the solar system) which is orbiting perpendicular to the line of sight would remain invisible to this technique for a long time to come. Let's call this hypothetical end-case "Sisimen" for convenience.)
Another technique that is becoming common, and is likely to unleash a flood of data in the next couple of years, is simple occultation. This has biases for a large ratio of planetary diameter to stellar diameter (to give a high ratio of occultation), short periods (lots of repeated events to stack and improve the signal-noise ratio), and orientation to line of sight (related to the ratio of occultation). Still real biases, but appreciably different to the spectrometric biases.
("Sisimen" would also remain invisible to this technique.)
The same technique has been applied, with lesser sensitivity, to large clouds of stars as part of the "MACHO" observation project of the last decade or so - I wonder if they have any possible targets that the French COROT satellite telescope is slated to observe?
What other techniques are in the pipeline? I can't think of any off-hand, but I haven't done any research on this, so there may be other techniques in proposal. Which will have their own biases, but which biases will be controlled and where possible adjusted to differ (in detail) from the biases of existing techniques. It is a definite aim to extended the search for exoplanets to wider areas of the "M.sin(i),P" parameter space.
In Tycho?
I know ; I'll RTFA now.)
These are searches taking place at the border (port of entry/exit), right? That's your probable cause. The people there fall into 4 classes - citizens vs non-citizens and incoming vs outgoing. This is your truth table :
citizen + outgoing they're trying to get out of the country. Must have been doing something and are now trying to escape. Search them. non-citizen + outgoing What were they doing in the country? Search them to find out. citizen + incoming They've had some reason to be outside the country for some reason ; they're unpatriotic at the minimum, and have probably been doing something illegal. Search them to find out what and stop them doing it. What possible attraction could exist outside our borders, which we are keeping safe. Better taser them too to welcome them back home. non-citizen + incoming Illegal immigrant, or someone planning to dig up our gold-plated pavements. Taser them then search them!Cynical? Moi?
Oui!
Indeed - the card reader from my bank-for-online-things (the UK's CoOperative Bank http://co-operativebank.co.uk/ ) is sitting under the table here.
Had it 3 months now ; still not had a reason to use it.
Of course they can - as long as they're on separate machines. I mean, which part of "company" in "company laptop" is spelt the same as the "personal" in "personal data"?
Nothing.
That's why they can co-exist on separate machines.
It's not very difficult.
You take your laptop with you when you travel for work, in the same way that you take your own personal sex aids and toothbrush. Work's laptop gets couriered to your destination, or travels with you in a separate bag and gets put on expenses as excess baggage as and when necessary.
Oh, you're talking about the boss buying a laptop to your specification? And that make it not a company laptop ... just how?
Speaking as someone who's been working offshore for over 20 years now, this is exactly what the people who do this for a living think too. ... so it never works again.
We also see this week's "wonderful new system" fall over and die at regular intervals. Which is why we nod our heads when the sales idiots bring out something new, tell them that we'll run it, file bug reports until it breaks, then tell them to come out and fix it. Of course, they can't come out (no certs), and they haven't described or documented the system well enough to be understood by someone who hasn't been working with it for 3 years
I did write a description of why I think it's going to be decades more before there's any reasonable chance of doing these things in an automated, remote-control, manner. But why should I? In the extremely unlikely event that it's next attempt in my specialisation works to a usable degree ... all that it's going to do is be used by me to stop younger, less experienced people in my profession from getting experience. Which makes my career more secure. ... I'm happy.
As for the improving systems threatening my career? Well, pretty unlikely from the ones I see regularly. They all have such glaring holes that they can't be relied on without being over-seen by someone experienced. Which make me secure. And with the lower-level systems killing-off the next generation of aspirants before they get the experience to be a threat
Then you take out the people who hire the botnets etc .... most of whom are probably in the States.
Oh.
... and so they die, painfully, taking their children and families with them. This terrorises their poverty-stricken friends and neighbours into begging, borrowing or stealing (or drug-dealing) to make more money so that they can afford basic health care. All is for the best in the the best of all possible worlds. Capitalism rolls on.
Film at eleven.
Honestly, is anyone even surprised by this? This is one of the biggest socio-economic forces in the history of the world working exactly as expected. The only reason not to point out that Marx predicted this 150 years ago is that he was trumped about 40 years earlier by Malthus.
I resisted the capitalist urge to buy a second edition of Malthus a couple of weeks ago. I had a better use for the £200, and I can get it cheaper on Project Gutenberg. But I did have to resist.
Parent had his numbers correct even before he (presumably a "he" from /. demographics, but not necessarily) went away and got more numbers.
To put it in context, assuming that 1 in 1000 is correct (and there could quite easily be environmental considerations that would change the exact numbers in different regions and societies), then this sort of abnormality is broadly as common as Trisomy-21 (maternal age dependant), neural tube defects (spina bifida etc), failure to close up the gill slits (a.k.a. orofacial clefts or "cleft palates" ; at least one of those in my close family), hypospadia (your cock-hole not being at the tip of your cock). But it's less common than heart defects (around 1 in 150 live births), and more common than triplet pregnancies (around 1 in 6000, but around 1 in 2000 births).
I was about to say that it's a dangerous thing being born, but of course these figures refer to it being dangerous to be conceived and to develop. I can't be bothered acquiring figures for deaths in childbirth (both for mother and child), because it's a SEP.