The ribbon is fine, it takes 5 mins to pick up unless you have a learning disability or a brain dead MS hater.
Bullshit. It took me a lot longer than 5 minutes to fail to find the essential facilities that I needed. So I copied Portable-OO.org off my memory stick onto Work's laptop and got on with doing my morning report with that. 5 minutes is far more time than you can afford to waste when the deadline for posting the complete-to-06:00-report is 40 minutes away.
The Boss refuses to pay for my time to be taught this new program. I'll use it after I've been trained to use it. So every one of Work's laptops which gets put onto a job with me acquires OO.org as it's default.DOC handler (.DOCX,.XLS,.XLSX, etc) ; since we don't buy MS-Orifice Pro, we also need a.PPT reader in any case and OO.org Impress does that whenever the situation arises.
People at Work do ask me how the various time-saving macros I've got work, so I show them. Then they ask me to translate them to function with MS-Orifice and I tell them to tell the Boss to pay for me to be trained to use Orifice and then they get all stroppy. "Tough", say I. I refuse to spend my time learning something that is not of use to me. If Work want me to do something, they can damned well pay me to do that. It's in the nature of the concept "employment".
All governments should adopt open source policies, regardless of what software they choose exactly, and there is no question about that AT ALL. You don't have a zillion different branches of your government each pay $$$$$ for closed source software, that's just lame beyond belief. You instead pay money to developers to either make something, or improve upon existing software
Being a pedant, this isn't necessarily true. Once your government (and by implication the population it serves and that population's GNP) reaches a certain size, then it would become cost effective to "roll your own", but smaller governments would be better served by using either COTS software or by hiring in consultants. In the limiting case, your atoll of NeckDeep, population 25, would not be best served by the chief/ Head of State/ Speaker/ President and sole MP (also the leader of the Loyal Opposition and chief anti-governmental gadfly) also having to become an OS developer in order to word-process his next poster advertising a consultation to be held at this evening's pig roast. Oh, and he'd have to become a CUPS developer in order to run off the 25 copies. (24 copies? Oh, one for the archives too.) ISTR there was a fluff a year or so back about Iceland's governmental IT policy - can't remember which way it was going -; with a population of 320,000, one has to wonder what size of developer ecosystem their government can afford to maintain.
The question is does it detect active ingredients instead of metabolites? For example cannabis can test positive even several days (or weeks) after consumption.
According to the "Proceedings" of a NATO gas chromatography workshop that I read back in the mid-1980s, the state of the art then was cannabis detection after months and identification (of quality, and plausibly origin) several weeks after consumption. (No, I don't have copies of the papers any more - they went years ago when clearing the flat for a move.
My rigid plastic lenses eventually develop small scratches no matter how careful you are.
Ditto - my first pair of plastic-lens glasses were significantly scratched within 5 years. Which is why I've never brought another pair of plastic-lens glasses. When I hear that their lifetime comes up to my (sorry!) scratch, then I'll start the decade-long countdown to starting to consider getting a pair.
But then I have natural wit and charm, a willingness to admit I slacked off at university, plus I did computer science. Little miss entitlement got a "Bachelor of Business Administration" in "IT". What the hell does that even mean?
It's a license to tell other people how they should be serving the fries^H^H^H^H^H^H chips at their counter. Sorry, "cow-orkers", not "people".
Old joke : she doesn't need to be nice to people on her way up... because she's going nowhere but down. And I'd probably put a dental gag in her mouth before letting her pursue that line of thought to it's obvious conclusion.
Older joke : prostitution isn't the oldest profession - flint knapping is.
Indeed Wikipedia says that "The ability to store and execute lists of instructions called programs makes computers extremely versatile, distinguishing them from calculators."
That is one meaning of the sequence of letters that make up the word "computer" ; another, utterly valid, meaning of that same word is "a human who specialises in carrying out computations without any deep understanding of the meaning of the calculations. That definition of that meaning of "computer" is correct, but it is not the only meaning associated with that symbol. Wikipedia is perhaps not the appropriate "authority" to cite in this discussion, and Wiktionary might be better, though I see that it's range of definitions is similarly lacking.
Wiki[n]s are great, but they do tend to have biases like this. If I didn't have a lawn waving it's arms at me, I'd think about how to improve this. The article you cite doesn't really have a good grasp of the range of meaning that's associated with the word.
With that argument, PDFs would be the thing to die, not MS Word.
PDFs have very important non-printing uses. The thing that makes them (relatively) good for printing (consistent placement of a variety of page elements with respect to each other) remains useful even outside the printed context. I use them frequently at work despite the terrible limitation the Adobe have arbitrarily imposed of constraining a page to have a maximum dimension of 200in. (We often have to work with document "pages" that need to be in the region of 400in, and world-record matching work in my field would imply single-page documents exceeding 1000in maximum dimension. This is a problem, but we can live with it for the ubiquity benefits from using PDF as a document distribution format. For actually working on the source documents - the cost starts around £15k/seat +£2k/year/seat and your system hardware will dictate your limitations. I still haven't found the limits on Win2K/256MB systems, and I've not looked on newer systems.) The ubiquity of PDF reading tools for reading/ displaying documents is not to be sneezed at. Adobe know this (which is why there are commenting and annotating tools and APIs for doing these tasks on PDFs ; the "yellow highlighter" icon is very apt) ; OpenOffice.Org know this (which is why they can read Word documents, and do it well). Ubiquity is very useful.
Just suppose the whole thing is some grad student's artificial life project that got away.
Given that the system involves a number of well-established viral (sense : computing) techniques, then that itself is pretty unlikely. But if the system continues to replicate in the wild and without the guiding hand of a god (or the human on the other end of the C+C channel ; same thing), then it's a safe bet that it's going to become the object of a lot of artificial-life research.
IIRC, the HIV virus really isn't that hardy outside of a host -
True again ; in fact, more true than most people realise. A significant change in pH (see stomach discussion later) or temperature is generally sufficient to kill the virus (or render it incapable of completing it's life cycle, which is effectively the same thing. Remember the old ha-ha-but-serious joke about a chicken being an egg's way of making another egg ; but if the egg never develops into another chicken, then the egg might as well be dead).
cooking the meat likely would have eliminated the infection
The process of killing the infected host will cool it to below the temperature at which the virus can remain infectious. As the circulation stops, the cells continue to respire and produce CO2 and thus lower the pH. Then, in the butchery the bulk of the blood is lost while oxygen is introduced, reducing the CO2 content of the flesh and raising the pH again. The start of decay involves the production of acids that tenderise the meat - the same reason that you use wine or wine vinegar to marinade your steak - with further lowering of the pH. By the time the meat gets is ready to go into the cook pot, it's not likely to be a HIV infection threat - though it may be riddled with other pathogens. (I had to debunk a victim of one of those "oxygen therapy" scams recently ; haven't seen him for a month or so, but I hope that he's done a bit more research on this idiocy and decided to not get involved in the pyramid scheme.)
(and again, IIRC, HIV can generally only be caught orally through and open sore or such in the mouth - it won't survive the conditions in the stomach to infect the host)
Saliva contains significant (though uncharacterised) antiseptic components, which only makes evolutionary sense if you think about it. Again, even taking a fresh mouth full of creamy spunk, little if any viable virus survives to make it to the stomach. Really, you need to have an open sore in your mouth and get a blob of spunk right onto it to have a good chance of acquiring an infection orally. The blunt experience of the older whores in the Bois du Bolougne (sp?) is that the ones who swallow have a significantly lower attrition rate compared to the ones who take creampie up the arse (or pussy, for those who have one or a simulacrum). But that's old news - people knew that in the mid-1980s. It's not sexy science, but the epidemiologists have unimpeachable evidence of who does and doesn't die. It's also not a message that sits well with the "every sperm is sacred" and "sex is for god" schools of "thought". Which is their problem, not reality's problem.
Can't imagine. I remember reading this book back in the 1970s that sounded eerily like this. Some guy... Nene or Ouse or Orwell or some East Anglian river, "1948" or "2001" or "2010" or one of those 4-digit names? It's on the tip of my tongue. Like a rat.
Both are computational tools - one is more advanced, simpler to operate but more restricted, than the other.
Logically you are correct. There is no logical distinction between (for example) Wossname's 1000-odd-strong Beowulf cluster for playing a fair amateur strength of Go and performing the same computation using a Maxwellian demon and a couple of billion atoms of hydrogen for working memory. Both, being physical devices for assisting with a computation, are computers. However, this then leaves the concept "analogue computer" as an utterly useless concept since there is no way to not argue that a pile of used condoms isn't actually an analogue computer. One of the important uses of terminology is to distinguish between significantly different classes of object. I, for example, deliberately take mild umbrage at people who talk about the "extinction of the dinosaurs", because to me, dinosaurs are not extinct. I've just looked out of the window to see a Lesser Black-Backed dinosaur sitting on top of a street lamp and shitting on my car. I'm deliberately using (most) people's (generally) poor understanding of phylogenetics to stimulate a discussion about an interesting part of the evolution of present-day life on Earth. The distinction I describe between dinosaurs and non-dinosaurs is technically defensible and deliberately challenges many people's understanding of the relatedness of organisms. In contrast, the way that you want to use the term "analogue computer" shows there to be no logical distinction between a cloud of hydrogen molecules combined with a valve, a stick combined with a beach, dozens of precisely machined gears combined with several support plates, and Pascal's Trisector (as Cundy & Rollett describe it ; Wikipedia has it as a geometrical theorem which can be realised as a linkage ; linkages are machines).
I'm not up to the century (maybe not even the current millennium) on the terminology of philosophical and rhetorical classification ; I think your meaning of the term "analogue computer" may be more usefully studied by asking what is it about your stick and beach or cloud of hydrogen atoms that makes them particularly designed for the problem of planetary motion (as the Antikythera Mechanism seems to be) or the trisection of angles (as Pascal's Trisector is). Were I to present you with two sticks and two beaches and assert to you the one is an analogue computer designed for the planetary motion problem, and the other an analogue computer for trisecting angles with... how could you tell the difference. Here I think we may have the crux. An analogue computer is not a general purpose computer - it's a computer designed for a particular task and which embodies that task within it's structure ; until recently the only general purpose computers were the stick and the beach (or their technological derivatives).
No, seriously, I'm not a troll. I want verification that this was done.
And a screenshot is verification? No, seriously - do you think that a screenshot would be verification? If I cared sufficiently, I could cook up a pixel-perfect screenshot of Amazon refunding me £17 million pounds in compensation for a burst condom and the consequential damages. (I don't know if Amazon sell condoms, but that's not relevant to the proposed fakery.)
Are you one of those people who think that PDF files can't be altered? It's hard to alter them, but by no means impossible.
Sounds exactly like a stick in sand is an analogue computer.
You could make a description like that, but you'd be missing the point (deliberately, I suspect). The stick and sand "analogue computer" you describe depends entirely on the software in the stick-user, who must not only understand what the problem is ("I want to know what the positions of the planets was/ will be on such-and-such a date"), but also all details of how to solve the problem. Without the user having both of these software packages installed, the stick-and-sand "analogue computer" is unable to compute the solution. In contrast, the hardware of the Antikythera mechanism embodies a method of solution, so that it's user only needs to understand the problem and how to enter it into the computer, but not the detailed method of solution.
Hum. My english level is not good enough for me to take such a stance.
The original poster was making a joke. Your use of "prolific" was correct, since it means "someone who has done a lot of [whatever]". I couldn't comment on the quality of Clive Custler's writing ; I don't recall having read any of his books. But I do see lots of them cluttering up the bookshops, so he's undoubtedly a prolific author.
got in the next day to find his desk cleared and the HR waiting where to tell him he was being sacked.
In the HRM department, "HRM" means "Human Resources Management" ; in the rest of the company and behind HRM's back "HRM means "Human Remains Mangling". We're trying to work out how to track the HRM people through the building, so that we know where those dangerous offensive fuckers are ; maybe we can force them to wear offender-tracking tags? Already the people who share an office with them have taken to disabling the speaker-phones on their desks and being very careful how they phrase their side of a conversation. But still the Manglers get their bloody oars involved in things that don't concern them.
The company has survived over 20 years and 5 slumps without HRM ; now there are manglers and many of the more experienced staff (we're in a trade where long experience is essential) are considering leaving. The appearence of HRM is a sign of a company that's folding. Shame, it's been a nice 20 years, but perhaps it's time to join the competition.
Actually I made a rather sarcastic comment on the relationship between the present state of America and the intentions of it's "Founding Fathers". I take it from your comment that you are of the opinion that the current state of American society and jurisprudence is exactly in accord with the intentions of their Founding Fathers.
I believe that there is a word "parody" in the language which we seem to be sharing. You might want to look up it's meaning. It's in the dictionary between "parachute" and "parrot" but it's not about in-flight safety devices for dinosaurs.
You also made yourself sound like a tyrannical would-be vigilante who obsesses about "punishing the wicked" with no regard to the actual effects on society.
If you knew me (which you don't) you'd realise how hilariously wrong you are. You are right about one thing - I really don't give a shit about what's happening to American society - since it's not one I live in and I have no intention of returning there. but that doesn't make them any the less dangerous to the rest of the world - the McKinnon case is just today's example of that.
But in North America, there is a history of offering the phone and the service as a bundle, and consumers don't expect this to change.
... So, there is no technical reason for this to be a problem. Nothing built into GSM. So, it's a non-story outside America. (I'm not too clear on whether or not America uses GSM - I'd thought they did, but I also see CDMA being mentioned upthread so I'm not so sure now.)
I recall back in the old days of analogue phones that there was bundling of phone and contract, but that's been dead for years now.
No one has reasonably suggested that there is a nutritional difference between organically grown food and conventionally grown food.
While this is true, it is also undoubtedly true that many, many people have irresponsibly suggested that there is a significant nutritional difference between organically-grown food and conventionally-grown food. Both media pundits, farmers, horticulturalists and members of the general public have made this claim, in my hearing, and almost always when I've asked them to be more precise about their claims, they have shown an appalling lack of know;edge about human physiology, nutrition, chemistry and even maths and/or physics. (you can tell that I take the view that physiology is complex chemistry, and that chemistry is predictable by physics even if the maths is more complex than most people can handle.
Such claims may not be formally supportable, but they are often made, and made very vocally, by people who frankly do not know what the fuck they are talking about. And yes, Big-Ears, I am talking to you (that's a not-very-affectionate Anglicism referring to our fuck-wit of a heir presumptive to the throne.).
The proper questions are: (1) is organic farming more sustainable? (2) does the elimination of chemical pesticides lead to better health?
These are good and important questions, but they're not the only questions that can be, or even should be asked. And they're not the questions that were being asked of the people who wrote the report.
"That it is better 100 (guilty) innocent Persons should (escape) suffer than that one (innocent) guilty Person should (suffer) escape, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved."
There, fixed that for you. I don't know, it's shocking some of the heretical thoughts that some of the liberal colonials come up with. We really shouldn't have stopped hanging, drawing and quartering seditioners.
That's a marketing department, not a heart. One is a fist-sized mass of complexly arranged muscles and nerves ; the other is a large building filled with overpaid shit-for-brains with the communal ethics of a pile of fetid dingos kidneys.
Please elaborate - that's an article about "economics and social sciences" while I read the original request as looking for a technical reason. Or are you saying that there is no technical reason for jailbreaking to actually be a problem (which is what I'd have expected).
I have trouble believing that's all rocket plume up there...
There used to be a perception that SlashDot had a scientifically and/or technically literate readership - I'll bet that's what they tell the advertisers anyway. So don't believe, work the numbers. Given - a shuttle is worth 300 tonnes of water ; altitude is 115km ; a cirrus cloud is 0.002 g/m^3 water (from http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap08/moist_cloud.html ) ; pressure at that altitude is about 2 Pa (estimate from the 71km figure in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_pressure#Altitude_atmospheric_pressure_variation , which broadly agrees with http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/air-altitude-pressure-d_462.html). So, (actually, do I need to look at the atmospheric pressure? Not for a first approximation.) 300 tonnes of water would make a cloud of 300x1000x1000 (tonnes -> g) / 0.002 (g/m^3 -> m^3) = 150000000000 m^3 which equates (broadly) to a 3300 m radius sphere. A sphere of 3.3km radius at 115km range would subtend an angle of 0.028 radians or 1.6 degrees. That's about the size of a thumb at arms length, or very easily visible. Including atmospheric pressure in the estimate would (I think) increase the apparent size of the cloud, as would the fact that the cloud is irregular and sheeted.
Sheesh - don't schools teach kids how to do a back-of-a-fag-packet calculation any more?
Slashdot Mirror
Bullshit. .DOC handler (.DOCX, .XLS, .XLSX, etc) ; since we don't buy MS-Orifice Pro, we also need a .PPT reader in any case and OO.org Impress does that whenever the situation arises.
It took me a lot longer than 5 minutes to fail to find the essential facilities that I needed. So I copied Portable-OO.org off my memory stick onto Work's laptop and got on with doing my morning report with that. 5 minutes is far more time than you can afford to waste when the deadline for posting the complete-to-06:00-report is 40 minutes away.
The Boss refuses to pay for my time to be taught this new program. I'll use it after I've been trained to use it. So every one of Work's laptops which gets put onto a job with me acquires OO.org as it's default
People at Work do ask me how the various time-saving macros I've got work, so I show them. Then they ask me to translate them to function with MS-Orifice and I tell them to tell the Boss to pay for me to be trained to use Orifice and then they get all stroppy. "Tough", say I. I refuse to spend my time learning something that is not of use to me. If Work want me to do something, they can damned well pay me to do that. It's in the nature of the concept "employment".
Being a pedant, this isn't necessarily true. Once your government (and by implication the population it serves and that population's GNP) reaches a certain size, then it would become cost effective to "roll your own", but smaller governments would be better served by using either COTS software or by hiring in consultants. In the limiting case, your atoll of NeckDeep, population 25, would not be best served by the chief/ Head of State/ Speaker/ President and sole MP (also the leader of the Loyal Opposition and chief anti-governmental gadfly) also having to become an OS developer in order to word-process his next poster advertising a consultation to be held at this evening's pig roast. Oh, and he'd have to become a CUPS developer in order to run off the 25 copies. (24 copies? Oh, one for the archives too.)
ISTR there was a fluff a year or so back about Iceland's governmental IT policy - can't remember which way it was going -; with a population of 320,000, one has to wonder what size of developer ecosystem their government can afford to maintain.
According to the "Proceedings" of a NATO gas chromatography workshop that I read back in the mid-1980s, the state of the art then was cannabis detection after months and identification (of quality, and plausibly origin) several weeks after consumption. (No, I don't have copies of the papers any more - they went years ago when clearing the flat for a move.
Ditto - my first pair of plastic-lens glasses were significantly scratched within 5 years. Which is why I've never brought another pair of plastic-lens glasses. When I hear that their lifetime comes up to my (sorry!) scratch, then I'll start the decade-long countdown to starting to consider getting a pair.
It's a license to tell other people how they should be serving the fries^H^H^H^H^H^H chips at their counter. Sorry, "cow-orkers", not "people".
Old joke : she doesn't need to be nice to people on her way up ... because she's going nowhere but down. And I'd probably put a dental gag in her mouth before letting her pursue that line of thought to it's obvious conclusion.
Older joke : prostitution isn't the oldest profession - flint knapping is.
That is one meaning of the sequence of letters that make up the word "computer" ; another, utterly valid, meaning of that same word is "a human who specialises in carrying out computations without any deep understanding of the meaning of the calculations. That definition of that meaning of "computer" is correct, but it is not the only meaning associated with that symbol. Wikipedia is perhaps not the appropriate "authority" to cite in this discussion, and Wiktionary might be better, though I see that it's range of definitions is similarly lacking.
Wiki[n]s are great, but they do tend to have biases like this. If I didn't have a lawn waving it's arms at me, I'd think about how to improve this. The article you cite doesn't really have a good grasp of the range of meaning that's associated with the word.
PDFs have very important non-printing uses. The thing that makes them (relatively) good for printing (consistent placement of a variety of page elements with respect to each other) remains useful even outside the printed context. I use them frequently at work despite the terrible limitation the Adobe have arbitrarily imposed of constraining a page to have a maximum dimension of 200in. (We often have to work with document "pages" that need to be in the region of 400in, and world-record matching work in my field would imply single-page documents exceeding 1000in maximum dimension. This is a problem, but we can live with it for the ubiquity benefits from using PDF as a document distribution format. For actually working on the source documents - the cost starts around £15k/seat +£2k/year/seat and your system hardware will dictate your limitations. I still haven't found the limits on Win2K/256MB systems, and I've not looked on newer systems.)
The ubiquity of PDF reading tools for reading/ displaying documents is not to be sneezed at. Adobe know this (which is why there are commenting and annotating tools and APIs for doing these tasks on PDFs ; the "yellow highlighter" icon is very apt) ; OpenOffice.Org know this (which is why they can read Word documents, and do it well). Ubiquity is very useful.
No, I haven't RTFA. Yet. I'm about to.
Given that the system involves a number of well-established viral (sense : computing) techniques, then that itself is pretty unlikely. But if the system continues to replicate in the wild and without the guiding hand of a god (or the human on the other end of the C+C channel ; same thing), then it's a safe bet that it's going to become the object of a lot of artificial-life research.
True,
True again ; in fact, more true than most people realise. A significant change in pH (see stomach discussion later) or temperature is generally sufficient to kill the virus (or render it incapable of completing it's life cycle, which is effectively the same thing. Remember the old ha-ha-but-serious joke about a chicken being an egg's way of making another egg ; but if the egg never develops into another chicken, then the egg might as well be dead).
The process of killing the infected host will cool it to below the temperature at which the virus can remain infectious. As the circulation stops, the cells continue to respire and produce CO2 and thus lower the pH. Then, in the butchery the bulk of the blood is lost while oxygen is introduced, reducing the CO2 content of the flesh and raising the pH again. The start of decay involves the production of acids that tenderise the meat - the same reason that you use wine or wine vinegar to marinade your steak - with further lowering of the pH.
By the time the meat gets is ready to go into the cook pot, it's not likely to be a HIV infection threat - though it may be riddled with other pathogens. (I had to debunk a victim of one of those "oxygen therapy" scams recently ; haven't seen him for a month or so, but I hope that he's done a bit more research on this idiocy and decided to not get involved in the pyramid scheme.)
Saliva contains significant (though uncharacterised) antiseptic components, which only makes evolutionary sense if you think about it. Again, even taking a fresh mouth full of creamy spunk, little if any viable virus survives to make it to the stomach. Really, you need to have an open sore in your mouth and get a blob of spunk right onto it to have a good chance of acquiring an infection orally. The blunt experience of the older whores in the Bois du Bolougne (sp?) is that the ones who swallow have a significantly lower attrition rate compared to the ones who take creampie up the arse (or pussy, for those who have one or a simulacrum).
But that's old news - people knew that in the mid-1980s. It's not sexy science, but the epidemiologists have unimpeachable evidence of who does and doesn't die. It's also not a message that sits well with the "every sperm is sacred" and "sex is for god" schools of "thought". Which is their problem, not reality's problem.
Can't imagine. I remember reading this book back in the 1970s that sounded eerily like this. Some guy ... Nene or Ouse or Orwell or some East Anglian river, "1948" or "2001" or "2010" or one of those 4-digit names? It's on the tip of my tongue. Like a rat.
Logically you are correct. There is no logical distinction between (for example) Wossname's 1000-odd-strong Beowulf cluster for playing a fair amateur strength of Go and performing the same computation using a Maxwellian demon and a couple of billion atoms of hydrogen for working memory. Both, being physical devices for assisting with a computation, are computers. However, this then leaves the concept "analogue computer" as an utterly useless concept since there is no way to not argue that a pile of used condoms isn't actually an analogue computer.
One of the important uses of terminology is to distinguish between significantly different classes of object. I, for example, deliberately take mild umbrage at people who talk about the "extinction of the dinosaurs", because to me, dinosaurs are not extinct. I've just looked out of the window to see a Lesser Black-Backed dinosaur sitting on top of a street lamp and shitting on my car. I'm deliberately using (most) people's (generally) poor understanding of phylogenetics to stimulate a discussion about an interesting part of the evolution of present-day life on Earth. The distinction I describe between dinosaurs and non-dinosaurs is technically defensible and deliberately challenges many people's understanding of the relatedness of organisms.
In contrast, the way that you want to use the term "analogue computer" shows there to be no logical distinction between a cloud of hydrogen molecules combined with a valve, a stick combined with a beach, dozens of precisely machined gears combined with several support plates, and Pascal's Trisector (as Cundy & Rollett describe it ; Wikipedia has it as a geometrical theorem which can be realised as a linkage ; linkages are machines).
I'm not up to the century (maybe not even the current millennium) on the terminology of philosophical and rhetorical classification ; I think your meaning of the term "analogue computer" may be more usefully studied by asking what is it about your stick and beach or cloud of hydrogen atoms that makes them particularly designed for the problem of planetary motion (as the Antikythera Mechanism seems to be) or the trisection of angles (as Pascal's Trisector is). Were I to present you with two sticks and two beaches and assert to you the one is an analogue computer designed for the planetary motion problem, and the other an analogue computer for trisecting angles with ... how could you tell the difference. Here I think we may have the crux. An analogue computer is not a general purpose computer - it's a computer designed for a particular task and which embodies that task within it's structure ; until recently the only general purpose computers were the stick and the beach (or their technological derivatives).
HERETIC!
Burn the heretic!
Kill! Burn!
Oh, you wanted a reasoned argument. Sorry, this is SlashDot.
And a screenshot is verification? No, seriously - do you think that a screenshot would be verification? If I cared sufficiently, I could cook up a pixel-perfect screenshot of Amazon refunding me £17 million pounds in compensation for a burst condom and the consequential damages. (I don't know if Amazon sell condoms, but that's not relevant to the proposed fakery.)
Are you one of those people who think that PDF files can't be altered? It's hard to alter them, but by no means impossible.
You could make a description like that, but you'd be missing the point (deliberately, I suspect). The stick and sand "analogue computer" you describe depends entirely on the software in the stick-user, who must not only understand what the problem is ("I want to know what the positions of the planets was/ will be on such-and-such a date"), but also all details of how to solve the problem. Without the user having both of these software packages installed, the stick-and-sand "analogue computer" is unable to compute the solution.
In contrast, the hardware of the Antikythera mechanism embodies a method of solution, so that it's user only needs to understand the problem and how to enter it into the computer, but not the detailed method of solution.
The original poster was making a joke. Your use of "prolific" was correct, since it means "someone who has done a lot of [whatever]".
I couldn't comment on the quality of Clive Custler's writing ; I don't recall having read any of his books. But I do see lots of them cluttering up the bookshops, so he's undoubtedly a prolific author.
In the HRM department, "HRM" means "Human Resources Management" ; in the rest of the company and behind HRM's back "HRM means "Human Remains Mangling". We're trying to work out how to track the HRM people through the building, so that we know where those dangerous offensive fuckers are ; maybe we can force them to wear offender-tracking tags? Already the people who share an office with them have taken to disabling the speaker-phones on their desks and being very careful how they phrase their side of a conversation. But still the Manglers get their bloody oars involved in things that don't concern them.
The company has survived over 20 years and 5 slumps without HRM ; now there are manglers and many of the more experienced staff (we're in a trade where long experience is essential) are considering leaving.
The appearence of HRM is a sign of a company that's folding. Shame, it's been a nice 20 years, but perhaps it's time to join the competition.
Actually I made a rather sarcastic comment on the relationship between the present state of America and the intentions of it's "Founding Fathers". I take it from your comment that you are of the opinion that the current state of American society and jurisprudence is exactly in accord with the intentions of their Founding Fathers.
I believe that there is a word "parody" in the language which we seem to be sharing. You might want to look up it's meaning. It's in the dictionary between "parachute" and "parrot" but it's not about in-flight safety devices for dinosaurs.
If you knew me (which you don't) you'd realise how hilariously wrong you are. You are right about one thing - I really don't give a shit about what's happening to American society - since it's not one I live in and I have no intention of returning there. but that doesn't make them any the less dangerous to the rest of the world - the McKinnon case is just today's example of that.
I recall back in the old days of analogue phones that there was bundling of phone and contract, but that's been dead for years now.
While this is true, it is also undoubtedly true that many, many people have irresponsibly suggested that there is a significant nutritional difference between organically-grown food and conventionally-grown food. Both media pundits, farmers, horticulturalists and members of the general public have made this claim, in my hearing, and almost always when I've asked them to be more precise about their claims, they have shown an appalling lack of know;edge about human physiology, nutrition, chemistry and even maths and/or physics. (you can tell that I take the view that physiology is complex chemistry, and that chemistry is predictable by physics even if the maths is more complex than most people can handle.
Such claims may not be formally supportable, but they are often made, and made very vocally, by people who frankly do not know what the fuck they are talking about. And yes, Big-Ears, I am talking to you (that's a not-very-affectionate Anglicism referring to our fuck-wit of a heir presumptive to the throne.).
These are good and important questions, but they're not the only questions that can be, or even should be asked. And they're not the questions that were being asked of the people who wrote the report.
"That it is better 100 (guilty) innocent Persons should (escape) suffer than that one (innocent) guilty Person should (suffer) escape, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved."
There, fixed that for you.
I don't know, it's shocking some of the heretical thoughts that some of the liberal colonials come up with. We really shouldn't have stopped hanging, drawing and quartering seditioners.
That's a marketing department, not a heart. One is a fist-sized mass of complexly arranged muscles and nerves ; the other is a large building filled with overpaid shit-for-brains with the communal ethics of a pile of fetid dingos kidneys.
Can't you just hang, draw and quarter them as an expression of traditional American respect for dissenting opinion and tea parties?
Please elaborate - that's an article about "economics and social sciences" while I read the original request as looking for a technical reason. Or are you saying that there is no technical reason for jailbreaking to actually be a problem (which is what I'd have expected).
Granted. Well, pretty big.
There used to be a perception that SlashDot had a scientifically and/or technically literate readership - I'll bet that's what they tell the advertisers anyway. So don't believe, work the numbers.
Given - a shuttle is worth 300 tonnes of water ; altitude is 115km ; a cirrus cloud is 0.002 g/m^3 water (from http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap08/moist_cloud.html ) ; pressure at that altitude is about 2 Pa (estimate from the 71km figure in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_pressure#Altitude_atmospheric_pressure_variation , which broadly agrees with http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/air-altitude-pressure-d_462.html).
So, (actually, do I need to look at the atmospheric pressure? Not for a first approximation.) 300 tonnes of water would make a cloud of 300x1000x1000 (tonnes -> g) / 0.002 (g/m^3 -> m^3) = 150000000000 m^3 which equates (broadly) to a 3300 m radius sphere. A sphere of 3.3km radius at 115km range would subtend an angle of 0.028 radians or 1.6 degrees.
That's about the size of a thumb at arms length, or very easily visible. Including atmospheric pressure in the estimate would (I think) increase the apparent size of the cloud, as would the fact that the cloud is irregular and sheeted.
Sheesh - don't schools teach kids how to do a back-of-a-fag-packet calculation any more?