I don't know for Danish but I find Norwegian or Icelandic souding incredibly beautiful. Some kind of bird language. Unfortunately I don't understand either language.
Then you need to get yourself a bird!
(Sorry, cheap shot. But this is SlashDot, where being an unwashed social incompetent virgin is almost a social necessity. In the event that you're not a confident English speaker, "bird" is a common British English slang for the female of the species. What Americans would often talk of as a "chick". And for what it's worth I find Norwegian quite grating - probably because I can catch part-words and phrases which I can almost understand. One of these days I'll have to learn some - probably by the simple expedient of working in a Norwegian workplace.)
Won't adding a provision to the GPL specifically about Windows violate the non-discrimination requirement?
What "non-discrimination requirement"?
No, seriously, what?
I don't recall having seen anything like that in GPL v2 (which I did read carefully) nor GPL v3 (which I've only skimmed through).
What would you non-discriminate against? Would you propose for example that any GPL'd device drivers for a novel PCI-X graphics card be required (in a non-discriminatory way) to compile and install for PDP-11 architecture? (The PDP is not chosen at random ; it could run some linuxes, even with the magnificent 128MB of core memory that mine had. Allegedly.)
Exactly. I have to wonder what kind of a cretin modded you down for saying this.
Probably some retard who thinks that anything posted on Facebook (or any other "social networking" site in the universe, or indeed any other website in the universe) is in any way, shape or form private.
Don't worry, there are a lot of them about. Evolution will get them out of the genepool eventually, if only by starving their children into reduced fertility.
Ah well. Makes my heart hurt, remembering how it all got burned down by a handful of idiots who didn't recognize what they had there.
That very sentiment probably kept thousands of subscribers there for months after they really should have gone. I know that it contributed to my reluctance to leave.
Didn't Rincewind think something similar, as the smoke from Ankh Morpork swept across the cabbage-scented Sto Plains? So we can blame Pterry for giving AOL the idea?
The first Redneck Games was held in 1996 as a spoof on the Olympics which were held in Atlanta that year.
Spoofed? Is it possible to spoof the Olympics. Or at least, any better than they spoof themselves. At least they're trying to approach the dress codes of the original sportsmen. That's the only trend worth watching.
Err... and what is "death metal" if not "white noise"?
"White noise" for the deaf of hearing? Or should that be "pink noise"? I'm not sure if death-metallers would be offended or excited by the girlishness of being compared to "pink noise".
But this is SlashDot - why should I let not knowing anything about the subject get in the way of posting about it?
When developers screw up, the fault lies with the developers.
... and at the most basic level, catching those screw-ups is the job of the compiler. Catching higher-levle screw-ups is a designer or managerial issue. I just spent about half an hour of Sunday morning bouncing a poorly defined change proposal back up the chain of command to the ultimate client. Yes, ultimately the change proposed is doable and not-insane, but I'm not going to take responsibility for turning a really incoherently phrased change request into something comprehensible and then passing on the necessary work to my colleagues to carry out. I don't get paid enough, by a factor of between 2 and 3, to take that sort of responsibility. And it's not as if it's so urgent that the client doesn't have 12 hours (of his Sunday) to work out what exactly he wants done, and get out a comprehensibly-worded change request in good time.
OzWin was one of the OLRs I investigated before I really knew what an OLR was, just that I needed to do something to avoid tying up the phone line for hours at a time. I settled on WigWam, a development of TeePee which begat Virtual Access. That was about the time that I was realising that the "Gun Control" forum was not about controlling guns and other such cultural mismatches.
100025 would be among the first European accounts, is that correct?
European, certainly. "First" I don't know. I know I didn't join before March 1992, because I was in an apartment with no phone line until about then. Through the summer of 1992 I was working 3+1 (3 weeks onsite, one week offsite) on the south coast, so I moved a day's travel closer to the worksite and spent the summer living in my parents attic. I think that was when I joined up. But I believe that people were using CIS for years before that in Europe. Or would that have been people signing up for US accounts, but using European dial-in nodes? ISTR a number of the European "old hands" were on 70007 accounts. Octal account numbers ; tell babies that today and they're like "why not hex, dood?". Don't they know how much a memory register bit costs?
Wasn't 102xxx an indicator of a German sign-up?
I'm trying to remember if I used a credit card to sign up for CIS. I'm not sure if I had one then, or if I used it if I did have one.
I've actually done some research on this aswell. On majority of times when I found a good clip, I had to clean my monitor.
Only on/. could this comment get modded up to 5, Insightful.
In- sight- ful.
"sight-" - the poster is talking about his monitor. You use monitors with the sense of sight.
"Insight" - unless the poster has got particularly strange physiology in one of two ways, then the monitor will need to be within sight. One strange exception would result in a painful Newton's-3rd-Law reaction that really doesn't bear thinking further about. The other strange exception would involve extreme short-sightedness, to the point of being effectively blind. Which then leads to thoughts about what sort of porn you'd put on a braille display, and that's. Quite. Another. Topic.
"ful." - evidently the poster's balls were full.
"Insightful." Seems an appropriate rating to me.
My mind is worryingly filled with poorly-formed images I get from thinking about porn on a Braille display. That disturbs me rather more than I'd expect. Scarily, I'm almost expecting SlashDot to inform me more than I ever wished...
Does it have to be expelled out the genitals in public to count as public urination,
Consider the case of a hypothetical catheterised or fistulated person, voiding their wastes in a public space. They don't expose their genitals to the outside world, so there's nothing there for people to object to. So the offence would be one of public littering (though there may be specific issues in English law about the disposal of human waste, but that doesn't stop people throwing used nappies into the bins in a park, so I doubt that's a problem in practice). With plain human urine, with no offensive exposure and no lascivious intent (try proving that in court, either way!), I doubt they'd get anything held against them.
I wouldn't use a soda bottle (well, I wouldn't waste time on this at all - the dog is probably dead and dumped in a ditch and I'm sure the adults know this even if they're lieing to the kids) ; I'd use a plant sprayer.
Actually, that reminds me that a number of well-known radio gardening personalities encourage the use of chamber pots to add various minerals and nutrients to the compost heap... so if someone were to challenge them as they walked the streets spraying a line back to their home, they could use a "fertilising the pretty flowers" argument. Follow that up with a strange laugh and most people would back off.
Also, yes, I'm ashamed to be on Idle, too.
Why - it's not as if you're using your own time here are you? You're at work, avoiding doing your job now. Surely?
So...how are these ATM 'hackers'....actually getting the cash out of the machines, without being identified by the ATM and bank's cameras???
Why do you think that ATMs in country X will have cameras mounted in them like you have in country Y? There's no fundamental law of physics controlling the construction of security policies around an ATM in the same way that there's a law of physics about the construction of gravitational potential gradients around masses.
Because my laptop, with a kosher copy of CIV from a "3-for-£5" bin at a games store about 5 years ago, is in the cabin on the far side of a snoring Serb. Believe me, you do not want to go in there without full PPE and permanent deafness. He'll get us moved to the cabin above the engine room if he doesn't shut up.
It's one small step from reading/. at work to playing Civ2;) And it's small enough that you can install it on a thumbdrive, not that I've ever done anything like that.....
Actually, I'd installed DOSBox-for-portables and the CIV onto the Serbian's memory stick for him to try yesterday... Haven't checked if it's working yet, but I've no reason to think that it wouldn't. The DOSBox certainly works.
I didn't know Epson outsourced software development to India too.
Well, if they'd outsourced to a native speaker of English in India, they might well have got such sloppiness, just as if they'd outsourced to a native speaker of English in Moscow, or in Ulan Bator, or in Peroria. If they'd outsourced to a non-native speaker though, there's a decent chance that they'd have used a spelling checker (or in the early 1980s, a dictionary - you know, ink-on-paper, small typeface, thin paper) because they knew that they had to check their choice of words, their spelling of words and their grammar.
In Britain (you know, where English was invented) there is a fairly well-known saying that if you wish to hear the Queens English as it should be spoken, go to Inverness ; that's a "ha-ha, but serious", because until the last couple of generations up to 30% of the population learned English in school, as a foreign language, using books and trained teachers. So their language was as per the manual. The native language in most of these cases was Gaelic.
There's a big difference in the care you take working in a foreign language compared to your "mother tongue". Which is a trait that can be used and exploited.
There, fixed that for you. From a machine in just that state.
It's a client's computer doing nothing important apart from being my access to the Internet and email, so why should I care if it burns? If it goes down and I lose internet access and email, I just carry on doing my job and send in my reports by fax until the client defrobs their IT policies. I don't see that happening for several more years, if ever.
It'd be much easier to sack the man responsible for getting it virused by installing random programs on it or visiting random websites.
As a bonus, when your city is down to size one and you raze it (rush settler production), you get a settler/engineer with zero upkeep cost.
I'd noticed the cities disappearing when I forgot to "turn off" settler production (usually due to being distracted by planting my jack-booted heel upon the necks of mine enemies), but I hadn't noticed the settlers being "home(city)-less". I know what I'm going to be trying when I finish this shift.
I can imagine a scene in a future movie where some old coot gives the protagonist a ride without nav-sat through the city - taking shortcuts, avoiding lights, dodging jams, and revealing hitherto unseen, decaying, abandoned-looking streets. The protagonist gets to his destination in half the normal time, but still thinks the old man is nutty for his luddite refusal to do things the easy way.
I can imagine a scene in some future move where the Bad Guys (wearing their black hats), get into their car and press the "follow get-away route" button, and the car drives away... a few seconds later the cops come around the corner (at 20 miles per hour, becasue it's on a child-friendly street), see the get-away car getting away and get onto the phone to head office. Then they drive to the back door of the police station in time to greet the Bad Guys who have been driven there by their car.
Not a very exciting plot, is it?
Oh, BTW, the Bad Guys didn't get out of the car because the police had locked them in, remotely. And they certainly weren't going to try to get away on foot, or in a sat-nav-free car because there are no footpaths and no "manual" cars any more.
Yeah, it's SF. But it's credible SF. Plausible within our lifetimes. In the unlikely event of "everyone getting their flying car", it'll be practically unavoidable - if people can't handle corners, lane changes and parking on a 2D surface, then they're going to kill millions trying to drive in 3D. Air traffic control is hard enough with a dozen or two planes around an airport ; imagine thousands.
If you set to E911 Only, does this enable privacy unless you call for E911 services or is the provider still tracking your location or enabling location based services?
Cell phone location works by one of 4 algorithms, by the laws of physics, not by the dictates of politicians:
Location type 1 - no base stations can pick up your phone's "hello, I'm looking for a signal" messages ; the network knows nothing (zero, nada) about where you are ; you cannot make or receive any calls whatsoever.
Location type 2 - one base station can pick up your phone's "hello, I'm looking for a signal" messages ; the network knows that you're "somewhere within range of" that base station. You can make or receive any calls that the network's billing system chooses to allow you to. The operator knows which base station is nearest to you, and may be able to constrain your bearing and/ or range from that base station. ("If you can be heard by this station here but not this one or this one, then you're likely on that side of the station not this side." For an emergency service, that might be sufficient to get them within sight of the pall of smoke.)
Location type 3 - two base stations can pick up your phone's "hello, I'm looking for a signal" messages ; the network knows that you're "somewhere within range of" both stations. You can make or receive any calls that the network's billing system chooses to allow you to. Depending on signal strength and base station load issues, your call may be routed through one station or the other, and this decision will be reassessed as regularly as the network thinks necessary given on what it knows about local signal strengths. The network operator has the possibility of tracing your route, in real time or from records. (Strictly, at any single moment there will be up to two possible locations, but likely the route will resolve individual ambiguities.)
Location type 4 - more than two base stations can pick up your phone's "hello, I'm looking for a signal" messages ; the network should unambiguously be able to determine your location and track you. Calls are subject to the same billing limitations as at location types 2 and 3. The more base stations can see you, the better the precision of tracking.
These basic rules are somewhat complicated in real life because terrain is un-even, different buildings or species of tree or types of rock or soil attenuate or reflect radio waves differently, but in principle, it's do-able, and not particularly difficult. The only barriers then are legal ones over whether it is done, and how well it is done.
I've made no mention at all of the telephone company except by their presence in the billing system. Once your phone has connected to the GSM network, it passes it's identity information from the SIM card (Subscriber Identity Module, IIRC) to the GSM network, from which the network determines who your billing provider is, whether or not that provider is willing to allow transmission of calls, if the phone is on a lost/stolen blacklist, etc. These are all decisions of the billing system, not the network itself.
An example (from the UK, but since GSM is a global system your local differences are likely to be unimportant) : about 6 years ago a gang of teenagers were charged, on the basis of witness evidence, of a stabbing. Several of the group at least lodged special defences of alibi - "I weren't there, Kop!" To disprove these alibi, the police simply walked around the area of the crime carrying a phone of the same type as the defendant's phone, producing a map of signal attenuation between location X and the various base stations in the area. The results were good enough that a jury could discriminate between the defendent's assertion that he walked to the left of a particular building and the police's assertion that he ran to the right of the same building, all the while carrying his phone ; the jury accepted the police version. Con
Probably wouldn't be acceptable - she'll need to live on Planet Earth and be intelligible to Brits, not be some loopy-fruit lunatic from a strange universe. Plus, while Palin does her try best with her 50-style clothes, screeching voice (she's witch-qualified there) and the cackling insanity (similarly well qualified), frankly I could imagine putting my dick inside her for fun, and that simply isn't haggish enough! (Of course, you might wish to claim that Palin really is haggish - but I'd want to measure her legs to check that they're different lengths. Sorry, Scottish joke.)
OK, so, taking this guy's science fair project at face value... there won't be any minorities in heaven. What's the current world population ? (2008, from Wikipedia)
Region
Population (million) ; Colour
World
6,707 ; varies
Africa
973 ; black with white and brown spots
Asia
4,054 ; yellow/ brown
Europe
732 ; white with suspiciously strong tan in parts
Latin America / Caribbean
577 ; yellow, brown and Hispanic
Northern America
337 ; white with a nasty brown stain that us good ol'boys are trying to rub out
Oceania
34 ; just let them drown
That's a total of 1069 for the whites (with various suspicions and stain eradication problems) and 5638 for the various non-white skin colours, very clearly making the whites the minority.
I'd love to hear that someone promptly took the nasty little racist shit away on the business end of a pitchfork, to start his eternity in hell. But I suspect that he'd have got away with it.
Just as with Iran, North Korea, and that African state with that cruel leader (forgot his name).
Never flying to the USA I can understand, assuming that Work was planning to send me there. But I don't understand why you'd object to flying to Iran (apart from the fact that it's a Gulf state with Gulf-state-shitty weather along the Gulf-coast) or North Korea (too hot in summer, too dreich in winter) if the opportunity to work there arose.
I can't work out which African state you're referring to. Could you narrow it down to a couple of dozen possibilities? Actually, excluding those that don't have a clear leader... nope I still can't narrow it down enough.
I wouldn't consider any of them for a holiday destination though. Why would you go through the hell of flying unless someone was paying you good money? Well, actually... Tanzania wasn't that bad. And no further than the Gulf. But I still wouldn't seriously consider going there for a break - too stressful.
That we have mob mentality? That isn't just today, that has been the case since we learned to use tools.
Your evidence that we (or rather, one of our common ancestors) learned to express a mob mentality after we (our common ancestor, etc) learned to use tools is... ?
One piece of my evidence to the contrary is a series of photos I was puzzling over a couple of days ago - at first glance the target seemed to be my wife's butt as she was cycling along (a perfectly reasonable target IMHO), but the framing seemed unusually bad even given that I was cycling at the time ; then I remembered - the target was actually a yearling eagle (or maybe a red kite) being mobbed by 3 or 4 rooks above the field ahead. Which I interpret as showing that mob mentality has been a potential in the crown group containing of us, Aves and our mutual common ancestor. That's in the order of 200 million years worth of organisms, ranging from shrews via sperm whales to fruit bats, but potentially excluding lizards, turtles, pterosaurs, amphibians and lampreys.
Mob mentality is probably something that any non-solitary animal group can develop if faced with environmental predators which are individually stronger than their prey, but numerically inferior. Tool use is probably something much more uncommon (and it's coincidence that my rook examples are likely to have been tool users like us hominins).
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Then you need to get yourself a bird!
(Sorry, cheap shot. But this is SlashDot, where being an unwashed social incompetent virgin is almost a social necessity. In the event that you're not a confident English speaker, "bird" is a common British English slang for the female of the species. What Americans would often talk of as a "chick". And for what it's worth I find Norwegian quite grating - probably because I can catch part-words and phrases which I can almost understand. One of these days I'll have to learn some - probably by the simple expedient of working in a Norwegian workplace.)
What "non-discrimination requirement"?
No, seriously, what?
I don't recall having seen anything like that in GPL v2 (which I did read carefully) nor GPL v3 (which I've only skimmed through).
What would you non-discriminate against? Would you propose for example that any GPL'd device drivers for a novel PCI-X graphics card be required (in a non-discriminatory way) to compile and install for PDP-11 architecture?
(The PDP is not chosen at random ; it could run some linuxes, even with the magnificent 128MB of core memory that mine had. Allegedly.)
Probably some retard who thinks that anything posted on Facebook (or any other "social networking" site in the universe, or indeed any other website in the universe) is in any way, shape or form private.
Don't worry, there are a lot of them about. Evolution will get them out of the genepool eventually, if only by starving their children into reduced fertility.
I for one hail our new non-ugly water-bag overlord! Seig Heil! Seig Heil!
That very sentiment probably kept thousands of subscribers there for months after they really should have gone. I know that it contributed to my reluctance to leave.
Didn't Rincewind think something similar, as the smoke from Ankh Morpork swept across the cabbage-scented Sto Plains? So we can blame Pterry for giving AOL the idea?
Spoofed? Is it possible to spoof the Olympics. Or at least, any better than they spoof themselves.
At least they're trying to approach the dress codes of the original sportsmen. That's the only trend worth watching.
"White noise" for the deaf of hearing? Or should that be "pink noise"? I'm not sure if death-metallers would be offended or excited by the girlishness of being compared to "pink noise".
But this is SlashDot - why should I let not knowing anything about the subject get in the way of posting about it?
... and at the most basic level, catching those screw-ups is the job of the compiler. Catching higher-levle screw-ups is a designer or managerial issue.
I just spent about half an hour of Sunday morning bouncing a poorly defined change proposal back up the chain of command to the ultimate client. Yes, ultimately the change proposed is doable and not-insane, but I'm not going to take responsibility for turning a really incoherently phrased change request into something comprehensible and then passing on the necessary work to my colleagues to carry out. I don't get paid enough, by a factor of between 2 and 3, to take that sort of responsibility. And it's not as if it's so urgent that the client doesn't have 12 hours (of his Sunday) to work out what exactly he wants done, and get out a comprehensibly-worded change request in good time.
Oh dear, I'm becoming a manager. Kill me. Now.
OzWin was one of the OLRs I investigated before I really knew what an OLR was, just that I needed to do something to avoid tying up the phone line for hours at a time. I settled on WigWam, a development of TeePee which begat Virtual Access. That was about the time that I was realising that the "Gun Control" forum was not about controlling guns and other such cultural mismatches.
European, certainly. "First" I don't know. I know I didn't join before March 1992, because I was in an apartment with no phone line until about then. Through the summer of 1992 I was working 3+1 (3 weeks onsite, one week offsite) on the south coast, so I moved a day's travel closer to the worksite and spent the summer living in my parents attic. I think that was when I joined up. But I believe that people were using CIS for years before that in Europe. Or would that have been people signing up for US accounts, but using European dial-in nodes? ISTR a number of the European "old hands" were on 70007 accounts. Octal account numbers ; tell babies that today and they're like "why not hex, dood?". Don't they know how much a memory register bit costs?
Wasn't 102xxx an indicator of a German sign-up?
I'm trying to remember if I used a credit card to sign up for CIS. I'm not sure if I had one then, or if I used it if I did have one.
In- sight- ful.
"sight-" - the poster is talking about his monitor. You use monitors with the sense of sight.
"Insight" - unless the poster has got particularly strange physiology in one of two ways, then the monitor will need to be within sight. One strange exception would result in a painful Newton's-3rd-Law reaction that really doesn't bear thinking further about. The other strange exception would involve extreme short-sightedness, to the point of being effectively blind. Which then leads to thoughts about what sort of porn you'd put on a braille display, and that's. Quite. Another. Topic.
"ful." - evidently the poster's balls were full.
"Insightful." Seems an appropriate rating to me.
My mind is worryingly filled with poorly-formed images I get from thinking about porn on a Braille display. That disturbs me rather more than I'd expect. Scarily, I'm almost expecting SlashDot to inform me more than I ever wished ...
Consider the case of a hypothetical catheterised or fistulated person, voiding their wastes in a public space. They don't expose their genitals to the outside world, so there's nothing there for people to object to. So the offence would be one of public littering (though there may be specific issues in English law about the disposal of human waste, but that doesn't stop people throwing used nappies into the bins in a park, so I doubt that's a problem in practice). With plain human urine, with no offensive exposure and no lascivious intent (try proving that in court, either way!), I doubt they'd get anything held against them.
I wouldn't use a soda bottle (well, I wouldn't waste time on this at all - the dog is probably dead and dumped in a ditch and I'm sure the adults know this even if they're lieing to the kids) ; I'd use a plant sprayer.
Actually, that reminds me that a number of well-known radio gardening personalities encourage the use of chamber pots to add various minerals and nutrients to the compost heap ... so if someone were to challenge them as they walked the streets spraying a line back to their home, they could use a "fertilising the pretty flowers" argument. Follow that up with a strange laugh and most people would back off.
Why - it's not as if you're using your own time here are you? You're at work, avoiding doing your job now. Surely?
Why do you think that ATMs in country X will have cameras mounted in them like you have in country Y? There's no fundamental law of physics controlling the construction of security policies around an ATM in the same way that there's a law of physics about the construction of gravitational potential gradients around masses.
Because my laptop, with a kosher copy of CIV from a "3-for-£5" bin at a games store about 5 years ago, is in the cabin on the far side of a snoring Serb. Believe me, you do not want to go in there without full PPE and permanent deafness. He'll get us moved to the cabin above the engine room if he doesn't shut up.
Actually, I'd installed DOSBox-for-portables and the CIV onto the Serbian's memory stick for him to try yesterday ... Haven't checked if it's working yet, but I've no reason to think that it wouldn't. The DOSBox certainly works.
/. isn't the time sink that CIV can be.
Well, if they'd outsourced to a native speaker of English in India, they might well have got such sloppiness, just as if they'd outsourced to a native speaker of English in Moscow, or in Ulan Bator, or in Peroria. If they'd outsourced to a non-native speaker though, there's a decent chance that they'd have used a spelling checker (or in the early 1980s, a dictionary - you know, ink-on-paper, small typeface, thin paper) because they knew that they had to check their choice of words, their spelling of words and their grammar.
In Britain (you know, where English was invented) there is a fairly well-known saying that if you wish to hear the Queens English as it should be spoken, go to Inverness ; that's a "ha-ha, but serious", because until the last couple of generations up to 30% of the population learned English in school, as a foreign language, using books and trained teachers. So their language was as per the manual. The native language in most of these cases was Gaelic.
There's a big difference in the care you take working in a foreign language compared to your "mother tongue". Which is a trait that can be used and exploited.
There, fixed that for you. From a machine in just that state.
It's a client's computer doing nothing important apart from being my access to the Internet and email, so why should I care if it burns? If it goes down and I lose internet access and email, I just carry on doing my job and send in my reports by fax until the client defrobs their IT policies. I don't see that happening for several more years, if ever.
It'd be much easier to sack the man responsible for getting it virused by installing random programs on it or visiting random websites.
I'd noticed the cities disappearing when I forgot to "turn off" settler production (usually due to being distracted by planting my jack-booted heel upon the necks of mine enemies), but I hadn't noticed the settlers being "home(city)-less".
I know what I'm going to be trying when I finish this shift.
I can imagine a scene in some future move where the Bad Guys (wearing their black hats), get into their car and press the "follow get-away route" button, and the car drives away ... a few seconds later the cops come around the corner (at 20 miles per hour, becasue it's on a child-friendly street), see the get-away car getting away and get onto the phone to head office. Then they drive to the back door of the police station in time to greet the Bad Guys who have been driven there by their car.
Not a very exciting plot, is it?
Oh, BTW, the Bad Guys didn't get out of the car because the police had locked them in, remotely. And they certainly weren't going to try to get away on foot, or in a sat-nav-free car because there are no footpaths and no "manual" cars any more.
Yeah, it's SF. But it's credible SF. Plausible within our lifetimes. In the unlikely event of "everyone getting their flying car", it'll be practically unavoidable - if people can't handle corners, lane changes and parking on a 2D surface, then they're going to kill millions trying to drive in 3D. Air traffic control is hard enough with a dozen or two planes around an airport ; imagine thousands.
Simultaneously.
And he'd be trying to tap you for a tenner too. Simultaneously.
Sounds like an arsehole to me.
Cell phone location works by one of 4 algorithms, by the laws of physics, not by the dictates of politicians :
These basic rules are somewhat complicated in real life because terrain is un-even, different buildings or species of tree or types of rock or soil attenuate or reflect radio waves differently, but in principle, it's do-able, and not particularly difficult. The only barriers then are legal ones over whether it is done, and how well it is done.
I've made no mention at all of the telephone company except by their presence in the billing system. Once your phone has connected to the GSM network, it passes it's identity information from the SIM card (Subscriber Identity Module, IIRC) to the GSM network, from which the network determines who your billing provider is, whether or not that provider is willing to allow transmission of calls, if the phone is on a lost/stolen blacklist, etc. These are all decisions of the billing system, not the network itself.
An example (from the UK, but since GSM is a global system your local differences are likely to be unimportant) : about 6 years ago a gang of teenagers were charged, on the basis of witness evidence, of a stabbing. Several of the group at least lodged special defences of alibi - "I weren't there, Kop!" To disprove these alibi, the police simply walked around the area of the crime carrying a phone of the same type as the defendant's phone, producing a map of signal attenuation between location X and the various base stations in the area. The results were good enough that a jury could discriminate between the defendent's assertion that he walked to the left of a particular building and the police's assertion that he ran to the right of the same building, all the while carrying his phone ; the jury accepted the police version. Con
Probably wouldn't be acceptable - she'll need to live on Planet Earth and be intelligible to Brits, not be some loopy-fruit lunatic from a strange universe. Plus, while Palin does her try best with her 50-style clothes, screeching voice (she's witch-qualified there) and the cackling insanity (similarly well qualified), frankly I could imagine putting my dick inside her for fun, and that simply isn't haggish enough!
(Of course, you might wish to claim that Palin really is haggish - but I'd want to measure her legs to check that they're different lengths. Sorry, Scottish joke.)
OK, so, taking this guy's science fair project at face value ... there won't be any minorities in heaven. What's the current world population ? (2008, from Wikipedia)
Region Population (million) ; Colour World 6,707 ; varies Africa 973 ; black with white and brown spots Asia 4,054 ; yellow/ brown Europe 732 ; white with suspiciously strong tan in parts Latin America / Caribbean 577 ; yellow, brown and Hispanic Northern America 337 ; white with a nasty brown stain that us good ol'boys are trying to rub out Oceania 34 ; just let them drownThat's a total of 1069 for the whites (with various suspicions and stain eradication problems) and 5638 for the various non-white skin colours, very clearly making the whites the minority.
I'd love to hear that someone promptly took the nasty little racist shit away on the business end of a pitchfork, to start his eternity in hell. But I suspect that he'd have got away with it.
Never flying to the USA I can understand, assuming that Work was planning to send me there. But I don't understand why you'd object to flying to Iran (apart from the fact that it's a Gulf state with Gulf-state-shitty weather along the Gulf-coast) or North Korea (too hot in summer, too dreich in winter) if the opportunity to work there arose.
I can't work out which African state you're referring to. Could you narrow it down to a couple of dozen possibilities? Actually, excluding those that don't have a clear leader ... nope I still can't narrow it down enough.
I wouldn't consider any of them for a holiday destination though. Why would you go through the hell of flying unless someone was paying you good money? Well, actually ... Tanzania wasn't that bad. And no further than the Gulf. But I still wouldn't seriously consider going there for a break - too stressful.
Which implies that you have a list of countries which you are not resident in where you would consider this to be commendable behaviour.
Would you like to enlighten us as to which countries are on this list of yours?
Your evidence that we (or rather, one of our common ancestors) learned to express a mob mentality after we (our common ancestor, etc) learned to use tools is ... ?
One piece of my evidence to the contrary is a series of photos I was puzzling over a couple of days ago - at first glance the target seemed to be my wife's butt as she was cycling along (a perfectly reasonable target IMHO), but the framing seemed unusually bad even given that I was cycling at the time ; then I remembered - the target was actually a yearling eagle (or maybe a red kite) being mobbed by 3 or 4 rooks above the field ahead. Which I interpret as showing that mob mentality has been a potential in the crown group containing of us, Aves and our mutual common ancestor. That's in the order of 200 million years worth of organisms, ranging from shrews via sperm whales to fruit bats, but potentially excluding lizards, turtles, pterosaurs, amphibians and lampreys.
Mob mentality is probably something that any non-solitary animal group can develop if faced with environmental predators which are individually stronger than their prey, but numerically inferior. Tool use is probably something much more uncommon (and it's coincidence that my rook examples are likely to have been tool users like us hominins).
A food that, when eaten, transforms an passive life form into a agressive predator ....
There, fixed that for ya.
Or were you talking about the chief bridesmaid?