And not too long ago, people used plates painted with paint containing uranium, and played around with radium like it's glow-in-the-dark fluorescent paint.
What do you mean "not too long ago"? I'm just (watch me!) walking across the room to get an apple, nice crunchy apple, out of the fruit bowl. Fruit bowl is nice pale green and glows bright yellow-green under UV illumination. Uranium Glass, and very pretty it is too. It makes the fruit taste nicer, too. [CRUNCH]
Scared of radiation? - sure I am! Capable of performing basic arithmetic? Of course I am. Bothered by something that is unlikely to even register as being at background level here in "the Granite City"? Of course I'm not. But I do occasionally think "I want an excuse to get a Geiger counter". But the uranium glass doesn't provide even this self-confessed gadget freak an adequate excuse.
The 1929 Grand Banks tsunami in Newfoundland killed more than two dozen people and snapped many transatlantic cables, and was set in motion by a submarine landslide set off by an earthquake.
There was a tsunami, triggered by the Grand Banks 1929 earthquake, but I wasn't aware of it killing many people at landfall. Then again - two dozen people is only a couple of years of Canadian oil exploration deaths, so it's still not that many.
But the cable snapping has generally been attributed to the progression of a "turbidity current" (often crudely described as an "underwater landslide", but there are significant differences that make the terminology awkward).
Whether the turbidity current and the tsunami are directly associated is less clear ; no-one disputes there was a common ultimate cause - seismic stress in the area, but which is the chicken, which the egg, or are they both consequences of a common cause? It is credible that the earthquake caused a turbidity current which caused a tsunami. Or that the earthquake caused a tsunami (by moving the seabed) and a turbidity current in different parts of it's energy-distribution pattern. Or even, that an "underwater landslip" (due to deglacial rebound changing slopes) caused a turbidity current to start downhill (underwater!), which resulted in relocation of considerable mass on the continental slope (and so changed stresses in the crust, and shortly led to the earthquake) which also involved moving considerable volumes of sediment from one point of the seabed to another (and this caused the tsunami).
I'm not sure that those possible sequences have been differentiated, in this case. The events are clearly related, but their exact interrelationships are not clear. Does this have any practical significance? Well, it does to me : if I knew which of those chickens came before which eggs, it would affect my interpretation of (for example) an earthquake under the Haltenbanke off the Norwegian coast (Wikipedia calls the event the Storegga Slide, but it's been long known as the "Haltenbanke event" too. Whatever). It could make the difference between me running uphill, stopping to get a bicycle to get my uphill faster, or conning a car dealer into letting me take a test drive (uphill). Assuming that I was down hill near the harbour ; at home I'm above (just) the wash line from the last time that bank failed, so I'd only need to walk up hill to the NATO bomb target. Oh, it might have consequences for Edinburgh, Hull, London, Rotterdam and Amsterdam which are likely to get hit, hard, and to be very difficult to evacuate fast enough.
Knowing what school was like when I was in attendance, and hearing reports from my friends who are teachers, or ex-teachers, and from my daughter who is still in the system, I know what the likelihood of anyone looking for an easy life and a well-paying career becoming a teacher is - essentially zero. You have to add in some sort of mental oddity, such as wanting to spend time with children, before you get to a reasonable chance of someone choosing to become a teacher.
Consequently, by the time that someone has slogged through the educational requirements to become a teacher, they're pretty rare. Then there is the attrition rate in the first couple of years of assessment and "supply teaching" - in the order of 30 to 50% of the people I've known who have gone through teacher training have gone off and got a job in the outside world and ditched the profession because it's too depressing (neither my mother nor my wife has any intention of going back into the teaching profession, which is not uncommon).
So, now you're a head master (chief administrator of a school), and you've got a bad teacher. Do you try to sack them (regardless of how hard that is going to be) and take the risk of simply being unable to replace them? Or do you use them for crowd-control in the pupil-pens where the sub-humans get caged during school hours, so that the more hopeful prospects can get the better teachers?
Bear in mind - the school administration have a legal obligation to provide a safe place for the children, and a safe system of work for the teachers. For many, that can be achieved by giving the teachers cattle-prods and Tasars to break up the fighting in the pens, and setting them in pairs to guard the animals. Which is where bad teachers can be much more useful than no teacher.
I figured your point was symptomatic of people fearing "x" because of a few anecdotal events despite the actual safety numbers (like people who are scared of flying despite the lower deaths per mile).
A more sensible metric is the number of deaths-per-journey, and is considerably less favourable to aircraft than the oft-cited deaths-per-passenger-kilometre (do you still use miles in your country? How quaint.). This, of course, is why the aircraft industry tries to persuade people to quote the deaths-per-passenger-kilometre figure instead. Every journey consists of at least one take-off and landing, which is where the large majority of deaths occur ; the number of intervening passenger-kilometres is variable but can be tens of thousands. Therefore, the deaths that occur on take-off or landing on the short journeys (the majority) are diluted by the passenger-kilometres accumulated on the long-haul flights. Just to put it in context - I've had 3 life-threatening car crashes in my life and 5 serious (i.e. potentially life-threatening) flying incidents. I've covered considerably more kilometres by air than I have by car ; I mostly fly medium haul (several hundred kilometres, over water) and I don't drive much.
Yes, conditions are pretty rough along those coasts, but they're not too bad compared to the Southern Ocean around 60deg South. There, the wind can build up horrendous circumpolar seas which will then interact violently with any cross seas, winds, or currents.
There are developing plans for hydrocarbon exploration in this area - the Argentine Malvinas and South Shetland Basins, and the (disputed) British South Falklands Basin. Crew-changing and equipment transfer in the "Roaring Forties" is going to be "fun", particularly when the rig is well beyond helicopter range from shorebase. If you've got the experience, you're welcome to come on down. But if you've got the experience, you're quite likely to decline the invitation (if you've got any sense).
The first 90-odd percent of your comment is superfluous. We might just as well start the ranting about the "evil Russians" here and now for the next month worth of stories that have even the most tangential reference to the FSU. Get it over and done with in a place where it's negligible-to-negative semantic content can be easily ignored. There are people who think that any mention of the "evil empire" (err, I can't remember if that's the USSR (deceased), the USA (in rapid decline), Iraq (in even more rapid decline), Iran (threatened with precipitous decline), or the Holy Roman Empire (deceased, though possibly undergoing resurrection if you believe some people)) must be accompanied by breast-beating, wailing and gnashing of teeth to try to prove that things are different today and here, where ever "here" is.
I did say old Soviet Russia specifically to fend off comments like yours. It implies all the countries that were originally associated with that political block.
Do you have any idea how offensive that blanket association-without-consent is to some people in the countries you refer to? Many residents of "the Baltic States" are quite furious about still being associated with the country which took them over by force majeur in the 19th and 20th centuries. Equally, many residents of the Baltic States who have been settled there for several generations and consider it home, are proud of the achievements of their "Mother Russia". Trouble is safely predicted (as we already see it ourselves in the microcosm of our Lithuanian field staff). Just to make your blanketing more ineffective, don't forget that there are also former Soviet states whose official behaviour since the break up of the CCCP may actually be distinctly embarrassing to that [mild irony alert!]paragon of self-control, Putin[/irony].
Your image of what the former Soviet Union is actually like is pretty stereotyped, and only contacts reality at a few points. The reality is far, far more complicated.
Global warming, fundamentalist christian, jews, muslims, poisonous food additives,and a global echonomic collaps can be a good start.
Why would you exclude other christians than fundamentalists? They are just as insane as the rest.
I'm not a fan of god-squaddies in general, may they rot in their own personal hells for all the eternities they desire under the torments of real "Room 101" experts, but I have to admit that non-fundamentalist Christians are often (possible "generally") not quite as spittle-dribblingly insane as their fundamentalist brethren. Equally, the dealings that I've had with fundamentalist Muslims indicate that they're as insane or more insane as their fundamentalist Christian sisteren (there seems to be no good antonym for "brethren"), while non-fundamentalist Jews, Muslims, Bahai's, Hindus, Buddhists and Wiccans don't generally have other consistent noxious habits.
The insanity seems to be associated with being fundamentalist, rather than the particular religion that you choose to take from normal silliness to insane degrees of silliness.
Just to expand a bit: encryption algorithms (except for one-time-pad) don't produce truly random output. But all good, modern ones seek to produce output that's as indistinguishable as possible from truly random output, as a necessary but not sufficient component of their security. There are a variety of techniques to produce pseudorandom data based on a variety of sophisticated mathematics.
Now, that makes me ask a clearly-begged question : if a particular encryption package produces an output that is distinguishable from truly random data (which I'll take as given ; I'm not a mathematician, but I have read up on the subject sufficiently to understand this point), then likely a different encryption package would produce a different output which would also (in theory) be distinguishable from random data. BUT, would it be possible to distinguish the two different encryption packages?
AIUI, most of these systems have a number of steps : combining multiple input files into one "archive" file ; compression of the archive into a high-entropy compressed file ; encryption of the compressed file to produce the output file. Each one of these steps can be done in different ways : on the archiving step, do you chain files in date order, alphabetical order or in folder order? ; compression could be done with the free zip libraries, or using the gZip libraries, or bZip, or something you cook up yourself? ; in the encryption stage you have choices like Blowfish, AES... yadda yadda. Given that, one would expect different choices to have consequences for what exact differences there are from randomness for each set of choices.
So, the potential may exist to distinguish between these different sets of choices if you can find sufficient differences between the outputs from the different stages. Which is one thing. But equally one could incorporate this into the design of your encryption package so that the compression method used is switched regularly. Or irregularly. Or possibly, in keeping with the contents of the files and doing the compression step before the archiving step (which becomes null if you're writing a single file).
Given three reasonable choices for each of those stages, you've got the thick part of 30 different reasonable choices that would lead to different "fingerprints" of non-randomness in the output. Which the "Forensics Innovations" being touted here would have to be able to distinguish.
On the assumption that the encryption libraries do a good job, those fingerprints are going to be relatively slight. So the amount of data needed to confidently distinguish between the dozens of reasonable possibilities (and between them and "random") starts to get pretty high. My guess would be that this software only distinguishes between the default settings for WinZip's encryption, the defaults of TrueCrypt (does TrueCrypt have defaults? It's that long since I set it up on my memory sticks that I can't remember if it has defaults, or if it asks you questions in random order.) and "true random" data.
Reading the discussion on ForensicInnovations' web site they focus on rather different aspects. But the implication is that they (FI) only report a small number of different file types, and that any files composed of plain random data they report as "Encrypted Data (Headerless)) (type #3174)". Which doesn't surprise me.
So, time to start producing lots of nice, big, empty, formatted TC containers to fill up the empty bits of the hard drive. Then delete them. Just to confuse people, of course.
Doesn't someone produce a tool for doing this automatically? My memory tells me there is.
ALWAYS get the flagship. For nVidia, this means buy the one with the most 8s in the name. The same holds true for their chipsets.
Are you some sort of graphics-card salesman. It's really difficult these days to get a good bottom-end graphics card. The sort of 32MB monstrosity that I need for 24-bit colour on my desktop, and the occasional session of XCom or CIV (the original). You want gaming cards - you go get them. But please would someone provide normal cards too!
I am very much aware of the problems and dangers of a nuclear war. How about you?
I grew up in the overlap between the "instant-death" flash zones for two Septic (read: American = overpaid + oversexed + over here) cruise missile bases. I used to bicycle past some of the perimeter fences on the way to visit my aunts and uncles. I watched while the underground ironstone mines had their entrances sealed "to stop children getting lost in them" (there had been no cases), and as an older adolescent I wonder if those mines were why that particular base was chosen. The ironstone would be about 40m down around that area, which is a good deal of protection ; maybe they'd have got two multimegatonnes, one to excavate, one to clean out.
As an anti-nuke demonstrator once I'd reached my majority, I wish I'd been able to re-locate some of those old entrances. But they'd been too well landscaped and the maps doctored too well.
My after-school job was cleaning at a manufacturer of plastic pot plants and nuclear fall-out shelters (I shit you not - even my diseased brain couldn't invent that!). We didn't even consider the idea of wasting effort on trying to survive "the bomb" being dropped on us by foreigners.
Currently I live in the flash zone between a NATO communications hub about 30m down in a granite quarry which would require multi-megatonnes to excavate (we used to be able to look down into it from the flight to work while it was being built - the flights have been re-routed since. Strange, it's still clouded over in Google maps, which is shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.), another general purpose communications tower (unarmoured, would be demolished in the blast from hitting the NATO hub), and a major port (probably worth a nuke in itself).
So, yes, I do have a pretty good idea about living with concerns about nuclear war. It's delightful having fucking neo-facists like Ronnie Ray-Gun and GW Dumbfuck hold power of life and death over you when you didn't even have an option to vote for or against them.
You want nukes? Take the fuckers home and live with them yourselves.
Yeah, but even your average phone is more powerful than your average PC was in 1982...
Just to put a little perspective on things :
- the 286 that they compare things with is a processor that was introduced in 1982 it's true ; - it's equally true that Windows 3 was optimised for the 286, in approximately 1988, as it was the most important processor of the time. (Yes Win-3 did include code to run on a 386 and do more bells and whistles, but the code-base was optimised for a 286 and on similarly-clocked systems ran faster on a 286 than on a 386. 386 optimisation came in with Win3.11/ WfWg) ; - my 386 (25MHz, 4MB memory, 40MB HDD) cost me over 3 months salary in 1989; - when I moved to a new company in 1991, the code developer/ director was running on a 286 as a development machine; - when we moved to a new, larger, building in 1993, that director did upgrade to a new machine. Well, same old machine with a new mother board and a 80287 maths co-processor. He stepped straight up to a Pentium (complete with the maths bug!) a couple of years later - to start the project of moving to the WinNT/ Win95 interface. Which is still in progress.
Just because a 286 can't run SuperSnotGun-3d or some such stuff, doesn't mean that it's an insignificant processor. Hell, my PDA barely has more computational grunt than my 1989 386 (on an 37MHz ARM processor), but I don't see it being replaced in the next decade.
Israel's nuclear arsenal is there mainly because several of its neighbors either have nukes already or may get them in the near future (read Iran).
Read : an atlas. Iran and Israel don't have a border in common. In fact, Iran and Israel don't even have a neighbour in common, only neighbour's neighbours. Now I know and you know that you meant something more along the lines of [countries in the same region] when you wrote [its neighbours], but you get listened to, shot for or marked on what you write, not on what you meant to write. (BTW : revise. You should try the fun of living with a non-native English speaker one of these days - or perhaps you do already?)
Keep in mind that it was Israel and not the USA who bombed the Iraqi nuclear program back to the stone age.
So, the Iranian nuclear programme was bombed back into the stone age in 1981 and has reached the point of being considered a threat again in a mere 27 years? That's either an extremely advanced stone age, some extremely ineffective "bombing into the stone age", or a relatively simple technology. (Hyperbole can be a terrible weapon - for the person who uses it.) Face a terrible fact : the nuclear genie is out of the bottle, and has been out of the bottle since my childhood at the latest (early 1970s). Live with it, because you will most assuredly die with it (even if you don't die of it ; not that I expect this will prevent people mis-quoting what I say).
you won't be packing one into a phone any smaller than ones we haven't seen in 10 years.
You might find this heretical, and you might be inclined to set the Thought Police onto me for having "unconventional thoughts", but... not everyone agrees that small is important. Once you get below a certain size, "small" is not desirable and in fact, is positively counter-productive.
The first mobile phone that I had was a Nokia 9000 - the clamshell mini-brick. That worked fine and fitted into a jacket pocket quite adequately, but fell foul of the banning of mobile phones at work. It's replacement was a tiny Nokia thing whose code number I can't even remember. That died by falling out of my shirt pocket and shattering onto the tiled floor of the office shit house. Next one was a Nokia (yes, there's a theme here - it's that I can't be bothered to spend time on learning how some other phone company decides to make things work) 6300-odd which was about twice the size of the previous decedant. And, unsurprisingly, about twice the battery life. When it died (of keyboard erosion), it was replaced by another Nokia of the same form factor. Which died of Ben Nevis rain. And now I've got another piece of miniature phone shit, waiting until it's upgrade time again.
I gather that some phones do things other than make calls and send/ receive text messages. Which prompts a resounding "and so?". Not only have I never bothered to read the manual sections of these alternative services, I've also never bothered to ask for the authorisation of such services, or agreed to pay for them. I have however, interrupted sales people to tell them "I'm not interested ; if someone has important information for me, they know my number and can call me". Which tends to interrupt their pre-planned spiel somewhat.
By coincidence, I'm just watching the 'Gadget Show', which is showing a feature on "which was more influential - the Psion or the Blackberry?" Obviously, as a person who's been using his Psion for over a decade, and who has sufficient spare ones (why else would I have set up an eBay account?) to last another decade... I see that the PDA market (Crackberries and overpowered mobile phones included) has about 3 weeks to increase their battery life times by. That's a pretty steep margin.
Booo. I got one of those miniature Linux laptop computers. Crap battery life - like about 5 minutes - off the mains, though it does work adequately on the mains. Now I guess I'll have to figure out how to use a wireless connection when I'm on holiday. Assuming that the hotel has one and I can be bothered.
Better yet, make the message personal, and send spammers to Jupiter.
I see no need to waste money on non-essential equipment for this mission. Little things like life support, atmosphere, that sort of thing.
Actually, no, I do see a need for life support. Just enough to allow one person to make the round trip, plus about 1/3 excess. And cameras, to transmit the evolutionary struggle back to Earth.
It wouldn't stop the spam problem on Earth, but if we repeated the process a few times, and bred together the spammers that survived the hecatomb... after a few generations, wouldn't we end up with pond scum?
I have seen chefs put lobsters in the freezer so they (presumably) go to sleep and die quietly. Is this more or less humane I wonder.
You need to compare the experience of being burned by boiling water with the experience of profound hypothermia ; I've had the former experience and definitely don't wish to repeat it ; I've had various brushes with hypothermia in the mountains and in survival training at work, and while I don't particularly wish to repeat the experience, it's not a terrifying. I don't look forward to having to swim home from work, but it's one of those prospects that you have to live with. Of course, you can make the procedure less distressing for the victim by using anaesthesia, but that's been a possibility that has been around for over a century and no commercial slaughtering I've heard of uses it. It's not now, and never has been, a question of scratching ethical itches ; it's a question of doing the slaughtering cheaply.
I used to propose the banning of commercial butchering as being the most effective way of reducing the harm done by the meat industry. But to be honest, people are evil enough to vote with their wallets, not with what they laughingly call their conscience.
The thing is is that when the whales die they will release the carbon again, so carbon is still in the system. If plankton sinks to the ocean floor though it is effectively being removed from the system.
If the plankton, or whale, sink into unoxygenated areas of the seabed, then the carbon could be effectively sequestered for a geologically significant period of time. Note that "could". The problem is, of course, in finding sufficiently unoxygenated areas of seabed, and being reasonably confident that they're going to remain unoxygenated for a reasonable period of time. Ocean currents are a mobile and complex beast.
My current favorite thought experiment replaces the big bang with a big coalescence.
Read up on Turok and Steinhardt's "ekpyrotic universe" theory. Not exactly the thoughts that you're expressing, but close enough to (probably) grab your attention.
Arxiv has plenty of papers on the subject, and it's a sufficiently unusual word that it makes for easy searching. Your reading list, should you choose to accept it.
In my direct experience, they are highly-skilled in copying/ripping off and even building on/improving on original ideas. Note: This is for stuff which is often already trademarked, registered and patented.
This is news?
Seriously, this is news?
In 1993 we made a batch of 15 of our particular thing to sell to a Chinese company in our business. We got a good price for them and we had absolutely no doubt that they were going to be stripped down. investigated and copied. That's fine and good. We got what we wanted from the deal ; we sold product into a market that we were never going to penetrate. And most importantly, we've raised the level of competition for our competitors. We still know how to do the job better than the Chinese (having the machine is one thing ; using it is another), and they're undercutting our competitors and driving them out of business. Win-win, for us.
Just in the spirit of lunacy, I went to look at this "Last.fm" thing that people have been talking about for a few weeks now.
It claims to be some sort of internet radio service - am I correct in this understanding?
But it doesn't appear to have any content apart from music. Again - am I correct in this, or have I failed in finding content using the site's search facilities?
So, no content other than music, and now they're charging for it's lack of content. I think that's not a business model I can see any reason to support.
Well, off to download this morning's In Our Time, and this afternoon's Material World. Couldn't listen to them live because I was working on some DVDs which required audio attention.
Last.FM? Unless it has some content, it's not going to get any money from me. Crash and burn, baby.
Getting back to the example of the octopus, we have no way of knowing whether the earlier version of octopus could change color at will, spurt ink, or figure out how to get food out of a bottle with a cork in the top.
But yeah - there's a lot to an organism that doesn't fossilise. I'm just watching the BBC wildlife unit's film of orcas playing rugby with a seal. Incredible behaviour, negligible fossilisation potential.
Oh, I didn't know that : "But the ink of modern squids paralyzes the organs of smell."You learn something every day. Well, I do. Every day that I'm not actually dead.
The thing is, the simpler our universe is, when all the rules are discovered, the more likely it seems that it was designed by a genius.
Every time I'm standing shivering at the bus stop, waiting for the bus that's always late (except when it's early), I think to myself that it there were a god responsible for designing a universe like this, it must be a god that's a sadistic retard. Come to think of it - the more I think about it, the more evidence I see to support this hypothesis. After all, who but a retard would deliberately accept responsibility for all evil?
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What do you mean "not too long ago"? I'm just (watch me!) walking across the room to get an apple, nice crunchy apple, out of the fruit bowl. Fruit bowl is nice pale green and glows bright yellow-green under UV illumination. Uranium Glass, and very pretty it is too. It makes the fruit taste nicer, too. [CRUNCH]
Scared of radiation? - sure I am! Capable of performing basic arithmetic? Of course I am. Bothered by something that is unlikely to even register as being at background level here in "the Granite City"? Of course I'm not. But I do occasionally think "I want an excuse to get a Geiger counter". But the uranium glass doesn't provide even this self-confessed gadget freak an adequate excuse.
There was a tsunami, triggered by the Grand Banks 1929 earthquake, but I wasn't aware of it killing many people at landfall. Then again - two dozen people is only a couple of years of Canadian oil exploration deaths, so it's still not that many.
But the cable snapping has generally been attributed to the progression of a "turbidity current" (often crudely described as an "underwater landslide", but there are significant differences that make the terminology awkward).
Whether the turbidity current and the tsunami are directly associated is less clear ; no-one disputes there was a common ultimate cause - seismic stress in the area, but which is the chicken, which the egg, or are they both consequences of a common cause? It is credible that the earthquake caused a turbidity current which caused a tsunami. Or that the earthquake caused a tsunami (by moving the seabed) and a turbidity current in different parts of it's energy-distribution pattern. Or even, that an "underwater landslip" (due to deglacial rebound changing slopes) caused a turbidity current to start downhill (underwater!), which resulted in relocation of considerable mass on the continental slope (and so changed stresses in the crust, and shortly led to the earthquake) which also involved moving considerable volumes of sediment from one point of the seabed to another (and this caused the tsunami).
I'm not sure that those possible sequences have been differentiated, in this case. The events are clearly related, but their exact interrelationships are not clear. Does this have any practical significance? Well, it does to me : if I knew which of those chickens came before which eggs, it would affect my interpretation of (for example) an earthquake under the Haltenbanke off the Norwegian coast (Wikipedia calls the event the Storegga Slide, but it's been long known as the "Haltenbanke event" too. Whatever). It could make the difference between me running uphill, stopping to get a bicycle to get my uphill faster, or conning a car dealer into letting me take a test drive (uphill). Assuming that I was down hill near the harbour ; at home I'm above (just) the wash line from the last time that bank failed, so I'd only need to walk up hill to the NATO bomb target. Oh, it might have consequences for Edinburgh, Hull, London, Rotterdam and Amsterdam which are likely to get hit, hard, and to be very difficult to evacuate fast enough.
Knowing what school was like when I was in attendance, and hearing reports from my friends who are teachers, or ex-teachers, and from my daughter who is still in the system, I know what the likelihood of anyone looking for an easy life and a well-paying career becoming a teacher is - essentially zero. You have to add in some sort of mental oddity, such as wanting to spend time with children, before you get to a reasonable chance of someone choosing to become a teacher.
Consequently, by the time that someone has slogged through the educational requirements to become a teacher, they're pretty rare. Then there is the attrition rate in the first couple of years of assessment and "supply teaching" - in the order of 30 to 50% of the people I've known who have gone through teacher training have gone off and got a job in the outside world and ditched the profession because it's too depressing (neither my mother nor my wife has any intention of going back into the teaching profession, which is not uncommon).
So, now you're a head master (chief administrator of a school), and you've got a bad teacher. Do you try to sack them (regardless of how hard that is going to be) and take the risk of simply being unable to replace them? Or do you use them for crowd-control in the pupil-pens where the sub-humans get caged during school hours, so that the more hopeful prospects can get the better teachers?
Bear in mind - the school administration have a legal obligation to provide a safe place for the children, and a safe system of work for the teachers. For many, that can be achieved by giving the teachers cattle-prods and Tasars to break up the fighting in the pens, and setting them in pairs to guard the animals. Which is where bad teachers can be much more useful than no teacher.
A more sensible metric is the number of deaths-per-journey, and is considerably less favourable to aircraft than the oft-cited deaths-per-passenger-kilometre (do you still use miles in your country? How quaint.). This, of course, is why the aircraft industry tries to persuade people to quote the deaths-per-passenger-kilometre figure instead.
Every journey consists of at least one take-off and landing, which is where the large majority of deaths occur ; the number of intervening passenger-kilometres is variable but can be tens of thousands. Therefore, the deaths that occur on take-off or landing on the short journeys (the majority) are diluted by the passenger-kilometres accumulated on the long-haul flights.
Just to put it in context - I've had 3 life-threatening car crashes in my life and 5 serious (i.e. potentially life-threatening) flying incidents. I've covered considerably more kilometres by air than I have by car ; I mostly fly medium haul (several hundred kilometres, over water) and I don't drive much.
Not in any important degree.
Yes, conditions are pretty rough along those coasts, but they're not too bad compared to the Southern Ocean around 60deg South. There, the wind can build up horrendous circumpolar seas which will then interact violently with any cross seas, winds, or currents.
There are developing plans for hydrocarbon exploration in this area - the Argentine Malvinas and South Shetland Basins, and the (disputed) British South Falklands Basin. Crew-changing and equipment transfer in the "Roaring Forties" is going to be "fun", particularly when the rig is well beyond helicopter range from shorebase. If you've got the experience, you're welcome to come on down. But if you've got the experience, you're quite likely to decline the invitation (if you've got any sense).
The first 90-odd percent of your comment is superfluous.
We might just as well start the ranting about the "evil Russians" here and now for the next month worth of stories that have even the most tangential reference to the FSU. Get it over and done with in a place where it's negligible-to-negative semantic content can be easily ignored.
There are people who think that any mention of the "evil empire" (err, I can't remember if that's the USSR (deceased), the USA (in rapid decline), Iraq (in even more rapid decline), Iran (threatened with precipitous decline), or the Holy Roman Empire (deceased, though possibly undergoing resurrection if you believe some people)) must be accompanied by breast-beating, wailing and gnashing of teeth to try to prove that things are different today and here, where ever "here" is.
Do you have any idea how offensive that blanket association-without-consent is to some people in the countries you refer to? Many residents of "the Baltic States" are quite furious about still being associated with the country which took them over by force majeur in the 19th and 20th centuries. Equally, many residents of the Baltic States who have been settled there for several generations and consider it home, are proud of the achievements of their "Mother Russia". Trouble is safely predicted (as we already see it ourselves in the microcosm of our Lithuanian field staff).
Just to make your blanketing more ineffective, don't forget that there are also former Soviet states whose official behaviour since the break up of the CCCP may actually be distinctly embarrassing to that [mild irony alert!]paragon of self-control, Putin[/irony].
Your image of what the former Soviet Union is actually like is pretty stereotyped, and only contacts reality at a few points. The reality is far, far more complicated.
I'm not a fan of god-squaddies in general, may they rot in their own personal hells for all the eternities they desire under the torments of real "Room 101" experts, but I have to admit that non-fundamentalist Christians are often (possible "generally") not quite as spittle-dribblingly insane as their fundamentalist brethren. Equally, the dealings that I've had with fundamentalist Muslims indicate that they're as insane or more insane as their fundamentalist Christian sisteren (there seems to be no good antonym for "brethren"), while non-fundamentalist Jews, Muslims, Bahai's, Hindus, Buddhists and Wiccans don't generally have other consistent noxious habits.
The insanity seems to be associated with being fundamentalist, rather than the particular religion that you choose to take from normal silliness to insane degrees of silliness.
Now, that makes me ask a clearly-begged question : if a particular encryption package produces an output that is distinguishable from truly random data (which I'll take as given ; I'm not a mathematician, but I have read up on the subject sufficiently to understand this point), then likely a different encryption package would produce a different output which would also (in theory) be distinguishable from random data. BUT, would it be possible to distinguish the two different encryption packages?
AIUI, most of these systems have a number of steps : combining multiple input files into one "archive" file ; compression of the archive into a high-entropy compressed file ; encryption of the compressed file to produce the output file. Each one of these steps can be done in different ways : on the archiving step, do you chain files in date order, alphabetical order or in folder order? ; compression could be done with the free zip libraries, or using the gZip libraries, or bZip, or something you cook up yourself? ; in the encryption stage you have choices like Blowfish, AES ... yadda yadda. Given that, one would expect different choices to have consequences for what exact differences there are from randomness for each set of choices.
So, the potential may exist to distinguish between these different sets of choices if you can find sufficient differences between the outputs from the different stages. Which is one thing. But equally one could incorporate this into the design of your encryption package so that the compression method used is switched regularly. Or irregularly. Or possibly, in keeping with the contents of the files and doing the compression step before the archiving step (which becomes null if you're writing a single file).
Given three reasonable choices for each of those stages, you've got the thick part of 30 different reasonable choices that would lead to different "fingerprints" of non-randomness in the output. Which the "Forensics Innovations" being touted here would have to be able to distinguish.
On the assumption that the encryption libraries do a good job, those fingerprints are going to be relatively slight. So the amount of data needed to confidently distinguish between the dozens of reasonable possibilities (and between them and "random") starts to get pretty high. My guess would be that this software only distinguishes between the default settings for WinZip's encryption, the defaults of TrueCrypt (does TrueCrypt have defaults? It's that long since I set it up on my memory sticks that I can't remember if it has defaults, or if it asks you questions in random order.) and "true random" data.
Reading the discussion on ForensicInnovations' web site they focus on rather different aspects. But the implication is that they (FI) only report a small number of different file types, and that any files composed of plain random data they report as "Encrypted Data (Headerless)) (type #3174)". Which doesn't surprise me.
So, time to start producing lots of nice, big, empty, formatted TC containers to fill up the empty bits of the hard drive. Then delete them. Just to confuse people, of course.
Doesn't someone produce a tool for doing this automatically? My memory tells me there is.
Hey, that's my line! <G>
Are you some sort of graphics-card salesman.
It's really difficult these days to get a good bottom-end graphics card. The sort of 32MB monstrosity that I need for 24-bit colour on my desktop, and the occasional session of XCom or CIV (the original).
You want gaming cards - you go get them. But please would someone provide normal cards too!
So, yes, I do have a pretty good idea about living with concerns about nuclear war. It's delightful having fucking neo-facists like Ronnie Ray-Gun and GW Dumbfuck hold power of life and death over you when you didn't even have an option to vote for or against them.
You want nukes? Take the fuckers home and live with them yourselves.
(For fucks sake! - the plastic pot plant and nuclear fallout shelter manufacturer is still in business, after a fashion!)
Just to put a little perspective on things :
- the 286 that they compare things with is a processor that was introduced in 1982 it's true ;
- it's equally true that Windows 3 was optimised for the 286, in approximately 1988, as it was the most important processor of the time. (Yes Win-3 did include code to run on a 386 and do more bells and whistles, but the code-base was optimised for a 286 and on similarly-clocked systems ran faster on a 286 than on a 386. 386 optimisation came in with Win3.11/ WfWg) ;
- my 386 (25MHz, 4MB memory, 40MB HDD) cost me over 3 months salary in 1989;
- when I moved to a new company in 1991, the code developer/ director was running on a 286 as a development machine;
- when we moved to a new, larger, building in 1993, that director did upgrade to a new machine. Well, same old machine with a new mother board and a 80287 maths co-processor. He stepped straight up to a Pentium (complete with the maths bug!) a couple of years later - to start the project of moving to the WinNT/ Win95 interface. Which is still in progress.
Just because a 286 can't run SuperSnotGun-3d or some such stuff, doesn't mean that it's an insignificant processor. Hell, my PDA barely has more computational grunt than my 1989 386 (on an 37MHz ARM processor), but I don't see it being replaced in the next decade.
Read : an atlas.
Iran and Israel don't have a border in common. In fact, Iran and Israel don't even have a neighbour in common, only neighbour's neighbours.
Now I know and you know that you meant something more along the lines of [countries in the same region] when you wrote [its neighbours], but you get listened to, shot for or marked on what you write, not on what you meant to write. (BTW : revise. You should try the fun of living with a non-native English speaker one of these days - or perhaps you do already?)
So, the Iranian nuclear programme was bombed back into the stone age in 1981 and has reached the point of being considered a threat again in a mere 27 years? That's either an extremely advanced stone age, some extremely ineffective "bombing into the stone age", or a relatively simple technology. (Hyperbole can be a terrible weapon - for the person who uses it.)
Face a terrible fact : the nuclear genie is out of the bottle, and has been out of the bottle since my childhood at the latest (early 1970s). Live with it, because you will most assuredly die with it (even if you don't die of it ; not that I expect this will prevent people mis-quoting what I say).
You might find this heretical, and you might be inclined to set the Thought Police onto me for having "unconventional thoughts", but ... not everyone agrees that small is important. Once you get below a certain size, "small" is not desirable and in fact, is positively counter-productive.
The first mobile phone that I had was a Nokia 9000 - the clamshell mini-brick. That worked fine and fitted into a jacket pocket quite adequately, but fell foul of the banning of mobile phones at work.
It's replacement was a tiny Nokia thing whose code number I can't even remember. That died by falling out of my shirt pocket and shattering onto the tiled floor of the office shit house.
Next one was a Nokia (yes, there's a theme here - it's that I can't be bothered to spend time on learning how some other phone company decides to make things work) 6300-odd which was about twice the size of the previous decedant. And, unsurprisingly, about twice the battery life.
When it died (of keyboard erosion), it was replaced by another Nokia of the same form factor. Which died of Ben Nevis rain. And now I've got another piece of miniature phone shit, waiting until it's upgrade time again.
I gather that some phones do things other than make calls and send/ receive text messages. Which prompts a resounding "and so?". Not only have I never bothered to read the manual sections of these alternative services, I've also never bothered to ask for the authorisation of such services, or agreed to pay for them. I have however, interrupted sales people to tell them "I'm not interested ; if someone has important information for me, they know my number and can call me". Which tends to interrupt their pre-planned spiel somewhat.
By coincidence, I'm just watching the 'Gadget Show', which is showing a feature on "which was more influential - the Psion or the Blackberry?" Obviously, as a person who's been using his Psion for over a decade, and who has sufficient spare ones (why else would I have set up an eBay account?) to last another decade ... I see that the PDA market (Crackberries and overpowered mobile phones included) has about 3 weeks to increase their battery life times by. That's a pretty steep margin.
Booo. I got one of those miniature Linux laptop computers. Crap battery life - like about 5 minutes - off the mains, though it does work adequately on the mains. Now I guess I'll have to figure out how to use a wireless connection when I'm on holiday. Assuming that the hotel has one and I can be bothered.
Hey, sounds like a good plan. thanks for that.
I see no need to waste money on non-essential equipment for this mission. Little things like life support, atmosphere, that sort of thing.
Actually, no, I do see a need for life support. Just enough to allow one person to make the round trip, plus about 1/3 excess. And cameras, to transmit the evolutionary struggle back to Earth.
It wouldn't stop the spam problem on Earth, but if we repeated the process a few times, and bred together the spammers that survived the hecatomb ... after a few generations, wouldn't we end up with pond scum?
[SIGH] If he were a drug DEALER, he'd have said "Here I was ready to resell some crack".
Give drug manufacturers the respect they deserve instead of getting confused between the production process and the distribution chain.
You need to compare the experience of being burned by boiling water with the experience of profound hypothermia ; I've had the former experience and definitely don't wish to repeat it ; I've had various brushes with hypothermia in the mountains and in survival training at work, and while I don't particularly wish to repeat the experience, it's not a terrifying. I don't look forward to having to swim home from work, but it's one of those prospects that you have to live with.
Of course, you can make the procedure less distressing for the victim by using anaesthesia, but that's been a possibility that has been around for over a century and no commercial slaughtering I've heard of uses it. It's not now, and never has been, a question of scratching ethical itches ; it's a question of doing the slaughtering cheaply.
I used to propose the banning of commercial butchering as being the most effective way of reducing the harm done by the meat industry. But to be honest, people are evil enough to vote with their wallets, not with what they laughingly call their conscience.
If the plankton, or whale, sink into unoxygenated areas of the seabed, then the carbon could be effectively sequestered for a geologically significant period of time. Note that "could". The problem is, of course, in finding sufficiently unoxygenated areas of seabed, and being reasonably confident that they're going to remain unoxygenated for a reasonable period of time. Ocean currents are a mobile and complex beast.
Read up on Turok and Steinhardt's "ekpyrotic universe" theory. Not exactly the thoughts that you're expressing, but close enough to (probably) grab your attention.
Arxiv has plenty of papers on the subject, and it's a sufficiently unusual word that it makes for easy searching. Your reading list, should you choose to accept it.
This is news?
Seriously, this is news?
In 1993 we made a batch of 15 of our particular thing to sell to a Chinese company in our business. We got a good price for them and we had absolutely no doubt that they were going to be stripped down. investigated and copied. That's fine and good. We got what we wanted from the deal ; we sold product into a market that we were never going to penetrate. And most importantly, we've raised the level of competition for our competitors. We still know how to do the job better than the Chinese (having the machine is one thing ; using it is another), and they're undercutting our competitors and driving them out of business. Win-win, for us.
Just in the spirit of lunacy, I went to look at this "Last.fm" thing that people have been talking about for a few weeks now.
It claims to be some sort of internet radio service - am I correct in this understanding?
But it doesn't appear to have any content apart from music. Again - am I correct in this, or have I failed in finding content using the site's search facilities?
So, no content other than music, and now they're charging for it's lack of content. I think that's not a business model I can see any reason to support.
Well, off to download this morning's In Our Time, and this afternoon's Material World. Couldn't listen to them live because I was working on some DVDs which required audio attention.
Last.FM? Unless it has some content, it's not going to get any money from me. Crash and burn, baby.
Ink sacs have been known to fossilize for a long time. This one was a commercial sale ; a whole batch reported from Charmouth ...
But yeah - there's a lot to an organism that doesn't fossilise. I'm just watching the BBC wildlife unit's film of orcas playing rugby with a seal. Incredible behaviour, negligible fossilisation potential.
Oh, I didn't know that : "But the ink of modern squids paralyzes the organs of smell."You learn something every day. Well, I do. Every day that I'm not actually dead.
Every time I'm standing shivering at the bus stop, waiting for the bus that's always late (except when it's early), I think to myself that it there were a god responsible for designing a universe like this, it must be a god that's a sadistic retard. Come to think of it - the more I think about it, the more evidence I see to support this hypothesis. After all, who but a retard would deliberately accept responsibility for all evil?