It sounds great to have all students excel in school, but the practicality of such a goal is silly, leading, as you say, to lower and lower standards for the exams.
It's a natural response to having people in power who object to half the population being below average.
When AndyG disappeared down to Alva, you disappeared to Glasgow ? And you'd borrowed a Psion of mine because you felt the need to dial into some servers you were administrating and wanted a pocket terminal that could hook up to an IR-enabled telephone.
I think I had a beard then, and the evil act took place in the KGB.
GordonJCP from Aberdeen that I might know?
'Peet' as in bad feet, bad eyes, extremely old and dodgy cat, and a living room between 4 and 8 feet deep in computer bits?
That Peet. "Pint of cider and off to perforate" Peet.
If you know James The Weird Person, or Bushy Bob, AndyG or Handy Andy, then we're in the same group of "people".
They also have more than enough technical equipment and expertise to "improve" the data, if it is in their interests to do so.
Ah, that would account for the 30-odd (sometimes very odd) video editors, graphics artists and CGI programmers I see occupying the 4 spare bedspace on a normal drilling rig.
Sure, the oil industry can hire all the graphics expertise that it needs, when it needs it. And when they're no longer needed... well that's the difference between "contractor" and "core crew". (I say this with one long-standing friend who's been kept off the breadline doing cartoons and animations for safety training materials while another friend regularly does video editing for induction courses, training courses and all sorts of other tediously repetitive bullshit. Hi Snoddy, Peet!)
Plus, of course, the rig is a great place for passing around video clips that are either weird (RTFA), shoot-yourself-in-the-foot-funny (I should have a link for the dropping of the Oseberg casing string somewhere at home, and there's always the wreckage of the LE's jetting assembly for raising a laugh), variously perverse ("She does WHAT to an Alsatian with a bog brush??"). Or just plain old kill porn, from the smoking wreckage of 167 men in the Piper to laughing one's arses off at YABLR (Yet Another Burning Land Rig) as everyone stands around looking sheepish and counting the crew.
In their traditional role as Porn-Merchants Designate to the industry, the ROV shack know fine well their obligations to copy and disseminate anything in the slightest bit out of the ordinary. for decades they were the only people on board with a video recording system, let alone a video COPYING system, and they've always known what to do with the spread.
Why would it threaten drilling rights? Unless the fish are living in the rock what's the problem?
Three things occur to me : (in decreasing order, probably) drilling mud coating the surface of rock cuttings discharged over the side ; unstable and/ or soluble minerals as part of the rock cuttings themselves ; heat from the cuttings.
If you're using oil-based mud (technically, invert emulsion drilling fluid with a low-dielectric continuous phase and a high-dielectric discontinuous phase ; the chemical nature of the continuous phase is varied but it is universally some degree of bad news for any skin it encounters ; I've got the chemical burns to prove it.) then it's unsurprising that dumping tons of it onto the seabed can cause problems in the surrounding areas. Less obviously, throwing tons of rock salt or anhydrite or unstable clay minerals has potential to do various degrees of nasty to water chemistry. There's also the other additives in the mud to consider - barytes is often associated with lead mineralisation, for example, raising the possibility of other forms of pollution. Finally, the rocks that come up from drilling are generally hot to some degree, and while the sea does have significant cooling power, when many tons are dumped into the sea in short order, it's within the bounds of credibility to change temperatures for a while, particularly within the seabed.
All of which is why discharge of cuttings coated with "oil" (natural or synthetic) is now forbidden in a number of areas. Which simply prompted the development of a range of "skip'n'ship" solutions which are loathed by drillers, but allow drilling to continue to use oil-based muds.
Unfortunately I believe you are correct. But for how much longer will we sit idly by while valiant Noglorpistanese freedom fighters wage war for their own sovereign lands!
Not "freedom fighters", but "terrists" ; if they're still fighting for their freedom, then they obviously still haven't won yet ; it is only the cleansing balm of history, written by the victors, that can turn a "terrist" into a "freedom fighter" (who but the successful ex-terrists would want to clean up history like that?).
By making your post you've revealed your pro-terrist inclinations. Go direct to Guantanamo ; do not pass the "Go" square ; do not collect 200 Remuneration Units ; do not expect to get out.
[JudgeDredd]"Grud, these pro-terrist sicko perps! Will they never learn!" [/JudgeDredd]
Famous Freedom fighters of the past : Alfred The Great (formerly Alfred Swamp-Straggler) ; Oliver Cromwell, Regicide ; Benjamin Franklin. Cromwell is more arguable than Franklin.
The dumb-fucks who designed that didn't include the possibility of "I neither know nor care, nor care to go through it again to make up for the deficiencies of your programming."
... working away to compile a record of your working day, defined as the 0.1 seconds either side of keystrokes. More than 0.1 seconds from a keystroke would mean that you've left work and are on your own time (unpaid). If you claim to have been "thinking" then clearly you should have been organising your time better and had some "thinking" tasks backgrounded while bringing the key-pressing tasks to the foreground, so that you always had keystroke tasks buffered. Time using the mouse must indicate time wasted.
As long as the energy required to create the positrons is less than MC^2 (and I would imagine it would be) since anti-matter/matter has a approximate 100% mass to energy conversion, then there should be a net "gain".
Why would you imagine that it takes less than "mc^2" (for m = mass of an electron-positron pair and 'c' standing for the speed of light in a vacuum, both in appropriate units) of energy to produce an electron-positron pair ?
Similar to how nuclear bombs can produce many many megatons of explosive power from a small catalyst. That too is just releasing the energy in the mass.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Or perhaps a better simile, considering previous plantings of space craft into sub-surface Martian orbits, would be that you're comparing newton-metres and lbf-ft, and that (like NASA), you're getting the conversion wrong.
The "megatons" of explosive energy release of a strategic nuke does not refer to the weight of the bomb (how could it be launched, or even carried in a bomber plane?), but to the amount of TNT (or another conventional chemical high-explosive, RDX perhaps) needed to produce the same energy release. That energy release is actually generated by the release of binding energy from converting around 1kg of hydrogen to around 0.96kg of helium.
If you wanted to convert that helium back into hydrogen, you'd have to power your device with the energy produced by exploding some megatons of high explosive (assuming that your energy conversion equipment is perfectly efficient).
IIRC, weight-for-weight you get less energy released from TNT than you do from burning the same weight of sucrose (table sugar) ; but you get the energy released more slowly. (I haven't done the sums - I suspect that there's a cheat here arising from the fact that the TNT contains it's oxygen for combustion inside the molecule, while in the sugar case you're adding atmospheric oxygen. But I'd have to dig out the chemical tables, which i'm not going to do at this time of the morning.)
The best thing is to get a cell phone jammer, but those are often not readily available.
Someone else has pointed out that by running a mobile phone jammer, you're effectively carrying around a beacon that shouts "Over here!" on the 2.4 (or whatever) GHz band.
But I'm wondering if you're talking about the basic cellphone jammers, or the sophisticated ones. The basic ones simply blast out 2.4GHz white noise at high enough amplitude to be the loudest thing on that channel for [however far around]. These are obviously not hard to spot ; equally obviously, they tend to eat batteries.
The more sophisticated ones put out signals saying the radio (GSM or CDMA/TDMA or whatever other systems are still in use in your area) equivalent of "Hello, I'm your friendly neighbourhood cellphone tower ; who're you?" ; then, when they get a radio bite, they reply as if they're starting to set up the network connections... and never complete the job. That's obviously a lot more sophisticated - you're essentially looking at most of the computing/ radio sophistication of a mobile phone tower ; so it's going to cost quite a bit - maybe even more than the guts of a mobile phone tower. But likely it's also going to be considerably more power efficient, so it may be feasible to run on batteries.
For the sophisticated jammers, you're already a large part of the way to having a machine that can talk to J.Random Hacker's mobile, acquire the necessary information for tracking it, then pass on the billing/ calling/ routing/ network information to the mobile phone network (perhaps by masquerading as a mobile phone itself?) for any calls that it finds interesting.
Cunning.
This could be circumvented if there was encryption between every handset and every tower for every interaction. But retrofitting that to the existing networks... no chance. If the spooks don't like it... even less chance.
Well that's my €0.02, anyway.
Black helicopters and unregistered CIA-rented jets, is it?
I don't understand what you're getting at, here.
Since (as you say) Germany doesn't extradite it's citizens to the USA (presumably because the USA government is in the habit of murdering it's own citizens), then the USA government will use it's standard tactics of kidnapping followed by extraordinary rendition in order to get the people it wants into the detention that it wants, under the questioning it wants. Isn't that what your post-W constitution requires?
Hubble hasn't been king since... some years before it was launched. It never has been a light bucket - it's 2.4m diameter mirror is around 1/4 of a modern national-grade light bucket, and so approximately 1/16 of the light gathering power of a light bucket
It's not really a matter of collecting light the fastest: resolution is the big issue, and the Earth's atmosphere is resolution's biggest enemy at this stage.
Resolution is, as you say, the issue. And, aS YOU SAY (bloody CapsLock!), the atmosphere is one of the major constraints to achieving high resolution. Which requires a combination of altitude (Mount Wilson gave way to Mauna Loa which is giving way to the Atacama), and Adaptive Optics, and then the diffraction limit (Rayleigh limt IIRC) imposed by interference between light from opposite edges of the mirror. So, while the popular designation of large mirrors is "light bucket", one of the major reasons for building large mirrors is to drive down the diffraction limit on resolution.
A modern, well sited (would anyone build a national-grade observatory at a non-optimal site?), AO-equipped system is hitting it's diffraction limit when the seeing is good. So the only ways to better resolution involve less atmosphere (higher altitude), or bigger mirrors.
For IR observations specifically, one of the other constraints is that water vapour in the atmosphere is a killer for some bands of observation. That's another reason for siting telescopes at high altitudes in deserts.
But IR has another problem - because diffraction is related to the wavelength, then using a (say) 3.5m telescope at optical wavelengths will return resolution comparable to an IR observation on a 4+m telescope.
Another issue - distant objects are at high red shifts and so the large majority of their light output arrives at Earth as IR, and their dim. Which pushes for big mirrors, operating in IR, sited in high-altitude deserts.
(Although processing tricks to counter the atmosphere "wiggle" for Earth scopes are making incremental improvements and may catch up someday.)
I'm unclear of what you mean by "processing tricks". Describing adaptive optics (AO) as "processing tricks" is strange - a better description would be "getting a better mirror". The AO systems that I've seen details of work by manipulating a mirror in the light path so that a near-axis guide star (natural or artificial) maintains as small an image as possible ; since the mirror is at a point where the whole wavefront is involved in the whole mirror, then correcting the size/ shape of the guide star by adjusting the shape of the AO mirror will also apply the same corrections to the on-axis target image. Several nanoseconds later (ummm, 10m at 300000000 m/s = 33ns, to a first approximation ; assuming the AO mirror is at one end of the scope and the detector is at the other end) the light comes to a focus on the detector, which works exactly as in non-AO modes. To my mind, if that's a processing trick, then I want to get a 500mm Ritchey-Chrétien processing trick, with a good dark processing trick above it.
There are other "processing tricks" that are used - speckle interferometry springs to mind - which are done off-line, after you've had your telescope time, but the AO that you've described happens before image capture.
Hubble hasn't been king since... some years before it was launched. It never has been a light bucket - it's 2.4m diameter mirror is around 1/4 of a modern national-grade light bucket, and so approximately 1/16 of the light gathering power of a light bucket ; that's around 3 orders of magnitude which is non-trivial. Also it's a LOT easier to put a new detector onto a ground telescope, so the improvements in seeing, lack of vibration, and exposure time that come from being in space have steadily been eroded. Don't get me wrong - Hubble is a great piece of telescope ; but it's not the only telescope in the world.
Instead of providing unproven hypotheticals, why not just look up Valve's company status? They're based in Bellevue, Washington.
Why waste my time learning how the business systems of a foreign country works? It's not as if it's a skill I'm likely to need again in the future.
As for their server locations... that's harder to find out, but there's not really a reason to think that they are in India, as the bulk of high-end hosting solutions are still in the U.S., and Valve probably runs their own servers, given that they have to support Steam.
This month, maybe, their servers are in the States ; next month, who knows? Where Steam's servers are is an even more open question ; one would hope that they're reasonably well distributed around the world, assuming that "Steam" is something that is sensitive to latency. As for whether source code is on a Steam server - well, I've never even bothered to consider using one, so your opinion on that is likely better informed than mine.
Also, Germany doesn't extradite its citizens to America.
Black helicopters and unregistered CIA-rented jets, is it?
What is the correlation between something orbiting a star and that something being able to support life?
The correlation is 1 (otherwise expressed as "100%", "complete", "unblemished"). All known natural occurrences of life occur on "somethings orbiting a star". More, of the postulated locations of naturally-occurring life in our vicinity, all are either themselves in orbit around a star, or in orbit around an object itself in orbit around a star. I am not aware of any seriously proposed locale for the development of life which does not occur in orbit around a star.
NOTE - this does not include the Hoyle-Wickramasinghe postulations about panspermia ; the objects they propose transiting between stars (and therefore not in orbit around a star, or in orbit around an object that itself is in orbit around a star) are locales for dormant life forms, not actively growing, developing or reproducing lifeforms. Even were the Hoyle-Wickramasinghe proposal shown to be true (not an event I consider a significantly important probability, while I do consider myself dieing in a plane crash as a significantly important probability), it would not constitute supporting life on objects not in orbit around a star.
Executive summary : life is only expected to exist in (fairly close) orbit of stars.
This process will NOT "create" energy. In fact, I doubt it will have any more efficiency than the current conventional methods of turning trash into useful components. Keep in mind that vaporization of any solids from room temperature it going to take a massive amount of energy.
The article is crappily written - you can tell from the way they use a long-exposure picture of pouring metal (probably a steel, but it's not sure) to illustrate a story about using plasma to break down detritus in a waste incineration plant. They didn't mention mixing the (selected?) plasma components with air-derived gases (activated oxygen?) to produce heat, water and carbon dioxide. That's one way that you could get a net energy yeild. They also mention "syngas", suggesting perhaps that they (partly?) dissociate both water and organic components of the supplied debris into a plasma, then let that re-associate to form a CO-H2 mix ("SynGas"), then burn that to power the turbine.
Given that the article is crappily-written, it's unclear what's exactly proposed. But it doesn't sound like they're actually deliberately trying to violate laws of thermodynamics.
What does give me pause for thought is... they're not talking about using bottled oxygen as an oxidiser, so I assume that they're using air... if they're using air in the plasma phases, then they're going to be producing lots of NOx as well. Reading the Wikipedia article, I also see citations of concerns about liner erosion (a reliability concern related to corrosive gasses), and also to chlorine outputs (derived from PVC plastics, I suspect). So, not a cure-all technology, but I see that it's well established for disposal of medical and other hazardous wastes.
FYI, if you dont know the crime was commited on Valve computers, meaning the original crime was performed in the USA.
There's a hidden assumption in there - actually several. They may be correct, but your point is only valid if they're all correct.
You're assuming that "Valve" is an American company - in the corporate sense ; it's perfectly credible that (for example) tax reasons, it's not an American company, though they maintain a façade of being American for political reasons.
Even if Valve are actually an American company, you're assuming that the servers in question are in America ; given the relative costs of bandwidth and administration, it's not incredible that a Valve programmer sitting in a home office in Much Hammering (why would they work in a centralised, expensive office?) is working on code stored on a server actually hosted in India.
("Much Hammering" is a fictional programmer's enclave in the Schwarzwald, or anywhere the programmer chooses to live ; the code jockey is hired for his skills, not his physical location. One of our staff programmers recently moved 500+km over the border into England, but that doesn't stop him from continuing to work for us.)
You're also assuming that the command passed at some point through communications infrastructure located in the US. Even if Valve were an American company, if their data were in India and were hacked from Germany, the routing may well not have touched American-owned or -operated systems at all.
Some (if not all) of those points need to have been checked before spending American TaxPayer's money on this (via the FBI). It's quite plausible that no crime, by American rules, has been committed. It's equally plausible that an alleged crime is not supported by sufficient evidence to succeed with an extradition request under German law.
Go to the exoplanets.EU site ; follow the news links to publications about HR 8799 and also see Science for the abstract on Formalhaut (if you're working through a location which pays for access to Science, which I'm not, you should be able to get the paper from there ; there's also Supporting Online Material available, which isn't terribly informative.
Now, contrary to SlashDot procedure, I'm going to shut my flap while I RTF-Papers. Shocking, isn't it?
As I understand it the 1918 virus is what's known as the H5N1 virus,
The current "bird flu" is, IIRC, a H5N1 influenza virus, in the same sense that I'm a brown-haired, non-colour blind human. The codes are a description of some significant, survival- and propagation- relevant, characteristics of the virus, but they by no means capture the whole of variation in the influenza families of viri. Similarly, not all brown-haired non-colour blind humans are identical or even particularly similar (it doesn't even specify the gender!). If my memory serves me correctly, the viri in question bind to a human blood protein type H5 (for haem-something #5 ; it's got something to do with the way the virus gets into the lungs and then spreads between people in sputum and snot), and also bind to one of a number of neuron-surface proteins (which is something to do with how the viri make you feel terrible).
"H5N1" is a quick-and-dirty way of describing a virus sample, and of checking if it's one of the currently-known, scary ones. A lab can carry a stock of about 10 reagents, and in the time it takes to do one binding/ coagulation test (because you can do them in parallel) you've got a classification into potentially 100 pigeonholes. If your sick patient isn't infected with the "H5N1" strain, then you can drop the biosecurity hazard precautions by a notch or two. Meanwhile, you've got samples on the way to a specialist virology lab for a full genomic analysis, which will add depth and detail to your preliminary "H5N1" classification.
Of course, you assess your biosecurity procedures on the likelihood that you've got the first case of a zoonosis - a new transmission of virus from it's animal vector (from pigs and/ or domesticated fowl, most likely but not guaranteed). In the urban West, that's pretty unlikely ; in the rural (or industrial agricultural) West, it's less unlikely ; in village China, Vietnam or Indonesia, it's a distinct possibility.
There was some work published a couple of years ago on the Spitzbergen samples of the 1918 pandemic ; IIRC, it had a "H" component which was similar to, but not identical to, one of the known "H" components, and also a known "N" component ; however the combination of components wasn't one that had been seen in the duration of modern virology. That suggests that, by natural (or artificial) recombination one could recreate something broadly similar to the 1918 pandemic virus. HOWEVER, it would not be the same virus, as there are likely to be significant differences in the other components of the virus genome. What significance those differences would have in terms of disease progression, is anyone's guess.
I would hope that the Spitzbergen samples are kept under appropriate security.
Whether the virologists can make the right guesses about which antigens to include in vaccines... well, one hopes they guess right.
I hadn't heard that little story about 1666 before. Which, given numerous visits to The Smoke, surprises me.
A browser-based place to write stuff and make spreadsheets and store the documents where I can access them whenever I like.
You assume, as is common, that you'll always have access to the internet. Which may be a safe assumption in your home and workplace (multiple connections failing over to multiple backbone providers), but I wouldn't bet on it. My work connection goes through a single DSL connection to a single ISP (with phones on a separate link, but to the same provider ; no-one has a modem TTBOMK) ; my home connection likewise. When travelling to client's worksite, almost all have one link through either the installation's satellite dish, or a fibre-optic cable inside a fixed pipeline (if there's anything fixed).
I don't assume that I've got a connection ; I can't assume that. So Google apps doesn't even get a detailed consideration.
Say that you find yourself at a client's site... and you fire up your laptop to connect to the wireless network. "We don't allow wireless here" is the answer to your question. So you want to connect to the wired network : "Our Admin people will have to install our network protection tools onto your machine. Come back in a couple of days." Or in your home or office location - someone puts a JCB scoop (in context here) through your network connection.
This bloody "new" discussion system seems to have lost my previous reply. What I want to know is, what did I do to get it turned on, so I can avoid doing that in future?
Do you know of a cross-platform code authentication system? You seem to have some sort of professional stake in code development.
I would guess that the only way such could work would be to distribute a package of pre-compiled binaries, separated into chunks (libraries) which are processor-specific versus processor-agnostic, together with linking information to put together the "libraries" at run time into a "authenticated" whole.
Authenticating the author of code would provide a worthwhile level of protection against malicious code, but no protection at all against incompetent programming, or the use of inappropriate algorithms.
If you get your pet free software project picked up by a company or a software foundation, signing software for public use is well worth it. Otherwise, $100 to $200 per supported platform per year can make it a really expensive hobby.
You need a different signature key for each platform?? Weird. And probably unhealthy.
The system you describe is very similar to the existing Authenticode system, with the company as the root CA.
I'll take your word for it. "Authenticode" rings a (faint) bell.
It would work within a sufficiently large company, which applies something like Windows group policy across a domain.
I'll take your word for it. I remember trying to get my head around the difference between a domain and a subnetwork yonks ago, and failing. It seems to be an incoherent mess - every company implementing different things differently, with zero or negative documentation.
But do you know any way this system could be extended to a home or home office environment? Adware and surveillanceware published by large companies routinely gets signed, and legitimate free software maintained by amateurs remains unsigned because the extra $200 per year to keep the certificate current isn't worth it.
I don't know what you mean by "home" or "home office" environment - at least in some way that differentiates it from any other office environment. You have costs (heating, tax, hardware, etc), which you pay as a part of doing your business. I've been considering whether or not to pay such a cost for myself, but not having any pressing reason to do so, I've got better uses for the money. But then, I don't make my living by writing software. Obviously, if you do make your living writing software, then you'll take a different opinion on what are necessary costs for your business. Such costs would, I assume, be tax deductible. So they come off your gross income before you start calculating tax. (If I understand the tax laws, which is something that I don't intend to put to the test, ever, if at all possible.)
What's $200? A pretty high end graphics card (which, if you're doing graphic-intense work, should itself be tax-deductable. But you'll have to keep it around for the auditors for IIRC 5 years.)? Well, far higher end than anything that I've ever wasted money on. Or a night out at a decent restaurant for several piglets? (Two nights if it's Malta - I was quite impressed by the food, and the prices.)
Is $200 more than you're willing to pay as part of the cost of being in that business? You'll love doing it for a living then - we spend something like that much on the execution-control device for every installation of our software.
There may well be lower-priced signing authorities - I thought that was part of the purpose of things like the PGP "network of trust"? I've never had reason to find out.
The fuel there is ridiculously expensive to get to, so without oil being $100+ per barrel, will any of these countries really bother?
The town that I met my wife in is within spitting distance of the Arctic circle, and was founded to exploit the area's oil reserves. If you believe the town's official history, it was founded in the late 1970s, but there was a settlement, then a railway line, then an industrial yard, then an administration centre, over the dozen years before then. At that time, exports were negligible (even though the country was still the largest producer), so the dollar price of oil didn't matter at all. But the dollar price was far below $40/bbl. Also, at the conference mentioned in my reply to the next message, the oil price was scarcely mentioned; it's not important at the range of planning which we're talking about. People are anticipating that oil prices will generally continue to go up, and over the decade-plus that these plans need to be made, that's pretty much all you need to be confident of. A two-year blip like we've just had isn't particularly important except in slightly changing base lines. (Of course, the conference was by geologists, for geologists. What the economists say got all the attention they deserve, considering that some of them believe the obvious fallacy that oil stocks are limited only by economics. Go away, dismal ones, and come back when your "science" has some practical foundation.)
So, yes, the countries planning to develop these areas, will develop them. They may shuffle priorities - like putting a couple of years into building railway lines and shooting wide-area 2-D seismic, instead of selling exploration licenses and encouraging people to do 3-D seismic - but the broader plans will go ahead. When the revolution starts in Saudi Arabia (and I'm not claiming to know which dissident group are going to pop-off first), there will be a market to sell the oil to.
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It's a natural response to having people in power who object to half the population being below average.
When AndyG disappeared down to Alva, you disappeared to Glasgow ? And you'd borrowed a Psion of mine because you felt the need to dial into some servers you were administrating and wanted a pocket terminal that could hook up to an IR-enabled telephone. I think I had a beard then, and the evil act took place in the KGB.
GordonJCP from Aberdeen that I might know? 'Peet' as in bad feet, bad eyes, extremely old and dodgy cat, and a living room between 4 and 8 feet deep in computer bits? That Peet. "Pint of cider and off to perforate" Peet. If you know James The Weird Person, or Bushy Bob, AndyG or Handy Andy, then we're in the same group of "people".
Ah, that would account for the 30-odd (sometimes very odd) video editors, graphics artists and CGI programmers I see occupying the 4 spare bedspace on a normal drilling rig.
Sure, the oil industry can hire all the graphics expertise that it needs, when it needs it. And when they're no longer needed ... well that's the difference between "contractor" and "core crew". (I say this with one long-standing friend who's been kept off the breadline doing cartoons and animations for safety training materials while another friend regularly does video editing for induction courses, training courses and all sorts of other tediously repetitive bullshit. Hi Snoddy, Peet!)
Plus, of course, the rig is a great place for passing around video clips that are either weird (RTFA), shoot-yourself-in-the-foot-funny (I should have a link for the dropping of the Oseberg casing string somewhere at home, and there's always the wreckage of the LE's jetting assembly for raising a laugh), variously perverse ("She does WHAT to an Alsatian with a bog brush??"). Or just plain old kill porn, from the smoking wreckage of 167 men in the Piper to laughing one's arses off at YABLR (Yet Another Burning Land Rig) as everyone stands around looking sheepish and counting the crew.
In their traditional role as Porn-Merchants Designate to the industry, the ROV shack know fine well their obligations to copy and disseminate anything in the slightest bit out of the ordinary. for decades they were the only people on board with a video recording system, let alone a video COPYING system, and they've always known what to do with the spread.
Three things occur to me : (in decreasing order, probably) drilling mud coating the surface of rock cuttings discharged over the side ; unstable and/ or soluble minerals as part of the rock cuttings themselves ; heat from the cuttings. If you're using oil-based mud (technically, invert emulsion drilling fluid with a low-dielectric continuous phase and a high-dielectric discontinuous phase ; the chemical nature of the continuous phase is varied but it is universally some degree of bad news for any skin it encounters ; I've got the chemical burns to prove it.) then it's unsurprising that dumping tons of it onto the seabed can cause problems in the surrounding areas. Less obviously, throwing tons of rock salt or anhydrite or unstable clay minerals has potential to do various degrees of nasty to water chemistry. There's also the other additives in the mud to consider - barytes is often associated with lead mineralisation, for example, raising the possibility of other forms of pollution. Finally, the rocks that come up from drilling are generally hot to some degree, and while the sea does have significant cooling power, when many tons are dumped into the sea in short order, it's within the bounds of credibility to change temperatures for a while, particularly within the seabed.
All of which is why discharge of cuttings coated with "oil" (natural or synthetic) is now forbidden in a number of areas. Which simply prompted the development of a range of "skip'n'ship" solutions which are loathed by drillers, but allow drilling to continue to use oil-based muds.
Well, you did ask!
Not "freedom fighters", but "terrists" ; if they're still fighting for their freedom, then they obviously still haven't won yet ; it is only the cleansing balm of history, written by the victors, that can turn a "terrist" into a "freedom fighter" (who but the successful ex-terrists would want to clean up history like that?).
By making your post you've revealed your pro-terrist inclinations. Go direct to Guantanamo ; do not pass the "Go" square ; do not collect 200 Remuneration Units ; do not expect to get out.
[JudgeDredd]"Grud, these pro-terrist sicko perps! Will they never learn!" [/JudgeDredd]
Famous Freedom fighters of the past : Alfred The Great (formerly Alfred Swamp-Straggler) ; Oliver Cromwell, Regicide ; Benjamin Franklin. Cromwell is more arguable than Franklin.
The dumb-fucks who designed that didn't include the possibility of "I neither know nor care, nor care to go through it again to make up for the deficiencies of your programming."
Welcome to the 20 minute working day ...
Me, I'm investing in a 300Hz metronome factory.
Why would you imagine that it takes less than "mc^2" (for m = mass of an electron-positron pair and 'c' standing for the speed of light in a vacuum, both in appropriate units) of energy to produce an electron-positron pair ?
You're comparing apples and oranges. Or perhaps a better simile, considering previous plantings of space craft into sub-surface Martian orbits, would be that you're comparing newton-metres and lbf-ft, and that (like NASA), you're getting the conversion wrong.
The "megatons" of explosive energy release of a strategic nuke does not refer to the weight of the bomb (how could it be launched, or even carried in a bomber plane?), but to the amount of TNT (or another conventional chemical high-explosive, RDX perhaps) needed to produce the same energy release. That energy release is actually generated by the release of binding energy from converting around 1kg of hydrogen to around 0.96kg of helium.
If you wanted to convert that helium back into hydrogen, you'd have to power your device with the energy produced by exploding some megatons of high explosive (assuming that your energy conversion equipment is perfectly efficient).
IIRC, weight-for-weight you get less energy released from TNT than you do from burning the same weight of sucrose (table sugar) ; but you get the energy released more slowly.
(I haven't done the sums - I suspect that there's a cheat here arising from the fact that the TNT contains it's oxygen for combustion inside the molecule, while in the sugar case you're adding atmospheric oxygen. But I'd have to dig out the chemical tables, which i'm not going to do at this time of the morning.)
Someone else has pointed out that by running a mobile phone jammer, you're effectively carrying around a beacon that shouts "Over here!" on the 2.4 (or whatever) GHz band.
But I'm wondering if you're talking about the basic cellphone jammers, or the sophisticated ones. The basic ones simply blast out 2.4GHz white noise at high enough amplitude to be the loudest thing on that channel for [however far around]. These are obviously not hard to spot ; equally obviously, they tend to eat batteries.
The more sophisticated ones put out signals saying the radio (GSM or CDMA/TDMA or whatever other systems are still in use in your area) equivalent of "Hello, I'm your friendly neighbourhood cellphone tower ; who're you?" ; then, when they get a radio bite, they reply as if they're starting to set up the network connections ... and never complete the job. That's obviously a lot more sophisticated - you're essentially looking at most of the computing/ radio sophistication of a mobile phone tower ; so it's going to cost quite a bit - maybe even more than the guts of a mobile phone tower. But likely it's also going to be considerably more power efficient, so it may be feasible to run on batteries.
For the sophisticated jammers, you're already a large part of the way to having a machine that can talk to J.Random Hacker's mobile, acquire the necessary information for tracking it, then pass on the billing/ calling/ routing/ network information to the mobile phone network (perhaps by masquerading as a mobile phone itself?) for any calls that it finds interesting.
Cunning.
This could be circumvented if there was encryption between every handset and every tower for every interaction. But retrofitting that to the existing networks ... no chance. If the spooks don't like it ... even less chance.
Well that's my €0.02, anyway.
Since (as you say) Germany doesn't extradite it's citizens to the USA (presumably because the USA government is in the habit of murdering it's own citizens), then the USA government will use it's standard tactics of kidnapping followed by extraordinary rendition in order to get the people it wants into the detention that it wants, under the questioning it wants. Isn't that what your post-W constitution requires?
Resolution is, as you say, the issue. And, aS YOU SAY (bloody CapsLock!), the atmosphere is one of the major constraints to achieving high resolution. Which requires a combination of altitude (Mount Wilson gave way to Mauna Loa which is giving way to the Atacama), and Adaptive Optics, and then the diffraction limit (Rayleigh limt IIRC) imposed by interference between light from opposite edges of the mirror. So, while the popular designation of large mirrors is "light bucket", one of the major reasons for building large mirrors is to drive down the diffraction limit on resolution.
A modern, well sited (would anyone build a national-grade observatory at a non-optimal site?), AO-equipped system is hitting it's diffraction limit when the seeing is good. So the only ways to better resolution involve less atmosphere (higher altitude), or bigger mirrors.
For IR observations specifically, one of the other constraints is that water vapour in the atmosphere is a killer for some bands of observation. That's another reason for siting telescopes at high altitudes in deserts.
But IR has another problem - because diffraction is related to the wavelength, then using a (say) 3.5m telescope at optical wavelengths will return resolution comparable to an IR observation on a 4+m telescope.
Another issue - distant objects are at high red shifts and so the large majority of their light output arrives at Earth as IR, and their dim. Which pushes for big mirrors, operating in IR, sited in high-altitude deserts.
Or a space-based IR-operating light-bucket.
[Enter, stage right, JWST]
I'm unclear of what you mean by "processing tricks". Describing adaptive optics (AO) as "processing tricks" is strange - a better description would be "getting a better mirror". The AO systems that I've seen details of work by manipulating a mirror in the light path so that a near-axis guide star (natural or artificial) maintains as small an image as possible ; since the mirror is at a point where the whole wavefront is involved in the whole mirror, then correcting the size/ shape of the guide star by adjusting the shape of the AO mirror will also apply the same corrections to the on-axis target image. Several nanoseconds later (ummm, 10m at 300000000 m/s = 33ns, to a first approximation ; assuming the AO mirror is at one end of the scope and the detector is at the other end) the light comes to a focus on the detector, which works exactly as in non-AO modes. To my mind, if that's a processing trick, then I want to get a 500mm Ritchey-Chrétien processing trick, with a good dark processing trick above it.
There are other "processing tricks" that are used - speckle interferometry springs to mind - which are done off-line, after you've had your telescope time, but the AO that you've described happens before image capture.
Hubble hasn't been king since ... some years before it was launched. It never has been a light bucket - it's 2.4m diameter mirror is around 1/4 of a modern national-grade light bucket, and so approximately 1/16 of the light gathering power of a light bucket ; that's around 3 orders of magnitude which is non-trivial. Also it's a LOT easier to put a new detector onto a ground telescope, so the improvements in seeing, lack of vibration, and exposure time that come from being in space have steadily been eroded.
Don't get me wrong - Hubble is a great piece of telescope ; but it's not the only telescope in the world.
Why waste my time learning how the business systems of a foreign country works? It's not as if it's a skill I'm likely to need again in the future.
This month, maybe, their servers are in the States ; next month, who knows? Where Steam's servers are is an even more open question ; one would hope that they're reasonably well distributed around the world, assuming that "Steam" is something that is sensitive to latency. As for whether source code is on a Steam server - well, I've never even bothered to consider using one, so your opinion on that is likely better informed than mine.
Black helicopters and unregistered CIA-rented jets, is it?
The correlation is 1 (otherwise expressed as "100%", "complete", "unblemished"). All known natural occurrences of life occur on "somethings orbiting a star". More, of the postulated locations of naturally-occurring life in our vicinity, all are either themselves in orbit around a star, or in orbit around an object itself in orbit around a star. I am not aware of any seriously proposed locale for the development of life which does not occur in orbit around a star.
NOTE - this does not include the Hoyle-Wickramasinghe postulations about panspermia ; the objects they propose transiting between stars (and therefore not in orbit around a star, or in orbit around an object that itself is in orbit around a star) are locales for dormant life forms, not actively growing, developing or reproducing lifeforms. Even were the Hoyle-Wickramasinghe proposal shown to be true (not an event I consider a significantly important probability, while I do consider myself dieing in a plane crash as a significantly important probability), it would not constitute supporting life on objects not in orbit around a star.
Executive summary : life is only expected to exist in (fairly close) orbit of stars.
The article is crappily written - you can tell from the way they use a long-exposure picture of pouring metal (probably a steel, but it's not sure) to illustrate a story about using plasma to break down detritus in a waste incineration plant. They didn't mention mixing the (selected?) plasma components with air-derived gases (activated oxygen?) to produce heat, water and carbon dioxide. That's one way that you could get a net energy yeild. They also mention "syngas", suggesting perhaps that they (partly?) dissociate both water and organic components of the supplied debris into a plasma, then let that re-associate to form a CO-H2 mix ("SynGas"), then burn that to power the turbine.
Given that the article is crappily-written, it's unclear what's exactly proposed. But it doesn't sound like they're actually deliberately trying to violate laws of thermodynamics.
What does give me pause for thought is ... they're not talking about using bottled oxygen as an oxidiser, so I assume that they're using air ... if they're using air in the plasma phases, then they're going to be producing lots of NOx as well. Reading the Wikipedia article, I also see citations of concerns about liner erosion (a reliability concern related to corrosive gasses), and also to chlorine outputs (derived from PVC plastics, I suspect). So, not a cure-all technology, but I see that it's well established for disposal of medical and other hazardous wastes.
There's a hidden assumption in there - actually several. They may be correct, but your point is only valid if they're all correct.
Some (if not all) of those points need to have been checked before spending American TaxPayer's money on this (via the FBI). It's quite plausible that no crime, by American rules, has been committed. It's equally plausible that an alleged crime is not supported by sufficient evidence to succeed with an extradition request under German law.
Go to the exoplanets.EU site ; follow the news links to publications about HR 8799 and also see Science for the abstract on Formalhaut (if you're working through a location which pays for access to Science, which I'm not, you should be able to get the paper from there ; there's also Supporting Online Material available, which isn't terribly informative. Now, contrary to SlashDot procedure, I'm going to shut my flap while I RTF-Papers. Shocking, isn't it?
The current "bird flu" is, IIRC, a H5N1 influenza virus, in the same sense that I'm a brown-haired, non-colour blind human. The codes are a description of some significant, survival- and propagation- relevant, characteristics of the virus, but they by no means capture the whole of variation in the influenza families of viri. Similarly, not all brown-haired non-colour blind humans are identical or even particularly similar (it doesn't even specify the gender!). If my memory serves me correctly, the viri in question bind to a human blood protein type H5 (for haem-something #5 ; it's got something to do with the way the virus gets into the lungs and then spreads between people in sputum and snot), and also bind to one of a number of neuron-surface proteins (which is something to do with how the viri make you feel terrible).
"H5N1" is a quick-and-dirty way of describing a virus sample, and of checking if it's one of the currently-known, scary ones. A lab can carry a stock of about 10 reagents, and in the time it takes to do one binding/ coagulation test (because you can do them in parallel) you've got a classification into potentially 100 pigeonholes. If your sick patient isn't infected with the "H5N1" strain, then you can drop the biosecurity hazard precautions by a notch or two. Meanwhile, you've got samples on the way to a specialist virology lab for a full genomic analysis, which will add depth and detail to your preliminary "H5N1" classification.
Of course, you assess your biosecurity procedures on the likelihood that you've got the first case of a zoonosis - a new transmission of virus from it's animal vector (from pigs and/ or domesticated fowl, most likely but not guaranteed). In the urban West, that's pretty unlikely ; in the rural (or industrial agricultural) West, it's less unlikely ; in village China, Vietnam or Indonesia, it's a distinct possibility.
There was some work published a couple of years ago on the Spitzbergen samples of the 1918 pandemic ; IIRC, it had a "H" component which was similar to, but not identical to, one of the known "H" components, and also a known "N" component ; however the combination of components wasn't one that had been seen in the duration of modern virology. That suggests that, by natural (or artificial) recombination one could recreate something broadly similar to the 1918 pandemic virus. HOWEVER, it would not be the same virus, as there are likely to be significant differences in the other components of the virus genome. What significance those differences would have in terms of disease progression, is anyone's guess.
I would hope that the Spitzbergen samples are kept under appropriate security.
Whether the virologists can make the right guesses about which antigens to include in vaccines ... well, one hopes they guess right.
I hadn't heard that little story about 1666 before. Which, given numerous visits to The Smoke, surprises me.
You assume, as is common, that you'll always have access to the internet. Which may be a safe assumption in your home and workplace (multiple connections failing over to multiple backbone providers), but I wouldn't bet on it. My work connection goes through a single DSL connection to a single ISP (with phones on a separate link, but to the same provider ; no-one has a modem TTBOMK) ; my home connection likewise. When travelling to client's worksite, almost all have one link through either the installation's satellite dish, or a fibre-optic cable inside a fixed pipeline (if there's anything fixed).
I don't assume that I've got a connection ; I can't assume that. So Google apps doesn't even get a detailed consideration.
Say that you find yourself at a client's site ... and you fire up your laptop to connect to the wireless network. "We don't allow wireless here" is the answer to your question. So you want to connect to the wired network : "Our Admin people will have to install our network protection tools onto your machine. Come back in a couple of days." Or in your home or office location - someone puts a JCB scoop (in context here) through your network connection.
Do you know of a cross-platform code authentication system? You seem to have some sort of professional stake in code development.
I would guess that the only way such could work would be to distribute a package of pre-compiled binaries, separated into chunks (libraries) which are processor-specific versus processor-agnostic, together with linking information to put together the "libraries" at run time into a "authenticated" whole.
Authenticating the author of code would provide a worthwhile level of protection against malicious code, but no protection at all against incompetent programming, or the use of inappropriate algorithms.
You need a different signature key for each platform?? Weird. And probably unhealthy.
I'll take your word for it. "Authenticode" rings a (faint) bell.
I'll take your word for it. I remember trying to get my head around the difference between a domain and a subnetwork yonks ago, and failing. It seems to be an incoherent mess - every company implementing different things differently, with zero or negative documentation.
I don't know what you mean by "home" or "home office" environment - at least in some way that differentiates it from any other office environment. You have costs (heating, tax, hardware, etc), which you pay as a part of doing your business. I've been considering whether or not to pay such a cost for myself, but not having any pressing reason to do so, I've got better uses for the money. But then, I don't make my living by writing software. Obviously, if you do make your living writing software, then you'll take a different opinion on what are necessary costs for your business.
Such costs would, I assume, be tax deductible. So they come off your gross income before you start calculating tax. (If I understand the tax laws, which is something that I don't intend to put to the test, ever, if at all possible.)
What's $200?
A pretty high end graphics card (which, if you're doing graphic-intense work, should itself be tax-deductable. But you'll have to keep it around for the auditors for IIRC 5 years.)? Well, far higher end than anything that I've ever wasted money on.
Or a night out at a decent restaurant for several piglets? (Two nights if it's Malta - I was quite impressed by the food, and the prices.)
Is $200 more than you're willing to pay as part of the cost of being in that business? You'll love doing it for a living then - we spend something like that much on the execution-control device for every installation of our software.
There may well be lower-priced signing authorities - I thought that was part of the purpose of things like the PGP "network of trust"? I've never had reason to find out.
Not really an area I have confidence in my understanding of - though as a registered bone marrow donor, perhaps I should - so I'll restrict my comment to linking to the presented poster : Treatment of HIV-1 Infection by Allogeneic CCR5-32/32 Stem Cell Transplantation: A Promising Approach.
The town that I met my wife in is within spitting distance of the Arctic circle, and was founded to exploit the area's oil reserves. If you believe the town's official history, it was founded in the late 1970s, but there was a settlement, then a railway line, then an industrial yard, then an administration centre, over the dozen years before then. At that time, exports were negligible (even though the country was still the largest producer), so the dollar price of oil didn't matter at all. But the dollar price was far below $40/bbl.
Also, at the conference mentioned in my reply to the next message, the oil price was scarcely mentioned; it's not important at the range of planning which we're talking about. People are anticipating that oil prices will generally continue to go up, and over the decade-plus that these plans need to be made, that's pretty much all you need to be confident of. A two-year blip like we've just had isn't particularly important except in slightly changing base lines.
(Of course, the conference was by geologists, for geologists. What the economists say got all the attention they deserve, considering that some of them believe the obvious fallacy that oil stocks are limited only by economics. Go away, dismal ones, and come back when your "science" has some practical foundation.)
So, yes, the countries planning to develop these areas, will develop them. They may shuffle priorities - like putting a couple of years into building railway lines and shooting wide-area 2-D seismic, instead of selling exploration licenses and encouraging people to do 3-D seismic - but the broader plans will go ahead.
When the revolution starts in Saudi Arabia (and I'm not claiming to know which dissident group are going to pop-off first), there will be a market to sell the oil to.