And it is acquired because surely, I was not the first who invented breathing under the water using tubes sticking out of the water.
Have you actually tried that? Get your lungs more than about 30 cm below the level of the water and you're going to have problems. The last researcher I heard of who tried it got a little over a metre down before he suffered heart problems. The heart damage eventually killed him (years later). (Note : I'm talking about pressure differential between inside the lungs and the bloodstream. I'm not talking about absolute pressure.)
I say we launch a preemptive strike to eliminate all tardigrades immediately!
That's easier said than done. Which is the whole point of the article. (BTW, tardigrades have LONG been known to be extremely tough ; which is precisely why they got the opportunity to breathe vacuum.)
Every time this comes up, I am compelled to recommend The Code Book by Simon Singh. It has a gripping account of Turing's life...
Not actually read that book, but I've heard well of it and of Simon Singh's writing in general.
and the cracking of Enigma.
... which was done in the late 1930s by a group of Polish cryptographers who smuggled it to the west before the war.
Just setting the record a little straighter, and not denigrating the work of Station X in the slightest. I've put my money where my mouth is - individual "Friend of Bletchley Park" # 3508.
This lunchtime I was considering getting a copy of Spore. Saw two important things in the window of a games shop before I went in to put down my cold hard cash : firstly the price (35GBP ~= 43EUR) was more than I was willing to spend for a little light entertainment ; secondly, a notice that an internet connection is required to play (when I have time/ energy/ inclination for games, it's because I don't have a connection). So, the game is DRM'd to the gills? Oh well, it's back to CIV for DOS then. Oh dear, what a pity, never mind.
The northwest passage, which obviously existed since well before it was first crossed in 1906 by Amundsen, and still to this day, is a hazardous journey requiring an expedition and specialist ice breaker ships to cross.
False. It has been traversed at least once by a private yacht - sailed by a one-time colleague of mine. It's just a difficult, dangerous passage. Me? I'm looking forward to drilling in the Roaring Forties, or even onshore Antarctica.
Intel's been busy making a whole new line of quad (and greater) core processors with SMT (Hyperthreading). Microsoft writes the bloaty code, intel sells you the chips to run it on.
Gilbert O'Sullivan, The Bay City Rollers, and Little Jimmy Osmond.
Some of the best arguments yet made for retroactive birth control. It's not strictly necessary for the birth control to be thermonuclear, but it's better to be on the safe side. Megatons of thermonuclear in the case of the Osmond being.
They were also a horrid 1970s pop group whose members wore Womble costumes. I am sadly old enough to remember them, and still bear the emotional scars.
I do too remember them. But emotional scars? Didn't your dad teach you to keep a pair of knitting needles at a dull red heat specifically for driving into your ears in such circumstances? Did wonders for my musical appreciation.
It seems like it would not be too difficult to install a radar (if one is not installed already) and have an onboard computer continually track objects, calculate orbital trajectories, and alert the crew and ground control if any piece of junk large enough to be tracked (above a configurable threshold) will intercept the imaginary sphere which contains the ISS.
Leaving aside the resolution and power consumptions issues that other respondents discuss, look at the ranges involved. According to Wikipedia, the ISS travels at 27700 km/hr or 462 km/minute. So, to allow for (say) a couple of minutes of engine firing (to actually accelerate the ISS into a different orbit) plus a few seconds of "prepare for acceleration" alarms and a few more seconds for identification and analysis, you're looking at needing a radar with over a thousand kilometre range. Also, you need to be looking both "ahead" and "cross-range" Probably need to look behind too.
Our economy might be "booming" if we concentrated more on our military, but only temporarily, until all the loans came due (loans which are held predominantly by the Chinese, the Saudis, and various others).
You're being cruel to Wombles. Wombles were cute, cuddly and useful, as well as being geographically educational. These Little sHitlers have none of these redeeming features.
That said, how many of you envisioned that scene from Pulp Fiction about this web-master just riding along in the back seat of the car with two cops, asks some stupid question and one of the cops turns around to answer when the car hits a bump and BLAM! shoots this guy in the face accidentally.
I'm not going to take a position on whether or not this killing was likely deliberate, but the point of the Pulp Fiction segment was that someone (Vincent Vega?) had got a gun trained on Marvin at the time of the bump-boom. Avoidance of incidents like this is why police (generally)
handcuff their detainees;
keep their guns in their holsters and/ or locked into the sealed weapon locker;
have a protective screen between the detainee(s) and the driver;
put an officer in the back with the detainee(s), to prevent him fucking with the driving officer;
and no-doubt many other standard operating procedures. Oh, hang on - wasn't the car in Pulp Fiction a 2-door ? When was the last time you saw a police 2-door car ? All the Russian police cars I've seen (3 visits totalling nearly 6 months) were 4-door Ladas or Moskvitchii.
The problem is that many utility companies, and other things you have monthly bills for, either don't have electronic payment options at all or they have a $5 fee for using a credit card. I use my chequing account for about 12 payments a month, electronic or otherwise, for those reasons. PS: I used your old-fangled spelling to avoid confusion;)
What possible reasons, apart from administrative incompetence, love of the old-fangled or the desire to keep their employment costs high, could your utility companies have for not accepting electronic payments? After all, it's not as if utility companies are going to be small organisations, so they've not got the excuse of it being too complicated. It's just another way of getting payments made. This thread reminds me : I've got a birthday present cheque from Dad sitting in my wallet. I'm going to have to make time to go into one of those bricks-on-mortar bank buildings some time in the next month or so. I think the last cheque I had to deal with was for the previous birthday.
Well, the judge ruled out Verizon and AT&T by using them as examples. Considering the relatively limited number of large ISP's in the USA, the chance is that it was directed at the largest of all... Comcast.
Can you provide a pointer to a "rogues gallery" of Comcast's management. When I start seeing them in orange jumpsuits, I'll believe you.
As long as I don't have to pay with checks I'm good. I don't have checks and don't expect to need any either.
You don't have any checks on what you pay? Not checking what you pay is just asking for trouble. I always want to check what I pay which is why I use cheques.
It's an American. Forgive it it's eccentric approach to spelling. I do have checks on what I spend. And I don't have a chequeing account. I shut down the chequeing account in about 1989. It's perfectly manageable, since most accounts can do DDs and/ or SOs regardless of whether or not they issue you with a cheque book.
Thing is - I'd been told that using cheques was much, much more common in America than in Britain. ME? I've been seeing signs declaring "we won't accept cheques after [DATE]" appearing in shops for over six months now, and the effective shutdown of the paper chequeing system is looming in a matter of months now. BFD. Big deal. Not.
He went to both, got his undergrad from Yale and an MBA from Harvard.
Of course at the time in addition to being from a rich family, his father was head of the CIA which isn't a bad reference to put on an application.
You have to put your parent's names, incomes and/ or professions onto your application forms?
Err. Why?
When I look at a potential employee's CV, I look at important things - languages spoken (native plus English as a minimum) judging from the errors in the CV (there are always some, or at least arguable bits) ; years of experience in what posts ; countries and/ or continents worked in. If someone even thought to waste CV space on parental occupation and other such irrelevant details, I'd count that as good reason to bin the CV straight off. What are they trying to say ? "My Daddy is rich and my Momma's good-lookin'// so you don't need to pay me to do this job// because I've got an ulterior motive for looking for employment." O.I.C. That's why Bush is trying to direct everyone's attention onto the terrorists - he's trying to deflect attention from something about himself. Well, that's hardly news.
Very true. That said, if a company wants to do something perfectly safe with their product that they feel will generate more sales, they ought to be able to do so.
I fail to see how they're prevented from doing what they want to, anyway they feel the need to :
Step 1 : export beef from (country of origin) to (partner company entirely set up in favourable target country) ; Step 2 : (partner company) does testing under whatever protocols the relevant country requires ; Step 3 : sell beef (wherever they want) under advertising that says (whatever is "legal, decent and honest" in the jurisdiction of sale and advertising) ; Step 4 :... profit.
Of course, if the USDA exerts extraterritorial jurisdiction, all bets are off. We can expect the black-helicopters of the USDA-Army to be disgorging their crack (-smoking) troops to back up their assertions of authority.
Um, we are talking the USA aren't we, where lying for profit is a constitutional right?
It's not a right, it's an obligation, isn't it? If you don't participate and promulgate such behaviour, then you're obviously a pinkocommiesubversivepervert who deserves everything he's going to get. Yeee-, as they say, -ha!
They offered him what he asked for, with conditions. He did not ask for those conditions. Sounds like they were rather distasteful to him. As they should be. The loss of ones freedom of speech should NEVER be a condition to anything. NDAs are counterproductive. Learn how to discern people that you can trust and you shouldn't have to rely on them.
Sorry to be blunt, but that's bollocks. I'm a consultant to the oil industry. My standard contract includes an NDA that prevents me from discussing the details of, for example, the Solan oil prospect I was working on last month for Chrysaor. You can go to their website and read what they're willing to tell you about it ; you can ask them to tell you ; you can even spend $100 million and buy them out to find out what's there. But I can't tell you. The same goes for the Torphins project last month (£1600 bonus on that one, sweet!), the month previous for the Iranian National Oil Company, previously off the West coast for Shell,... ad nauseam for the last 20-something years.
Keeping your trap shut about client's confidential material is absolutely standard in a lot of business, and that's got to be secured by a contract of some sort. How would you feel if your lawyer chose to discuss the details of your divorce with a man he met in the pub? (Note : I'm not talking about him being coerced by some agent of the state, that's normally covered by a bill of rights ; I'm talking about him just telling random people.) Don't you think that having an implicit or explicit NDA in your contract with him is a good idea? The terms might be hidden in "standard practice", an industry's code of conduct, or whatever, but they're there.
I agree that this particular use of an NDA is pretty piss-poor. And I can't really think what Lenovo would have wanted to keep quiet. One of those bizarre choices that some businesses make. But that doesn't make NDAs inherently bad themselves.
I noticed that you did not answer the second part of my post. What kind of process WOULD you use to detect these Non-DNA based life forms?
OK, I'll bite. I'd put in an MS (mass spectrometer), possibly front-ended with a gas chromatograph. No, it's not (directly) capable of identifying the chemistry of life as found on an alien world. But what it is intended to do is (1) identify with good accuracy the components of the environment ; (2) get reasonably good concentrations for those components. Then, if there are significant disequilibria, you've got life. Detection part of the job is done. The same equipment would also have a pretty good chance of characterising the major components of any "obviously living" matter fed into it (take a Japanese schoolgirl on the mission, then chop off any tentacles that come creeping out of a swamp to molest her).
But I'd have to say that we should be able to detect the presence of life long before landing a probe. Any or all of the following should give us an adequate clue that there's something alive down there : atmospheric composition ; presence of seasonal changes ; reflection of only certain colours of light which indicates that something non-mineralogical is using a large chunk of the incoming spectrum. Designing something algorithmic to work this out without human intervention is a challenge. But probably less of a challenge than building an interstellar craft that can carry humans.
as for getting them off that device later...thats his problem:)
RS232. It's been in use for over 35 years (for equipment that I've personally had to deal with), and it's still in large amounts of long-lifetime industrial equipment. I'd put good money of my own on it being in use in 25 years from now, even better money on there being equipment in use then that communicates over RS232. The ONLY threat to the continuance of RS232 is that it's been missing from the last generation of laptops, so a lot of children are growing up and leaving university without meeting it. But it'll hit them when they hit the real world, if not before.
Quick check on the new motherboard for the wife's desktop - one RS232 port. It ain't dead yet.
Just because a technology has acknowledged limits doesn't mean that it's going to go extinct. RS232 is much more robust than Ethernet, much less fiddly than fibre optic links.
Among the 13,500 scanned pages are 1,500 different language versions of Genesis 1-3
I'm sure they picked bible passages because the translations were mostly done for them already but I'm a little embarassed that future generations are going to think how amazingly superstitious we were. I mean, Genesis 2 alone...
Whats wrong with Genesis 2? It's a perfectly good book, though I am getting the feeling that version 2.1 is due some day soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you actually tried that? Get your lungs more than about 30 cm below the level of the water and you're going to have problems. The last researcher I heard of who tried it got a little over a metre down before he suffered heart problems. The heart damage eventually killed him (years later).
(Note : I'm talking about pressure differential between inside the lungs and the bloodstream. I'm not talking about absolute pressure.)
That's easier said than done. Which is the whole point of the article. (BTW, tardigrades have LONG been known to be extremely tough ; which is precisely why they got the opportunity to breathe vacuum.)
Ha ha. But serious.
What are the current figures for functional illiteracy? 10%? 20%?
Not actually read that book, but I've heard well of it and of Simon Singh's writing in general.
Just setting the record a little straighter, and not denigrating the work of Station X in the slightest. I've put my money where my mouth is - individual "Friend of Bletchley Park" # 3508.
This lunchtime I was considering getting a copy of Spore. Saw two important things in the window of a games shop before I went in to put down my cold hard cash : firstly the price (35GBP ~= 43EUR) was more than I was willing to spend for a little light entertainment ; secondly, a notice that an internet connection is required to play (when I have time/ energy/ inclination for games, it's because I don't have a connection).
So, the game is DRM'd to the gills?
Oh well, it's back to CIV for DOS then. Oh dear, what a pity, never mind.
False.
It has been traversed at least once by a private yacht - sailed by a one-time colleague of mine. It's just a difficult, dangerous passage.
Me? I'm looking forward to drilling in the Roaring Forties, or even onshore Antarctica.
You forgot the obligatory " ... profit".
Some of the best arguments yet made for retroactive birth control. It's not strictly necessary for the birth control to be thermonuclear, but it's better to be on the safe side. Megatons of thermonuclear in the case of the Osmond being.
I do too remember them. But emotional scars? Didn't your dad teach you to keep a pair of knitting needles at a dull red heat specifically for driving into your ears in such circumstances? Did wonders for my musical appreciation.
Leaving aside the resolution and power consumptions issues that other respondents discuss, look at the ranges involved. According to Wikipedia, the ISS travels at 27700 km/hr or 462 km/minute. So, to allow for (say) a couple of minutes of engine firing (to actually accelerate the ISS into a different orbit) plus a few seconds of "prepare for acceleration" alarms and a few more seconds for identification and analysis, you're looking at needing a radar with over a thousand kilometre range.
Also, you need to be looking both "ahead" and "cross-range" Probably need to look behind too.
Ah, someone with a clue.
You have some reason for believing that the guy asking the question isn't in India?
You're being cruel to Wombles. Wombles were cute, cuddly and useful, as well as being geographically educational. These Little sHitlers have none of these redeeming features.
I'm not going to take a position on whether or not this killing was likely deliberate, but the point of the Pulp Fiction segment was that someone (Vincent Vega?) had got a gun trained on Marvin at the time of the bump-boom. Avoidance of incidents like this is why police (generally)
and no-doubt many other standard operating procedures.
Oh, hang on - wasn't the car in Pulp Fiction a 2-door ? When was the last time you saw a police 2-door car ? All the Russian police cars I've seen (3 visits totalling nearly 6 months) were 4-door Ladas or Moskvitchii.
What possible reasons, apart from administrative incompetence, love of the old-fangled or the desire to keep their employment costs high, could your utility companies have for not accepting electronic payments? After all, it's not as if utility companies are going to be small organisations, so they've not got the excuse of it being too complicated. It's just another way of getting payments made.
This thread reminds me : I've got a birthday present cheque from Dad sitting in my wallet. I'm going to have to make time to go into one of those bricks-on-mortar bank buildings some time in the next month or so. I think the last cheque I had to deal with was for the previous birthday.
Can you provide a pointer to a "rogues gallery" of Comcast's management. When I start seeing them in orange jumpsuits, I'll believe you.
It's an American. Forgive it it's eccentric approach to spelling.
I do have checks on what I spend. And I don't have a chequeing account. I shut down the chequeing account in about 1989. It's perfectly manageable, since most accounts can do DDs and/ or SOs regardless of whether or not they issue you with a cheque book.
Thing is - I'd been told that using cheques was much, much more common in America than in Britain. ME? I've been seeing signs declaring "we won't accept cheques after [DATE]" appearing in shops for over six months now, and the effective shutdown of the paper chequeing system is looming in a matter of months now. BFD. Big deal. Not.
You have to put your parent's names, incomes and/ or professions onto your application forms?
Err. Why?
When I look at a potential employee's CV, I look at important things - languages spoken (native plus English as a minimum) judging from the errors in the CV (there are always some, or at least arguable bits) ; years of experience in what posts ; countries and/ or continents worked in. // so you don't need to pay me to do this job // because I've got an ulterior motive for looking for employment."
If someone even thought to waste CV space on parental occupation and other such irrelevant details, I'd count that as good reason to bin the CV straight off. What are they trying to say ? "My Daddy is rich and my Momma's good-lookin'
O.I.C. That's why Bush is trying to direct everyone's attention onto the terrorists - he's trying to deflect attention from something about himself. Well, that's hardly news.
In both directions. At once.
(I'd have missed the story by less than half an hour, but I went to bed with the wife instead. Which makes me doubly unusual by SlashDot's standards.)
I fail to see how they're prevented from doing what they want to, anyway they feel the need to :
Step 1 : export beef from (country of origin) to (partner company entirely set up in favourable target country) ; ... profit.
Step 2 : (partner company) does testing under whatever protocols the relevant country requires ;
Step 3 : sell beef (wherever they want) under advertising that says (whatever is "legal, decent and honest" in the jurisdiction of sale and advertising) ;
Step 4 :
Of course, if the USDA exerts extraterritorial jurisdiction, all bets are off. We can expect the black-helicopters of the USDA-Army to be disgorging their crack (-smoking) troops to back up their assertions of authority.
It's not a right, it's an obligation, isn't it? If you don't participate and promulgate such behaviour, then you're obviously a pinkocommiesubversivepervert who deserves everything he's going to get. Yeee-, as they say, -ha!
Sorry to be blunt, but that's bollocks. ... ad nauseam for the last 20-something years.
I'm a consultant to the oil industry. My standard contract includes an NDA that prevents me from discussing the details of, for example, the Solan oil prospect I was working on last month for Chrysaor. You can go to their website and read what they're willing to tell you about it ; you can ask them to tell you ; you can even spend $100 million and buy them out to find out what's there. But I can't tell you. The same goes for the Torphins project last month (£1600 bonus on that one, sweet!), the month previous for the Iranian National Oil Company, previously off the West coast for Shell,
Keeping your trap shut about client's confidential material is absolutely standard in a lot of business, and that's got to be secured by a contract of some sort. How would you feel if your lawyer chose to discuss the details of your divorce with a man he met in the pub? (Note : I'm not talking about him being coerced by some agent of the state, that's normally covered by a bill of rights ; I'm talking about him just telling random people.) Don't you think that having an implicit or explicit NDA in your contract with him is a good idea? The terms might be hidden in "standard practice", an industry's code of conduct, or whatever, but they're there.
I agree that this particular use of an NDA is pretty piss-poor. And I can't really think what Lenovo would have wanted to keep quiet. One of those bizarre choices that some businesses make. But that doesn't make NDAs inherently bad themselves.
OK, I'll bite.
I'd put in an MS (mass spectrometer), possibly front-ended with a gas chromatograph.
No, it's not (directly) capable of identifying the chemistry of life as found on an alien world. But what it is intended to do is (1) identify with good accuracy the components of the environment ; (2) get reasonably good concentrations for those components. Then, if there are significant disequilibria, you've got life. Detection part of the job is done.
The same equipment would also have a pretty good chance of characterising the major components of any "obviously living" matter fed into it (take a Japanese schoolgirl on the mission, then chop off any tentacles that come creeping out of a swamp to molest her).
But I'd have to say that we should be able to detect the presence of life long before landing a probe. Any or all of the following should give us an adequate clue that there's something alive down there : atmospheric composition ; presence of seasonal changes ; reflection of only certain colours of light which indicates that something non-mineralogical is using a large chunk of the incoming spectrum.
Designing something algorithmic to work this out without human intervention is a challenge. But probably less of a challenge than building an interstellar craft that can carry humans.
RS232.
It's been in use for over 35 years (for equipment that I've personally had to deal with), and it's still in large amounts of long-lifetime industrial equipment. I'd put good money of my own on it being in use in 25 years from now, even better money on there being equipment in use then that communicates over RS232. The ONLY threat to the continuance of RS232 is that it's been missing from the last generation of laptops, so a lot of children are growing up and leaving university without meeting it. But it'll hit them when they hit the real world, if not before.
Quick check on the new motherboard for the wife's desktop - one RS232 port. It ain't dead yet.
Just because a technology has acknowledged limits doesn't mean that it's going to go extinct. RS232 is much more robust than Ethernet, much less fiddly than fibre optic links.
Whats wrong with Genesis 2? It's a perfectly good book, though I am getting the feeling that version 2.1 is due some day soon.