one huge collection of transmission lines that can be taken down with one well placed bomb.
Unless you're talking about the layout of the actual distribution switchgear at the source plant, then WTF are you talking about? The distribution lines leave from points on the coast hundreds of km apart (what's that in EN_US? New York to Rhodes Island?), which is approaching as far apart as you can get for coastal points in Tunisia. The lines fan out over about 60degrees of azimuth to their various destinations. Even a Tsar Bomb wouldn't take out all of them.
And lets place that in one of the most war torn regions in the world.
So, isn't that an argument for trying to reduce warfar in that area. As the French have been doing, with nearly no other support, in Mali for nearly a decade (sorry, translation into EN_US ; "French" = cheese-eating surrender monkey" ; not that the description fits). Yes, Lybia has a severe governance crisis. Which means that surrounding politicians need to choose one group to support, and the stick with it. Problem is, different nearby countries support different factions. Which is a problem that can be solved in two ways : "jaw-jaw" (ie, diplomacy and negotiation) or "war-war" (war), to steal a line from a half-American who has a fair reputation for knowing what war meant.
To be honest, I'm more interested in the engineering difficulties of a HVDC line in abyssal depths (and pressures) where there are occasional but not infrequent underwater avalanches down the Rhone delta front and off across the West Mediterranean Abyssal Plain. that's water several km deeper than any HVDC line I've heard of before (though it's not a field I follow closely).
Which is very nice, but a compass does not work well in a car made from ferrous metal.
True. But if you're in a car, then you're on either a metalled road, or in a ditch next to a metalled road, and that itself excludes 97-99% of the map from consideration (higher outside cities).
I believe there are some types of vehicle which can drive off-road (actually, I've driven such myself), but almost all of these never do leave the road, and most of those that do follow the tracks of previous vehicles (even if they were horse-drawn carts).
A sense of direction is an instinct, you either have it, or you don't.
You don't, even if you think you do.
It is almost certain that I'm a far more experienced navigator than you - both above and below ground, and in areas with wildly varying local magnetic fields (compass reading changes up to 90degrees/ 5m travel) as well as areas with slowly varying magnetic fields. I'm a damned sight better than most people at counting "60 degrees leftwards for 30m, then 40 deg right for 50m while ascending 5-7m" to do "dead reckoning", underground (no external cues except bedding in the limestone), and I know that I don't have a "sense of direction" instinct. I do have better tracking than most, through practice, but it's no instinct. And I do not trust it. My friends in the Mountain Rescue and Cave Rescue teams have lots of experience in finding people who did believe that they had a sense of direction. Some of them were dead by the time their corpses were found. It's a boring occurrence for them.
If you seriously believe that there is a "sense of direction" in humans, you're best advised to stop talking about it, get yourself to a research lab to prove it (you'll fail) and then spend the rest of your days being bred-up to propagate your unique genes. Think of the military advantages for the brainwashed bottle-fertilised cyborg soldiers your sex organs would be used to create. (or... would it be cheaper to remove the sex organs and lock you in a psychiatric ward with Napoleon and Jesus? That's an accountancy problem.)
Map-and-compass navigation in the real world requires practice.
I know, it's shocking. But it's true. These intellectual skills need to be practised, and then re-used to retain the skill.
No, there's not an app for that. You, yourself, with your attention, need to do the practice. In real time, with real footsteps, over real uneven terrain. Horizontal hail and incipient hypothermia are optional, but do inject a certain degree of urgency into the exercise.
Coal can be turned into gasoline and has been since at least World War II.
Not long after WW1. It's not terribly efficient, but the Third Reich extended their regime lifetime with it, as did the Blanker Zud Afrikans within my lifetime if not yours.
a cleverness and willingness to listen to those around him.
Well, behaviour like that would have got him a bullet in the head from either of the 4 or 5 sides in the area at this time. What did the Peacemonger-In-Chief once say? "If you're not with us, you're against us." Listening to others is dangerous to such attitudes and... well, your associate paid the price.
He wasn't the first, and won't be the last. He's unlikely to be in the last tens of millions.
But one thing they might not expect to share? Skin bacteria.
I can't see how someone with even the slightest knowledge of anatomy and animal behaviour (includes hoomins) could actually write such garbage with a straight face. Contact transfers material - first rule of forensics (so basic, it might even get mentioned in the intro of one of those dozens of American forensics cop shows, though the actual principal goes back to a mid-19th Century Frenchman. IIRC).
I'd be astonished if two people living in close proximity, even if they don't swap (bacteria-laden) bodily fluids, didn't transfer significant amounts of bacteria between each other. How well those transferred colonies are able to establish in the teeth of already-established microbiomes is slightly more interesting, but that they do it is utterly un-surprising.
Is it common for people to believe that a shower is sufficient to remove bacteria from the skin? More than a few percent of the skin bacteria. And the skin fungi. And the skin insects, crustaceans and microscopic animals (with all the bacteria in their guts).
Don't children do school experiments in culturing microbes off their skin any more?
Smokers are exposed to the highest levels of alpha radiation encountered by any group of humans on the planet (polonium), but the vast majority of cancers which develop in ex-smokers seem to be catalysed by the breakdown products of that radiation (berylium features heavily in the decay chain
Huh?
That's a Wheeler-ism : "not even wrong".
Polonium has isotopes
208 (alpha decay to 204Pb, which is stable ; positron emission to 208Bi, which is sort-of-stable (~10^19 years half life) ;
209 (alpha decay to 205Pb, electron emission to 205Tl which is stable) ; positron emission to 209Bi, alpha decay to 205Tl which is stable.
210 (alpha decay to 206Pb which is stable)
You're trying to say something, but I can't for the blazes figure out what.
Unless mom is a criminal, there is little chance the judge will award custody to the father.
Well, if you're stupid enough to have a child, then you're probably too stupid to get the wife ensnared in some jail-worthy criminality before she divorces you.
I think I saw it bundled with Acrobat Reader very recently.
Acrobat Reader? Is that bucket of shit still around? By the four balls of Jesus Mary and Joseph, I stopped using that crock before Vista drove me away from Windows altogether.
How will providing access to electricity help, for example, an agricultural labourer working out in the fields keep cool? Are you going to air condition the fields?
OK, so you're going to turn the whole of India's agricultural production into greenhouse growing areas, air-conditioned to a comfortable temperature. And the construction crews who actually build those greenhouse food factories (and install the cables to power the air conditioning)? You're going to have them actually running live cables, carrying a reel of cable under one arm and an AC unti under the other arm?
I'll be generous and say that you didn't think through your comment before posting. 6-digit UID - you've been around long enough to have no excuses for that sort of mental laziness.
But I wonder if there will ever be a way to early DNA hack enough cells to flip a kid to being a mostly unmutated chimera with a shot at no physical weakness or IQ hit.
The "mostly unmutated chimera" contradicts the "no physical weakness or IQ hit" bit.
The sickle-cell mutation isn't in a chromosomal area associated with skin colour or nose shape. The mutation has probably occurred, multiple times, in all racial groups, but the only one where it produced a significant selection advantage was in West Africa, where most people are of "African" stereotypes. (There's a non-trivial population from the Tuareg and other desert nomads in parts of West Africa, but malaria is not much of a desert disease, so the selection advantage died off as those groups moved around.)
I wonder how many of those audiophiles would have claim they can even hear the difference.
If they didn't have a stock 20-minute long diatribe about how they conducted their own triple-blind placebo-controlled trial to prove they can tell the difference on Edison cylinders of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries", then they have to hand in their "audiophie" card.
The first year that I had my own address, but no TV (and therefore, no TV license. Or radio license either.) I got the letter, and returned it stating "I have no TV, but would you send me information about how to get a Radio License" (I knew they'd stopped doing radio licenses).
In subsequent years, when I got the letter about "according to our records, you have no TV license..." I wrote back that "your records contain the information I sent you in [first year] which answer your query." Which covers me, but would require them to admit that they don't have a record-keeping system worth pissing on.
I'd get a visit from the doorsteppers about 1 year in 2.
Yes. The license is for the possession (not use, possession) of equipment capable of receiving and decoding broadcast TV signals. UHF or VHF, doesn't matter, it''s not specified. Frequency is not specified (and varies from one transmission tower to the next, to reduce interference in overlap areas).
People tried the "I only use the TV to watch ITV" defence repeatedly in the 1960s and 70s. It has never been accepted, because the legislation was written to cover any equipment regardless of what (if anything) was being broadcast. And the legislation used to cover radio reception equipment too, until the mid-80s when they gave up on that.
The radio reception license was folded into the TV license fee around the mid-1980s, IIRC. You can't purchase a separate radio license any more - I tried in the mid-1990s.
There is no cool breeze licensing fee or tanning fee, since possession of cool breeze receptors or melanocyte cells were not considered as spying equipment during WW2. (That's why radio receivers were registered devices during the War, extended to add TV in 1948.)
In the mid-1990s, when the water utilities were sold off for profit, they tried to sue people who installed water butts to collect the rain water from their roofs for use in the garden. They came pretty close to succeeding too, but in his summing up the judge started going down the path that the water utility (Severn-Trent, I think it was) had established it's ownership of all rainfall from the moment it touched a roof or the ground. But the utility company barrister saw the trap that was being primed and withdrew the case with seconds to spare. The trap being that, if the water utility owned the water as soon as it touched the ground, then they were liable for any damage that it caused - such as by running through leaky roofs or drowning people in rivers. But yes, they (the privatised, for-profit) water utilities did try to establish what would have been a "rain fee".
For the record I have bought a couple of antenna in the last couple of years from Amazon (for someone else, I don't watch over the air tv) but I can't say its made any difference to their 'investigations'.
I think The Raven was talking about Set-Top Boxes, DVRs, etc. rather than antennae. An antenna isn't capable of receiving and decoding a TV broadcast signal.
Your approach to the "money with menaces" letters is correct. They do send round doorsteppers - at least in town. And their doorsteppers do not have right of entry. So no matter how foul the weather outside, the correct response is "get off my property and come back with a search warrant" and the police officers to validate and enforce it". The "validate" bit is important - you'll comply with the law, but do not trust the doorsteppers themselves. The "police officers" bit is important - the police do not have the resources to attend (PCSOs are not police officers, BTW). And the "search warrant" bit is important because it would destroy any hope of profit for the doorstepping company from the encounter.
IME, they send the doorsteppers round on dark and stormy nights, and will appeal to you to "let us in to get out of the weather. Don't - once they're in, they can search and seize. Refuse entry, point-blank, then order them off your property, then shut the door in their faces.
The only common metal processing operation that I can think of that specifically requires oxygen is the Bessemer converter, which burns the carbon (and other elements) out of liquid pig iron fresh from the smelter, prior to the addition of sufficient alloying elements to get the mix of steel that you want.
Smelting a metal-oxide ore (many of them) down to the metal alone requires a reducing agent that will react with the metal oxide to produce "reductant oxide" and metal. Far and away the commonest reductant is carbon (coke, coal, charcoal...), but hydrogen and electricity are also used to produce significant metal tonnages.
Oh, there used to be a trick if you had a high-grade copper sulphide ore, where you could roast it in air to produce clouds of sulphur dioxide (for your sulphuric acid plant) and then when you'd converted about 2/3 of your ore charge from sulphide to oxides, close the tuyeres and roast the sulphide and oxide together to produce metal and more clouds of sulphur dioxide. As long as you captured 100% of the SO2 into the sulphuric acid plant, everyone was happy. But only capture 99%, and you've got a serious pollution problem for miles downwind. Not so popular these decades. But it kept the planet cool for a decade or so.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you're talking about the layout of the actual distribution switchgear at the source plant, then WTF are you talking about? The distribution lines leave from points on the coast hundreds of km apart (what's that in EN_US? New York to Rhodes Island?), which is approaching as far apart as you can get for coastal points in Tunisia. The lines fan out over about 60degrees of azimuth to their various destinations. Even a Tsar Bomb wouldn't take out all of them.
So, isn't that an argument for trying to reduce warfar in that area. As the French have been doing, with nearly no other support, in Mali for nearly a decade (sorry, translation into EN_US ; "French" = cheese-eating surrender monkey" ; not that the description fits). Yes, Lybia has a severe governance crisis. Which means that surrounding politicians need to choose one group to support, and the stick with it. Problem is, different nearby countries support different factions. Which is a problem that can be solved in two ways : "jaw-jaw" (ie, diplomacy and negotiation) or "war-war" (war), to steal a line from a half-American who has a fair reputation for knowing what war meant.
To be honest, I'm more interested in the engineering difficulties of a HVDC line in abyssal depths (and pressures) where there are occasional but not infrequent underwater avalanches down the Rhone delta front and off across the West Mediterranean Abyssal Plain. that's water several km deeper than any HVDC line I've heard of before (though it's not a field I follow closely).
that half of people are dumber than that.
True. But if you're in a car, then you're on either a metalled road, or in a ditch next to a metalled road, and that itself excludes 97-99% of the map from consideration (higher outside cities).
I believe there are some types of vehicle which can drive off-road (actually, I've driven such myself), but almost all of these never do leave the road, and most of those that do follow the tracks of previous vehicles (even if they were horse-drawn carts).
You don't, even if you think you do.
It is almost certain that I'm a far more experienced navigator than you - both above and below ground, and in areas with wildly varying local magnetic fields (compass reading changes up to 90degrees/ 5m travel) as well as areas with slowly varying magnetic fields. I'm a damned sight better than most people at counting "60 degrees leftwards for 30m, then 40 deg right for 50m while ascending 5-7m" to do "dead reckoning", underground (no external cues except bedding in the limestone), and I know that I don't have a "sense of direction" instinct. I do have better tracking than most, through practice, but it's no instinct. And I do not trust it. My friends in the Mountain Rescue and Cave Rescue teams have lots of experience in finding people who did believe that they had a sense of direction. Some of them were dead by the time their corpses were found. It's a boring occurrence for them.
If you seriously believe that there is a "sense of direction" in humans, you're best advised to stop talking about it, get yourself to a research lab to prove it (you'll fail) and then spend the rest of your days being bred-up to propagate your unique genes. Think of the military advantages for the brainwashed bottle-fertilised cyborg soldiers your sex organs would be used to create. (or ... would it be cheaper to remove the sex organs and lock you in a psychiatric ward with Napoleon and Jesus? That's an accountancy problem.)
Map-and-compass navigation in the real world requires practice.
I know, it's shocking. But it's true. These intellectual skills need to be practised, and then re-used to retain the skill.
No, there's not an app for that. You, yourself, with your attention, need to do the practice. In real time, with real footsteps, over real uneven terrain. Horizontal hail and incipient hypothermia are optional, but do inject a certain degree of urgency into the exercise.
Not long after WW1. It's not terribly efficient, but the Third Reich extended their regime lifetime with it, as did the Blanker Zud Afrikans within my lifetime if not yours.
Well, behaviour like that would have got him a bullet in the head from either of the 4 or 5 sides in the area at this time. What did the Peacemonger-In-Chief once say? "If you're not with us, you're against us." Listening to others is dangerous to such attitudes and ... well, your associate paid the price.
He wasn't the first, and won't be the last. He's unlikely to be in the last tens of millions.
The question in TFS seems ... just ... incredible :
I can't see how someone with even the slightest knowledge of anatomy and animal behaviour (includes hoomins) could actually write such garbage with a straight face. Contact transfers material - first rule of forensics (so basic, it might even get mentioned in the intro of one of those dozens of American forensics cop shows, though the actual principal goes back to a mid-19th Century Frenchman. IIRC).
I'd be astonished if two people living in close proximity, even if they don't swap (bacteria-laden) bodily fluids, didn't transfer significant amounts of bacteria between each other. How well those transferred colonies are able to establish in the teeth of already-established microbiomes is slightly more interesting, but that they do it is utterly un-surprising.
Is it common for people to believe that a shower is sufficient to remove bacteria from the skin? More than a few percent of the skin bacteria. And the skin fungi. And the skin insects, crustaceans and microscopic animals (with all the bacteria in their guts).
Don't children do school experiments in culturing microbes off their skin any more?
Which would prompt all sorts of questions along the lines of "do they know a thing about OS?"
Which is an extremely bad question to be asking about a "security" provider - commercial or no.
Streisand Effect, big style.
They're on the outside of the gate, which I'm fine with. It's what I'm locked into the building with that I'm worried about.
Huh?
That's a Wheeler-ism : "not even wrong".
Polonium has isotopes
You're trying to say something, but I can't for the blazes figure out what.
Do I detect Trump's slogan for his third presidential campaign?
Well, if you're stupid enough to have a child, then you're probably too stupid to get the wife ensnared in some jail-worthy criminality before she divorces you.
Acrobat Reader? Is that bucket of shit still around? By the four balls of Jesus Mary and Joseph, I stopped using that crock before Vista drove me away from Windows altogether.
OK, so you're going to turn the whole of India's agricultural production into greenhouse growing areas, air-conditioned to a comfortable temperature. And the construction crews who actually build those greenhouse food factories (and install the cables to power the air conditioning)? You're going to have them actually running live cables, carrying a reel of cable under one arm and an AC unti under the other arm?
I'll be generous and say that you didn't think through your comment before posting. 6-digit UID - you've been around long enough to have no excuses for that sort of mental laziness.
Go back to tweeting, Donald. By the way, Vladimir wants a blowjob.
The "mostly unmutated chimera" contradicts the "no physical weakness or IQ hit" bit.
The sickle-cell mutation isn't in a chromosomal area associated with skin colour or nose shape. The mutation has probably occurred, multiple times, in all racial groups, but the only one where it produced a significant selection advantage was in West Africa, where most people are of "African" stereotypes. (There's a non-trivial population from the Tuareg and other desert nomads in parts of West Africa, but malaria is not much of a desert disease, so the selection advantage died off as those groups moved around.)
If they didn't have a stock 20-minute long diatribe about how they conducted their own triple-blind placebo-controlled trial to prove they can tell the difference on Edison cylinders of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries", then they have to hand in their "audiophie" card.
So high? When I had satellite (3 years ago now), it was £37/mo, so about USD 45/mo?
I'd get a visit from the doorsteppers about 1 year in 2.
People tried the "I only use the TV to watch ITV" defence repeatedly in the 1960s and 70s. It has never been accepted, because the legislation was written to cover any equipment regardless of what (if anything) was being broadcast. And the legislation used to cover radio reception equipment too, until the mid-80s when they gave up on that.
The radio reception license was folded into the TV license fee around the mid-1980s, IIRC. You can't purchase a separate radio license any more - I tried in the mid-1990s.
There is no cool breeze licensing fee or tanning fee, since possession of cool breeze receptors or melanocyte cells were not considered as spying equipment during WW2. (That's why radio receivers were registered devices during the War, extended to add TV in 1948.)
In the mid-1990s, when the water utilities were sold off for profit, they tried to sue people who installed water butts to collect the rain water from their roofs for use in the garden. They came pretty close to succeeding too, but in his summing up the judge started going down the path that the water utility (Severn-Trent, I think it was) had established it's ownership of all rainfall from the moment it touched a roof or the ground. But the utility company barrister saw the trap that was being primed and withdrew the case with seconds to spare. The trap being that, if the water utility owned the water as soon as it touched the ground, then they were liable for any damage that it caused - such as by running through leaky roofs or drowning people in rivers. But yes, they (the privatised, for-profit) water utilities did try to establish what would have been a "rain fee".
I think The Raven was talking about Set-Top Boxes, DVRs, etc. rather than antennae. An antenna isn't capable of receiving and decoding a TV broadcast signal.
Your approach to the "money with menaces" letters is correct. They do send round doorsteppers - at least in town. And their doorsteppers do not have right of entry. So no matter how foul the weather outside, the correct response is "get off my property and come back with a search warrant" and the police officers to validate and enforce it". The "validate" bit is important - you'll comply with the law, but do not trust the doorsteppers themselves. The "police officers" bit is important - the police do not have the resources to attend (PCSOs are not police officers, BTW). And the "search warrant" bit is important because it would destroy any hope of profit for the doorstepping company from the encounter.
IME, they send the doorsteppers round on dark and stormy nights, and will appeal to you to "let us in to get out of the weather. Don't - once they're in, they can search and seize. Refuse entry, point-blank, then order them off your property, then shut the door in their faces.
The people behind such law want to drag us back to the Bronze Age, so good luck on getting them to accept the 1800s.
Or did you mean 1800s BCE? (~3750 BP)
You've got wires severely crossed. Rat's nested, even.
The only common metal processing operation that I can think of that specifically requires oxygen is the Bessemer converter, which burns the carbon (and other elements) out of liquid pig iron fresh from the smelter, prior to the addition of sufficient alloying elements to get the mix of steel that you want.
Smelting a metal-oxide ore (many of them) down to the metal alone requires a reducing agent that will react with the metal oxide to produce "reductant oxide" and metal. Far and away the commonest reductant is carbon (coke, coal, charcoal ...), but hydrogen and electricity are also used to produce significant metal tonnages.
Oh, there used to be a trick if you had a high-grade copper sulphide ore, where you could roast it in air to produce clouds of sulphur dioxide (for your sulphuric acid plant) and then when you'd converted about 2/3 of your ore charge from sulphide to oxides, close the tuyeres and roast the sulphide and oxide together to produce metal and more clouds of sulphur dioxide. As long as you captured 100% of the SO2 into the sulphuric acid plant, everyone was happy. But only capture 99%, and you've got a serious pollution problem for miles downwind. Not so popular these decades. But it kept the planet cool for a decade or so.