... which amongst other things shows a persistently blinking light a few hundred miles offshore Nigeria. Now, it could be a drilling rig with a conscientious Radio Officer, patching his various systems. But I bet it's more likely someone else who's set up his ICBM address incorrectly.
Depends on the sense of "easy" you mean. From what I understand, the work involved in factory jobs is insanely easy,
Sounds to me like you've never worked in a factory.
Ever tried scraping Guinea-pig shit off cages for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, in stinking "high" summer? Even after 6 weeks, Monday morning normally involves struggling to keep your breakfast down. (OK, in a hospital, not a factory.)
Ever tried spending all day climbing around inside 10m tall machines, trying to get to obscurely-placed grease points to pump them, or getting to a lube-oil tank to install the drain hose, then fill up with flushing oil, then drain again, then fill with the next year's worth of lube oil. See those 40 mixing vats - go inspect the oil level in every gear box, and top up as necessary ; here's your 25l top-up tank, carry it to the top of each separate tank. This afternoon, you can do the vats in the next building, but they need a different type of oil.
Ever tried dashing up to the top of a 250ft tower, in a Force 9 and rising gale, because NOW is the only opportunity that you're going to have this month to clean the various sensors up there, and it needs to be done this week.
Been there, done that, got the tee-shirt and the industrially-damaged hearing and dermatitis. And believe me,working 20-hour days (bed-to-bed, including 1 hour/day for food, shit and coffee breaks) in the geology lab is a lot preferable to working on the shop floor.
I would really, strongly, advise you to spend one or more of your summers working at the bottom of the industrial pile. NOTHING but NOTHING will improve your motivation to get a better job more than some experience of what for most people is "real life". Love of money and such like trivia are nothing compared to the motivation of avoiding hard work.
Hey, I can even SlashDot while supervising a gas system calibration and doing a system backup!
While targeting the user is a perfectly good way to go about breaking in to something, that topic area isn't very practical for computer science.
I think that the Bastard Operator From Hell would disagree with you. Though I must admit that the last decade or so he's been using the lime pits less and outsourcing the cattle prod work to the PFY and booby-trapped lift shafts. He even, Grud preserve us, sometimes calls Security. (When he wants one of the PFY's traps defusing at no cost to himself or humanity.)
The painful detail (apart from the complexity) is the mechanism for braking - you're f*d if that fails.
The braking mechanism for a reaction drive ? Well, pending some "New Physics" based on the crystalline excretions of a wombat's anal gland, I think that we'd have to use Newton's Third Law ("for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction" ; it's what puts the "reaction" into the "reaction drive"). To brake, you use the reaction drive. That's why the mid-point of long trips in a reaction-drive vehicle is called "turn over". Of course, you don't rely on one reaction drive ; you use multiple fuel tanks manifolded to multiple reaction drives and you have significant redundancy in the turn over mechanisms too (say, gyroscopes AND attitude jets). But that's just conservative engineering.
Clearly you've got a clue, unlike that Lord Apathy twat.
I'm thinking dinosaur killer when I say punched through to the mantle because that is what that one did. It rang the planet like a bell. That would very likely kills us as a species.
The Earth rings like a bell after every major earthquake.
And after every minor earthquake, and after every gnat's footfall, but at amplitude is too low to detect. It was in Seismology 1.0.1 (or at least, it was in my Earth Physics classes. (BTW, unlike Lord Apathy, I am a geologist. My professional affiliation is FGS, if you're interested.)
I'm not even sure that you're right that the Chixulub event punched clear to the mantle; got a source?
I rather doubt that he'd have a source, or at least, not a source of repute. Ball park figures : Chixulub is about 150km in diameter ; diameter/ depth for complex craters is around 10/ 1 ; so depth of the early crater (once the transitional shuffling is over and done with) was in the order of 15km. Typical depth to Moho on typical continental crust is about 30-35km. (There used to be a geological map server at Cornell.edu, which could generate a map of depth-to-Moho over arbitrary regions of the Earth's surface. It seems to have gone now. [SADNESS] )
Even if it did, so what? It might trigger some supervolcanism (I know of no evidence of this with Chixulub), but that's hardly the be-all and end-all of ways that impacts kill you.
People have repeatedly and confusedly claimed the the eruption of the Deccan Traps antipodially to the Chixulub impact may indicate a causal relationship. This has never gained strong credence within the profession because the events leading up to the eruption of a hotspot (generation of a core-surface hot point, initiation of thermal upwelling) must have started at a minimum 10s of millions of years prior to the impact, and from the stratigraphic record of other hotspots (I drill oilfields whose location and reservoir properties are increasingly seen as affected by the Iceland hotspot ; this really is something I get paid to understand and argue about, with tens of millions of dollars in exploration budgets in the balance), the duration of regional uplifting preceeds eruption of first basalts by hundreds of thousands of years. There is a superficial appeal to the idea of a "contre-coup" fracture consequent on the impact, but the idea simply doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Bloody Vista has shat it's TCP stack twice while I've been editing this, and I have to travel to an oil rig tomorrow morning, so I don't have time to work further on this. If you're interested, reply and I'll pick it up once I'm into the swing of my 20-hour workday.
Sadly, what most people do not realize is that they do not actually need a car ownership (or need to put themselves in a situation in which they need a car ownership).
BURN the heretic! KILL the unbeliever! Bring down Biblical punishments on the doubter (in the sense of punishing him and his descendants, even to the seventh generation ; yes, it is the fault of someone who won't be born for a century from now that this heretic hasn't re-canted ; not having been conceived yet is not sufficient excuse for not restraining the heretic).
I'm having to face the grim and unpleasant prospect of having to get a car. Or, to be more precise, having to be the owner-of-record for a year or so, until my daughter has accumulated a year of no-claims bonus. Not that I've got any intention of doing any more driving than the absolute minimum I have to (including instructional driving). Both the wife and I have long since ceased to consider driving to be anything other than an unpleasant, expensive, frustrating, dangerous chore. The question of whether the half-hour a day that a car might save over using the bus... is a very open question. The wife finds the traffic in this country to be so terrifyingly aggressive that she's unlikely to use the car during morning rush hour herself ; obviously I'm not going to use any car while I'm at work at sea, or on a different continent. Add to that the shit that is fucking with maintenance... who would want one? Sure, if you want to live out in the country, then that's your choice. But don't delude yourself that it's anything other than another cost of the lifestyle choices that you make.
Well, no. This is the first for colour, which is a pretty wild first.
Actually, I think that's not the case, by around a decade. It might be a first for pigmentation, but pigmentation is IIRC only one of 7 different ways of giving an organism "colour". Without digging through the reference books, around 1998 some fossils were discovered that contained structures whose dimensions indicated the presence of diffraction gratings and other elements of "structural colours".
This calls for an inverse of the oft-repeated lie that "there are no atheists in a foxhole" (attributed to some American fundamentalist idiot of a general, IIRC). Let's put your faith in your religion over science to the test : go learn to parachute, then kit up with a good, scientifically designed parachute (and scientifically-recommended reserve chute). Jump out of the plane, do a few seconds of freefall and PRAY your way safely to the ground. I would contend that there are actually more non-hypocritical atheists in foxholes than there are non-hypocritical religionists in freefall parachute jumps.
(Those pseudo-parachute jumps in a vertical wind tunnel don't count ; they don't have the full effect. I mean a real 9.98m/(s^2), big round "ground" coming up to meet you, terminal velocity around 170 km/hr, experience.)
Or you could be aware that they're going to hand you a twenty page contract and set aside enough time to read it when you go to the shop and not just spend the majority of the time fiddling around with the phones they have on display.
That'd get you arrested and Tasered (in that order, probably) as the terr'st that you obviously are. Reading anything, rather than taking the word of retail androids, is a Thought Crime. More importantly, it could infect other customers with the meme that "Maybe there's something I should check about this product". It's this second anti-competitive aspect that would get the Taser applied, to stop you from voicing more heretical thoughts such as "I haven't done anything wrong!"
Sheeple, go back to your grass and graze. There's nothing to see here apart from a truck labelled 'Slaughterhouse 5'.
That's between 20 and 35 years out of date. It's got a monolithic Russia (missing the undoubtedly important nations of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, and the politically sensitive "allies" of Tadjikstan and Uzbekistan), so is more than 17/18 years old ; it's got a Bangladesh, which means it's post 1974/5 IIRC (Pakistani civil war). There's deliberate mention of "Palestine" in there, which is strange in an ostensibly American product targeted at children. I'd have expected the Americo-Israeli Thought-Police would have caught this before it became public.
Shapeways is in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, so while each piece may only cost $50-$150, the shipping could push that quite a bit higher, depending on size, weight, and location.
I don't see shipping being any serious degree of expensive - after all it's not as if it needs to go by airmail. Oh, are you on the wrong side of the Pond? A more serious problem for trans-Pondians would be the continuing decline of the dollar and the rise of the uro. Eindhoven, eh? I think I got lost there once. But I'm not sure. Obviously.
, a Jesus Dildo, and yes, such a thing exists. I refrain from direct linking to a page that has one. Google is your friend if you're really interested...
Though I dunno who sues first, the maker of the dildo or the RC church. Afaik they claim some rights to the cross with a carpenter's corpse and all that stuff surrounding it.
I thought that Jesus ibn Joseph was a failure as a carpenter, which is why he went into the confidence trickster market? You want to be careful saying things like that, you're insulting carpenters. "RC church" ? Is that like an RC helicopter? http://www.maplin.co.uk/module.aspx?ModuleNo=220841&doy=2m8 Does the RC church come with self-propelled deluded victims who'll auto-navigate to be screwed at the altar? RC opening and closing of the doors to symbolise excluding the victims from Never-Never Land? Wooo, the advances of religion these millennia! I can't wait until experimental theology comes up with an explanation for lightning.
More seriously,.... nah, this isn't really a serious post.
In popular media, there is no distinction between Open source, Free software, and the GPL. They are all considered to be the synonymous by the illinformed.
This isn't "the popular media", this is Slashdot. While debates could be had about the effectiveness of the tag-line "News for Nerds", the intention is very clear that the audience here should be better informed about tech matters than the population average.
It's like how people with brown skin have become terrorists. It makes no sense but people believe it.
Timothy McVeigh was made into a nigger before he was fried/ poisoned/ shot/ whatever? Doesn't that come under "cruel and unusual punishment"? (I'm not saying that's an inherently bad thing - if you've made a choice to have cruel and unusual punishments in your judicial system, then making a white supremacist KKK whackjob into a nigger while he's still alive is a nicely calculated piece of cruel and unusual punishment. Sort of like putting a hog-tied rapist into the Bridal Suite with Big Sven and a jar of vaseline. Much more effective than pissing on their graves.) (Don't bother complaining about me using the "n-word" ; I think it's justified in the context of insulting KKK whackjobs. It's done deliberately, not thoughtlessly.)
OOPS! we were hacked! our source code was stolen! OMG!! It's all over pirate bay! sorry! In other words, legally say "Blizzard.... Go To Hell."
Except, it's not legal if MDY claims this happens in court, when in reality the story is a bit fabricated.
When you get down to personal motivations, it gets very difficult to prove in court what was going on inside someone's head. At which point, the "disgruntled employee" line of leakage becomes much more defensible than "we woz haxxored, yer 'onour". The judge demands to speak to the "disgruntled employee", who says "Send me a pre-paid plane ticket from and back to my vacation" or "Go fuck yerself, yer'onour" depending on jurisdiction ; there's then not a lot that the judge can do, short of sending in the extraordinary rendition squads with their water boards and other paraphernalia.
Getting "haxxored" on the other hand, should leave a forensics trail a mile wide and long. A "disgruntled employee" (particularly one with legitimate access to the data in question) doesn't imply a long forensics trail, so the absence of any forensic evidence can't be presented as implying miscooperation by the management of MDY. Even proof that the "disgruntled employee" had been planning a move to another company/ country/ continent weeks before the leak would only be evidence that his disgruntlement was long-standing, and that MDY's internal personnel paperwork isn't terribly bright.
"I wonder what happens if you inform a cop that you are recording him when he pulls you over."
Oh..that's simple...camera mysteriously gets dropped and smashed on the ground (probably while you are being slammed against the car), and you get charged first with obstructing justice...with more charges to follow later as they have time to think them up.
I think you've missed the point of the article (assuming that you read TFA). What the cop-on-the-take is worried about is that when they're pulling Joe Bloggs over, they're being video-taped by John Doe from the other side of the street. Should they notice John Doe, and start trying to take out his "sous-veillence" they still have to be looking over their shoulders because they've now attracted a crowd and there are 4 more video cameras trained on them. They can't assume that the crowd is either friendly, or even non-hostile. Again, this is in the UK context, where by all accounts, the police are much more "community interaction" than "fist of god" compared to the States. The context I saw was very much more in-town arrests rather than being shaken down on a quiet country road. There's a very good reason that, when I go work in to third-world countries, I get a native driver for driving me around out of town and I just sit in the back pretending to not understand either the tongue language or the body language. In town though, often in the presence of other foreigners, things are generally considerably safer. The reason for the native driver out-of-town is that it is cheaper and safer for their high-value, high-insurance cost assets. No disrespect to the drivers, often very nice, very intelligent blokes ; but a month in a coma in a hospital for them costs the insurance company less than if it were me. Plus they're far more likely to talk their way out of a problem before I'd even notice it. That talking, knowing the local "squeeze" rates and procedures, is their job (which is probably why they're mostly intelligent, personable blokes). In the third world, an argument with the police that you crawl away from and spend a month in a coma is a good police interaction.
Is this another idiot journalist who thinks that because he lives in America, then the Internet ends at the 6-mile limit. Or is it a 200-mile EEZ because you've got weak neighbours?
So the final price is inflated because of government theft.... er, taxes. -- I USE 50k PHONE LINE TO DOWNLOAD DOCTOR WHO (about 5 hours per episode). Who needs broadband?;-)
You like your Doctor Who?
Produced by the BBC.
Paid for by those taxes which you so despise.
Here, {=== have a pair of tweezers to pull the shotgun pellets out of your foot.
Another possible reason is because import taxes are very high. The software may actually cost $299 to the German, but with the added customs, imports, and sales taxes, plus any mark-up from the seller, the out-of-pocket spent may be around $500 or more.
What's being imported? The software is produced locally, translated locally, burned to CDs locally, put into cardboard boxes locally with locally-written and printed manuals and finally sold locally. The only importation would be the one-off import of some confidential data - the source code. The last time I brought a piece of Microsoft software directly (as opposed to getting a program on a machine) the address to contact for support of my copy of Windows 3.11 was near London, not near Seattle. If there is taxation going on, it'd be at the point where software companies try to export their profits back to their home country. "Repatriation of profit" is what we call it in the oil industry, and every government everywhere fights hard against it.
All of this is actually of benefit to those of us who like our FLOSS. There are some really good open source and/or free software coming out of Europe. Plus, I suspect, any serious study of encryption should be done outside of the US so that the stuff can actually be used anywhere/everywhere.
GPG, funded in no small part by the German government, out of those so-despised taxes.
Power's generated mostly with coal. Current projections estimate that we have hundreds of years worth of coal left;
Did you see the recent critique of coal reserve figures in GeoScientist? It's not anything like as rosy as the popular view that we've got "hundreds of years worth of coal left in the ground".
A report from the EU Institute of Energy published in February 2007 calculated that the R/P ratio dropped by almost a third - from 277 years in 2000 to just 155 in 2005. If this rate of decline were to continue, the report warned, "the world could run out of economically recoverable reserves of coal (at current economic and operating conditions) much earlier than widely anticipated." In 2006 the R/P dropped again to 144. The question of why coal reserves are falling so fast, and whether the trend will continue, is only now beginning to be asked.
I'm not going to quote the entire article - it's far too much for a Slashdot post - but the bottom line is that coal reserves seem to be a lot tighter than popularly supposed. With coal prices having quintupled since 2002, conventional economics would suggest that reserve figures should have been increased (as higher prices can support extraction of deeper and/ or thinner seams, thus making greater volumes of coal basins economically minable) ; reserve figures have fallen, and by more than be accounted for by extraction. Which means that in the past there has been previous overestimation of reserves, if not outright lies.
Peak oil is here already ; peak coal will probably be closer to 2020 than to 2120. Within our lifetimes.
0.02 worth to think about.
(By the way, "GeoScientist" isn't a for-sale magazine ; it's the in-house newsletter of the Geological Society, written by geologists, for geologists. It's not quite as authoritative as Jnl.Geol.Soc.Lond, but it's probably more reliable (in this context) than the likes of New Scientist or Scientific American.)
Some nano-particles, specifically carbon nanotube nanoparticles of considerable length, which are loose in the air, have been shown to behave like asbestos in lung tissue culture. Which means that people using them loose (e.g. in carbon nanotube nanoparticle manufacturing and device fabrication facilities) should probably take care. Or that further design work needs to take place to modify the surface properties of carbon nanotube nanoparticles to remove this undesirable property. Since the vast majority of uses proposed for long carbon nanotube nanoparticles propose using them intimately embedded in some binder (typically an epoxy resin), then the issue of their being loose in the air doesn't arise except at the fabrication site. Adding surface components that bind carbon nanotube nanoparticles to each other (which is likely to be a desirable property in most structural uses) will greatly reduce their ability to disperse into the air and to penetrate deep into the lung. Carbon nanotubes used for "interesting" electrical properties (including photovoltaics) are considerably shorter than the ones implicated in the carcinogenic study you're referring to. And the same general techniques of modifying surface properties are still available to further reduce any carcinogenic risk. One minor point - not all nanoparticles are carbon nanotubes, as your comment seems to imply ; for example, titanium dioxide nanoparticles have long been a target of study for artificial direct-to-hydrogen photolysis of water.
One second minor point - in my day-to-day work I am exposed to carcinogenic and toxic materials in the chemicals I work with and in the atmosphere I breathe. Which is why I'm conscientious about applying protective skin treatments and using my PPE. The carcinogenic fumes are a concern, which I minimise as much as I can by paying attention to the location and direction of the forced ventilation. And in the past, I've worked on asbestos demolition. I'm not reckless, far from it ; I reckon the hazards quite closely and I don't hide them from the people who work under me (this makes me very unpopular with some superiors and clients who don't want to admit to these materials being hazardous. It doesn't stop me working with hazardous materials.
That's the way unix is supposed to work. Many isolated processes communicating over pipes. That's why it's so stable compared to windows.
An adapatation of something I read on/. long, long ago:
Say that Mac (UNIX) and PC from the commercials went off and started their own family. (Say PC got lucky with one of those cheerleaders in the background.)
If PC were to teach his child how to drive, he would have the child launch multiple threaders and store the HANDLEs, assigning hRightFoot to the gas,
[... SNIP...] Mac would have septuplets. He'd fork one child process for controlling the gas, one child for controlling the stearing, one child for controlling the iRadio, and have them all communicate with pipes!
That way, if one of them crashes, they can just be restarted! Wait...
Assuming, for the moment, that children being born today are ever going to learn to drive (I'm an oil geologist ; I expect to teach my 16y.o. step daughter to drive in the next few months, if she gets a car; I don't expect any children she chooses to have to have any need to learn to drive ; what private use vehicles there are will be roboticised, and probably for hire only) The PC child, driving with threads, has corrupted data in (say) hRightFoot ; next time the state of hRightFoot is accessed by hBrain, then the state of hBrain becomes unpredictable. Maybe error handlers will be adequate, and the system won't come down. Maybe not. If hBrain doesn't crash, it continues sending messages to hRightFoot and expecting to get sane output. So when hBtrain wants the pedal to go to the metal, the radio gets retuned and hBrain is told that the spare wheel is being attached. Either way, hBrain gets well brain-fucked, pretty fast, and starts instructing the spare wheel to load itself into the CD player on drives A: through Z:. For the Unix child, when the gas-control process crashes it's pipes are re-connected to a new instance of the fuel-supply-control process. As part of it's re-start code, the fuel-supply-process checks the current state of the gas pedal, then starts processing messages piped to it. The supervisory program may see a delay in response to the message queue, or it may see messages being dropped, both of which are situations it should be constructed to manage. Meanwhile, the clutch/ gear-shift control process continues unaffected.
Violence is the last resort of the incompetent, a wise man once said. I beg to differ. It is usually the first.
Wasn't that in the Foundation books? I think it was meant to signify that violence is such a worthless option that only the incompetent would use it at all, and even then it would be their last resort.
Yes, that line is in the Foundations. The Good Doctor was tipping his literary hat to another Good Doctor, Samuel Johnson, the harmless drudge : "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."
Ultimately, even the smallest infraction (a speeding ticket?) is backed up by deadly force.
If that's truly the state of affairs in your country, I think you'd have perfectly good grounds for claiming political asylum when you escape to somewhere in the civilized world. Get out now, your life is obviously in immediate danger.
Then we partially agree: the solution is to go in and kill the fuckers, not to "shut down" mining capabilities.
Which begs the question, how are you going to identify who are the fuckers that you're going to kill, and who are the fuckees that you're not going to kill? The little work that I've done in Africa (2 months, with the expectation of further employment there in decades to come) leaves me in full and certain doubt of my ability to distinguish between fuckers and fuckees there. At least, not without spending months getting to know the specifics of a particular area.
This is not the answer that you want to hear. Tough.
Saves having to go to the store, grab a DVD then return it after.
Now, why on earth would someone do that? My letter box is far closer than the nearest video rental place, and the mail box for the returns is still closer than the video store and on the way to the bus stop. No DRM required on that rental scheme.
Slashdot Mirror
... which amongst other things shows a persistently blinking light a few hundred miles offshore Nigeria. Now, it could be a drilling rig with a conscientious Radio Officer, patching his various systems. But I bet it's more likely someone else who's set up his ICBM address incorrectly.
Sounds to me like you've never worked in a factory.
Ever tried scraping Guinea-pig shit off cages for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, in stinking "high" summer? Even after 6 weeks, Monday morning normally involves struggling to keep your breakfast down. (OK, in a hospital, not a factory.)
Ever tried spending all day climbing around inside 10m tall machines, trying to get to obscurely-placed grease points to pump them, or getting to a lube-oil tank to install the drain hose, then fill up with flushing oil, then drain again, then fill with the next year's worth of lube oil. See those 40 mixing vats - go inspect the oil level in every gear box, and top up as necessary ; here's your 25l top-up tank, carry it to the top of each separate tank. This afternoon, you can do the vats in the next building, but they need a different type of oil.
Ever tried dashing up to the top of a 250ft tower, in a Force 9 and rising gale, because NOW is the only opportunity that you're going to have this month to clean the various sensors up there, and it needs to be done this week.
Been there, done that, got the tee-shirt and the industrially-damaged hearing and dermatitis. And believe me,working 20-hour days (bed-to-bed, including 1 hour/day for food, shit and coffee breaks) in the geology lab is a lot preferable to working on the shop floor.
I would really, strongly, advise you to spend one or more of your summers working at the bottom of the industrial pile. NOTHING but NOTHING will improve your motivation to get a better job more than some experience of what for most people is "real life". Love of money and such like trivia are nothing compared to the motivation of avoiding hard work.
Hey, I can even SlashDot while supervising a gas system calibration and doing a system backup!
I think that the Bastard Operator From Hell would disagree with you. Though I must admit that the last decade or so he's been using the lime pits less and outsourcing the cattle prod work to the PFY and booby-trapped lift shafts. He even, Grud preserve us, sometimes calls Security. (When he wants one of the PFY's traps defusing at no cost to himself or humanity.)
The braking mechanism for a reaction drive ? Well, pending some "New Physics" based on the crystalline excretions of a wombat's anal gland, I think that we'd have to use Newton's Third Law ("for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction" ; it's what puts the "reaction" into the "reaction drive"). To brake, you use the reaction drive. That's why the mid-point of long trips in a reaction-drive vehicle is called "turn over".
Of course, you don't rely on one reaction drive ; you use multiple fuel tanks manifolded to multiple reaction drives and you have significant redundancy in the turn over mechanisms too (say, gyroscopes AND attitude jets). But that's just conservative engineering.
Oh, were you joking?
Clearly you've got a clue, unlike that Lord Apathy twat.
And after every minor earthquake, and after every gnat's footfall, but at amplitude is too low to detect. It was in Seismology 1.0.1 (or at least, it was in my Earth Physics classes. (BTW, unlike Lord Apathy, I am a geologist. My professional affiliation is FGS, if you're interested.)
I rather doubt that he'd have a source, or at least, not a source of repute. Ball park figures : Chixulub is about 150km in diameter ; diameter/ depth for complex craters is around 10/ 1 ; so depth of the early crater (once the transitional shuffling is over and done with) was in the order of 15km. Typical depth to Moho on typical continental crust is about 30-35km. (There used to be a geological map server at Cornell.edu, which could generate a map of depth-to-Moho over arbitrary regions of the Earth's surface. It seems to have gone now. [SADNESS] )
People have repeatedly and confusedly claimed the the eruption of the Deccan Traps antipodially to the Chixulub impact may indicate a causal relationship. This has never gained strong credence within the profession because the events leading up to the eruption of a hotspot (generation of a core-surface hot point, initiation of thermal upwelling) must have started at a minimum 10s of millions of years prior to the impact, and from the stratigraphic record of other hotspots (I drill oilfields whose location and reservoir properties are increasingly seen as affected by the Iceland hotspot ; this really is something I get paid to understand and argue about, with tens of millions of dollars in exploration budgets in the balance), the duration of regional uplifting preceeds eruption of first basalts by hundreds of thousands of years. There is a superficial appeal to the idea of a "contre-coup" fracture consequent on the impact, but the idea simply doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
Bloody Vista has shat it's TCP stack twice while I've been editing this, and I have to travel to an oil rig tomorrow morning, so I don't have time to work further on this. If you're interested, reply and I'll pick it up once I'm into the swing of my 20-hour workday.
BURN the heretic!
KILL the unbeliever!
Bring down Biblical punishments on the doubter (in the sense of punishing him and his descendants, even to the seventh generation ; yes, it is the fault of someone who won't be born for a century from now that this heretic hasn't re-canted ; not having been conceived yet is not sufficient excuse for not restraining the heretic).
I'm having to face the grim and unpleasant prospect of having to get a car. Or, to be more precise, having to be the owner-of-record for a year or so, until my daughter has accumulated a year of no-claims bonus. Not that I've got any intention of doing any more driving than the absolute minimum I have to (including instructional driving). Both the wife and I have long since ceased to consider driving to be anything other than an unpleasant, expensive, frustrating, dangerous chore. The question of whether the half-hour a day that a car might save over using the bus ... is a very open question. The wife finds the traffic in this country to be so terrifyingly aggressive that she's unlikely to use the car during morning rush hour herself ; obviously I'm not going to use any car while I'm at work at sea, or on a different continent. ... who would want one? Sure, if you want to live out in the country, then that's your choice. But don't delude yourself that it's anything other than another cost of the lifestyle choices that you make.
Add to that the shit that is fucking with maintenance
Actually, I think that's not the case, by around a decade. It might be a first for pigmentation, but pigmentation is IIRC only one of 7 different ways of giving an organism "colour". Without digging through the reference books, around 1998 some fossils were discovered that contained structures whose dimensions indicated the presence of diffraction gratings and other elements of "structural colours".
This calls for an inverse of the oft-repeated lie that "there are no atheists in a foxhole" (attributed to some American fundamentalist idiot of a general, IIRC).
Let's put your faith in your religion over science to the test : go learn to parachute, then kit up with a good, scientifically designed parachute (and scientifically-recommended reserve chute). Jump out of the plane, do a few seconds of freefall and PRAY your way safely to the ground.
I would contend that there are actually more non-hypocritical atheists in foxholes than there are non-hypocritical religionists in freefall parachute jumps.
(Those pseudo-parachute jumps in a vertical wind tunnel don't count ; they don't have the full effect. I mean a real 9.98m/(s^2), big round "ground" coming up to meet you, terminal velocity around 170 km/hr, experience.)
That'd get you arrested and Tasered (in that order, probably) as the terr'st that you obviously are. Reading anything, rather than taking the word of retail androids, is a Thought Crime. More importantly, it could infect other customers with the meme that "Maybe there's something I should check about this product". It's this second anti-competitive aspect that would get the Taser applied, to stop you from voicing more heretical thoughts such as "I haven't done anything wrong!"
Sheeple, go back to your grass and graze. There's nothing to see here apart from a truck labelled 'Slaughterhouse 5'.
That's between 20 and 35 years out of date. It's got a monolithic Russia (missing the undoubtedly important nations of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, and the politically sensitive "allies" of Tadjikstan and Uzbekistan), so is more than 17/18 years old ; it's got a Bangladesh, which means it's post 1974/5 IIRC (Pakistani civil war). There's deliberate mention of "Palestine" in there, which is strange in an ostensibly American product targeted at children. I'd have expected the Americo-Israeli Thought-Police would have caught this before it became public.
I don't see shipping being any serious degree of expensive - after all it's not as if it needs to go by airmail. Oh, are you on the wrong side of the Pond?
A more serious problem for trans-Pondians would be the continuing decline of the dollar and the rise of the uro.
Eindhoven, eh? I think I got lost there once. But I'm not sure. Obviously.
I remember encountering such things in the past. Oh yes, plenty of hits. http://www.divine-interventions.com/baby.php if you like it one way. Or http://www.blowfish.com/catalog/toys/symbolic_dildos.html if you like it lots of other ways.
I thought that Jesus ibn Joseph was a failure as a carpenter, which is why he went into the confidence trickster market? You want to be careful saying things like that, you're insulting carpenters.
"RC church" ? Is that like an RC helicopter? http://www.maplin.co.uk/module.aspx?ModuleNo=220841&doy=2m8 Does the RC church come with self-propelled deluded victims who'll auto-navigate to be screwed at the altar? RC opening and closing of the doors to symbolise excluding the victims from Never-Never Land? Wooo, the advances of religion these millennia! I can't wait until experimental theology comes up with an explanation for lightning.
More seriously, .... nah, this isn't really a serious post.
This isn't "the popular media", this is Slashdot. While debates could be had about the effectiveness of the tag-line "News for Nerds", the intention is very clear that the audience here should be better informed about tech matters than the population average.
Timothy McVeigh was made into a nigger before he was fried/ poisoned/ shot/ whatever? Doesn't that come under "cruel and unusual punishment"?
(I'm not saying that's an inherently bad thing - if you've made a choice to have cruel and unusual punishments in your judicial system, then making a white supremacist KKK whackjob into a nigger while he's still alive is a nicely calculated piece of cruel and unusual punishment. Sort of like putting a hog-tied rapist into the Bridal Suite with Big Sven and a jar of vaseline. Much more effective than pissing on their graves.)
(Don't bother complaining about me using the "n-word" ; I think it's justified in the context of insulting KKK whackjobs. It's done deliberately, not thoughtlessly.)
When you get down to personal motivations, it gets very difficult to prove in court what was going on inside someone's head. At which point, the "disgruntled employee" line of leakage becomes much more defensible than "we woz haxxored, yer 'onour". The judge demands to speak to the "disgruntled employee", who says "Send me a pre-paid plane ticket from and back to my vacation" or "Go fuck yerself, yer'onour" depending on jurisdiction ; there's then not a lot that the judge can do, short of sending in the extraordinary rendition squads with their water boards and other paraphernalia.
Getting "haxxored" on the other hand, should leave a forensics trail a mile wide and long. A "disgruntled employee" (particularly one with legitimate access to the data in question) doesn't imply a long forensics trail, so the absence of any forensic evidence can't be presented as implying miscooperation by the management of MDY.
Even proof that the "disgruntled employee" had been planning a move to another company/ country/ continent weeks before the leak would only be evidence that his disgruntlement was long-standing, and that MDY's internal personnel paperwork isn't terribly bright.
I think you've missed the point of the article (assuming that you read TFA). What the cop-on-the-take is worried about is that when they're pulling Joe Bloggs over, they're being video-taped by John Doe from the other side of the street. Should they notice John Doe, and start trying to take out his "sous-veillence" they still have to be looking over their shoulders because they've now attracted a crowd and there are 4 more video cameras trained on them. They can't assume that the crowd is either friendly, or even non-hostile. Again, this is in the UK context, where by all accounts, the police are much more "community interaction" than "fist of god" compared to the States.
The context I saw was very much more in-town arrests rather than being shaken down on a quiet country road.
There's a very good reason that, when I go work in to third-world countries, I get a native driver for driving me around out of town and I just sit in the back pretending to not understand either the tongue language or the body language. In town though, often in the presence of other foreigners, things are generally considerably safer. The reason for the native driver out-of-town is that it is cheaper and safer for their high-value, high-insurance cost assets. No disrespect to the drivers, often very nice, very intelligent blokes ; but a month in a coma in a hospital for them costs the insurance company less than if it were me. Plus they're far more likely to talk their way out of a problem before I'd even notice it. That talking, knowing the local "squeeze" rates and procedures, is their job (which is probably why they're mostly intelligent, personable blokes). In the third world, an argument with the police that you crawl away from and spend a month in a coma is a good police interaction.
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Billie Piper doing an anal GFE in her school uniform. Now there's an idea.
Is this another idiot journalist who thinks that because he lives in America, then the Internet ends at the 6-mile limit. Or is it a 200-mile EEZ because you've got weak neighbours?
You like your Doctor Who?
Produced by the BBC.
Paid for by those taxes which you so despise.
Here, {=== have a pair of tweezers to pull the shotgun pellets out of your foot.
What's being imported? The software is produced locally, translated locally, burned to CDs locally, put into cardboard boxes locally with locally-written and printed manuals and finally sold locally. The only importation would be the one-off import of some confidential data - the source code. The last time I brought a piece of Microsoft software directly (as opposed to getting a program on a machine) the address to contact for support of my copy of Windows 3.11 was near London, not near Seattle.
If there is taxation going on, it'd be at the point where software companies try to export their profits back to their home country. "Repatriation of profit" is what we call it in the oil industry, and every government everywhere fights hard against it.
GPG, funded in no small part by the German government, out of those so-despised taxes.
Did you see the recent critique of coal reserve figures in GeoScientist? It's not anything like as rosy as the popular view that we've got "hundreds of years worth of coal left in the ground".
I'm not going to quote the entire article - it's far too much for a Slashdot post - but the bottom line is that coal reserves seem to be a lot tighter than popularly supposed. With coal prices having quintupled since 2002, conventional economics would suggest that reserve figures should have been increased (as higher prices can support extraction of deeper and/ or thinner seams, thus making greater volumes of coal basins economically minable) ; reserve figures have fallen, and by more than be accounted for by extraction. Which means that in the past there has been previous overestimation of reserves, if not outright lies.
Peak oil is here already ; peak coal will probably be closer to 2020 than to 2120. Within our lifetimes.
0.02 worth to think about.
(By the way, "GeoScientist" isn't a for-sale magazine ; it's the in-house newsletter of the Geological Society, written by geologists, for geologists. It's not quite as authoritative as Jnl.Geol.Soc.Lond, but it's probably more reliable (in this context) than the likes of New Scientist or Scientific American.)
Some nano-particles, specifically carbon nanotube nanoparticles of considerable length, which are loose in the air, have been shown to behave like asbestos in lung tissue culture. Which means that people using them loose (e.g. in carbon nanotube nanoparticle manufacturing and device fabrication facilities) should probably take care. Or that further design work needs to take place to modify the surface properties of carbon nanotube nanoparticles to remove this undesirable property.
Since the vast majority of uses proposed for long carbon nanotube nanoparticles propose using them intimately embedded in some binder (typically an epoxy resin), then the issue of their being loose in the air doesn't arise except at the fabrication site. Adding surface components that bind carbon nanotube nanoparticles to each other (which is likely to be a desirable property in most structural uses) will greatly reduce their ability to disperse into the air and to penetrate deep into the lung.
Carbon nanotubes used for "interesting" electrical properties (including photovoltaics) are considerably shorter than the ones implicated in the carcinogenic study you're referring to. And the same general techniques of modifying surface properties are still available to further reduce any carcinogenic risk.
One minor point - not all nanoparticles are carbon nanotubes, as your comment seems to imply ; for example, titanium dioxide nanoparticles have long been a target of study for artificial direct-to-hydrogen photolysis of water.
One second minor point - in my day-to-day work I am exposed to carcinogenic and toxic materials in the chemicals I work with and in the atmosphere I breathe. Which is why I'm conscientious about applying protective skin treatments and using my PPE. The carcinogenic fumes are a concern, which I minimise as much as I can by paying attention to the location and direction of the forced ventilation. And in the past, I've worked on asbestos demolition. I'm not reckless, far from it ; I reckon the hazards quite closely and I don't hide them from the people who work under me (this makes me very unpopular with some superiors and clients who don't want to admit to these materials being hazardous. It doesn't stop me working with hazardous materials.
Assuming, for the moment, that children being born today are ever going to learn to drive (I'm an oil geologist ; I expect to teach my 16y.o. step daughter to drive in the next few months, if she gets a car; I don't expect any children she chooses to have to have any need to learn to drive ; what private use vehicles there are will be roboticised, and probably for hire only)
The PC child, driving with threads, has corrupted data in (say) hRightFoot ; next time the state of hRightFoot is accessed by hBrain, then the state of hBrain becomes unpredictable. Maybe error handlers will be adequate, and the system won't come down. Maybe not. If hBrain doesn't crash, it continues sending messages to hRightFoot and expecting to get sane output. So when hBtrain wants the pedal to go to the metal, the radio gets retuned and hBrain is told that the spare wheel is being attached. Either way, hBrain gets well brain-fucked, pretty fast, and starts instructing the spare wheel to load itself into the CD player on drives A: through Z:.
For the Unix child, when the gas-control process crashes it's pipes are re-connected to a new instance of the fuel-supply-control process. As part of it's re-start code, the fuel-supply-process checks the current state of the gas pedal, then starts processing messages piped to it. The supervisory program may see a delay in response to the message queue, or it may see messages being dropped, both of which are situations it should be constructed to manage. Meanwhile, the clutch/ gear-shift control process continues unaffected.
Yes, that line is in the Foundations. The Good Doctor was tipping his literary hat to another Good Doctor, Samuel Johnson, the harmless drudge : "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."
If that's truly the state of affairs in your country, I think you'd have perfectly good grounds for claiming political asylum when you escape to somewhere in the civilized world.
Get out now, your life is obviously in immediate danger.
Which begs the question, how are you going to identify who are the fuckers that you're going to kill, and who are the fuckees that you're not going to kill?
The little work that I've done in Africa (2 months, with the expectation of further employment there in decades to come) leaves me in full and certain doubt of my ability to distinguish between fuckers and fuckees there. At least, not without spending months getting to know the specifics of a particular area.
This is not the answer that you want to hear. Tough.
Now, why on earth would someone do that? My letter box is far closer than the nearest video rental place, and the mail box for the returns is still closer than the video store and on the way to the bus stop. No DRM required on that rental scheme.