> But there's no need to throw racism into the mix.
Where was I racist? Making fun of someone's poor quality of service, partly due to their inability to speak the same language as the customer, isn't racism.
Ever heard the "slippery slope" theory? Well, at least you're asking yourself the question. Just as a matter of interest, my wife is Russian, and was taught to speak English at university. Since she and her daughter came to the UK, she's learned a lot about how poorly English-speakers (native speakers, to be precise) speak English. You may have heard the joke about how the man who wishes to hear the Queen's English spoken properly should go to Inverness. There is more than a grain of truth in the joke - until quite recently a high proportion of Highlanders have Gaelic as their mother-tongue, and were taught to speak English once they started to attend school. Which is why, on average, the streets of Inverness have a higher proportion of good English speakers than, say, London. Or Bangalore. And I admit to having as many routine spelling and grammatical errors as anyone other native speaker.
(Joke - one of my university friends turned up massively hung-over for his Philosophy final exams. He couldn't be bothered with the effort of translating his answers from Gaelic to English, so he just wrote them out in Gaelic. As Aberdeen is a bi-lingual university, officially, they had to accept the script and mark it without discrimination. Which meant finding a lecturer-grade philosopher who was fluent in Gaelic and English. I don't remember how closely related the marker was to Fionnlaigh, but it was close enough that he got told of his pass by a phone call to the croft a couple of weeks in advance of his classmates. No implication of nepotism - just small-world syndrome. I'm sure the same happens in the Welsh Universities.)
I don't think we need to pass comment on the TransPondians; different language.
They have outsourced it. I've not dealt with the billing people, but the 'technical' people who answer the phone are absolutely useless.
What's that sound? A pump action shotgun chambering a round. Cocked. Aimed at both feet at point blank range. 3... 2...... over to you. Or Tiscali.
Also, I'm more interested in there being a Rocky Mountain Safe Streets Task Force and why they think a geek like Edward Davidson is really a danger to the public.
From the name of the Task Force, it's a safe bet that they think anyone who can walk and chew gum at the same time is a potential danger. While most people would deride the spam man's choice of ways of making a living, it's a fairly safe bet that he has got a reasonable amount of intelligence. That in itself is enough for him to be considered dangerous.
> And to be honest, they're all ISPs I'd avoid anyway for plenty of other reasons.
Vod are you saying? Tiscali is to be having very good customer service. Please to be having a very good day.
Ah, sarcasm. But there's no need to throw racism into the mix. Tiscali's incompetence at billing and inability to follow simple instructions (like "close my account and stop billing me") are perfectly adequate reasons to boycott them. I assume from your mocking accent that they've outsourced their support work to somewhere in India? I wouldn't know whether that's accurate or not ; I don't think that I ever had to call their technical support people. the billing people I dealt with, over a period of months, were based in the UK and utterly incompetent.
Is this your ten-foot barge pole? Yes? Well I still wouldn't touch them even with that.
Yeah, right. I don't WOMBAT in the SMOKE too often, it's too much of a WOMBAT. But for the last several years, when I've WOMBATted in a hole in the ground, I've used an Oyster card registered to Osama Bin Laden, and only ever topped up by paying cash. ============== Codes : WOMBAT = Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time. SMOKE = not an acronym, unfortunately. London, where the zoological specimens live inside the cages, to protect them from the city's inhabitants. Many people travel as OSAMA, without challenge ; some are imaginative; while there is a coin-only way to charge-up the card, I'll continue to do so.
If he's on a BES the problem is non-existent, the Admin can remotely wipe the BlackBerry with a single command.
I'll admit straight up to never having touched a Blackberry except with my pint glass, to move it along the bar and make room for something else. I didn't need to read the manual to do that. But I doubt that this statement can possibly be correct without some additional specifications. As-written, it would appear that an Admin, presumably somewhere in the world, can wipe a Blackberry by (typing?) a single command, without requiring any communication between the Admin and the Blackberry. Err, right. I'm watching an episode of Gerry & Sylvia Anderson's "UFO" series ; they didn't postulate that technology. Neither did Gene 'Star Trek' Rodenberry in his universe - Uhuru has enough work to do twiddling knobs on the radio set (both neglect time-of-flight from Earth to Moon though).
If I were a barely competent electronic espionage planner, I'd have used some of my copious budget to buy a number of the systems under attack (since they're available at a low cost ; many people have died, painfully, paying the higher prices of obtaining more restricted systems). I'd have RTFM'd and found out about these capabilities, then I'd have found out (by experiment, backed-up by radio experience) how to block such electronic hara kiri instructions. And probably any other communication between the device and the rest of the world. A good start may simply have been two metallised-plastic crisp packets and an elastic band. Or, in the context of the "honey trap", perhaps a couple of wrapper for "female condom" - see the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnyC_v0-DQ4 to see the sort of size of these things. Close enough? So your thief distracts the mark's attention, then while he's sleeping (need to slip something into his drink? Why not paint your nips with a mild skin-absorbed narcotic? Or is that too kinky for a/. discussion?) pop the Blackberry into your improvised-by-design radio quiet room and disappear to the facility where it can have it's electronic braincell picked at leisure. Not the hardest mission outline to come up with. Maybe it'll need something a bit sturdier, like getting something ordered on Room Service by the thief, which arrives wrapped in aluminium foil to keep it warm.
I suppose that you could set these Blackberry things up so that they wipe their braincells each time they go out of contact with base. Yeah, that'll please the customer at the limits of connectivity. Otherwise, simply blocking reception of any signal by the unit before the mark realises that their braincell is missing, would be sufficient to prevent the device being wiped administratively. After which, it's down to conventional hardware hacking and cryptography.
(A pile of dead bodies is universal code for, "Danger!, stay away from here!").
for a short period, yes. A few thousand years or so. The challenge is to put up a sign that would last more than 100,000 years. A pile of dead bodies would only be recognisable as such for... oh, not even a few thousand years. Maybe 10,000 years. After that, it would have worn away to be just a weird, phosphate-rich patch of soil. True the intensity of the radiation would have declined, taking it from mostly-harmless instantly-lethal levels to civilisation-destroying takes-decades-to-kill-you levels. Scenario 1 - 3000AD, Indiana 'Fry' Jones (and his sidekick Bender) wends his inept way through the Desert of Doom and finds a weird artefact laying on the ground in a grove of lush, if weird vegetation. (The "lush" is from the phosphate fertilizer a.k.a. bones ; the "weird" is from the radiation.) Scattered around are the extremely tattered remains of clothing. Bender picks up the weird, green-glowing, warm-to-the-touch artefact and sets off towards his home village. A hundred metres away, he starts to throw up ; another hundred metres and he collapses. Fifty metres further on, his rotting bones will remain. Scenario 2 - 12000AD, Indiana 'Grud' Metalwright, also travelling, finds no trace of the original body, or of Indiana 'Fry'. But he does find the artefact. Now it's glow can only be seen in a dark room, though it remains strangely warm to the touch. Obviously it's a holy relic of some sort. So 'Grud' takes it to the highest city in his homeland, garnering much favour from the priestly authorities in the process. For years the best minds in the country, perhaps in the continent, visit it to try to understand it's mysteries. One, possibly more, generations of the intelligentsia of a continent are reduced by the radiation poisoning, setting back the recovery of the continent, if not of the human race, by decades. While radioactive detritus may get less dangerous to individuals, it could become more dangerous to their societies.
(You'll note that I'm assuming that any recovery of hom.sap from a presumed collapse of civilisation is going to take a lot longer than the first rise. This is due to all the easily-extracted resources - fossil fuels, metal ores in particular - having been extracted by us and our parents.)
As a geologist, this designing signs that are going to remain legible (and hopefully, comprehensible) for hundreds of millennia is an interesting task. While you can be reasonably sure that certain areas are going to remain as continental interiors, you can't really rely upon drainage basins and therefore rivers as markers, and even then you're assuming that the people who're likely to stumble upon your radiation site are going to be capable or mapping the landscape to read your warning. Much though I dislike the idea of putting the shit of human pollution deep into the earth (because that is too close in appearance to "putting it away", when there is, of course, no place called "away"), I do fear that may turn out to be the best option. At least, while civilisations can even theoretically fall in a matter of mere decades. I'm not convinced by whats-his-name and his proposal for getting the stuff to melt it's own way down to arbitrary depths (errr, read Journal of the Geological Society, London, Vol. 157, 2000, pp. 27-36. "A new scheme for the very deep geological disposal of high-level radioactive waste"), but the idea of putting it down where it's going to be an extremely demanding job to recover it does have a reluctant air of inevitability.
Godwin right in the first post! Bravo I say, Bravo! A true and shining accomplishment in the field of utterly irrelevant comparisons.
Speaking as someone who was harassed yesterday morning by the UK police for being engaged in fully lawful trade union recruitment activities, which part of the word "irrelevant" are you using in it's normal dictionary meaning?
... implying that the US doesn't live in the 21st century? Seriously, when the Russians sold it to you, weren't there any riders in the contract about the humane treatment of the natives, not subjecting them to cruel and unusual systems of measurement, etc. Or don't you call that... collection of things that you measure with... a "system"?
[snigger] [snigg...er] [sni...g...g...errrrr] Actually, that's not the silliest idea so far. Do a bit of amateur moon ranging... radio astronomy. Lots of interesting potential there. Or, if you're not that interested yourself, perhaps a local college would be into a radio astronomy outstation.
I thought the current theory was that Gondwana the resulting scar of whatever hit the earth forming the moon such a very long time ago. How many generations super continents where there?
Oh wow, that's so not-even-wrong that it goes beyond being not-even-wrong to being not-even-wrong. It's achieved stasis in the continuum of wrongness. (Sorry - I'm watching Dr Who - claptrap overload.)
The giant impact that is the best working explanation for the formation of the Moon (and parallel hypotheses for the formation of Charon in the Pluto-Charon system, and quite likely the axial orientations of Uranus and Venus) would have removed something on the order of 20~40% of the volume of the proto-Earth, at least temporarily. In the succeeding few hours to days, almost all of this would have re-accreted onto the proto-Earth - what didn't was either lost to the Earth-Moon system or went to form the Moon. There wouldn't have been a surface left in any meaningful form to bear a scar. Now, timing : the Gondwana grouping of cratons, and associated "crustal ephemera" (the junk around the craton edges that has accreted in the last billion years of so of bouncing around the globe) was only around from 400 million years ago to 120, arguably 100, million years ago. The giant impact that formed the Moon was between 4500 million years ago and (some would argue) 4300million years ago ; most opinion I've seen puts it at the older end of that scale. In the period from 500million years ago to the present (well, 2-3 million years ago) the UK (well, the bit NW of the Highland Boundary Fault, or possibly the Iapetus Suture, depends on your opinion of the status of the Central Belt as a displaced terrane or not) has in succession a glaciation (Tayvallich Tillite, been there, seen that, hammered the rocks, examined the drop stones), hot deserts ("Old Red Sandstone", been there, seen that, examined the mud crack fossils), highly productive forest environments (Coal Measures ; been there, caved in that, burned the coal and never found a decent fossil!), another hot desert sequence (New Red Sandstone, drilled through the evaporite sequences ad nauseam as well as mapping the marginal deposits (no hammers allowed), and then a temperate sequence (grew up collecting fossils on it, and make a living drilling holes in it's various parts) extending to the present day. Or, to put it another way, 500million years and the UK goes scuttling form one end of the planet to the other, passing through the equator in the process. (Decades of palaeomagnetics work tells the same story, but with boring precision and I don't 'do' palaeomagnetics myself) So, in the 4000-odd million years unaccounted for, a conveniently random piece of crustal territory could have looped the entire globe about 4 times more. That's a pretty good way of messing things up - give a Rubik cube 4 complete turns (OK, 16 quarter-turns) at random and see how well messed up it is.
Actually, chances of surviving a fire on the ground in an aircraft are quite low. Most of the fatalities in air crashes come from people who burn to death shortly after impact, rather than the impact itself.
Smoke inhalation, rather than burning. Look at the CO (carbon mon-oxide) figures for their bloodstreams, smoke residues inside the lungs. Dead before cooked, normally.
The rocks that water is in is volcanic, likely formed on the moon. This indicates that some time the past, the moon was volcanically active,
This hasn't been seriously disputed since people started to do detailed mapping of the Moon. The presence of volcanic features has been undisputed. There has been much dispute about the age of the volcanism, with a small proportion of observers claiming contemporaneous activity while others remain unconvinced by the reports of activity.
and these volcanos ejected rock and water.
Rock with a very-low-but-not-zero concentration of water.
The concentration of water in these rocks appears to suggest that concentration of water match the concentration in the Earth's mantle.
Considerably lower than most estimates for the composition of the mantle. Caveat : the mantle is not homogeneous, and it has 10-km thick slabs of wet (up to 10% w/w H2O) rock pulled into it to bake at regular intervals.
So what this points to a cool event that pulled the moon off the earth, but left the water intact. that water was then flung off later on by volcanos. So while the moon may still be a part of the earth flung off is not collision, that event would have to cool enough not to boil off all the water. This tends not to support the idea of an mars size rock hitting the earth, ejecting rocks into orbit, and heating everything so much that all the water boils off, which is why it was expected that the moon would be dry, except for anything brought after the formation.
Go back and look at the numbers I presented to, uhh, Wot'his'name (search for my username) ; the water contents being reported are up to 46ppm. Easily under a 10th to a 20th of normal contents in the corresponding minerals on Earth. That would suggest, to me, something considerably more effective at de-watering material than "normal" volcanic temperatures. The paucity of, for example, sodium in bulk moon concentrations strongly suggests events in the hundreds if not thousands of degrees C.
I never bought that massive collision thing, something about it just doesn't seem right. Now there is some proof it isn't.
As Chyeld says, not quite ; actually, not by a significant margin.
If you RTFA, you'll see that they're detecting "up to" 46ppm water. That's 0.0046% (presumably percentages by weight not by volume, but it could be mole-% ; it makes a difference, but not a huge difference). In contrast, if you pick a random lump of mafic minerals from your reference books, you'll find water concentrations of 0.05%, 0.33, 0.09 (all percentages by weight of H2O retained after drying the sample above 120degC, these figures from olivines, like all the numbers I'm going to quote, cited in DH&Z 1966 ISBN 0582442109 ; because it's on my bookshelf), 0.56, 0.15, 0.17, 0.03, 0.08, 0.13, 0.84, 0.28 (plagioclase analyses), 0.04, 0.11, 0.06, 0.15, 0.10, 0.08, 0.13 (pyroxenes). They're all many times higher than reported for the lunar glasses.
Agreed, the reported water contents of lunar glasses are higher than I'd have expected ; but absolutely they're still low. I'd have to see some work on cooling rates and diffusion speeds for the components of the rock vapour atmosphere postulated for after the giant impact before I found this work terribly upsetting. Water does, at the molecular level, have considerable affinity with silicate grains, to the extent that it's hard to remove every last damned trace of the stuff. Getting something that is 'dry' to 10s of parts per million is a pretty impressive feat. The pre-impact proto-Earth and the impactor would have had a hard job being seriously dry themselves, therefore there would have been appreciable water (and CO2, mercury, sodium, other "volatiles") in the debris cloud. That some of the water adsorbed back onto mineral grains before it dispersed, and then got re-accreted onto proto-Earth or proto-Luna is plausible to me. Also no-one is claiming that there were not other bits of material flying around in the area. It was an accreting planetary system FFS! ; cometary (read : volatile rich) debris would have been passing through the area more frequently than the Clapham Omnibus, and some of it is statistically certain to have stuck.
Maybe slightly OT, but I've always wondered why it is that abandonware doesn't automatically become public domain.
Errr, you've shot yourself in the feet there. Just because it's old, and has been superseded, and is no longer in development, doesn't make it abandonware. To become abandonware, the authors (individual and corporate) of the software need to have disappeared off the face of the Earth. No longer answering letters sent by their own lawyers, not paying domain registration fees, nor answering emails. The phone is off the hook, and mail to their last known address comes back with an "address unknown" sticker on it (my registration fee for some shareware, PFM by Paul R. Culley returned that way, after traveling around the States for about 3 months ; that was back in the days of Windows 3.0, when DOS file utilities were deeply necessary.).
While Microsoft can be accused of a lot of things, disappearing off the map wouldn't be one of them.
My employers still have clients that never converted from the last DOS [4, 5, 6 or 7, including Windows 3.0 and higher] version of our software [released 1992] to the Windows-only version [released 1996 or 1997 IIRC], and so are presumably still using it. Or worse, they've moved to using a competitor's product. But we do still have the expertise in-house to support them, if they were to make that call. We'd have to dig out some of the fossils, like how to manage DOS memory. We'd have to dig out an old machine that still has a licensed version of DOS on it (includes DR-DOS, of course). We'd have to find a machine with a hardware Parallel port to host the copy-protection device. All of which would cost, but we could do it. We're certainly not going to be giving the software away though. It's still capable of doing the job, and in some ways is still as fast as the Windows versions running on two- to three- hundred times the speed of hardware. (The development and testing machine was a 16MHz 286, IIRC.) Hmmm, just having a think... The only thing that new versions have which the older versions couldn't do was to produce a proper PDF (as opposed to a PDF of an image of the report). But, on the other hand, it handled it's fonts better than Windows (still) does. Oh well, 2 steps forward, one step sideways then a back somersault with a double-pike. And we're in the same place we were 15 years ago.
One of the things that killed off any idea of maintaining the DOS version was a Millennium bug in the hardware copy-protection devices, which... oh, hang on, no, that was the new, Windows-only protection devices. I don't know any specific reason for stopping development of the DOS version, just that the programmer didn't want to keep working on both at the same time.
You see it every so often when people attempt to throw the fact that before we knew and understood how bad nuclear bombs were, because we used a couple to end a war,
Some people would assert, on very defensible grounds, that while American scientists (and others) who worked on the Manhatten Project have a lot of numbers about the effects of a nuclear bomb, the only people with a comprehensive understanding of what a nuclear bomb is are the Japanese.
I recall, as a child, reading a book by one of the first journalists into Hiroshima. Really quite horrifying stuff, and the sort of thing that simply doesn't get published these days. (I see from Amazon's UK page on it that there has been a new edition with an additional chapter published some time in the 1980s ; I might have to get that out of the library. Here's another review.) Arguably the people of Chernobyl could add a few relevant observations to the Japanese experience.
it somehow vilifies our attempts to stop the proliferations in rogue and hostile states.
What sticks in the craw of many aspirant nuclear nations is the way the the old, colonialist, paternalistic, white overseers (I use the language of slavery deliberately) are trying to deny the new, formerly colonised, developing, various shades of brown, freed nations from achieving tools to ensure that they'll never be enslaved again. (I wouldn't bother wasting electrons on protesting that this is a false description of the West's motivations ; what matters is the perception that people have and the rhetoric that politicians use to justify their actions.) By the way, I note that you use the term "hostile", which implies that you're concerned about countries with plans inimical to your own. This does not, of course imply that their actions are wrong on any "absolute" or disinterested scale, only that their actions are not in the interest of your country. While it's a perfectly defensible, pragmatic, position to take, be very careful because politicians often play with words to imply that this pragmatic position is in some sense absolutely, morally correct.
Don't get me wrong, thrashing on a country because of it's actions isn't a bad thing. But thrashing to bash simply because you think it might offer prestige and somehow elevate your comment is wrong.
More importantly, it's poor rhetoric, which any competent debater would be easily able to take apart. Not that TV politicians generally bother with debate these days, not when there's soundbites, rabble-rousing and compliant media to use to control the thoughts of the sheeple.
The truth of the matter is that our debt isn't near as bad as some other countries but
An argument from economics. Find someone who's interested in economics - like my Boss. My degree is in Geology and Mineralogy ; his is in Geology and Economics, which is probably why I look down a microscope on oil rigs and he's the Boss in the office. By the way - he would disagree with you. I'd give you his personal email address if I had it - it might be interesting to see what arguments came out. Hang on - did I just use the words "Economics" and "interesting" in the same sentence? I'd better go see the doctor, or take some of my schizophrenic friend's medication - I can't be a well man.
we also generally have a higher growth rate on average then those countries (which I probably should have pointed out too)
One of the things that I've never understood about economics is their concentration on growing economies. Given that all economies are, to some extent, linked into some "global" economy ; given that the Earth is a finite syste
Anne McCaffery has some good ones, but they are generally dragon & space oriented. Pretty good reads, and there's quite a few in the series.
The "Ship..." series has some really interesting long-term themes of discrimination, ability and disability, 'what is it to be human'. In the long run, I suspect that they'll be the ones by which McCaffrey is remembered. "Dragon... XX(Gay)X" is a good enough series, but it could really have benefited from being about half the size. Some people might consider the gay undertones a bit much for pre-teens. Perhaps not the parents (or pre-teens) in question, but loaning one of the books to a schoolfriend who's parents are gay-burners could make for some unpleasant scenes. Educational for the kids, but possibly upsetting too. Or amusing, depends on their personality.
You have to look at cultural background before you judge someone for child labor or killing a woman, right?
No I don't have to look at cultural background to say the subjecting children to dangerous and long working conditions or killing women who are not killers themsevles, or perhaps fighting in war, is wrong. I am not a moral relativist.
Nice couple of straw men you slip into the argument there.
The question originally was about "child labor", not about "child labour under dangerous and long working conditions". The second part of the question was about "killing a women", not about "killing a woman who hadn't killed someone herself".
Some people would consider sending a child to spend hours a day under the command of adults who force the child to produce incomprehensible things to be a form of child abuse, and these people object vigorously when their State forces them to do it ; other people don't object to sending their children to school. Both camps have passionate, humane advocates of the correctness of their positions. Which group are you saying is wrong and which is right?
In your twisting of the other question you seem to imply that killing a woman (or a child, or a man, or any other person ; say that guy who delivered his first child recently, just to be inclusive) would be right if that person was alleged to have previously killed someone. Many people find such a position utterly repugnant. So, do you support murder, or not?
When it comes to right an wrong there ARE some absolutes.
Such as?
There isn't much leeway about "thou shalt not kill", and the world's three largest monotheistic religions all accept it as being a cornerstone of their belief systems. So thanks to that absolute of right and wrong, peace reigns throughout the Middle East.
OK, we'll have to accept that the Hindus are stirring up a bit of trouble, at the risk of a few million generations of being reborn as earthworms. This shows the innate superiority of monotheistic moral absolutism over polytheistic pragmatism.
If there were a "smart" lottery, where only smart people could get a ticket, you'd have a different opinion of it than a "poor-tax" lottery.
The opinion would be - why get a ticket in that lottery? It's got no prize fund.
"Smart people" don't gamble where the expectation of gain is significantly less than unity (your returns are not going to be much lower than your stake, and may be more). Fruit machines, one-armed bandits etc in the UK (the country under discussion) are required to pay out a minimum of about 70% of their takings as prizes. (I don't remember the exact figure, and it probably changes from time to time with gambling regulations. It was around 70% in the early 1980s when I did Statistics.) So, smart people are going to be looking for a better return on their lottery ticket than that. The probability of winning the UK lottery is about 1/14,500,000 ; therefore, the smart money is going to go to the one-armed bandit in the pub rather than the lottery, until the prize fund for the lottery is bigger than about 0.7*14,500,000 = £10,150,000. I don't follow the lottery news closely, but I don't think that the prize fund reaches that sort of level more than a couple of times a year. A (UK National-style) Lottery which restricted it's tickets to "smart people" would have to get the prize fund up to that sort of level every week if they wanted to attract significant funds from "smart people".
Unless, of course, by "smart" you are referring to people's sartorial elegance. Which rules me out too.
As for which country I'm in - of course it's not America.
unless your another America who thinks it is couth to mindlessly bash his own country.
It is always couth to bash a country, or any other entity, that's in the wrong, regardless of your relationship with it. Someone is reputed to have said "my country, right or wrong" ; that's a deeply dangerous sentiment which is likely to have been responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths throughout the world and throughout history.
I am scanning few of them from time to time, but there are way too much to manually scan each one of them. TIA
Define "way to much". My problem is two-fold - a few thousand photographs of my family's, plus approximately 40,000 slides of my father's. I also have a couple of thousand pre-digital slides of my own. OK, Dad has got a competent database of the slide collection, so that's most of the hard work taken care of. But despite having had a slide scanner for several years now, he's never scanned in more than a few hundred of the damned things. Which means that I either have to encourage him to get down to it (can I borrow a taser?) or I'll have to do the damned job myself when they die. [SIGH] 40 kiloslides should only take a couple of months. Assuming that he's being competent with his digital pictures now.
OK i guess this will be modded as flamebait, but perhaps it's US's responsibility to just stop messing with other countries altogether, no breaking, no fixing, just leaving them alone.
Remember to pay your bill before you check out. Remember those those hundreds of billions of dollars that you owe to the rest of the world? Particularly the Chinese. Oh, and we'd strongly prefer being paid in a stable currency, not dollars. Seems there's too much debt associated with the USD for it to maintain it's level against the rest of the world's currencies. did you think that the Chinese accidentally let your country get so deeply in debt to them? If war is a "continuing of diplomacy by other means", then economics is obviously becoming a "continuation of war by other (and more profitable) means".
This is reminiscent of the car built by Messerschmidt after WWII.
Popularly (at least in the UK) nicknamed "bubble cars". I remember a family friend who had one (for moving his wife and kids around) in the early 1970s, and I've seen such on the road in pretty good condition in the last 5 years. Not of course, while I've been driving. Why would one drive when there is public transport?
Slashdot Mirror
Ever heard the "slippery slope" theory? Well, at least you're asking yourself the question.
Just as a matter of interest, my wife is Russian, and was taught to speak English at university. Since she and her daughter came to the UK, she's learned a lot about how poorly English-speakers (native speakers, to be precise) speak English.
You may have heard the joke about how the man who wishes to hear the Queen's English spoken properly should go to Inverness. There is more than a grain of truth in the joke - until quite recently a high proportion of Highlanders have Gaelic as their mother-tongue, and were taught to speak English once they started to attend school. Which is why, on average, the streets of Inverness have a higher proportion of good English speakers than, say, London. Or Bangalore.
And I admit to having as many routine spelling and grammatical errors as anyone other native speaker.
(Joke - one of my university friends turned up massively hung-over for his Philosophy final exams. He couldn't be bothered with the effort of translating his answers from Gaelic to English, so he just wrote them out in Gaelic. As Aberdeen is a bi-lingual university, officially, they had to accept the script and mark it without discrimination. Which meant finding a lecturer-grade philosopher who was fluent in Gaelic and English. I don't remember how closely related the marker was to Fionnlaigh, but it was close enough that he got told of his pass by a phone call to the croft a couple of weeks in advance of his classmates. No implication of nepotism - just small-world syndrome. I'm sure the same happens in the Welsh Universities.)
I don't think we need to pass comment on the TransPondians; different language.
What's that sound? A pump action shotgun chambering a round. Cocked. Aimed at both feet at point blank range. ... ... ... over to you. Or Tiscali.
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From the name of the Task Force, it's a safe bet that they think anyone who can walk and chew gum at the same time is a potential danger. While most people would deride the spam man's choice of ways of making a living, it's a fairly safe bet that he has got a reasonable amount of intelligence. That in itself is enough for him to be considered dangerous.
Ah, sarcasm.
But there's no need to throw racism into the mix. Tiscali's incompetence at billing and inability to follow simple instructions (like "close my account and stop billing me") are perfectly adequate reasons to boycott them.
I assume from your mocking accent that they've outsourced their support work to somewhere in India? I wouldn't know whether that's accurate or not ; I don't think that I ever had to call their technical support people. the billing people I dealt with, over a period of months, were based in the UK and utterly incompetent.
Is this your ten-foot barge pole? Yes? Well I still wouldn't touch them even with that.
Yeah, right.
I don't WOMBAT in the SMOKE too often, it's too much of a WOMBAT. But for the last several years, when I've WOMBATted in a hole in the ground, I've used an Oyster card registered to Osama Bin Laden, and only ever topped up by paying cash.
==============
Codes :
WOMBAT = Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time.
SMOKE = not an acronym, unfortunately. London, where the zoological specimens live inside the cages, to protect them from the city's inhabitants.
Many people travel as OSAMA, without challenge ; some are imaginative; while there is a coin-only way to charge-up the card, I'll continue to do so.
I'll admit straight up to never having touched a Blackberry except with my pint glass, to move it along the bar and make room for something else. I didn't need to read the manual to do that. But I doubt that this statement can possibly be correct without some additional specifications.
As-written, it would appear that an Admin, presumably somewhere in the world, can wipe a Blackberry by (typing?) a single command, without requiring any communication between the Admin and the Blackberry.
Err, right. I'm watching an episode of Gerry & Sylvia Anderson's "UFO" series ; they didn't postulate that technology. Neither did Gene 'Star Trek' Rodenberry in his universe - Uhuru has enough work to do twiddling knobs on the radio set (both neglect time-of-flight from Earth to Moon though).
If I were a barely competent electronic espionage planner, I'd have used some of my copious budget to buy a number of the systems under attack (since they're available at a low cost ; many people have died, painfully, paying the higher prices of obtaining more restricted systems). I'd have RTFM'd and found out about these capabilities, then I'd have found out (by experiment, backed-up by radio experience) how to block such electronic hara kiri instructions. And probably any other communication between the device and the rest of the world. A good start may simply have been two metallised-plastic crisp packets and an elastic band. Or, in the context of the "honey trap", perhaps a couple of wrapper for "female condom" - see the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnyC_v0-DQ4 to see the sort of size of these things. Close enough? /. discussion?) pop the Blackberry into your improvised-by-design radio quiet room and disappear to the facility where it can have it's electronic braincell picked at leisure.
So your thief distracts the mark's attention, then while he's sleeping (need to slip something into his drink? Why not paint your nips with a mild skin-absorbed narcotic? Or is that too kinky for a
Not the hardest mission outline to come up with. Maybe it'll need something a bit sturdier, like getting something ordered on Room Service by the thief, which arrives wrapped in aluminium foil to keep it warm.
I suppose that you could set these Blackberry things up so that they wipe their braincells each time they go out of contact with base. Yeah, that'll please the customer at the limits of connectivity. Otherwise, simply blocking reception of any signal by the unit before the mark realises that their braincell is missing, would be sufficient to prevent the device being wiped administratively. After which, it's down to conventional hardware hacking and cryptography.
for a short period, yes. A few thousand years or so. The challenge is to put up a sign that would last more than 100,000 years. A pile of dead bodies would only be recognisable as such for ... oh, not even a few thousand years. Maybe 10,000 years. After that, it would have worn away to be just a weird, phosphate-rich patch of soil. True the intensity of the radiation would have declined, taking it from mostly-harmless instantly-lethal levels to civilisation-destroying takes-decades-to-kill-you levels.
Scenario 1 - 3000AD, Indiana 'Fry' Jones (and his sidekick Bender) wends his inept way through the Desert of Doom and finds a weird artefact laying on the ground in a grove of lush, if weird vegetation. (The "lush" is from the phosphate fertilizer a.k.a. bones ; the "weird" is from the radiation.) Scattered around are the extremely tattered remains of clothing. Bender picks up the weird, green-glowing, warm-to-the-touch artefact and sets off towards his home village. A hundred metres away, he starts to throw up ; another hundred metres and he collapses. Fifty metres further on, his rotting bones will remain.
Scenario 2 - 12000AD, Indiana 'Grud' Metalwright, also travelling, finds no trace of the original body, or of Indiana 'Fry'. But he does find the artefact. Now it's glow can only be seen in a dark room, though it remains strangely warm to the touch. Obviously it's a holy relic of some sort. So 'Grud' takes it to the highest city in his homeland, garnering much favour from the priestly authorities in the process. For years the best minds in the country, perhaps in the continent, visit it to try to understand it's mysteries. One, possibly more, generations of the intelligentsia of a continent are reduced by the radiation poisoning, setting back the recovery of the continent, if not of the human race, by decades.
While radioactive detritus may get less dangerous to individuals, it could become more dangerous to their societies.
(You'll note that I'm assuming that any recovery of hom.sap from a presumed collapse of civilisation is going to take a lot longer than the first rise. This is due to all the easily-extracted resources - fossil fuels, metal ores in particular - having been extracted by us and our parents.)
As a geologist, this designing signs that are going to remain legible (and hopefully, comprehensible) for hundreds of millennia is an interesting task. While you can be reasonably sure that certain areas are going to remain as continental interiors, you can't really rely upon drainage basins and therefore rivers as markers, and even then you're assuming that the people who're likely to stumble upon your radiation site are going to be capable or mapping the landscape to read your warning. Much though I dislike the idea of putting the shit of human pollution deep into the earth (because that is too close in appearance to "putting it away", when there is, of course, no place called "away"), I do fear that may turn out to be the best option. At least, while civilisations can even theoretically fall in a matter of mere decades. I'm not convinced by whats-his-name and his proposal for getting the stuff to melt it's own way down to arbitrary depths (errr, read Journal of the Geological Society, London, Vol. 157, 2000, pp. 27-36. "A new scheme for the very deep geological disposal of high-level radioactive waste"), but the idea of putting it down where it's going to be an extremely demanding job to recover it does have a reluctant air of inevitability.
Speaking as someone who was harassed yesterday morning by the UK police for being engaged in fully lawful trade union recruitment activities, which part of the word "irrelevant" are you using in it's normal dictionary meaning?
Seriously, when the Russians sold it to you, weren't there any riders in the contract about the humane treatment of the natives, not subjecting them to cruel and unusual systems of measurement, etc. Or don't you call that
[snigger] ... radio astronomy. Lots of interesting potential there. Or, if you're not that interested yourself, perhaps a local college would be into a radio astronomy outstation.
[snigg...er]
[sni...g...g...errrrr]
Actually, that's not the silliest idea so far. Do a bit of amateur moon ranging
Put it at L1 in the Earth-Moon system and have a bail-out for any future lunanauts.
... get treated like shit.
Here endeth the first lesson of human-computer relationships.
Oh wow, that's so not-even-wrong that it goes beyond being not-even-wrong to being not-even-wrong. It's achieved stasis in the continuum of wrongness. (Sorry - I'm watching Dr Who - claptrap overload.)
The giant impact that is the best working explanation for the formation of the Moon (and parallel hypotheses for the formation of Charon in the Pluto-Charon system, and quite likely the axial orientations of Uranus and Venus) would have removed something on the order of 20~40% of the volume of the proto-Earth, at least temporarily. In the succeeding few hours to days, almost all of this would have re-accreted onto the proto-Earth - what didn't was either lost to the Earth-Moon system or went to form the Moon. There wouldn't have been a surface left in any meaningful form to bear a scar.
Now, timing : the Gondwana grouping of cratons, and associated "crustal ephemera" (the junk around the craton edges that has accreted in the last billion years of so of bouncing around the globe) was only around from 400 million years ago to 120, arguably 100, million years ago. The giant impact that formed the Moon was between 4500 million years ago and (some would argue) 4300million years ago ; most opinion I've seen puts it at the older end of that scale. In the period from 500million years ago to the present (well, 2-3 million years ago) the UK (well, the bit NW of the Highland Boundary Fault, or possibly the Iapetus Suture, depends on your opinion of the status of the Central Belt as a displaced terrane or not) has in succession a glaciation (Tayvallich Tillite, been there, seen that, hammered the rocks, examined the drop stones), hot deserts ("Old Red Sandstone", been there, seen that, examined the mud crack fossils), highly productive forest environments (Coal Measures ; been there, caved in that, burned the coal and never found a decent fossil!), another hot desert sequence (New Red Sandstone, drilled through the evaporite sequences ad nauseam as well as mapping the marginal deposits (no hammers allowed), and then a temperate sequence (grew up collecting fossils on it, and make a living drilling holes in it's various parts) extending to the present day.
Or, to put it another way, 500million years and the UK goes scuttling form one end of the planet to the other, passing through the equator in the process. (Decades of palaeomagnetics work tells the same story, but with boring precision and I don't 'do' palaeomagnetics myself) So, in the 4000-odd million years unaccounted for, a conveniently random piece of crustal territory could have looped the entire globe about 4 times more. That's a pretty good way of messing things up - give a Rubik cube 4 complete turns (OK, 16 quarter-turns) at random and see how well messed up it is.
Smoke inhalation, rather than burning. Look at the CO (carbon mon-oxide) figures for their bloodstreams, smoke residues inside the lungs. Dead before cooked, normally.
This hasn't been seriously disputed since people started to do detailed mapping of the Moon. The presence of volcanic features has been undisputed. There has been much dispute about the age of the volcanism, with a small proportion of observers claiming contemporaneous activity while others remain unconvinced by the reports of activity.
Rock with a very-low-but-not-zero concentration of water.
Considerably lower than most estimates for the composition of the mantle. Caveat : the mantle is not homogeneous, and it has 10-km thick slabs of wet (up to 10% w/w H2O) rock pulled into it to bake at regular intervals.
Go back and look at the numbers I presented to, uhh, Wot'his'name (search for my username) ; the water contents being reported are up to 46ppm. Easily under a 10th to a 20th of normal contents in the corresponding minerals on Earth. That would suggest, to me, something considerably more effective at de-watering material than "normal" volcanic temperatures.
The paucity of, for example, sodium in bulk moon concentrations strongly suggests events in the hundreds if not thousands of degrees C.
As Chyeld says, not quite ; actually, not by a significant margin.
If you RTFA, you'll see that they're detecting "up to" 46ppm water. That's 0.0046% (presumably percentages by weight not by volume, but it could be mole-% ; it makes a difference, but not a huge difference). In contrast, if you pick a random lump of mafic minerals from your reference books, you'll find water concentrations of 0.05%, 0.33, 0.09 (all percentages by weight of H2O retained after drying the sample above 120degC, these figures from olivines, like all the numbers I'm going to quote, cited in DH&Z 1966 ISBN 0582442109 ; because it's on my bookshelf), 0.56, 0.15, 0.17, 0.03, 0.08, 0.13, 0.84, 0.28 (plagioclase analyses), 0.04, 0.11, 0.06, 0.15, 0.10, 0.08, 0.13 (pyroxenes). They're all many times higher than reported for the lunar glasses.
Agreed, the reported water contents of lunar glasses are higher than I'd have expected ; but absolutely they're still low. I'd have to see some work on cooling rates and diffusion speeds for the components of the rock vapour atmosphere postulated for after the giant impact before I found this work terribly upsetting. Water does, at the molecular level, have considerable affinity with silicate grains, to the extent that it's hard to remove every last damned trace of the stuff. Getting something that is 'dry' to 10s of parts per million is a pretty impressive feat.
The pre-impact proto-Earth and the impactor would have had a hard job being seriously dry themselves, therefore there would have been appreciable water (and CO2, mercury, sodium, other "volatiles") in the debris cloud. That some of the water adsorbed back onto mineral grains before it dispersed, and then got re-accreted onto proto-Earth or proto-Luna is plausible to me. Also no-one is claiming that there were not other bits of material flying around in the area. It was an accreting planetary system FFS! ; cometary (read : volatile rich) debris would have been passing through the area more frequently than the Clapham Omnibus, and some of it is statistically certain to have stuck.
Errr, you've shot yourself in the feet there. Just because it's old, and has been superseded, and is no longer in development, doesn't make it abandonware. To become abandonware, the authors (individual and corporate) of the software need to have disappeared off the face of the Earth. No longer answering letters sent by their own lawyers, not paying domain registration fees, nor answering emails. The phone is off the hook, and mail to their last known address comes back with an "address unknown" sticker on it (my registration fee for some shareware, PFM by Paul R. Culley returned that way, after traveling around the States for about 3 months ; that was back in the days of Windows 3.0, when DOS file utilities were deeply necessary.).
While Microsoft can be accused of a lot of things, disappearing off the map wouldn't be one of them.
My employers still have clients that never converted from the last DOS [4, 5, 6 or 7, including Windows 3.0 and higher] version of our software [released 1992] to the Windows-only version [released 1996 or 1997 IIRC], and so are presumably still using it. Or worse, they've moved to using a competitor's product. But we do still have the expertise in-house to support them, if they were to make that call. We'd have to dig out some of the fossils, like how to manage DOS memory. We'd have to dig out an old machine that still has a licensed version of DOS on it (includes DR-DOS, of course). We'd have to find a machine with a hardware Parallel port to host the copy-protection device. All of which would cost, but we could do it. We're certainly not going to be giving the software away though. It's still capable of doing the job, and in some ways is still as fast as the Windows versions running on two- to three- hundred times the speed of hardware. (The development and testing machine was a 16MHz 286, IIRC.) Hmmm, just having a think ... The only thing that new versions have which the older versions couldn't do was to produce a proper PDF (as opposed to a PDF of an image of the report). But, on the other hand, it handled it's fonts better than Windows (still) does. Oh well, 2 steps forward, one step sideways then a back somersault with a double-pike. And we're in the same place we were 15 years ago.
One of the things that killed off any idea of maintaining the DOS version was a Millennium bug in the hardware copy-protection devices, which ... oh, hang on, no, that was the new, Windows-only protection devices. I don't know any specific reason for stopping development of the DOS version, just that the programmer didn't want to keep working on both at the same time.
Some people would assert, on very defensible grounds, that while American scientists (and others) who worked on the Manhatten Project have a lot of numbers about the effects of a nuclear bomb, the only people with a comprehensive understanding of what a nuclear bomb is are the Japanese.
I recall, as a child, reading a book by one of the first journalists into Hiroshima. Really quite horrifying stuff, and the sort of thing that simply doesn't get published these days. (I see from Amazon's UK page on it that there has been a new edition with an additional chapter published some time in the 1980s ; I might have to get that out of the library. Here's another review.) Arguably the people of Chernobyl could add a few relevant observations to the Japanese experience.
What sticks in the craw of many aspirant nuclear nations is the way the the old, colonialist, paternalistic, white overseers (I use the language of slavery deliberately) are trying to deny the new, formerly colonised, developing, various shades of brown, freed nations from achieving tools to ensure that they'll never be enslaved again. (I wouldn't bother wasting electrons on protesting that this is a false description of the West's motivations ; what matters is the perception that people have and the rhetoric that politicians use to justify their actions.) By the way, I note that you use the term "hostile", which implies that you're concerned about countries with plans inimical to your own. This does not, of course imply that their actions are wrong on any "absolute" or disinterested scale, only that their actions are not in the interest of your country. While it's a perfectly defensible, pragmatic, position to take, be very careful because politicians often play with words to imply that this pragmatic position is in some sense absolutely, morally correct.
More importantly, it's poor rhetoric, which any competent debater would be easily able to take apart. Not that TV politicians generally bother with debate these days, not when there's soundbites, rabble-rousing and compliant media to use to control the thoughts of the sheeple.
An argument from economics. Find someone who's interested in economics - like my Boss. My degree is in Geology and Mineralogy ; his is in Geology and Economics, which is probably why I look down a microscope on oil rigs and he's the Boss in the office. By the way - he would disagree with you. I'd give you his personal email address if I had it - it might be interesting to see what arguments came out. Hang on - did I just use the words "Economics" and "interesting" in the same sentence? I'd better go see the doctor, or take some of my schizophrenic friend's medication - I can't be a well man.
One of the things that I've never understood about economics is their concentration on growing economies. Given that all economies are, to some extent, linked into some "global" economy ; given that the Earth is a finite syste
The "Ship ..." series has some really interesting long-term themes of discrimination, ability and disability, 'what is it to be human'. In the long run, I suspect that they'll be the ones by which McCaffrey is remembered. "Dragon ... XX(Gay)X" is a good enough series, but it could really have benefited from being about half the size. Some people might consider the gay undertones a bit much for pre-teens. Perhaps not the parents (or pre-teens) in question, but loaning one of the books to a schoolfriend who's parents are gay-burners could make for some unpleasant scenes. Educational for the kids, but possibly upsetting too. Or amusing, depends on their personality.
Nice couple of straw men you slip into the argument there.
The question originally was about "child labor", not about "child labour under dangerous and long working conditions". The second part of the question was about "killing a women", not about "killing a woman who hadn't killed someone herself".
Some people would consider sending a child to spend hours a day under the command of adults who force the child to produce incomprehensible things to be a form of child abuse, and these people object vigorously when their State forces them to do it ; other people don't object to sending their children to school. Both camps have passionate, humane advocates of the correctness of their positions. Which group are you saying is wrong and which is right?
In your twisting of the other question you seem to imply that killing a woman (or a child, or a man, or any other person ; say that guy who delivered his first child recently, just to be inclusive) would be right if that person was alleged to have previously killed someone. Many people find such a position utterly repugnant. So, do you support murder, or not?
Such as?
There isn't much leeway about "thou shalt not kill", and the world's three largest monotheistic religions all accept it as being a cornerstone of their belief systems. So thanks to that absolute of right and wrong, peace reigns throughout the Middle East.
OK, we'll have to accept that the Hindus are stirring up a bit of trouble, at the risk of a few million generations of being reborn as earthworms. This shows the innate superiority of monotheistic moral absolutism over polytheistic pragmatism.
The opinion would be - why get a ticket in that lottery? It's got no prize fund.
"Smart people" don't gamble where the expectation of gain is significantly less than unity (your returns are not going to be much lower than your stake, and may be more). Fruit machines, one-armed bandits etc in the UK (the country under discussion) are required to pay out a minimum of about 70% of their takings as prizes. (I don't remember the exact figure, and it probably changes from time to time with gambling regulations. It was around 70% in the early 1980s when I did Statistics.) So, smart people are going to be looking for a better return on their lottery ticket than that. The probability of winning the UK lottery is about 1/14,500,000 ; therefore, the smart money is going to go to the one-armed bandit in the pub rather than the lottery, until the prize fund for the lottery is bigger than about 0.7*14,500,000 = £10,150,000.
I don't follow the lottery news closely, but I don't think that the prize fund reaches that sort of level more than a couple of times a year.
A (UK National-style) Lottery which restricted it's tickets to "smart people" would have to get the prize fund up to that sort of level every week if they wanted to attract significant funds from "smart people".
Unless, of course, by "smart" you are referring to people's sartorial elegance. Which rules me out too.
Thank you for so ably illustrating my point.
As for which country I'm in - of course it's not America.
It is always couth to bash a country, or any other entity, that's in the wrong, regardless of your relationship with it.
Someone is reputed to have said "my country, right or wrong" ; that's a deeply dangerous sentiment which is likely to have been responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths throughout the world and throughout history.
Define "way to much".
My problem is two-fold - a few thousand photographs of my family's, plus approximately 40,000 slides of my father's. I also have a couple of thousand pre-digital slides of my own.
OK, Dad has got a competent database of the slide collection, so that's most of the hard work taken care of. But despite having had a slide scanner for several years now, he's never scanned in more than a few hundred of the damned things. Which means that I either have to encourage him to get down to it (can I borrow a taser?) or I'll have to do the damned job myself when they die. [SIGH] 40 kiloslides should only take a couple of months. Assuming that he's being competent with his digital pictures now.
When you hear the phrase "his shoe size is higher than his IQ", it is an insult not a description of someone with abnormally large feet.
Remember to pay your bill before you check out. Remember those those hundreds of billions of dollars that you owe to the rest of the world? Particularly the Chinese. Oh, and we'd strongly prefer being paid in a stable currency, not dollars. Seems there's too much debt associated with the USD for it to maintain it's level against the rest of the world's currencies.
did you think that the Chinese accidentally let your country get so deeply in debt to them? If war is a "continuing of diplomacy by other means", then economics is obviously becoming a "continuation of war by other (and more profitable) means".
Popularly (at least in the UK) nicknamed "bubble cars". I remember a family friend who had one (for moving his wife and kids around) in the early 1970s, and I've seen such on the road in pretty good condition in the last 5 years. Not of course, while I've been driving. Why would one drive when there is public transport?