..and then you'll realize that the computer was resold, the thief is long gone, and you've been harassing and invading the privacy of an innocent person.
Not an innocent person, a person guilty of reset. It might not be a crime in your jurisdiction, but buying stolen property is a crime in mine. To be more precise, knowingly buying (or taking possession of) stolen property is a crime. And the courts do take "I brought it for a fiver from a guy I don't know, in the pub" as evidence of mens rea - guilty knowledge. Just possibly the person in possession of the stolen property is personally innocent, and will be able to convince the court of that. Which will have nasty repercussions for whoever gave/ sold them the stolen property. There was an amusing case a while back of a man who stole various jewellery, including an engagement ring. The bulk he sold, but the engagement ring he used to propose to his floozy. Who was unimpressed when she was arrested and charged with reset not long before the wedding.
Most everything can be washed and disinfected with ease. Laptops and keyboards are more problematic. Even if you are a neat freak you're going to get dead skin cells trapped in the keyboard.
DEAD cells of any sort, including your own skin aren't the problem (you've got several square metres of dead skin wrapped around your body, "Skinbag !" as Bender would put it) ; the problem is "live", or at least "infective" virus particles. For influenza in particular, modest heat (50 degrees C, whatever the is in your local measure) in a DRY atmosphere is likely to be fairly effective against influenza variants. That's not a cure-all though - if you had anthrax you'd just cause the organism to sporulate and disperse.
So when the invasion happens, we Americans will have to start using ICQ again? Noooooooooooooo!
Yes, several people will be assigned (working shifts) to hold a gun to your head and force you to communicate by ICQ. Your guards will not allow you to use any other medium of communication, including speech, telepathy, hand signals or Morse code transmitted by sequential firing of anti-aircraft nukes. [Speaks a person who has probably exchanged a couple of hundred characters by any "chat" protocol in the 21st century, and a similar quantity in the 1980s, but none to the best of my recall in the 1990s. Chat, Schmat.]
If you have Cingular/ATT disable text messaging on your phone, they don't promise that you won't receive any text messages.
So? Naturally you don't pay to receive text messages. Well, to be more precise, I don't pay to receive text messages, nor does anyone else I know. If you do, then you've got a problem to solve. Leave the carrier, or the network, or the system. Or if you decide that the other compensations of living [wherever] are sufficient, change the local system or stop complaining about it.
Sticking one's head in the sand is just as bad as crying wolf. We haven't hit peak oil yet.
Hmmm, just a second while I look around me.
On a drilling rig doing a 4-well exploration series.Check.
Coveralls have "Geologist" label on them, as they have for the last 15 years.Check.
Working on a small prospect that's been under study since 1975.Check.
Your opinion that we haven't reached "Peak Oil" might be worth a lot to you, and to your fellow head-stickers. It's not worth a lot to me.
We haven't even explored all of the oil fields in the oceans, under the two polar caps....etc.
Speaking as someone who is actively pursuing work east of Greenland, West of Greenland, and in the South Atlantic, in addition to Siberia and East Africa and North Korea, tell me which areas haven't been considered yet? The middle of the Pacific? Where there's no significant thickness of sediments. Under the Antarctic icecap? (If you say the latter I'll tell you 2 things - Prospects have been publicly proposed, but the papers haven't been published yet ; at the conference where they were discussed, the next speaker blew three metaphorical sawn-off shotgun holes through the proposals ; taking a median line between the two positions, you're only looking at a year or two of consumption at present day rates. Look at oil production rates over the last decade. Do you see the flattening off over the last half-decade? That's Peak Oil for you. If you don't like it, go stick your head back in the sand with the rest of the ostriches.
As for the actual topic of discussion... this is not news either. Which part of "Rare Earth Elements" suggests that these are common materials? That name is well over a century old, so no-one has any excuse for not having known that this is coming. And indeed, it's no news to me, and I know that 20-odd of my classmates at university knew about it in the mid-1980s. Whether politicians or anyone else took the resource projections seriously is another question. But resource depletion is a real issue, and has been for generations.
For criminal investigators, NGI could be as useful as DNA some day -- a distinctive scar or a lopsided jaw line could mean the difference between a cold case and closed one.
Sounds to me like a re-implementation of the system proposed by Bertillion a century and a half ago. No doubt it'll be a rip-roaring success this time around too.
Since I don't have a Facebook account, I must be playing "hard to get."
No, you're pitching to an audience that doesn't include FaceBook users. So'm I - I'm another non-Facebook, non-Bebo, non-anything more complex than SlashDot or Linked-In person, not looking to attract the sort of people who live their lives on Facebook. Heritics of the world, unite! It makes it much easier for the Inquisition to send the trucks round to gather us up and take us to the crematoria.
So, now we know what step three is: set up a security agency in the US to resell otherwise unavailable data.
Step three, selling the data, comes after step two.point.five, leaving the data on an open server at a credit card company, to ensure the free-est possible distribution. Probably a Chinese credit card company, in deference to the Romanians behind me.
I had thought that the moon is mostly composed of material from the earth anyway?
The Giant Impact studies done a few years back by Robin Canup (SWRI, Colorado) and others (whose names escape me ; I'm at work) showed that most of the core of a likely impactor ended up in the (proto-)Earth's core, while the debris ring consisted of similar amounts of the impactor ("Theia" in your cite) and the (proto-)Earth. The debris ring then segregated to form orbiter(s) and to re-impact. The impact process would have liberated enough energy to melt the Earth's entire mantle - several thousand kilometres depth of rock - as well as vaporising large volumes of rock to produce a silicate atmosphere. Those are conditions which are pretty incompatible with survival of carbon-based life forms. (Incidentally, they're also pretty imcompatible with the survival of "primordial hydrocarbons" in the mantle - one of the reasons I don't give Tom Gold's hypothesis about the origin of oil any credence.)
I know it's just a hypothesis but it seems pretty sensible. It could have been before any forms of life had started developing though, I don't know my time periods for when life is projected to have begun.
Some datum points :
origin of most meteorites is within spitting distance of 4564 million years ago. This is generally taken as the "origin" of the Solar System (SNIP caveats);
construction of the Solar System probably took a handful of dozens of millions of years (defining your end points - you could probably earn a PhD discussing just that question. It's one of the caveats to the previous point.) ;
Kelvin estimated the cooling time for the Earth to be on the order of 40 million years (this has been challenged, but by factors of 2~3, not 20~30, so saying between 20 and 80 million is likely to be right) ;
the oldest undisputed fossils on Earth are some 3200 million years old (well-layered stromatolites) ;
disputed (J.W.Schopf proposing, Martin Brasier challenging) fossils are claimed at 3500 million years ;
disputed geochemical evidence from graphite flakes in highly-altered sediments in the Acasta gneiss of SW Greenland has been interpreted as evidence for the presence of a biology-involving-carbon-cycle-with-similar-isotope-fractionating-properties-to-present-life-on-Earth around 3800 million years ago (the interpretation is disputed, and the implications are more like I've written than a headline-grabbing "3800 million year old fossil!!") ;
disputed isotope-geochemical evidence (Jack Hills metasediments, Australia; detrital zircon grains; analysed IIRC by Stephen Moorbath and colleagues) suggests the presence of a geochemical cycle on Earth involving liquid water as far back as 4000 million years, possibly 4100 million years
There is room between the datum points to have considerable "slop" over how long the Earth took to cool, how long it took to acquire a functional atmosphere, how long to develop interesting chemistry, and how long for that chemistry to become "life". Defining "life" in this context is probably fuel for a research institute or three, not a single PhD. What evidence there is over the origin of life is not incompatible with reasonable scientific proposals for the origin of life, but doesn't really constrain choice of an origin of life scenario either.
My 2 minor units of currency : I simply don't know. But I've left out the "late heavy bombardment" (of meteorites) because of the imprecision of it's dating, not because I don't think it unimportant.
That should provide you plenty of grist for Google ; I may have slipped a little on some of the dates and names because I'm at work, on a work computer, and don't have access to my normal library.
maybe would be a better example of teaching critical thinking than evolution or global warming. Take some widely accepted by a lot of people in some moment, something "self-evident", "obvious", and give elements that proved it wrong even in the time it was popular.
It's a popular belief that in times gone past, believing in a "flat Earth" was general among the population. "Christopher Columbus proved them wrong", and all that. It's a popular belief, but it's very poorly supported by evidence, and is probably just plain wrong. The historians argue and waste energy over who started the myth that pre-1492 "everyone knew that the Earth was flat", but the myth probably started in the early 1900s. There is pretty good evidence that as far back as the ancient Greeks (and probably the Chinese too), most people from the educated classes who thought about the problem rapidly realised that Earth, Moon and Sun were pretty close to spherical, simply by observation of the Sun and the Moon, and observation of the shape of the Earth's shadow on the Moon at eclipses (particularly partial eclipses).
Of course, the vast, overwhelming majority of the population at any time in history, including today, don't waste a second of their lives thinking about such things, unless told to do so.
A more practical demonstration of critical thinking would be to find volunteers who profess belief in a god of personal intervention and the power of intercessory prayer, line them up, and shoot them individually in the head, while warning the next one in the line to start praying for their god to save them, or to step out of the line and so admit that their god is non-existent. You'd find a long line of people who've stepped aside, a number of bodies with a single bullet wound to the head, and no lightening-charred body of the inquisitor/ executioner. No one could possibly object, as long as you took due care to avoid entangling the mentally deficient, and got release forms for the experiment signed by all participants in advance. You might need to get permission from the local graveyard, because of the extra work too. Religion is a good way of cowing the masses and stopping them from thinking. One of the UK's bishops was recently bleating that things started going wrong for religion in Britain when parents stopped teaching religion to their children. Which may well be correct, but not for the reason he thought : no adult would accept the preposterous ideas of religions - so you've got to brainwash children to get the next generation of believers. "No brainwashed children" implies "no believers for the next generation" implies lots of churches being sold to become discos, car showrooms, and chic apartment blocks. Thinking of one such apartment block near my home, I wonder who got the apartment with the altar in it, and do they fuck on the altar? That some (at least) religions have procedures for de-consecrating premises and objects speaks a lot for their self-confidence.
people used to think having a huge Moon like ours was a once-in-a-universe event.
And I should hope that they still think so, seeing as Mars does not have a huge Moon like ours... Despite evidence of an impact that COULD have created one, and yet didn't.
One word : Charon.
For the less-well astronomically-informed out there, Charon, the first-discovered moon of Pluto, is proportionately larger than Luna is in the Earth-Luna system. So, for almost 30 years, having a huge moon hasn't been a "once-in-a-universe event", it's been a twice-in-a-planetary-system event. And looking at the spins of Uranus (stop sniggering at the back!) and Venus, it's quite credible it could have been a half-the-large-planets-in-one-planetary-system event.
No, I'm not going to get into the "is Pluto a planet debate" ; I made my suggestions, which would have retained Pluto as a planet, and elevated around a half-dozen "asteroids" to planethood along with an unknown number of Kuiper Belt Objects and Oort Cloud Objects. I'm not emotionally attached to "9 planets".
Of real interest here, especially including non-geeks in the mix, will be firstname.lastname
Interesting idea. But, as you realise, with problems.
Wonder that how's going to work out. There can be only one lucky John Smith!
More generally, what does John Alexander Smith do? Or for that matter, Fred Smith? Both would, under the present system, have to rely on whoever got the.smith TLD choosing to (and being technically competent to) correctly maintain several thousand subdomains. While there's only (in your scheme) one lucky John Smith, there's also one lucky Abelard Smith, Belulah Smith... and one Zebedee Smith.
It is an interesting question though - I gave some thought to it a few years ago when I had MyFamilyName.org (as I'm sure you know,.org is intended for non-profit organisations and personal domains). I wondered about subdomaining to ca.MyFamilyName.org , ie.MyFamilyName.org, uk.MyFamilyName.org (all areas where I knew there are members of my family) ; where would I find suitable people. I debated what I'd do if I found an axe-wielding murderer with the same family name as me but no known relationship, who wanted AxeMurderer.us.MyFamilyName.org ? Did I want the joys of having to fight a discrimination case in a foreign jurisdiction, or would I give him the domain. What if the Axe Murderer was the only (or first) applicant from the US - should I let him control the whole subdomain?
That's a really good question; it could be a huge boon for unsolved cases, vindicating wrongfully convicted individuals.
You have someone who's been convicted of something ; you institute a second (third, or whatever) re-examination of the forensic evidence gathered at the scene using this technique (it's probably far too late to get new evidence now) ; you find no fingerprints assignable to the convicted person, and petition for a release. The first appeal judge say to you "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" and toss your petition. The second appeal judge says "So, the convict wore gloves. Film at eleven." and tosses the appeal. The third appeal judge says "The fingerprints were on the bits of bomb casing that didn't survive, or get found.", and tosses the appeal.
Potentially, you might find enough evidence to get someone else implicated, and get them hauled in for questioning, and a new line of investigation re-opened. But that's a long, slow process, and plenty of people have died of old age waiting for vindication in those circumstances.
Taxis are usually cash transactions, at least in the US. I travel by taxi and I travel anonymously.
... because you scooped the taxi-driver's eyeballs out with a red-hot teaspoon before you got into the cab. Or you only take taxis from the "Big Yellow Blind Driver" taxi company. Yep, that'd work.
Unless they start putting facial recognition cameras in taxis.
Quite a lot of taxis have cameras fitted for crime prevention and/ or deterrence ("Hmmm," thinks the potential-perp, "I see a camera filming me ; I'll just give this driver an extra navel, steal his Boss' money and run ; no-one'll think to look at the film"). A non-trivial number have a camera fitted at the taxi-company's insurance company's behest, for simplifying crash injury or abuse claims. I'll just bet that those films aren't accessible to the man in the suit with the impressive looking badge.
If you're in public without your tin-foil hat, then you're visible. You're also visible with the tin-foil hat, but you get lumped into the category "suspicious tin-foil hat wearer" until they've got their automatic tin-foil-crease-fingerprinting system sorted out. Trials start in August.
What about Alan Turing? Of course he is still much better received abroad than in his own country, but he is a perfect example of an unrecognised genius. He was used to win the war, and then dumped like a hot potato.
You forgot some important elements :
He was:
used to win the war;
accounted a security risk due to his being an unapologetic homosexual;
chemically castrated under order of the courts (the alternative being jail);
he started to grow breasts as a result of the "chemical castration" (a large dose of progesterone IIRC);
he started to lose control of his thinking and reasoning capabilities;
only then was his "dumping like a hot potato" getting properly into gear, so he decided on suicide as being his best option.
The competition sent you an email with some of their so-so customers' names in the hopes that you would make complete idiots of yourselves trying to poach them, spamming included.
You're the first person I've seen who has a suitably devious mind. That's the second thing that sprang into my mind.
Pretty much everyone I know gets one or more of these "accidental mass CC" mails from vague contacts at frequent intervals. Very often it's "ain't it cute" photo mails, or "there's a baby-eating virus about!!" useless mail. Normally I delete them unread, but about once a month I LART the sender by writing a detailed explanation of why they shouldn't have done that, why virus alerts are pretty much useless, various other points as appropriate to the offending mail. I'm polite, but firm, I use appropriate interfingering of quoting the original mail and my comments, and I then move on to a detailed explanation of the difference between CC and BCC, and that they (the original sender). If (as is so common), there's a "Outlook tail" of all the previous history of the mail, then I'll go through that, pointing out further email addresses of other people completely uninvolved, and point out the security and privacy violations that the message sender is complicit with. In short, I have a polite rant about all the things that annoy me about such emails. Then I BCC the mail to every address in the original mail, but CC it to the original sender. I add all the addresses I've spam-harvested from the body of the mail to the BCC too. And in the body of the text, I explain that I've sent this mail out as an object lesson to the sender, and that any complaints should be sent to him/her/it/them, not me. I do get a moderate amount of blow-back from these, but I don't see too many repeat offenders.
I only do it once a month - it's a Canute-like railing against the popular ignorance of email standards.
To return to the case cited in TFA, I'd do something fairly similar. I'd send the mail back out to the entire list (BCC'd at least, or even as individually composed emails if you've got appropriate bulk mailing tools) with an explanation of the circumstances, a discourse on the privacy issues, a bit of moralising about spamming. I'd trim out most of the mailshot to keep my response short, but I'd quote enough so that anyone who got the original and read it would recognise it. I might even drop in a little bit about "it may be a Joe Job". I'd add that the recipients should check their email security with the administrator of the original sending domain. Try to project an air of annoyed innocent bystander attempting to do a public service by educating the rest of the victims of privacy breach.
Of course, what you're really trying to do is to alert the present customers of the competitor to their dangerous practices, and persuade those customers to transfer their business to you, since you're obviously so much nicer a company, and you've got more respect for your customers privacy. A tricky balancing act, but potentially worthwhile. Turn your enemy's mistakes to your benefit.
4. Pump and sell more oil. There is no benefit for the oil companies to develop and market an alternative technology until all the oil is gone. If an alternative technology becomes commercially viable the remaining oil reserves become nearly worthless.
A popular view. It's wrong, of course.
What you're neglecting is that the product from this bacterial digestion is a relatively simple mix of chemicals, to paraphrase TFA "a few biochemical steps from long-chain fatty acids". While that's a large part of the dull and boring part of oil, it's by no means everything.
Remember what your father was taught by his college chemistry lecturers back in the 1950s? That "oil is too good to burn"? Well, a lot of the reason for chemists having wasted their breath for the large part of a century saying that is the non-"few steps from fatty acid" hydrocarbon components of natural oils.
Remember the big eruption of the chemical industry back in the 1850s, propelled by the "coal tar" byproducts of the town gas industry? well, again, it was the non-simple hydrocarbons that people were working on.
Oil is still too good to burn ; if someone comes up with something cheaper and easier to burn, then there will be plenty of other markets for the interesting chemicals in oil.
FWIW, what I notice missing from this "miracle cure" is the source of the sugars they feed their modified E.coli on. They don't mention a process for turning cellulosic biomass into sugars. Which is no great surprise, because that's the hard bit. That's why people are presently producing "biofuel" from human-edible foodstuffs, and all the consequent palaver.
Termites can do it, and some fungi can do it (degrade cellulosic materials to simple oligosaccharides) ; but there isn't yet an industrial process that can do it. Yet.
You didn't see them look up when you went thru the detector, but I'd wager they'd looked already, saw him, and that's why they exhibited no reaction *that you could detect* to an alarm going off.
I'd be surprised if they bothered. Like I said, one of them was sleeping. The other two were reading. Granted, it's probably a pretty boring job at a small airport with no ongoing arrivals or departures, but sleeping on duty? I'd be fired for that and my job is a lot less critical than a TSA screener.
Egads, the ranchers had firearms mounted in their trucks! OH NOES, THEY MUST BE FOR THE EXPRESS PURPOSE OF MURDERING US, THERE IS NO OTHER POSSIBLE EXPLANATION!
There is an alternative explanation : they're terr'sts. Just send them to Guantanamo and cease worrying about them.
Of course, looking for a third explanation, once the terr'st explanation has been revealed, is itself a terr'st activity, so there's no need for further discussion.
I'm sure it enables business models or something; but whoever came up with that one needs to be garroted.
Only if you've got a really slow-operating garotte. Wouldn't the Death of the Boats be more appropriate, perhaps with the added complication of installing a new "unauthorized" sub-dermal USB power supply. If you did that several times per day, you could even incorporate important elements of the Death of a Thousand Cuts into the torture.
Obviously you'll be taking a Biblical attitude to this : "visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children... unto the third and to the fourth generation" and all that jazz.
that new connector on the back of their audiophool equipment.
"audiophool" : nice neologism. Well, the word is new to me, at least. The species I've known for ages.
A couple of years ago one of my colleagues was worrying over a "audiophool" magazine at lunch time, and asked my advice : he was seeing all these adverts for £2000 mains leads and a variety of more sanely priced 50Hz mains filters etc, "because I can hear the hum of the mains". He then got highly offended when I suggested that, for his budget of £500 to £1000, he build a mains-powered motor-belt-flywheel-belt-dynamo rig, with some nice chunky chokes, rechargeable batteries and capacitors, then feed the DC from that directly into the appropriate circuits of his amplifiers. With a moderate amount of work, he could even make it look neat, and be "hand-cart portable". My audiophool colleague got quite angry, because he though I was taking the piss out of him. Which I was. But he had started it by considering spending £2000 on a mains cable.
I may have discussed the possible benefits of using steam as the energy-transfer medium instead of belts and flywheels. Or maybe compressed air. It's all a question of making sure that the system damps heavily at 50Hz and has a very low-pass filter built into it. But the audiophool seemed to think that 1% of 0.001Hz harmonic in a 20-minute long record would be an unacceptable level of distortion.
It's more flexible than most people think, but it does have real constraints. The presence of liquid water being one - even if under pressure ; moderate temperatures being another - unless the record has been raised in the last few years, the highest temperature at which an organism has been observed to reproduce is in the order of 120degC, and that hasn't changed greatly in the last decade. Getting up to 140 or even 150degC may be credible, but 200degC is being very optimistic - no complex molecules are known that are stable to such temperatures, particularly in wet conditions.
There are forms of life in volcanic vents on Earth that would find Venus a paradise beyond imagining.
I suspect that you refer to the organisms that inhabit "black smoker" hydrothermal vents. While these are associated with volcanic systems, and the imagery used on the likes of "Discovery Channel" implies that they're found with flowing lava, boiling lava fountains, etc, this impression is incorrect. The systems are called "hydrothermal" because they involve hot water, but the pressures involved prevent the water from boiling. Underground the water is often supercritical, but where the hydrothermal vent water mixes with seawater, the temperature plummets rapidly. This is the region where the interesting chemoautotrophic communities are found, powered by gradients of temperature, pH, redox potential, and (often) sulphide concentration. This is also where the interesting high-temperature bugs are found. And they don't seem able to get up above about 120degC, as noted above. with the 2black smoker" systems, you're back to needing the presence of liquid water.
The ppH2O (partial pressure of water) in the atmosphere of Venus is too low to permit it's presence on the surface of Venus. The pH is quite horrible too, but that's not likely to be unsurvivable.
In the past most of the planets in our solar system have been hospitable to some form of life found on our planet.
Earth is definitely hospitable, Mars possibly has been, Venus almost certainly never could have been, Mercury never; the gas giants have too different a chemistry to assess readily (is life possible based on liquid ammonia? You'd be hard put to find a chemist who'd say it was impossible, but we've no direct evidence of metabolism-like systems in liquid ammonia); interesting things may be possible in the satellites of the gas giants, and it's certainly worth investigating, but there's no hard data.
I don't think that it's necessarily a given that any life within a rock entering the atmosphere will be baked to a crisp, depending on the ablative properties of the body in question.
Most meteorites that land intact and recognisable are cold when they land. Yes, the outer surface gets hot and ablated on entry to the atmosphere, but the poor thermal conductivity of silicate minerals and the short duration of atmospheric flight means that most of that heat stays on the surface of the meteorite and the interior remains at space-like (cold ! ) temperatures. Also, most meteorites are physically weak and don't survive the atmospheric transit intact, exposing a lot of their interior volume to the heat of re-entry. The pre-existing fractures where the meteorites are most likely to break are just the places where any putative "panspermia particles" are likely to reside if they're going to survive interplanetary radiation.
It doesn't look terribly good for getting (complex) panspermia particles onto the surface of a planet once it's got an atmosphere. And when it's not got an atmosphere, it's even harder to get the particles onto a planet without shocking them to pieces.
Panspermia isn't theoretically impossible, but it's damned difficult to do naturally, and it still doesn't address the problem of how life originated on the source of the panspermia particles. Which makes it an unrewarding subject to work in.
An RTG will give you consistent power for a long time, whereas the solar cells will have issues managing eclipses and long-term degradation from radiation exposure.
The orbit of Ulysses goes from a perihelion of 1.34 AU, to an aphelion of 5.4 AU (period 6.2 years) (from a NASA position paper) ; that's a factor of 4.03 difference in heliocentric range and 16.24 in sunlight intensity through it's orbit. That's without any variations in cell efficiency at different temperatures, pointing issues, or long-term degradation. Given that the orbit has an inclination of 80deg to the plane of the Earth's orbit (and thus 63-97deg to the orbits of the other planets), eclipses are unlikely to be a major problem.
I can envision fitting every passenger with a transponder, like those gadgets they use for enforcing house-arrest.
Good choice of example : do you know what the failure rate of those transponders is (viz : the proportion of false positives where an alarm is raised though the detainee hasn't left the designated area PLUS the proportion of false negatives, where the detainee has left the designated area but no alarm has been raised ; these include hardware failures as well as evasive actions by the detainee)? Reports in the UK are that the failure rate is in the order of tens of percent. So, as an example of "security theatre", it's better than you expected. Perhaps.
I don't know the detailed reasons for the technical failures, but here are some troublesome areas :
attaching them to the detainee is known to be a problem (I've seen a criminal slip handcuffs while 'cuffed to a police officer in a court room ; so they're going to be able to do a lot in privacy with access to tools and lubricants) ;
the ranging technology is dubious, probably using radio signal strengths and/ or timing, but this falls prey to differential absorption in differing wall materials, reflections of signals from metal building frames, and good old analogue interference ;
obviously, GPS isn't going to work. The signals don't penetrate glass well, let alone roofing of many types - just try using a GPS indoors one day in a large-enough building to show the changes in readings like a warehouse or a shopping centre.
The "home curfew" idea sounds nice and simple ; the implementation is harder ; cheap and effective implementation is even harder.
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Not an innocent person, a person guilty of reset.
It might not be a crime in your jurisdiction, but buying stolen property is a crime in mine.
To be more precise, knowingly buying (or taking possession of) stolen property is a crime. And the courts do take "I brought it for a fiver from a guy I don't know, in the pub" as evidence of mens rea - guilty knowledge.
Just possibly the person in possession of the stolen property is personally innocent, and will be able to convince the court of that. Which will have nasty repercussions for whoever gave/ sold them the stolen property. There was an amusing case a while back of a man who stole various jewellery, including an engagement ring. The bulk he sold, but the engagement ring he used to propose to his floozy. Who was unimpressed when she was arrested and charged with reset not long before the wedding.
DEAD cells of any sort, including your own skin aren't the problem (you've got several square metres of dead skin wrapped around your body, "Skinbag !" as Bender would put it) ; the problem is "live", or at least "infective" virus particles. For influenza in particular, modest heat (50 degrees C, whatever the is in your local measure) in a DRY atmosphere is likely to be fairly effective against influenza variants. That's not a cure-all though - if you had anthrax you'd just cause the organism to sporulate and disperse.
Yes, several people will be assigned (working shifts) to hold a gun to your head and force you to communicate by ICQ. Your guards will not allow you to use any other medium of communication, including speech, telepathy, hand signals or Morse code transmitted by sequential firing of anti-aircraft nukes.
[Speaks a person who has probably exchanged a couple of hundred characters by any "chat" protocol in the 21st century, and a similar quantity in the 1980s, but none to the best of my recall in the 1990s. Chat, Schmat.]
If you have Cingular/ATT disable text messaging on your phone, they don't promise that you won't receive any text messages.
So? Naturally you don't pay to receive text messages. Well, to be more precise, I don't pay to receive text messages, nor does anyone else I know. If you do, then you've got a problem to solve. Leave the carrier, or the network, or the system. Or if you decide that the other compensations of living [wherever] are sufficient, change the local system or stop complaining about it.
Hmmm, just a second while I look around me.
Your opinion that we haven't reached "Peak Oil" might be worth a lot to you, and to your fellow head-stickers. It's not worth a lot to me.
Speaking as someone who is actively pursuing work east of Greenland, West of Greenland, and in the South Atlantic, in addition to Siberia and East Africa and North Korea, tell me which areas haven't been considered yet? The middle of the Pacific? Where there's no significant thickness of sediments. Under the Antarctic icecap? (If you say the latter I'll tell you 2 things - Prospects have been publicly proposed, but the papers haven't been published yet ; at the conference where they were discussed, the next speaker blew three metaphorical sawn-off shotgun holes through the proposals ; taking a median line between the two positions, you're only looking at a year or two of consumption at present day rates.
Look at oil production rates over the last decade. Do you see the flattening off over the last half-decade? That's Peak Oil for you. If you don't like it, go stick your head back in the sand with the rest of the ostriches.
As for the actual topic of discussion ... this is not news either. Which part of "Rare Earth Elements" suggests that these are common materials? That name is well over a century old, so no-one has any excuse for not having known that this is coming. And indeed, it's no news to me, and I know that 20-odd of my classmates at university knew about it in the mid-1980s. Whether politicians or anyone else took the resource projections seriously is another question. But resource depletion is a real issue, and has been for generations.
Sounds to me like a re-implementation of the system proposed by Bertillion a century and a half ago. No doubt it'll be a rip-roaring success this time around too.
No, you're pitching to an audience that doesn't include FaceBook users. So'm I - I'm another non-Facebook, non-Bebo, non-anything more complex than SlashDot or Linked-In person, not looking to attract the sort of people who live their lives on Facebook.
Heritics of the world, unite! It makes it much easier for the Inquisition to send the trucks round to gather us up and take us to the crematoria.
Step three, selling the data, comes after step two.point.five, leaving the data on an open server at a credit card company, to ensure the free-est possible distribution.
Probably a Chinese credit card company, in deference to the Romanians behind me.
The Giant Impact studies done a few years back by Robin Canup (SWRI, Colorado) and others (whose names escape me ; I'm at work) showed that most of the core of a likely impactor ended up in the (proto-)Earth's core, while the debris ring consisted of similar amounts of the impactor ("Theia" in your cite) and the (proto-)Earth. The debris ring then segregated to form orbiter(s) and to re-impact.
The impact process would have liberated enough energy to melt the Earth's entire mantle - several thousand kilometres depth of rock - as well as vaporising large volumes of rock to produce a silicate atmosphere. Those are conditions which are pretty incompatible with survival of carbon-based life forms. (Incidentally, they're also pretty imcompatible with the survival of "primordial hydrocarbons" in the mantle - one of the reasons I don't give Tom Gold's hypothesis about the origin of oil any credence.)
Some datum points :
There is room between the datum points to have considerable "slop" over how long the Earth took to cool, how long it took to acquire a functional atmosphere, how long to develop interesting chemistry, and how long for that chemistry to become "life". Defining "life" in this context is probably fuel for a research institute or three, not a single PhD.
What evidence there is over the origin of life is not incompatible with reasonable scientific proposals for the origin of life, but doesn't really constrain choice of an origin of life scenario either.
My 2 minor units of currency : I simply don't know. But I've left out the "late heavy bombardment" (of meteorites) because of the imprecision of it's dating, not because I don't think it unimportant.
That should provide you plenty of grist for Google ; I may have slipped a little on some of the dates and names because I'm at work, on a work computer, and don't have access to my normal library.
It's a popular belief that in times gone past, believing in a "flat Earth" was general among the population. "Christopher Columbus proved them wrong", and all that.
It's a popular belief, but it's very poorly supported by evidence, and is probably just plain wrong. The historians argue and waste energy over who started the myth that pre-1492 "everyone knew that the Earth was flat", but the myth probably started in the early 1900s. There is pretty good evidence that as far back as the ancient Greeks (and probably the Chinese too), most people from the educated classes who thought about the problem rapidly realised that Earth, Moon and Sun were pretty close to spherical, simply by observation of the Sun and the Moon, and observation of the shape of the Earth's shadow on the Moon at eclipses (particularly partial eclipses).
Of course, the vast, overwhelming majority of the population at any time in history, including today, don't waste a second of their lives thinking about such things, unless told to do so.
A more practical demonstration of critical thinking would be to find volunteers who profess belief in a god of personal intervention and the power of intercessory prayer, line them up, and shoot them individually in the head, while warning the next one in the line to start praying for their god to save them, or to step out of the line and so admit that their god is non-existent. You'd find a long line of people who've stepped aside, a number of bodies with a single bullet wound to the head, and no lightening-charred body of the inquisitor/ executioner. No one could possibly object, as long as you took due care to avoid entangling the mentally deficient, and got release forms for the experiment signed by all participants in advance. You might need to get permission from the local graveyard, because of the extra work too.
Religion is a good way of cowing the masses and stopping them from thinking. One of the UK's bishops was recently bleating that things started going wrong for religion in Britain when parents stopped teaching religion to their children. Which may well be correct, but not for the reason he thought : no adult would accept the preposterous ideas of religions - so you've got to brainwash children to get the next generation of believers. "No brainwashed children" implies "no believers for the next generation" implies lots of churches being sold to become discos, car showrooms, and chic apartment blocks. Thinking of one such apartment block near my home, I wonder who got the apartment with the altar in it, and do they fuck on the altar?
That some (at least) religions have procedures for de-consecrating premises and objects speaks a lot for their self-confidence.
One word : Charon.
For the less-well astronomically-informed out there, Charon, the first-discovered moon of Pluto, is proportionately larger than Luna is in the Earth-Luna system. So, for almost 30 years, having a huge moon hasn't been a "once-in-a-universe event", it's been a twice-in-a-planetary-system event. And looking at the spins of Uranus (stop sniggering at the back!) and Venus, it's quite credible it could have been a half-the-large-planets-in-one-planetary-system event.
No, I'm not going to get into the "is Pluto a planet debate" ; I made my suggestions, which would have retained Pluto as a planet, and elevated around a half-dozen "asteroids" to planethood along with an unknown number of Kuiper Belt Objects and Oort Cloud Objects. I'm not emotionally attached to "9 planets".
Interesting idea. But, as you realise, with problems.
More generally, what does John Alexander Smith do? Or for that matter, Fred Smith? Both would, under the present system, have to rely on whoever got the .smith TLD choosing to (and being technically competent to) correctly maintain several thousand subdomains. While there's only (in your scheme) one lucky John Smith, there's also one lucky Abelard Smith, Belulah Smith ... and one Zebedee Smith.
It is an interesting question though - I gave some thought to it a few years ago when I had MyFamilyName.org (as I'm sure you know, .org is intended for non-profit organisations and personal domains). I wondered about subdomaining to ca.MyFamilyName.org , ie.MyFamilyName.org, uk.MyFamilyName.org (all areas where I knew there are members of my family) ; where would I find suitable people. I debated what I'd do if I found an axe-wielding murderer with the same family name as me but no known relationship, who wanted AxeMurderer.us.MyFamilyName.org ? Did I want the joys of having to fight a discrimination case in a foreign jurisdiction, or would I give him the domain. What if the Axe Murderer was the only (or first) applicant from the US - should I let him control the whole subdomain?
I let the domain lapse.
The first appeal judge say to you "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" and toss your petition.
The second appeal judge says "So, the convict wore gloves. Film at eleven." and tosses the appeal.
The third appeal judge says "The fingerprints were on the bits of bomb casing that didn't survive, or get found.", and tosses the appeal.
Potentially, you might find enough evidence to get someone else implicated, and get them hauled in for questioning, and a new line of investigation re-opened. But that's a long, slow process, and plenty of people have died of old age waiting for vindication in those circumstances.
If you're in public without your tin-foil hat, then you're visible. You're also visible with the tin-foil hat, but you get lumped into the category "suspicious tin-foil hat wearer" until they've got their automatic tin-foil-crease-fingerprinting system sorted out. Trials start in August.
- He was
: - used to win the war;
- accounted a security risk due to his being an unapologetic homosexual;
- chemically castrated under order of the courts (the alternative being jail);
- he started to grow breasts as a result of the "chemical castration" (a large dose of progesterone IIRC)
; - he started to lose control of his thinking and reasoning capabilities;
- only then was his "dumping like a hot potato" getting properly into gear, so he decided on suicide as being his best option.
If, of course, it was suicide.Pretty much everyone I know gets one or more of these "accidental mass CC" mails from vague contacts at frequent intervals. Very often it's "ain't it cute" photo mails, or "there's a baby-eating virus about!!" useless mail. Normally I delete them unread, but about once a month I LART the sender by writing a detailed explanation of why they shouldn't have done that, why virus alerts are pretty much useless, various other points as appropriate to the offending mail. I'm polite, but firm, I use appropriate interfingering of quoting the original mail and my comments, and I then move on to a detailed explanation of the difference between CC and BCC, and that they (the original sender). If (as is so common), there's a "Outlook tail" of all the previous history of the mail, then I'll go through that, pointing out further email addresses of other people completely uninvolved, and point out the security and privacy violations that the message sender is complicit with. In short, I have a polite rant about all the things that annoy me about such emails.
Then I BCC the mail to every address in the original mail, but CC it to the original sender. I add all the addresses I've spam-harvested from the body of the mail to the BCC too. And in the body of the text, I explain that I've sent this mail out as an object lesson to the sender, and that any complaints should be sent to him/her/it/them, not me.
I do get a moderate amount of blow-back from these, but I don't see too many repeat offenders.
I only do it once a month - it's a Canute-like railing against the popular ignorance of email standards.
To return to the case cited in TFA, I'd do something fairly similar. I'd send the mail back out to the entire list (BCC'd at least, or even as individually composed emails if you've got appropriate bulk mailing tools) with an explanation of the circumstances, a discourse on the privacy issues, a bit of moralising about spamming. I'd trim out most of the mailshot to keep my response short, but I'd quote enough so that anyone who got the original and read it would recognise it. I might even drop in a little bit about "it may be a Joe Job". I'd add that the recipients should check their email security with the administrator of the original sending domain. Try to project an air of annoyed innocent bystander attempting to do a public service by educating the rest of the victims of privacy breach.
Of course, what you're really trying to do is to alert the present customers of the competitor to their dangerous practices, and persuade those customers to transfer their business to you, since you're obviously so much nicer a company, and you've got more respect for your customers privacy. A tricky balancing act, but potentially worthwhile. Turn your enemy's mistakes to your benefit.
What you're neglecting is that the product from this bacterial digestion is a relatively simple mix of chemicals, to paraphrase TFA "a few biochemical steps from long-chain fatty acids". While that's a large part of the dull and boring part of oil, it's by no means everything.
Remember what your father was taught by his college chemistry lecturers back in the 1950s? That "oil is too good to burn"? Well, a lot of the reason for chemists having wasted their breath for the large part of a century saying that is the non-"few steps from fatty acid" hydrocarbon components of natural oils.
Remember the big eruption of the chemical industry back in the 1850s, propelled by the "coal tar" byproducts of the town gas industry? well, again, it was the non-simple hydrocarbons that people were working on.
Oil is still too good to burn ; if someone comes up with something cheaper and easier to burn, then there will be plenty of other markets for the interesting chemicals in oil.
FWIW, what I notice missing from this "miracle cure" is the source of the sugars they feed their modified E.coli on. They don't mention a process for turning cellulosic biomass into sugars. Which is no great surprise, because that's the hard bit. That's why people are presently producing "biofuel" from human-edible foodstuffs, and all the consequent palaver.
Termites can do it, and some fungi can do it (degrade cellulosic materials to simple oligosaccharides) ; but there isn't yet an industrial process that can do it. Yet.
Of course, looking for a third explanation, once the terr'st explanation has been revealed, is itself a terr'st activity, so there's no need for further discussion.
Wouldn't the Death of the Boats be more appropriate, perhaps with the added complication of installing a new "unauthorized" sub-dermal USB power supply. If you did that several times per day, you could even incorporate important elements of the Death of a Thousand Cuts into the torture.
Obviously you'll be taking a Biblical attitude to this : "visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children ... unto the third and to the fourth generation" and all that jazz.
A couple of years ago one of my colleagues was worrying over a "audiophool" magazine at lunch time, and asked my advice : he was seeing all these adverts for £2000 mains leads and a variety of more sanely priced 50Hz mains filters etc, "because I can hear the hum of the mains". He then got highly offended when I suggested that, for his budget of £500 to £1000, he build a mains-powered motor-belt-flywheel-belt-dynamo rig, with some nice chunky chokes, rechargeable batteries and capacitors, then feed the DC from that directly into the appropriate circuits of his amplifiers. With a moderate amount of work, he could even make it look neat, and be "hand-cart portable".
My audiophool colleague got quite angry, because he though I was taking the piss out of him. Which I was. But he had started it by considering spending £2000 on a mains cable.
I may have discussed the possible benefits of using steam as the energy-transfer medium instead of belts and flywheels. Or maybe compressed air. It's all a question of making sure that the system damps heavily at 50Hz and has a very low-pass filter built into it. But the audiophool seemed to think that 1% of 0.001Hz harmonic in a 20-minute long record would be an unacceptable level of distortion.
The ppH2O (partial pressure of water) in the atmosphere of Venus is too low to permit it's presence on the surface of Venus. The pH is quite horrible too, but that's not likely to be unsurvivable.
Earth is definitely hospitable, Mars possibly has been, Venus almost certainly never could have been, Mercury never; the gas giants have too different a chemistry to assess readily (is life possible based on liquid ammonia? You'd be hard put to find a chemist who'd say it was impossible, but we've no direct evidence of metabolism-like systems in liquid ammonia); interesting things may be possible in the satellites of the gas giants, and it's certainly worth investigating, but there's no hard data.It doesn't look terribly good for getting (complex) panspermia particles onto the surface of a planet once it's got an atmosphere. And when it's not got an atmosphere, it's even harder to get the particles onto a planet without shocking them to pieces.
Panspermia isn't theoretically impossible, but it's damned difficult to do naturally, and it still doesn't address the problem of how life originated on the source of the panspermia particles. Which makes it an unrewarding subject to work in.
Given that the orbit has an inclination of 80deg to the plane of the Earth's orbit (and thus 63-97deg to the orbits of the other planets), eclipses are unlikely to be a major problem.
I don't know the detailed reasons for the technical failures, but here are some troublesome areas :
- attaching them to the detainee is known to be a problem (I've seen a criminal slip handcuffs while 'cuffed to a police officer in a court room ; so they're going to be able to do a lot in privacy with access to tools and lubricants) ;
- the ranging technology is dubious, probably using radio signal strengths and/ or timing, but this falls prey to differential absorption in differing wall materials, reflections of signals from metal building frames, and good old analogue interference ;
- obviously, GPS isn't going to work. The signals don't penetrate glass well, let alone roofing of many types - just try using a GPS indoors one day in a large-enough building to show the changes in readings like a warehouse or a shopping centre.
The "home curfew" idea sounds nice and simple ; the implementation is harder ; cheap and effective implementation is even harder.