Ok, say I'm paranoid. Is there anything on the market that can detect these devices?
I'm not paranoid - I'm greedy. I want to be able to detect these devices so that, should I choose to change my phone, I can go to the mobile phone store, scan the (desirable) phones in their boxes until I find one which contains a very small, long-battery-life GPS/ GSM combination device, then buy that particular phone and walk off with two nice packages of electronic goodness under my arm.
Once they lose several thousand of these, they'll re-think their economics.
My suspicion would be that they're actually putting these devices into PALLETS of mobiles asthey're shipped from manufacturer to distributors. If a pallet gets stolen en route, then whenever the pallet "sees the sky" (GSM still doesn't work terribly well through the steel roofs of lorries), it stores a location and later sends a message home. (Being in GSM coverage at the same time as seeing the sky is not guaranteed.) By the time the thieves get the pallet dismantled and distributed to the extent of finding that one of the boxes contains a GPS instead of a phone, a stream of locations has gone to the security people. (Obviously, if the delivery gets to the distribution centre unmolested, then the people at the distribution centre find the GPS device - probably from it's serial number on the outside of the box, maybe from an RFID, maybe simply from it's weight, who cares? - and return it to the manufacturer for re-use. The match to a mobile in it's box doesn't have to be exact if it's buried in the middle of a pallet of similar devices.)
One of the first mobile phones I ever saw was one of those Motorola "brick" phones on the dash of a lorry while I was hitch-hiking. The driver was showing it off to me, so I asked the obvious "why?" - it seems that he was carrying a load of about 2 million pounds worth (4,000,000 USD, approx) of toys and his haulage company had had a lorry hijacked a few months previously. The insurance company had insisted on the phones being fitted. The problem hasn't disappeared.
Putting on the tinfoil hat, I guess Microsoft could "accidentally" leak hitherto-unknown XP vulnerabilities so that XP will be so exploitable and unpatchable that it will eventually be unuseable.
Hmmm, one tiny question : what makes you think that MS know where the unpatched vulnerabilities are? They may know where some of them are, but imagine the corporate liability issues if there were any significant number of liabilities that they knew of (and knew of at least a proof-of-concept exploit for) and didn't make some sort of attempt at patching during the "run-down" phase. The courts would eat them alive. I hope.
Now here's some tinfoil hat fodder :
MS decide to kill XP by releasing the core source code, repeatedly spamming it to the LKML (using an anonymous or deniable stooge) ;
they achieve their twin aims of feeding the "hunter-killer" pack of exploit writers ;
and they have the beneficial (in their eyes) sideeffect of contaminating a lot of kernel developers with sight of MS code;
the FUD-mongers get whole SCOs-worth of material for their next campaigns ;
XP ends up unusable due to unpatchable exploits (which have been addressed by Vista SP2);
a lot of people have to downgrade to Vista as being less painful than continuing to use XP.
*there shouldn't have been a club, because the theory is what's interesting at the MIT level, and that was well known. All that's left is the practice, and the practice was potentially very dangerous.
By extension then, there shouldn't be an MIT BASE-jumping club. How about cave-diving? Bungee-cording? Big-wall alpinism? Polar travel? Off-piste skiing? Technical diving? Motor racing? Standard scuba diving? Swimming? Walking? going to bars in the more "interesting" areas of town (around here if my beer-fuddled memory is good).
Almost all clubs and societies are built around things that have a well-understood theory but which require practice ; many are significantly dangerous. Where do you draw the line? For students who are, let's not forget, adults. (It's a very different argument for minors.)
TFA says that consumers want to see more relevant ads. It is very important to note that "more" modifies the word "relevant", not the word "ads".
- Speak very slowly and clearly [ticked];
- use short words, and use them correctly [ticked];
- have a short chain of logic and keep the steps simple [ticked].
Yes, you've ticked all the boxes for explaining exactly message you want your readers to take away with them.
What's the probability that advertising people will read your message and interpret it to be a call for "more adverts"? I'd reckon it's pretty near to 100%.
Re:Frustrating, but not really...
on
NXP RFID Cracked
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· Score: 1
...the chip in my dog.
Must be a pretty small dog or pretty large pants...
It's entirely possible he meant to say the chip in his dong...
I have a friend, Dr. Arizona Gleason, who learned knapping while getting her PhD in Archeology, and now does it for a living.
The link appears to be broken - I time out on http://www.obsidiandesigns.com/ but I get a webpage from obsidiandesigns.com/ . Modern-day knapping is interesting, but you can't beat the fascination of finding stone-age artefacts. I was holidaying in Russia a few years ago (at Lake Zuratkul, in the southern Urals between Chelyabinsk and Ufa) where there was a Neolithic knapping workshop/ village eroding out of the shores of the lake (since the dam raised it's level). Lots of flint fragments and broken pieces on the shore line, once you get your eye in practice.
A few days later I was trying to open up a CD case to back-up the various photos onto. No fingernails and I just couldn't get the damned plastic coating to rip. Then I thought a little, dug out the flint tips and lo and behold - one opened CD case. tickled my funny bone that did.
Someone might as well point out that a flint knife wouldn't show up on a metal detector. Neolithic terrorists - 1, security guards - 0.
Surgeons have experimented with flint scalpels made by modern flint knappers and found them as sharp as surgical steel, easy to sterilize and better at holding their edge.
Actually, the formally-written up stuff that I've seen (not too long ago, but I don't have a citation) referred to people comparing the efficiency of modern surgical steel with OBSIDIAN blades. Both obsidian and flint are amorphous materials, but they're very definitely not the same.
One of the particular characteristics of obsidian edges over steel is that the microscopic effect of grinding and sharpening steel leaves a quite ragged edge, while the obsidian edges examined were smoothly curved to a far finer scale. This is hypothesised to make for a smoother cutting process (as felt by the surgeon) with less damage beyond the edges of the wound.
Without experimental cutting comparison and microscopical edge comparison, I wouldn't a priori expect flint to share these characteristics with obsidian.
Now, where did I read that damned paper? Could well have been in "Susan Fox Hodgson 'Obsidian: sacred glass from the California sky' Geological Society, London, Special Publications 273: 295-313." , because I won a copy of the book a few months ago.
IE 0.833 had a heyday? Or even IE 5 or IE 6? I may have had to use them at work (I don't recall. At work, browser security is their problem, not mine.), but I know for sure that I've never installed either at home. Occasionally I've come across programmes that require one of these to be installed in order to complete an installation process. That has swiftly terminated the installation process and triggered the search for an alternative programme to do that job.
You know, before we invented lawyers and decided toasters needed labels saying 'do not immerse in water'.
Sounds good advice to me - I hate soggy toast.
(this afternoon's risk assessment was - should we stow the container of fuming nitric acid next to the container of lithium metal, or should we put them on opposite sides of the deck. Hmmm, hard choice. It sounds likely to be an interesting bang. But no soggy toast, please.)
Clarke event, a gamma ray burst? I don't think so. I'm holding out for the lunar obelisk.
Despite being best known as a SF writer, Clarke was always an engineer first and foremost. So I suspect he'd have been much more interested in having a real, tangible, visible event named for him than having his works of fiction as his contribution to posterity.
Besides, the lunar obelisk already has a name. It's TMA-1. Maybe not as snappy as "The Clarke Obelisk", but to the cognoscenti, that is definitely it's name. And to the cognoscenti, the opinions of the rest of the world don't matter at all.
There are plenty other things called TMA-1, and part of the fun is trying to guess which of them had their name manipulated by their designers so that the one SF fan in the room so that the acronym was correct. (Examining the first page returned by Google for "TMA-1" : ) A Soyuz mission? Obviously someone playing to the in joke. A tax management company? Probably one of the partners having a quiet laugh which the rest of the partners don't understand (beancounters, y'know!). The Tutor Marked Assignments at the Open University? Certainly a backronym. And the other 96-odd thousand hits - mostly SF fans, I'd guess.
Hydrogen can be an excellent power source, but it is notoriously difficult to store.
At least, not under conditions vaguely like Earth's surface. Hydrogen can be a good (or even very good) tool for storing and transporting energy from one place to another on the Earth's surface, but until someone discovers a hydrogen mine on the surface of the Earth, and someone else discovers a separate oxygen mine on the surface of the Earth, then neither is an energy source. To produce hydrogen in significant quantities on Earth, you need to chemically reduce water. You can do that directly (with electrolysis) or indirectly (for example, by electrolysing molten rubidium chloride to produce rubidium, then reducing water with the rubidium. It's the same reaction at the atomic level, but likely to be thermodynamically less efficient than the direct route.)
It dismays me that even a forum like SlashDot, which claims to have a technically competent audience, allows such sloppy writing to persist. It might not be "kewel", but chemistry and thermodynamics are important, dammit! If it weren't for understanding thermodynamics, neither the engine in your car, nor the engine in the bus I use would work. And without the chemistry, we wouldn't have the materials to build either.
... not just for "modern", "compact" fluorescent lamps. For as long as I've had anything to do with industry (20+ years now), I've known that fluorescent lamps have non-zero quantities of mercury in them, and therefore can't be disposed of by throwing into the bin. Instead, when a fluorescent lamp dies, you take it down to the electrician's workshop and carefully place it in the appropriate storage bin for return to shore for recycling. That applies for 6ft fluorescent tubes, 3ft tubes, 2ft tubes, 60cm rings, 40cm rings, and now "compacts". They're all fundamentally the same technology, with the same disposal issues.
Why is there a fuss about these things in the last year or so? I guess it's a confluence of two things : for decades the retail sellers of fluorescents have failed to provide a "back channel" for returning failed fluorescents (I guess that's the result of vigorous lobbying by those companies, who don't want the associated costs) ; and secondarily the incandescant lamp manufacturers are feeling the fear of their market drying up, and are indulging in FUD tactics. This is SlashDot - FUD is recognised as an illegitimate rhetorical technique.
For what it's worth, my score card with fluorescents : brought house in 1993 ; changed all lamps as they failed to either CFL, SFL (for "Strip Fluorescent Lamp"), or RFL ("Ring FL") as the incandescents failed ; completed that task in early 1995, leaving the house with a late-night,-all-rooms-in-use lighting drain of about 60W. I replaced less than one CFL per year until 2004 when I got married ; SWMBO was obeyed and the various fluorescents were replaced with incandescents (cost of fittings around £350, plus effort, plus around £50 for dimmer switches). Comparable lighting drain now is around 1000W (£~0.30/day), with 1-2 incandescents per month failing (~£3/month) . FINALLY, SWMBO is seeing my point about lighting efficiency and I'm getting her to accept daylight-spectrum CFLs back into the house (with non-daylight-spectrum where appropriate), with some incandescent GU10s being replaced as they fail with GU10 LED packages in appropriate colours or blends of colours (some of the GU10 incandescents are on dimmers, which is a problem I'm still looking for a solution to). At current rates, it's going to take several years to halve the lighting drain, during which time lighting technologies will, no doubt, change availability and prices. Again.
I'm nagging the local independant lighting retailer to stock daylight-spectrum CFLs. They really do look different, and in these northern climes they make a huge difference to indoor plants through the winter (we don't have any south-facing windows, so 4 hours of oblique light through rain clouds might be all the natural light the plants get in a day). People with SAD also find them very helpful, I'm told. All good grounds for independent shops to stock them so they don't have to compete on price with the big chains.
Having watched the program a few days ago... there are several "big deals" :
Many of the illicit body dealers are selling on bodies (or parts) without the consent of the body's previous inhabitant, or if the next-of-kin owns the body, without the consent of the next-of-kin. That's theft, by any other name.
Often body parts that are extracted from a cadaver and sold on for transplant or for tissue-use are mis-described. When Alastair Cooke's long bones were put up for sale, there was no indication that they came from a 90+ year-old man. That's mis-description at the very least, regardless of any risks of latent/ cryptic infections in the tissues.
Sometimes it's just pure, simple re-sale of stolen goods. Which is illegal in all jurisdictions that I'm familiar with.
Even without religious scruples, that's a big list of big enough issues to be concerned with. Personally, I've no problem with organ donation myself - I carry a donor card and my wife knows my opinions, and I support the concept of "required request" (broadly : requiring medical staff to request the next-of-kin to give permission for harvesting organs from an unresponsive potential-donor) - but I can understand that some people could be unhappy about it.
Think about it. Right now, one of the major breadbaskets of the Unites States, the Palouse region, is in perfect shape weather-wise for a bumper crop of wheat this year. We do not exactly have a shortage. But overseas they might... AND the dollar is low...
Sound to me like U.S. wheat farmers are going to clean up this year.
Just send everything one way, okay, guys? We don't want that fungus over here!
It's a fungus that spreads by airborne spores. That means really, really small spores. Probably invisible to the human eye, except as a random dust. Which makes it a really good target to be a bio-weapon. It's already got a distribution system built in (and tested). It's going to be effectively invisible to surveillance at ports, harbours and airports (you're going to do a full biological assessment of every pair of unwashed smalls in every suitcase people are bringing into the States? It'd be easier to ban the transport of clothes into the country. (The same could be said of the UK, or European countries, but you mentioned the US Dollar as a possible beneficiary.) If I was a biologicals attack planner for any anti-American group, particularly those that have an aversion to directly killing people, I'd not have read your post - I'd have gone from the New Scientist article (cited up-thread) a year ago and had my tentacles out and collecting samples. It would be trivial to get some mule to inadvertently carry samples into the US - for example put the spores into a talcum powder mix (inert), then decant it into a (clean, dry, empty) fungicide container; give that to someone who's about to embark on a trip to the States with a warning about how the US are scared of incoming fungi and the mule carrying the infective material into the country is genuinely innocent. The mule is careful to dust the contents of his suitcase regularly because he's doing the 'Right Thing'.
But since the apocalyptic scenario has been brought up: what a great illustration of the fact that we have WAY too much of our food crops being grown as huge tracts of monoculture, often all the same crop and all the same species. What a great target for famine-causing organisms.
I agree with the general point. It's not the organism that I'd target for investigation, but my interest in biological warfare was never to cause economic damage. If I were interested, this would be a Heaven-sent opportunity. Which begs a question - how many Apocalyptic Xtian sects are there in the US that have already got a ban on eating wheat because "it's the work of the Devil"? ("How many?" is a more sensible question than "Are there any?", given the diversity of home-grown religious nut jobs in America.) Better round them up, now. Using black helicopters.
Having broken the Prime Directive of/. by RTFAing, I wonder why they're surprised that astronaut's "goody stash" become a source of "trade goods" towards the end of a mission. People in an isolated environment, with restricted access to status goods use a lower status material of restricted availability as a proxy for other items of value. Look in any prison at the trade in "contraband" tobacco. Look also at the submariner's tale (up-thread, look for a typo of "submarien", IIRC) of tobacco rations being treated similarly. Look back to the rationing in the war (any war), and what a GI could get for a pair of nylons. Come out to an oil rig with my colleagues and I for a couple of weeks and notice how the "can of coke and a Mars bar" becomes a local variant of a gold standard. To be honest, I'd suspect that the mission planners DELIBERATELY included the sweeties etc. - in a "stashable" form - so that people would develop this sort of economy. It then naturally provides a (seemingly) self-developed social lubricant to minor awkward moments. Good psychology. That's probably why the submariners had a "smokes" ration too. This isn't exactly a novel situation. Which would you prefer - chocolates, smokes, or a good dose of Rum, Sodomy and The Lash (allegedly Winston Churchill's list of the traditions of the Royal Navy).
So, the surface of the space station is probably above freezing. The space station will then be radiating heat. Some of that heat will be caught by the ice cream ingredients. The ingredients themselves will also be "evaporating" heat, of course, so the question is, will the ingredients evaporate more heat that they catch from the space station? If so, they will cool off, if not, they will warm up.
Reflective foil "heat shield" between the space shuttle (and the station, for that matter) and the "cool box". Not exactly rocket science. What would be rocket science would be providing the "cool box" with an orientation and position control system that would hook into the space station and shuttle's systems, to avoid anything bumping into anything else. That would be interestingly complex. But since your "cool box" is pretty much going to require to be "put outside" by someone on a space walk, why not just put the task "put the cool box outside, attached to the BACK of the space station's solar panels" onto the task list for the first space walk, with assorted "bring in mint-choc-chip tonight" tasks on the end of succeeding space walks. Actually, given what the article says about people swapping labels on the rest of the food, I think it may be best to just label them all "ice cream, unspecified flavour".
the current calendar isn't arbitrary, it is based on observations in nature. Time isn't arbitrary either, it is also based on nature. If it was just arbitrary you couldn't use it for anything else.
arbitrary: capricious; unreasonable; unsupported
It is none of those things.
Maybe "extremely parochial" would be a better description, with a side-dish spelling out that such parochialism will become more apparent as human environments become more dissociated from the natural environment. Example : I generally work 24-hour cover in steel boxes without windows, and only venture into the outside when necessary (which is as likely to be at 03:00 local time as at 15:00). Already, of those of us who work 24-hour cover (as opposed to those who work 12-hour back-to-back shifts with an opposite number) often notice that we drift to a circa 26-hour day when we're running on body clocks only. Over a 2 to 3 week normal working hitch, that can shift you over a day out of phase with the rest of the world.
having a density of about 19.1g/cm3, it tends to be just over twice as heavy as sword steel (at 7.8g/cm3). Your 2kg sword would be 4.8kg and tire you and your four arms out quite nicely
But if you have 4 arms, then you'll have twice as much strength to heft the sword, so you will get tired at an equal rate as if the sword was a normal weight with only two arms. So by making you sprout those extra arms, the sword solves its own problems!
You have twice as many arms (in that particular universe), but you still only have one spine, and one set of torsional-bracing muscles on that spine. So... you still can probably get that double-density sword up towards the normal operating speeds, but when you hit (or are hit by) your opponent's sword, you're going to have a serious impact on your sword arm(s) but nothing additional to back it up with. Also, as you use the arm muscles to torque your arm and sword into action, you're going to exert a similar torque accelerating your torso in the opposite direction. that's going to decrease the maximum sword velocities that you're going to achieve.
You pay. Just like the Europeans. (Ever seen a private airplane in England or Germany? No? There's a reason for that.)
I'm not sure if your "private" means "owned by one or several individuals, for their own exclusive use and not for hire" or if it means "tickets are not available to the public ; the planes are standard commercial, but no-body can buy a ticket to fly on them. They're operated by companies for their own purposes". The huge majority of my flying is on private (second sense) flights. One of my former colleagues got his commercial pilot's license after a number of years operating as a part-time chauffeur to people who owned private (first sense) planes. There's no shortage of commercial, non-public, flying going on in the country. But you tend not to see it adv ertised, because there's no need to advertise it. A small number of seats do become available to the general public, but on strict stand-by (viz, you can have brought your ticket and be walking up the steps onto the 80-seater plane, and still be bumped for a more important non-paying passenger; you'll get your ticket refunded, probably, but you'll have hours or days to wait to get a chance at another seat. Quicker to get the boat.) I did about 500 miles of "private" (second sense) flying today. Nothing unusual about that.
Wired Science asks: Should scientists date people who believe in astrology?
The important question is - does belief in astrology significantly alter one's physiology or physical structure? That's a pretty unlikely claim, so if s/he/it/hem looked worth a genital wrestle before you discovered their mental deficiencies, then wrestle to the extent of your genitals. You have, of course, taken long-term contraceptive steps, to avoid "accidents" when the retard that you're genitally wrestling with "forgets" their short term contraceptive. After all, you don't want to be wasting your breeding years bringing up another generation of retards, do you? And you're not going to waste brain cell-seconds explaining to a retard why you're selective about breeding partners (viz - not retards).
Most people don't know it's there (or don't care). I believe the term is "bloatware" - it's supplied, but it's got many, many features that are almost never used.
Hey bone head,
Hey, MrNaz, stop looking in the mirror!
how many times does it need to be said that OUTLOOK IS NOT A MAIL PROGRAM.
[SNIP irrelevant motorised simile]
Outlook has its problems, but there are many large corporate environments that use Outlook as an integral part of their organisational infrastructure. If you haven't seen any then it's because you've never worked in any large enterprise environment.
Looking around the room, just gone midnight in a project being run by one of the biggest (in monetary terms - I don't know about employment numbers) corporate entities in the world. A company I work with regularly. I've just spent the afternoon searching around trying to get one of *their* computers to connect to *their* network so that I can do my job for *them* using *their* highly modified and control-freaked environment (their global helpdesk system is several thousand strong). What's the email client? OUTLOOK (not Outlook Express). Just like with the overwhelming majority of their competitors (one used something different in the dim and distant past - I remember having to RTFM for the Win3.11 client). Outlook is what comes pre-installed on their systems, so that's what they use.
When they want to do resource management, they don't use the generic management features of Outlook, they use custom-written "vertically-integrated" applications, often with a contractor on site to drive the software and do the relevant science/ engineering. Presumably because Outlook doesn't cover their *particular* requirements. I don't recall seeing anything in the help for Outlook to manage the consequences of (for an example) filling of tanks in a boat with different fluids on different days (vaguely similar to using the same room for subsequent meetings). 116 people spent ½ hour at their emergency stations last night because of an unexpected interaction consequent on such an error. So, they have an application that keeps track of those things. And typically a couple of hundred other applications in the one project.
What's left for Outlook? Email.
Maybe you work in a generic, interchangeable office situation. That must be fun for you. One day, you're going to be replaced by a robot, as soon as robots to do generic interchangeable office task become cheap enough. Enjoy that job security.
You have obviously never used outlook for anything other than email. Outlook, for want of a better term because there is no other software tool that does what it does, is a fully integrated personal information manager.
That may or may not be true. But what I do know for sure is that in the ever-shifting world of contracting, I've never met anyone who's had more training on using Outlook than I have (I've had zero training), and I've never met anyone who knows or cares about it's "PIM" functionality, because they keep their contacts information in a notebook (ink-on-paper) version, or their own PDA (which can't synchronise with the computer they're using because they've not got permission to install synchronisation software onto the work's computer). And I can't recall having seen any "meeting room management" used, ever. Most people don't know it's there (or don't care). I believe the term is "bloatware" - it's supplied, but it's got many, many features that are almost never used. Without checking, but I believe the median size of the employee-count at a company (in Britain, at least) is in the region of 100. Which makes using dedicated software to "manage" use of a meeting room a bit overkill. Whose regular office is closest to the room in question? Give them the job of looking after the room, because they'll end up doing the job anyway. Possibly it's more relevant in a 35000-people, 300-site company, but that's a relatively small proportion of the population.
Well, it's not exactly rocket science. In the unlikely event that I find myself taking a flight down to London (instead of taking a nice, relaxing overnight train as I normally do), then I'll take a flight on some other carrier to some other terminal, or to some other airport. Once BA collapses into economic ruin, maybe the corporate skeleton will be hung on a gibbet outside the airport as a reminder to others not to be so silly.
I think that BA aren't going to like the number of requests they have to deal with demanding a print out of any personal information they hold on passengers, then challenging it's veracity, demanding it's deletion (after it's allegedly been deleted). Just the general tricks of making life hell for bureaucrats. It's more fun than pulling the wings off flies, and ethically much more defensible (flies don't have a choice about being flies ; bureaucrats do have a choice).
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I'm not paranoid - I'm greedy. I want to be able to detect these devices so that, should I choose to change my phone, I can go to the mobile phone store, scan the (desirable) phones in their boxes until I find one which contains a very small, long-battery-life GPS/ GSM combination device, then buy that particular phone and walk off with two nice packages of electronic goodness under my arm.
Once they lose several thousand of these, they'll re-think their economics.
My suspicion would be that they're actually putting these devices into PALLETS of mobiles asthey're shipped from manufacturer to distributors. If a pallet gets stolen en route, then whenever the pallet "sees the sky" (GSM still doesn't work terribly well through the steel roofs of lorries), it stores a location and later sends a message home. (Being in GSM coverage at the same time as seeing the sky is not guaranteed.) By the time the thieves get the pallet dismantled and distributed to the extent of finding that one of the boxes contains a GPS instead of a phone, a stream of locations has gone to the security people.
(Obviously, if the delivery gets to the distribution centre unmolested, then the people at the distribution centre find the GPS device - probably from it's serial number on the outside of the box, maybe from an RFID, maybe simply from it's weight, who cares? - and return it to the manufacturer for re-use. The match to a mobile in it's box doesn't have to be exact if it's buried in the middle of a pallet of similar devices.)
One of the first mobile phones I ever saw was one of those Motorola "brick" phones on the dash of a lorry while I was hitch-hiking. The driver was showing it off to me, so I asked the obvious "why?" - it seems that he was carrying a load of about 2 million pounds worth (4,000,000 USD, approx) of toys and his haulage company had had a lorry hijacked a few months previously. The insurance company had insisted on the phones being fitted.
The problem hasn't disappeared.
Hmmm, one tiny question : what makes you think that MS know where the unpatched vulnerabilities are? They may know where some of them are, but imagine the corporate liability issues if there were any significant number of liabilities that they knew of (and knew of at least a proof-of-concept exploit for) and didn't make some sort of attempt at patching during the "run-down" phase. The courts would eat them alive. I hope.
Now here's some tinfoil hat fodder :
Duke Nukem Forever will only run on Windows 7.
It's obvious when you think about it - explains everything.
By extension then, there shouldn't be an MIT BASE-jumping club. How about cave-diving? Bungee-cording? Big-wall alpinism? Polar travel? Off-piste skiing? Technical diving? Motor racing? Standard scuba diving? Swimming? Walking? going to bars in the more "interesting" areas of town (around here if my beer-fuddled memory is good).
Almost all clubs and societies are built around things that have a well-understood theory but which require practice ; many are significantly dangerous. Where do you draw the line? For students who are, let's not forget, adults. (It's a very different argument for minors.)
Yes, you've ticked all the boxes for explaining exactly message you want your readers to take away with them.
What's the probability that advertising people will read your message and interpret it to be a call for "more adverts"? I'd reckon it's pretty near to 100%.
A bar-coded Prince Albert! But
The link appears to be broken - I time out on http://www.obsidiandesigns.com/ but I get a webpage from obsidiandesigns.com/ .
Modern-day knapping is interesting, but you can't beat the fascination of finding stone-age artefacts. I was holidaying in Russia a few years ago (at Lake Zuratkul, in the southern Urals between Chelyabinsk and Ufa) where there was a Neolithic knapping workshop/ village eroding out of the shores of the lake (since the dam raised it's level). Lots of flint fragments and broken pieces on the shore line, once you get your eye in practice.
A few days later I was trying to open up a CD case to back-up the various photos onto. No fingernails and I just couldn't get the damned plastic coating to rip. Then I thought a little, dug out the flint tips and lo and behold - one opened CD case. tickled my funny bone that did.
Someone might as well point out that a flint knife wouldn't show up on a metal detector. Neolithic terrorists - 1, security guards - 0.
Actually, the formally-written up stuff that I've seen (not too long ago, but I don't have a citation) referred to people comparing the efficiency of modern surgical steel with OBSIDIAN blades. Both obsidian and flint are amorphous materials, but they're very definitely not the same.
One of the particular characteristics of obsidian edges over steel is that the microscopic effect of grinding and sharpening steel leaves a quite ragged edge, while the obsidian edges examined were smoothly curved to a far finer scale. This is hypothesised to make for a smoother cutting process (as felt by the surgeon) with less damage beyond the edges of the wound.
Without experimental cutting comparison and microscopical edge comparison, I wouldn't a priori expect flint to share these characteristics with obsidian.
Now, where did I read that damned paper? Could well have been in "Susan Fox Hodgson 'Obsidian: sacred glass from the California sky' Geological Society, London, Special Publications 273: 295-313." , because I won a copy of the book a few months ago.
IE 0.833 had a heyday? Or even IE 5 or IE 6?
I may have had to use them at work (I don't recall. At work, browser security is their problem, not mine.), but I know for sure that I've never installed either at home. Occasionally I've come across programmes that require one of these to be installed in order to complete an installation process. That has swiftly terminated the installation process and triggered the search for an alternative programme to do that job.
Sounds good advice to me - I hate soggy toast.
(this afternoon's risk assessment was - should we stow the container of fuming nitric acid next to the container of lithium metal, or should we put them on opposite sides of the deck. Hmmm, hard choice. It sounds likely to be an interesting bang. But no soggy toast, please.)
Despite being best known as a SF writer, Clarke was always an engineer first and foremost. So I suspect he'd have been much more interested in having a real, tangible, visible event named for him than having his works of fiction as his contribution to posterity.
Besides, the lunar obelisk already has a name. It's TMA-1. Maybe not as snappy as "The Clarke Obelisk", but to the cognoscenti, that is definitely it's name. And to the cognoscenti, the opinions of the rest of the world don't matter at all.
There are plenty other things called TMA-1, and part of the fun is trying to guess which of them had their name manipulated by their designers so that the one SF fan in the room so that the acronym was correct. (Examining the first page returned by Google for "TMA-1" : ) A Soyuz mission? Obviously someone playing to the in joke. A tax management company? Probably one of the partners having a quiet laugh which the rest of the partners don't understand (beancounters, y'know!). The Tutor Marked Assignments at the Open University? Certainly a backronym.
And the other 96-odd thousand hits - mostly SF fans, I'd guess.
At least, not under conditions vaguely like Earth's surface. Hydrogen can be a good (or even very good) tool for storing and transporting energy from one place to another on the Earth's surface, but until someone discovers a hydrogen mine on the surface of the Earth, and someone else discovers a separate oxygen mine on the surface of the Earth, then neither is an energy source.
To produce hydrogen in significant quantities on Earth, you need to chemically reduce water. You can do that directly (with electrolysis) or indirectly (for example, by electrolysing molten rubidium chloride to produce rubidium, then reducing water with the rubidium. It's the same reaction at the atomic level, but likely to be thermodynamically less efficient than the direct route.)
It dismays me that even a forum like SlashDot, which claims to have a technically competent audience, allows such sloppy writing to persist. It might not be "kewel", but chemistry and thermodynamics are important, dammit! If it weren't for understanding thermodynamics, neither the engine in your car, nor the engine in the bus I use would work. And without the chemistry, we wouldn't have the materials to build either.
... not just for "modern", "compact" fluorescent lamps.
For as long as I've had anything to do with industry (20+ years now), I've known that fluorescent lamps have non-zero quantities of mercury in them, and therefore can't be disposed of by throwing into the bin. Instead, when a fluorescent lamp dies, you take it down to the electrician's workshop and carefully place it in the appropriate storage bin for return to shore for recycling. That applies for 6ft fluorescent tubes, 3ft tubes, 2ft tubes, 60cm rings, 40cm rings, and now "compacts". They're all fundamentally the same technology, with the same disposal issues.
Why is there a fuss about these things in the last year or so? I guess it's a confluence of two things : for decades the retail sellers of fluorescents have failed to provide a "back channel" for returning failed fluorescents (I guess that's the result of vigorous lobbying by those companies, who don't want the associated costs) ; and secondarily the incandescant lamp manufacturers are feeling the fear of their market drying up, and are indulging in FUD tactics.
This is SlashDot - FUD is recognised as an illegitimate rhetorical technique.
For what it's worth, my score card with fluorescents : brought house in 1993 ; changed all lamps as they failed to either CFL, SFL (for "Strip Fluorescent Lamp"), or RFL ("Ring FL") as the incandescents failed ; completed that task in early 1995, leaving the house with a late-night,-all-rooms-in-use lighting drain of about 60W. I replaced less than one CFL per year until 2004 when I got married ; SWMBO was obeyed and the various fluorescents were replaced with incandescents (cost of fittings around £350, plus effort, plus around £50 for dimmer switches). Comparable lighting drain now is around 1000W (£~0.30/day), with 1-2 incandescents per month failing (~£3/month) .
FINALLY, SWMBO is seeing my point about lighting efficiency and I'm getting her to accept daylight-spectrum CFLs back into the house (with non-daylight-spectrum where appropriate), with some incandescent GU10s being replaced as they fail with GU10 LED packages in appropriate colours or blends of colours (some of the GU10 incandescents are on dimmers, which is a problem I'm still looking for a solution to). At current rates, it's going to take several years to halve the lighting drain, during which time lighting technologies will, no doubt, change availability and prices. Again.
I'm nagging the local independant lighting retailer to stock daylight-spectrum CFLs. They really do look different, and in these northern climes they make a huge difference to indoor plants through the winter (we don't have any south-facing windows, so 4 hours of oblique light through rain clouds might be all the natural light the plants get in a day). People with SAD also find them very helpful, I'm told. All good grounds for independent shops to stock them so they don't have to compete on price with the big chains.
Whoever said that lighting was easy?
Having watched the program a few days ago
Even without religious scruples, that's a big list of big enough issues to be concerned with. Personally, I've no problem with organ donation myself - I carry a donor card and my wife knows my opinions, and I support the concept of "required request" (broadly : requiring medical staff to request the next-of-kin to give permission for harvesting organs from an unresponsive potential-donor) - but I can understand that some people could be unhappy about it.
It's a fungus that spreads by airborne spores.
That means really, really small spores. Probably invisible to the human eye, except as a random dust.
Which makes it a really good target to be a bio-weapon. It's already got a distribution system built in (and tested). It's going to be effectively invisible to surveillance at ports, harbours and airports (you're going to do a full biological assessment of every pair of unwashed smalls in every suitcase people are bringing into the States? It'd be easier to ban the transport of clothes into the country. (The same could be said of the UK, or European countries, but you mentioned the US Dollar as a possible beneficiary.)
If I was a biologicals attack planner for any anti-American group, particularly those that have an aversion to directly killing people, I'd not have read your post - I'd have gone from the New Scientist article (cited up-thread) a year ago and had my tentacles out and collecting samples. It would be trivial to get some mule to inadvertently carry samples into the US - for example put the spores into a talcum powder mix (inert), then decant it into a (clean, dry, empty) fungicide container; give that to someone who's about to embark on a trip to the States with a warning about how the US are scared of incoming fungi and the mule carrying the infective material into the country is genuinely innocent. The mule is careful to dust the contents of his suitcase regularly because he's doing the 'Right Thing'.
I agree with the general point. It's not the organism that I'd target for investigation, but my interest in biological warfare was never to cause economic damage. If I were interested, this would be a Heaven-sent opportunity.
Which begs a question - how many Apocalyptic Xtian sects are there in the US that have already got a ban on eating wheat because "it's the work of the Devil"? ("How many?" is a more sensible question than "Are there any?", given the diversity of home-grown religious nut jobs in America.) Better round them up, now. Using black helicopters.
Having broken the Prime Directive of /. by RTFAing, I wonder why they're surprised that astronaut's "goody stash" become a source of "trade goods" towards the end of a mission.
People in an isolated environment, with restricted access to status goods use a lower status material of restricted availability as a proxy for other items of value. Look in any prison at the trade in "contraband" tobacco. Look also at the submariner's tale (up-thread, look for a typo of "submarien", IIRC) of tobacco rations being treated similarly. Look back to the rationing in the war (any war), and what a GI could get for a pair of nylons. Come out to an oil rig with my colleagues and I for a couple of weeks and notice how the "can of coke and a Mars bar" becomes a local variant of a gold standard.
To be honest, I'd suspect that the mission planners DELIBERATELY included the sweeties etc. - in a "stashable" form - so that people would develop this sort of economy. It then naturally provides a (seemingly) self-developed social lubricant to minor awkward moments. Good psychology.
That's probably why the submariners had a "smokes" ration too. This isn't exactly a novel situation.
Which would you prefer - chocolates, smokes, or a good dose of Rum, Sodomy and The Lash (allegedly Winston Churchill's list of the traditions of the Royal Navy).
Reflective foil "heat shield" between the space shuttle (and the station, for that matter) and the "cool box". Not exactly rocket science. What would be rocket science would be providing the "cool box" with an orientation and position control system that would hook into the space station and shuttle's systems, to avoid anything bumping into anything else. That would be interestingly complex.
But since your "cool box" is pretty much going to require to be "put outside" by someone on a space walk, why not just put the task "put the cool box outside, attached to the BACK of the space station's solar panels" onto the task list for the first space walk, with assorted "bring in mint-choc-chip tonight" tasks on the end of succeeding space walks.
Actually, given what the article says about people swapping labels on the rest of the food, I think it may be best to just label them all "ice cream, unspecified flavour".
Maybe "extremely parochial" would be a better description, with a side-dish spelling out that such parochialism will become more apparent as human environments become more dissociated from the natural environment.
Example : I generally work 24-hour cover in steel boxes without windows, and only venture into the outside when necessary (which is as likely to be at 03:00 local time as at 15:00). Already, of those of us who work 24-hour cover (as opposed to those who work 12-hour back-to-back shifts with an opposite number) often notice that we drift to a circa 26-hour day when we're running on body clocks only. Over a 2 to 3 week normal working hitch, that can shift you over a day out of phase with the rest of the world.
Effective at what? Feeding the lawyers. Not the best of outcomes.
You have twice as many arms (in that particular universe), but you still only have one spine, and one set of torsional-bracing muscles on that spine. So
More power is not always the answer.
I'm not sure if your "private" means "owned by one or several individuals, for their own exclusive use and not for hire" or if it means "tickets are not available to the public ; the planes are standard commercial, but no-body can buy a ticket to fly on them. They're operated by companies for their own purposes".
The huge majority of my flying is on private (second sense) flights. One of my former colleagues got his commercial pilot's license after a number of years operating as a part-time chauffeur to people who owned private (first sense) planes.
There's no shortage of commercial, non-public, flying going on in the country. But you tend not to see it adv ertised, because there's no need to advertise it. A small number of seats do become available to the general public, but on strict stand-by (viz, you can have brought your ticket and be walking up the steps onto the 80-seater plane, and still be bumped for a more important non-paying passenger; you'll get your ticket refunded, probably, but you'll have hours or days to wait to get a chance at another seat. Quicker to get the boat.)
I did about 500 miles of "private" (second sense) flying today. Nothing unusual about that.
You have, of course, taken long-term contraceptive steps, to avoid "accidents" when the retard that you're genitally wrestling with "forgets" their short term contraceptive. After all, you don't want to be wasting your breeding years bringing up another generation of retards, do you? And you're not going to waste brain cell-seconds explaining to a retard why you're selective about breeding partners (viz - not retards).
Hey, MrNaz, stop looking in the mirror!
[SNIP irrelevant motorised simile]
Looking around the room, just gone midnight in a project being run by one of the biggest (in monetary terms - I don't know about employment numbers) corporate entities in the world. A company I work with regularly. I've just spent the afternoon searching around trying to get one of *their* computers to connect to *their* network so that I can do my job for *them* using *their* highly modified and control-freaked environment (their global helpdesk system is several thousand strong).
What's the email client? OUTLOOK (not Outlook Express). Just like with the overwhelming majority of their competitors (one used something different in the dim and distant past - I remember having to RTFM for the Win3.11 client). Outlook is what comes pre-installed on their systems, so that's what they use.
When they want to do resource management, they don't use the generic management features of Outlook, they use custom-written "vertically-integrated" applications, often with a contractor on site to drive the software and do the relevant science/ engineering. Presumably because Outlook doesn't cover their *particular* requirements. I don't recall seeing anything in the help for Outlook to manage the consequences of (for an example) filling of tanks in a boat with different fluids on different days (vaguely similar to using the same room for subsequent meetings). 116 people spent ½ hour at their emergency stations last night because of an unexpected interaction consequent on such an error. So, they have an application that keeps track of those things. And typically a couple of hundred other applications in the one project.
What's left for Outlook? Email.
Maybe you work in a generic, interchangeable office situation. That must be fun for you. One day, you're going to be replaced by a robot, as soon as robots to do generic interchangeable office task become cheap enough. Enjoy that job security.
I believe the term is "bloatware" - it's supplied, but it's got many, many features that are almost never used.
Without checking, but I believe the median size of the employee-count at a company (in Britain, at least) is in the region of 100. Which makes using dedicated software to "manage" use of a meeting room a bit overkill. Whose regular office is closest to the room in question? Give them the job of looking after the room, because they'll end up doing the job anyway. Possibly it's more relevant in a 35000-people, 300-site company, but that's a relatively small proportion of the population.
Well, it's not exactly rocket science. In the unlikely event that I find myself taking a flight down to London (instead of taking a nice, relaxing overnight train as I normally do), then I'll take a flight on some other carrier to some other terminal, or to some other airport. Once BA collapses into economic ruin, maybe the corporate skeleton will be hung on a gibbet outside the airport as a reminder to others not to be so silly.
I think that BA aren't going to like the number of requests they have to deal with demanding a print out of any personal information they hold on passengers, then challenging it's veracity, demanding it's deletion (after it's allegedly been deleted). Just the general tricks of making life hell for bureaucrats. It's more fun than pulling the wings off flies, and ethically much more defensible (flies don't have a choice about being flies ; bureaucrats do have a choice).