"Maybe we'll see another browser?... I'd be happy with [a browser] that just stripped out all CSS."
Isn't that more or less what you suggested? (Other than that I'm content to wish; I've got more than enough projects to keep me busy already.) Of course such a feature would be optional, and not once did I suggest that Safari should do that by default.
I'd read what you said as meaning that you wanted all support for CSS stripped out, not just dumping the CSS code from the data stream before rendering it.
Have you tried the likes of Lynx (Links?) - the text mode web browser. No, seriously. I've used it on a few occasions and found it a pleasant change. Hmmm, I'm just about to knock off from work - I wonder if there a Windoze version I can use on the works system here?... Nah, no windoze versions, so I'd better get back to feeding the plotter.
Crappy webpage design is everywhere. I'm just trying to remember the name of (one of many) websites that ridicules some of the more egregious examples. I think I must have scrubbed it from my memory in reaction to some of the horrors I saw.
Now all I want is to be able to use that file on my iPhone. Nothing worse than downloading ads over EDGE. Ugh. Unfortunately, I don't think the SDK will allow quite that much access. Maybe we'll see another browser? Safari really isn't that much to write home about. I'd be happy with one that just stripped out all CSS.
CSS is used a lot by people making websites accessible to "differently abled" people. (For once I'm using the PC term for "the handicapped" because in this context it does make a significant point.) Since there are a number of countries that have laws in effect (and which are being enforced) which ban discrimination against the differently abled, then you're not going to see significant browsers which don't support it, and you are going to see more sites using it. Tough. Live with it. If you really don't like it, get involved with an OS browser and try to persuade the rest of the developer community to make it possible to switch off support for CSS.
My understanding is that life began about 3 billion years ago, and that Hadean Earth pretty much lasted until then.
The fossil record of stromatolites extends to at least 3.2 billion (10^9) years ago ; claims have been made (and disputed!) for finding microfossils of bacteria-like forms (cocci and bacilli) from a 3.56 billion-year-old chert from Australia. Some isotope specialists working on graphite inclusions in apatite crystals from 3.7 billion-year-old claim to see isotope ratios suggestive of (but not proof of) the carbon having been through a metabolic process, but that is pretty esoteric. Recent work on diamond inclusions in 4.2 billion-year-old zircons from Jack hills (also Australia) suggests that there may have been a weathering cycle on the Earth (and by extension, probably an ocean) as far back as 4.2 billion-years-ago. While the precise numbers are unclear, the evidence is strong that life evolved on Earth very early in it's development.
"Hadean" is an informal term used by some for the early part of the Archean. At different times, different people have used the term in different ways. The general effect implied is of a period of great surface heat, lots of vulcanism etc. One useful dividing line which could be used to distinguish "Hadean" from "post-Hadean" would be the end of the "late heavy bombardment", which is when meteorite impact ceased to be a major geological influence. From lunar evidence this is put at about 3.7 billion-years-ago.
It's also something which should be possible within a reasonable timescale - certainly before oil starts to run out.
The oil has already started to run out. Production is at approximately it's peak ; exploration costs are rising for decreasing returns ; and there simply aren't any significant area unexplored.
(I've worked in exploration and production for over 20 years now ; despite increasing sums spent trying to find and develop the stuff, the returns are decreasing. Plus, of course, most of the "new" discoveries being worked on have actually been on the books since the eighties or earlier.)
True, but considering the country was recently 'liberated' and democracy was 'brought' to it, it is a little weird.
What's weird about it?
The "liberators" and "bringers of democracy" are using Afghanistan as a trial run for the "liberation" and "democracy" that they plan on bringing back home. So, what you see in Afghanistan today you can anticipate on a street corner near you in a couple of years.
Shame about the 256mb memory limit but otherwise is perfect. For linux that will be enough but would need 512mb to work well with XP (I think-- will read their forums).
Sheesh.
Some of us started using Linux on 4MiB systems. My PDA has a grand total of 32MiB, using about 5MiB of the memory for running the system.
Where the fsck does all the memory go?
(/self is learning OOP with the Open University open.ac.uk; I have my suspicions about where all the memory goes.)
I am willing to admit to not knowing ancient Greek.
But, you're posting in a science-based forum! And of the languages that have contributed to scientific and technical terminology, by far the most profligate sources have been Latin and Greek (probably with German as a distant third). So... either you're not as much of a scientist/ technically educated person as you think, or you never spend time thinking about the words that you use.
Well, few people do spend time thinking about what the words they use mean, which would make you normal (which does not mean that you're right).
Considering the fact that there are at least 5 words in the English language to describe fecal matter, it would be interesting to know how many ways it could be expressed in ancient Greek.Considering the fact that there are at least 5 words in the English language to describe fecal matter, it would be interesting to know how many ways it could be expressed in ancient Greek.
You missed out the "a" in "fæcal". Twice. It's not an American word, or an English word, or even in an ASCII-compatible character set ; if you want to change it's spelling, dig out the time machine. However many ways of expressing "shit" there are in modern, socially acceptable English, at the time that the word "coprolite" became necessary, the strong convention was to euphemise anything to do with "matters below the belt" by using a Classical language to describe it. And the word "cophrophagy" had the precedent established some centuries earlier. "Cophrophagy" is a standard term for the junction between the two halves of a popular meat animal's digestive process ; the profession of looking after these animals has had a family name associated with it for nearly a millennium now. Which reminds me to see if the butcher can get hold of a brace of coney for the weekend. Yummy! Even if I do have to dress them myself.
Some people have even rumored that Marsh actually named dinosaur dung "coprolites" as a way to discredit his competitor named Cope.
That would be the commentators on palaeontology who have got no knowledge of Greek at all, or the ones who think that Marsh had a time machine and went back a bit over 2000 years to change classical Greek in a way that's subtly insulting to his competitor.
Coprolites has the same roots as lithology and coprophagia.
I think it would be simpler to pay some computer sweatshop in Delhi to do this for a few cents each.
Well, the revised subject line pretty much says it all. But seriously, Delhi has a significant (and growing) software industry. It's got that highly valuable thing of a large pool of well-educated, English-speaking people looking for work. You can find a much more profitable use for such a workforce than "clicking for porn". For breaking CAPTCHAs, all you need is adequate pattern recognition skills to identify the letters in the CAPTCHA compared to those on the keyboard. The person doing the job would likely run into more difficulty from the fact that most keyboards only show the upper-case form of a letter, when many CAPTCHAs are case-sensitive. Being able to read or speak the language isn't necessarily an advantage (few use dictionary words anyway), and may be a definite disadvantage.
Has anyone met CAPTCHAs in the wild that use non-Latin character sets?
The title is very misleading, its actual a response to a possible panic caused by people using bad detectors. Imagine if hundreds of people buy shitty detectors that can be tripped by high NOX counts(A car emission). Suddenly on a hot afternoon during rush hour, 100+ counters register a large nuclear presence.
And you're implying that 10,000 people are then killed in the stampede to get out of the city. I fail to see the problem. A large number of people have been removed from the gene pool because they're too stupid to get tools of decent quality, or because they rely on poor information sources, or simply because they're of the cud-chewing mentality that makes them want to live in dangerously large cities. Meanwhile, the majority of the population continue unaffected. It's called "culling the population" ; it's an essential part of evolution (breed an excess of population ; cull those without the desired trait ; repeat until you've a population with the traits desired). I still fail to see that there's a problem.
I'm also wondering how a Geiger-Muller tube would actually be affected by a high NOx level in the atmosphere. The tube itself is sealed and filled with an inert gas (argon, neon, or possibly nitrogen for cheap ones) and it's separated from the atmosphere by a mica or Mylar film window. How's the NOx going to affect the breakdown of insulation between the shell and the central wire, since it doesn't ever come into the tube itself. I suspect that this is a failure mode of some radiation metering technology other than the Geiger-Muller tube. Come to think of it, searching with Google for reports of this failure mode for GM detectors, your post is the top of the pile. Do you have any evidence to back up your assertion that this is a failure mode of GM detectors.
Damn I stepped on my dick, they made 12Km before calling it quits, 6.7Km is the depth they were finding fossils where they didn't expect it.
Could you point me at the original reports of them finding fossils at any depth in the Kola super-deep borehole/ ANY fossils. ANY depth. I'm not particularly bothered if the reports are in the original Russian, or translated into English (or French for that matter).
I'll give you a hint - I read some of the original reports myself when I was studying high-P metamorphism back in the '80s. Since then I've spent 20 years drilling holes in the ground.
The borehole location was selected for it's absence of sediments, because the original objective of the well was to study high-grade metamorphic rocks at great depth, and you don't do that by starting off drilling fossiliferous sediments. Where in the borehole log (http://www.icdp-online.org/contenido/icdp/front_content.php?idart=1559) do you see any mention of (or even a possibility of) finding fossils?
Interesting. In the U.S., I'm pretty sure that would be considered a "pyramid scheme" and therefore illegal. The people who start it may make a lot of money, but once there's no one left to recruit, a bunch of people just lose their starter kit money.
As SQLGuru points out, the critical thing is that a stand-alone product is delivered. If the kit included an instruction (backed up by some sort of technical measures, perhaps) to send $10 of each $100 revenue to the person who sold you the original kit, then it would be a pyramid scheme, and illegal as a consequence. That would probably also be the case if the "kit" required you to buy your first set of 20 kits for selling on (at the bargain knock-down price of $10 ! ! ) from the person selling you the advice. Quite how this is different from marketing a franchise, I'm not sure (and I have some shreds of self-respect, so I'm not going to become a lawyer). But since so many franchise businesses are close to exploitation scams anyway...
5 instead of 4? Well that's a pretty good guess given that the previous generation of scientists did not have a lot of the tools that the new kids on the block have.
The previous "5 kingdoms" model is hardly the result of guesswork. I've been working through a (now-outdated) reference tome on the model on-and-off for about 4 years now, and I'm barely half way through the book (It's Margulis & Schwartz, BTW, "Five Kingdoms: Illustrated Guide to the Phyla of Life on Earth (Paperback) " ISBN 0716730278). Given that it's 10 years old now, I was actually expecting this to happen. In the time since I got the book (about 5 years) and started working my way through it, making notes, one of the 137 phyla which they describe has been found to be a grossly degenerated member of another phylum (it's an obscure parasite found normally only on the gills of cephalopod molluscs), another two have been merged (I can't even remember which ones they were. Protoctists of some sort.), and now someone has proposed a different way of slicing up the pie at the super-phylum level. I see that the unikont grouping still stands in this new analysis, which even I could figure out as a natural grouping.
Trust me (or do the legwork for yourself!), the 5 kingdoms model was not guesswork. It might not be the correct model, but it's based on a lot of evidence. (BTW, sitting in my rucksack at this very moment I've got a reprint of one of Margulis' 1995 papers setting out some of the grounds for the 5 kingdoms model. It's my "light reading" on the bus to work, as a change from doing a correspondence course in Java. Next to it is a reference to the geological structure of the South Atlantic, which may be my work place in a couple of years. Lifelong training is a requirement, not an option.)
Savers money was never in any doubt in the Northern Rock - it had about 100bn of assets to guarantee something like 20bn of deposits (who will have had first call on the money raised from a firesale).
At best second call ; more likely third call. Still probably safe, but the people who were running from the bank were thinking with their twitching sphincters, not their brains. In a liquidation, the first two organisations in the line for getting paid out of the assets are the tax man and the beancounters doing the liquidation ; this is obviously because the beancounters wouldn't do the job if they weren't sure of getting paid, and the taxman sets the laws about the taxman ALWAYS getting paid. Normal (and secured) creditors form the next line. I'm not sure about the sequence of the taxman and the liquidators.
So the run was not rational
Agreed. As a non-investor, may I add the phrase "rib-ticklingly hilarious"?
Hmmm.. maybe it got something to do with the estimated 5yr orbit of the asteroid.
The rule is, IIRC, that the object has to have had an orbit determined which is good enough to be "useful in the establishment of identifications" (from http://www.ss.astro.umd.edu/IAU/csbn/mpnames.shtml ). That would normally be a minimum of 2 apparitions ; potentially as little as one year. However, for an "interesting" object you can establish a preliminary orbit from a few nights of observations and spend the intervening days trying to find the object on archived images. Since these often go back to the late 1940s, you rapidly get a long baseline of observations. IF you can put the time in on the re-calculation of candidate orbits, and the searching of databases for images with the correct combination of direction (on the sky), time, and limiting magnitude. AND you get a moderate amount of luck in the archives.
There are institutional constraints on the time to naming as well : "From Transactions of the IAU XVIIIB : All names proposed for minor planets will be reviewed for suitability, even when names are proposed by discoverers. The review will be done as indicated in the 1979 Commission 20 resolution, except that in the case of a name proposed by the discoverer, the six-month waiting period for a newly numbered object can be reduced to two months. Names shall be limited to a maximum length of sixteen characters, including spaces and hyphens."
One has to be sure that it is a unique one and not another one that strayed from its recorded orbit. (by collision with another asteroid)
Collision is certainly possible, but has never been observed directly. There's total confidence that it has happened (for example, the matching compositions of 4 Vesta and the Vestoid asteroids and the HED family of meteorites strongly indicate a common origin in the geologically differentiated interior of Vesta), but excepting the Deep Impact mission, we've never actually seen a space collision. Equally, no-one has seen a lunar crater being formed, but only creationists and such-like retards disbelieve that it happens. (It has been proposed that the lunar crater Giordano Bruno was seen being formed in 1178, but this is disputed by other researchers.) The interaction of gravitational fields between the planets is perfectly adequate to explain the complexity and evolution of asteroidal orbits (look up "Kirkwood gaps") to a first approximation. The interacting gravitational influences of the other asteroids then complicates matters considerably.
To be fair, this is all unverified, so choose to believe at your own risk.
This is slashdot. The article is critical of Microsoft. Of course they will believe.
And there is one good reason not to believe?
(Actually, in the tea shack yesterday one of my colleagues was moaning about having had computing support at [A MAJOR OIL COMPANY] doing a call back to him 3 months after he raised a BSOD ticket about on of their networked machines on an oil platform. In the intervening 3 months he'd had a laptop heli-freighted out to him, had completed the well, and had moved to work for 3 different clients in 2 different countries. And by sheer coincidence was back in the exact same office, with a different laptop, in time for the 3-month call back. From Houston, to the sub-tropical North Sea)
But in the end, I suspect a lot of corporations just want to write scripts and such without mucking around in the source code proper. The issues most likely to resonate are: (1) How do you efficiently distribute the customizations? (2) How hard are they to develop and maintain? and (3) Can we use them on all of our platforms as is, or do we have to port or (ack!) redevelop for each platform?
Sense? On SlashDot?
I'll hold the box - you just empty the contents of your desk into it. Been nice knowing you.
Two consecutive Slashdot stories with sanity prevailing. Things are slipping.
There's an unstated assumption in the article (and in the alleged practice), that people will routinely carry their driving license with them when going out. Assuming that they have a driving license - which not everyone has. It also assumes that the criteria for getting a drink are similar to those for getting a driving license. Is the driving license being used as a de facto State Identity Card? Of course it is. Stupid. Inaccurate. Non-universal. Easily-forged. Can be removed from a person by administrative fiat. Contains irrelevant information. Certainly seems to have all the characteristics necessary for a State Identity Card.
There's a difference between saying "The terrorists don't scare me" and flying internationally anyways, and running naked through Tikrit with a bullseye painted on your ass with red lipstick.
Huh? What's flying internationally got to do with jackshit? ISTR that the planes hijacked on 11/9/2001 were domestic flights, not international flights. And, since the large majority of the hijackers were Saudis, that would explain the invasion of Saudi Arabia.
"So which technology will eventually prevail to be the future of wireless power?"
Why assume that one will win out over the other. There are likely to be circumstances where neither are going to be suitable (but a third method is), or where one is ruled out for some local reason. Or just possibly, someone will combine both systems into one device that (say) fits under a desk surface and that takes off with both. Magnetic induction is going to need current-turn-square-metres, so be more suitable to devices with a substantial footprint (keyboards connected to a processing device, for example) ; radio antennae on the other hand can be fairly linear, suiting your "pen format" memo recorder. Different courses, different horses. Then again, perhaps the cheapest and most flexible form of wireless power would be a 3rd-world orphan with a hand-cranked generator. Just pour some slops from the kitchen into one end from time to time. Just make sure to get it neutered at the vets, unless you're planning on setting up a breeding programme.
When Jesus used to ride dinosaurs, he used a Trojan.
(I was trying to figure out why the condom machine in the restaurant we used this evening bore the slogan "Trojan - America's #1 condoms". I get that it's a trademark, but what associations were the marketing people trying to get between sex and the Trojans? "Have sex like people who've been dead for about 3000 years"? "Fuck like the losers"? "Fuck like an adulterer who died for his squeeze"? "These condoms are as comfortable as a brass helmet on the end of your dick"? Something about that advertising campaign didn't cross the Atlantic successfully.)
After you point the telescope to a nearby rocky planet, it's trivial to record and later analyze possible radio transmission.
Whatever you get by piggybacking an observation is, by definition, free.
At first glance you'd think so, but at second glance you start to see the costs of recording media, transmission of data, etc. Those costs become non-trivial quite rapidly as your volume of "free" observations go up. I don't know the current status of the "pipeline" between the Areceibo radio telescope and the SETI@home servers, but when the project started they spread their shoestring budget as far as possible by MAILING many-gigabytes of tape reels from Puerto Rico to California. "Low cost per bit" is not the same as "free".
it devotes much of its space to explaining the differences between science and religion, and asserting that acceptance of evolution does not require abandoning belief in God.'"
A complete waste of ink, brains, money and time. Just let the god-believers go back to living in caves, shitting into their water supplies, and dieing in their 40s if they didn't die in their first 3 years of life. That's the natural way that religious belief systems are designed to keep people inhabiting. If you want a better life style, show religion the inside of the shit can that it so richly deserves to inhabit.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd read what you said as meaning that you wanted all support for CSS stripped out, not just dumping the CSS code from the data stream before rendering it.
Have you tried the likes of Lynx (Links?) - the text mode web browser. No, seriously. I've used it on a few occasions and found it a pleasant change.
Hmmm, I'm just about to knock off from work - I wonder if there a Windoze version I can use on the works system here?
Crappy webpage design is everywhere. I'm just trying to remember the name of (one of many) websites that ridicules some of the more egregious examples. I think I must have scrubbed it from my memory in reaction to some of the horrors I saw.
CSS is used a lot by people making websites accessible to "differently abled" people. (For once I'm using the PC term for "the handicapped" because in this context it does make a significant point.) Since there are a number of countries that have laws in effect (and which are being enforced) which ban discrimination against the differently abled, then you're not going to see significant browsers which don't support it, and you are going to see more sites using it.
Tough.
Live with it.
If you really don't like it, get involved with an OS browser and try to persuade the rest of the developer community to make it possible to switch off support for CSS.
The fossil record of stromatolites extends to at least 3.2 billion (10^9) years ago ; claims have been made (and disputed!) for finding microfossils of bacteria-like forms (cocci and bacilli) from a 3.56 billion-year-old chert from Australia. Some isotope specialists working on graphite inclusions in apatite crystals from 3.7 billion-year-old claim to see isotope ratios suggestive of (but not proof of) the carbon having been through a metabolic process, but that is pretty esoteric. Recent work on diamond inclusions in 4.2 billion-year-old zircons from Jack hills (also Australia) suggests that there may have been a weathering cycle on the Earth (and by extension, probably an ocean) as far back as 4.2 billion-years-ago.
While the precise numbers are unclear, the evidence is strong that life evolved on Earth very early in it's development.
"Hadean" is an informal term used by some for the early part of the Archean. At different times, different people have used the term in different ways. The general effect implied is of a period of great surface heat, lots of vulcanism etc. One useful dividing line which could be used to distinguish "Hadean" from "post-Hadean" would be the end of the "late heavy bombardment", which is when meteorite impact ceased to be a major geological influence. From lunar evidence this is put at about 3.7 billion-years-ago.
The oil has already started to run out. Production is at approximately it's peak ; exploration costs are rising for decreasing returns ; and there simply aren't any significant area unexplored.
(I've worked in exploration and production for over 20 years now ; despite increasing sums spent trying to find and develop the stuff, the returns are decreasing. Plus, of course, most of the "new" discoveries being worked on have actually been on the books since the eighties or earlier.)
What's weird about it?
The "liberators" and "bringers of democracy" are using Afghanistan as a trial run for the "liberation" and "democracy" that they plan on bringing back home. So, what you see in Afghanistan today you can anticipate on a street corner near you in a couple of years.
Sheesh.
Some of us started using Linux on 4MiB systems.
My PDA has a grand total of 32MiB, using about 5MiB of the memory for running the system.
Where the fsck does all the memory go?
(/self is learning OOP with the Open University open.ac.uk; I have my suspicions about where all the memory goes.)
But, you're posting in a science-based forum! And of the languages that have contributed to scientific and technical terminology, by far the most profligate sources have been Latin and Greek (probably with German as a distant third). So
Well, few people do spend time thinking about what the words they use mean, which would make you normal (which does not mean that you're right).
You missed out the "a" in "fæcal". Twice. It's not an American word, or an English word, or even in an ASCII-compatible character set ; if you want to change it's spelling, dig out the time machine.
However many ways of expressing "shit" there are in modern, socially acceptable English, at the time that the word "coprolite" became necessary, the strong convention was to euphemise anything to do with "matters below the belt" by using a Classical language to describe it. And the word "cophrophagy" had the precedent established some centuries earlier. "Cophrophagy" is a standard term for the junction between the two halves of a popular meat animal's digestive process ; the profession of looking after these animals has had a family name associated with it for nearly a millennium now.
Which reminds me to see if the butcher can get hold of a brace of coney for the weekend. Yummy! Even if I do have to dress them myself.
That would be the commentators on palaeontology who have got no knowledge of Greek at all, or the ones who think that Marsh had a time machine and went back a bit over 2000 years to change classical Greek in a way that's subtly insulting to his competitor.
Coprolites has the same roots as lithology and coprophagia.
... arsenal large enough to sterilise the land surface of the planet ... doesn't give a shit about what the American government or population think.
Film at eleven.
Best argument for nuclear proliferation I've heard so far.
Manual spamming. What a really depressing prospect for a way to make a living. Does the guy sell his arse by night as well? Probably.
Well, the revised subject line pretty much says it all.
But seriously, Delhi has a significant (and growing) software industry. It's got that highly valuable thing of a large pool of well-educated, English-speaking people looking for work. You can find a much more profitable use for such a workforce than "clicking for porn".
For breaking CAPTCHAs, all you need is adequate pattern recognition skills to identify the letters in the CAPTCHA compared to those on the keyboard. The person doing the job would likely run into more difficulty from the fact that most keyboards only show the upper-case form of a letter, when many CAPTCHAs are case-sensitive. Being able to read or speak the language isn't necessarily an advantage (few use dictionary words anyway), and may be a definite disadvantage.
Has anyone met CAPTCHAs in the wild that use non-Latin character sets?
And you're implying that 10,000 people are then killed in the stampede to get out of the city.
I fail to see the problem. A large number of people have been removed from the gene pool because they're too stupid to get tools of decent quality, or because they rely on poor information sources, or simply because they're of the cud-chewing mentality that makes them want to live in dangerously large cities. Meanwhile, the majority of the population continue unaffected. It's called "culling the population" ; it's an essential part of evolution (breed an excess of population ; cull those without the desired trait ; repeat until you've a population with the traits desired). I still fail to see that there's a problem.
I'm also wondering how a Geiger-Muller tube would actually be affected by a high NOx level in the atmosphere. The tube itself is sealed and filled with an inert gas (argon, neon, or possibly nitrogen for cheap ones) and it's separated from the atmosphere by a mica or Mylar film window. How's the NOx going to affect the breakdown of insulation between the shell and the central wire, since it doesn't ever come into the tube itself.
I suspect that this is a failure mode of some radiation metering technology other than the Geiger-Muller tube.
Come to think of it, searching with Google for reports of this failure mode for GM detectors, your post is the top of the pile. Do you have any evidence to back up your assertion that this is a failure mode of GM detectors.
Could you point me at the original reports of them finding fossils at any depth in the Kola super-deep borehole/ ANY fossils. ANY depth. I'm not particularly bothered if the reports are in the original Russian, or translated into English (or French for that matter).
I'll give you a hint - I read some of the original reports myself when I was studying high-P metamorphism back in the '80s. Since then I've spent 20 years drilling holes in the ground.
The borehole location was selected for it's absence of sediments, because the original objective of the well was to study high-grade metamorphic rocks at great depth, and you don't do that by starting off drilling fossiliferous sediments.
Where in the borehole log (http://www.icdp-online.org/contenido/icdp/front_content.php?idart=1559) do you see any mention of (or even a possibility of) finding fossils?
As SQLGuru points out, the critical thing is that a stand-alone product is delivered.
If the kit included an instruction (backed up by some sort of technical measures, perhaps) to send $10 of each $100 revenue to the person who sold you the original kit, then it would be a pyramid scheme, and illegal as a consequence. That would probably also be the case if the "kit" required you to buy your first set of 20 kits for selling on (at the bargain knock-down price of $10 ! ! ) from the person selling you the advice.
Quite how this is different from marketing a franchise, I'm not sure (and I have some shreds of self-respect, so I'm not going to become a lawyer). But since so many franchise businesses are close to exploitation scams anyway
The previous "5 kingdoms" model is hardly the result of guesswork. I've been working through a (now-outdated) reference tome on the model on-and-off for about 4 years now, and I'm barely half way through the book (It's Margulis & Schwartz, BTW, "Five Kingdoms: Illustrated Guide to the Phyla of Life on Earth (Paperback) " ISBN 0716730278).
Given that it's 10 years old now, I was actually expecting this to happen. In the time since I got the book (about 5 years) and started working my way through it, making notes, one of the 137 phyla which they describe has been found to be a grossly degenerated member of another phylum (it's an obscure parasite found normally only on the gills of cephalopod molluscs), another two have been merged (I can't even remember which ones they were. Protoctists of some sort.), and now someone has proposed a different way of slicing up the pie at the super-phylum level. I see that the unikont grouping still stands in this new analysis, which even I could figure out as a natural grouping.
Trust me (or do the legwork for yourself!), the 5 kingdoms model was not guesswork. It might not be the correct model, but it's based on a lot of evidence.
(BTW, sitting in my rucksack at this very moment I've got a reprint of one of Margulis' 1995 papers setting out some of the grounds for the 5 kingdoms model. It's my "light reading" on the bus to work, as a change from doing a correspondence course in Java. Next to it is a reference to the geological structure of the South Atlantic, which may be my work place in a couple of years. Lifelong training is a requirement, not an option.)
At best second call ; more likely third call. Still probably safe, but the people who were running from the bank were thinking with their twitching sphincters, not their brains.
In a liquidation, the first two organisations in the line for getting paid out of the assets are the tax man and the beancounters doing the liquidation ; this is obviously because the beancounters wouldn't do the job if they weren't sure of getting paid, and the taxman sets the laws about the taxman ALWAYS getting paid.
Normal (and secured) creditors form the next line. I'm not sure about the sequence of the taxman and the liquidators.
Agreed. As a non-investor, may I add the phrase "rib-ticklingly hilarious"?
The rule is, IIRC, that the object has to have had an orbit determined which is good enough to be "useful in the establishment of identifications" (from http://www.ss.astro.umd.edu/IAU/csbn/mpnames.shtml ). That would normally be a minimum of 2 apparitions ; potentially as little as one year. However, for an "interesting" object you can establish a preliminary orbit from a few nights of observations and spend the intervening days trying to find the object on archived images. Since these often go back to the late 1940s, you rapidly get a long baseline of observations. IF you can put the time in on the re-calculation of candidate orbits, and the searching of databases for images with the correct combination of direction (on the sky), time, and limiting magnitude. AND you get a moderate amount of luck in the archives.
There are institutional constraints on the time to naming as well : "From Transactions of the IAU XVIIIB : All names proposed for minor planets will be reviewed for suitability, even when names are proposed by discoverers. The review will be done as indicated in the 1979 Commission 20 resolution, except that in the case of a name proposed by the discoverer, the six-month waiting period for a newly numbered object can be reduced to two months. Names shall be limited to a maximum length of sixteen characters, including spaces and hyphens."
Collision is certainly possible, but has never been observed directly. There's total confidence that it has happened (for example, the matching compositions of 4 Vesta and the Vestoid asteroids and the HED family of meteorites strongly indicate a common origin in the geologically differentiated interior of Vesta), but excepting the Deep Impact mission, we've never actually seen a space collision. Equally, no-one has seen a lunar crater being formed, but only creationists and such-like retards disbelieve that it happens. (It has been proposed that the lunar crater Giordano Bruno was seen being formed in 1178, but this is disputed by other researchers.)
The interaction of gravitational fields between the planets is perfectly adequate to explain the complexity and evolution of asteroidal orbits (look up "Kirkwood gaps") to a first approximation. The interacting gravitational influences of the other asteroids then complicates matters considerably.
And there is one good reason not to believe?
(Actually, in the tea shack yesterday one of my colleagues was moaning about having had computing support at [A MAJOR OIL COMPANY] doing a call back to him 3 months after he raised a BSOD ticket about on of their networked machines on an oil platform. In the intervening 3 months he'd had a laptop heli-freighted out to him, had completed the well, and had moved to work for 3 different clients in 2 different countries. And by sheer coincidence was back in the exact same office, with a different laptop, in time for the 3-month call back. From Houston, to the sub-tropical North Sea)
Sense? On SlashDot?
I'll hold the box - you just empty the contents of your desk into it. Been nice knowing you.
Two consecutive Slashdot stories with sanity prevailing. Things are slipping.
... or bicycle to a bar.
There's an unstated assumption in the article (and in the alleged practice), that people will routinely carry their driving license with them when going out. Assuming that they have a driving license - which not everyone has. It also assumes that the criteria for getting a drink are similar to those for getting a driving license.
Is the driving license being used as a de facto State Identity Card? Of course it is. Stupid. Inaccurate. Non-universal. Easily-forged. Can be removed from a person by administrative fiat. Contains irrelevant information. Certainly seems to have all the characteristics necessary for a State Identity Card.
Huh? What's flying internationally got to do with jackshit? ISTR that the planes hijacked on 11/9/2001 were domestic flights, not international flights. And, since the large majority of the hijackers were Saudis, that would explain the invasion of Saudi Arabia.
"So which technology will eventually prevail to be the future of wireless power?"
Why assume that one will win out over the other. There are likely to be circumstances where neither are going to be suitable (but a third method is), or where one is ruled out for some local reason. Or just possibly, someone will combine both systems into one device that (say) fits under a desk surface and that takes off with both.
Magnetic induction is going to need current-turn-square-metres, so be more suitable to devices with a substantial footprint (keyboards connected to a processing device, for example) ; radio antennae on the other hand can be fairly linear, suiting your "pen format" memo recorder. Different courses, different horses.
Then again, perhaps the cheapest and most flexible form of wireless power would be a 3rd-world orphan with a hand-cranked generator. Just pour some slops from the kitchen into one end from time to time. Just make sure to get it neutered at the vets, unless you're planning on setting up a breeding programme.
When Jesus used to ride dinosaurs, he used a Trojan.
(I was trying to figure out why the condom machine in the restaurant we used this evening bore the slogan "Trojan - America's #1 condoms". I get that it's a trademark, but what associations were the marketing people trying to get between sex and the Trojans?
"Have sex like people who've been dead for about 3000 years"?
"Fuck like the losers"?
"Fuck like an adulterer who died for his squeeze"?
"These condoms are as comfortable as a brass helmet on the end of your dick"?
Something about that advertising campaign didn't cross the Atlantic successfully.)
At first glance you'd think so, but at second glance you start to see the costs of recording media, transmission of data, etc. Those costs become non-trivial quite rapidly as your volume of "free" observations go up.
I don't know the current status of the "pipeline" between the Areceibo radio telescope and the SETI@home servers, but when the project started they spread their shoestring budget as far as possible by MAILING many-gigabytes of tape reels from Puerto Rico to California.
"Low cost per bit" is not the same as "free".
A complete waste of ink, brains, money and time. Just let the god-believers go back to living in caves, shitting into their water supplies, and dieing in their 40s if they didn't die in their first 3 years of life. That's the natural way that religious belief systems are designed to keep people inhabiting. If you want a better life style, show religion the inside of the shit can that it so richly deserves to inhabit.