and if there are, do they do their makeup in the rear view mirror while driving? (ducking and running for cover)
Ahem. Ask them in person sometime, and see what happens.
Luckily for you, they all have good senses of humor, so you're reasonably likely to escape with your life. Bear in mind that Julie does karate, though.;-) -- ``Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.'' -- Richard Dawkins
Sounds to me like someone is cruising for a (neo-)Darwin award.
Glad you knew that lead was discovered and put to use during the computer age. And chromes were NOT used to treat leather, no siree, that's just our imagination!! Only in computers are these materials used. Nobody else ever used lead before high tech mining operations came into existence.
Ah. Abuse. I think. Oh dear, what a pity, never mind. Did you know that one of the GRIP projects (atmosphere sampling from gas pockets trapprd in Greenland ice and snow) also picks up the consequences of atmospheric dust. So the major volcanic events get picked out quite nicely. As well as a nice, broad peak of lead pollution from the Roman era which wasn't matched again until the Industrial revolution was well under way. Of course, unlike us, the Romans do have the excuse that they didn't realise that they were shitting on their own doorsteps to a significant degree.
Even if true, a detailed look at 30 places is going to be better than a detailed look at a couple of places.
That depends a lot on how carefully you select the thirty places that you're going to look at. Landing at thirty similar sites is likely to yield LESS data than landing at two highly diverse sites. I attended a conference last week which was (in part) about planning and selecting sites for oil exploration in the South Atlantic. Such explorations are highly expensive just like your Mars Rovers, so you don't go around with a scatter-gun approach. You put a lot of effort into site selection to get as much information as possible for your buck. BTW : yes, the Elephant (seal) in the room did get mentioned. Several times. Just because we can't drill in Antarctica yet doesn't mean that we can't think about where we would drill if we could.
The posting states "all the primordial biochemistry took place in phyllosilicates, some kind of mineral that is a good matrix for preserving organic matter". This is partially wrong, partially misleading, and partially speculative.
Anything right about it ? Actually I was wondering what to do about that comment - it is significantly confusing. You beat me to it.
First, phyllosilicates are minerals whose structure is built out of SiO4 tetrahedra polymerized into 2-D sheets at the atomic scale. Examples are clay minerals and micas (biotite and muscovite, principally).
tHERE'S A (VARIABLE AMOUNT OF ALUMINIUM SUBSTITUTION (Damned CapsLock!) for the silicon, with coupled amounts of different cations (typically Mg, Ca, or K) in between the sheets of silica tetrahedra to maintain charge balance. (I am certain that you know this ; I mention it to make the following point more comprehensible for the audience.)
Second, the "life began on phyllosilicates" is merely an interesting hypothesis, and has not made it to the stage of theory. The basis for this is that phyllosilicates have those sheets stacked up in a periodic structure, and the spacing can be on the order of the spacing in RNA (disclaimer: I'm no expert on this hypothesis, and I don't have the paper in front of me now).
The arrangement of aluminium substitutions in the silica sheet can have slightly different energy levels, with differing levels of stability in a variety of geologically plausible pore fluids. Alan Graham Cairns-Smith (at one of the Glasgow universities) proposed that this could form a genetic system, storing information within the physical arrangement of these defects and with a phenotypic expression in the shape of the crystals,which could influence the flow of fluids through rocks. AGC-S proposes that such a system could have been a carbon-free living system (for some definitions of "living") which provided a basis for the start of Darwinian selection leading to eventual replacement of the inorganic elements with faster-reacting organic elements. He did a very interesting lecture tour back in about 1986, which I guess was linked to his book "Seven Clues to the Origin of Life : A Scientific Detective Story" Publisher: Cambridge University Press (29 Aug 1985)ISBN-10: 0521275229 or "Genetic Takeover And the Mineral Origins of Life" Publisher: Cambridge University Press New edition (28 Aug 1987) ISBN-10: 0521346827. He's been working on this thesis (in between his day job as a research chemist) for a long time, the first publication of his on the topic that I can find is "Life Puzzle: Crystals and Organisms and on the Possibility of a Crystal as an Ancestor" Publisher: Oliver & B (Sep 1971) ISBN-10: 0050022970). I remember "Seven Clues" as being one of the first books I ever ordered from Amazon. And guess what - I can't find my damned copy now either!
I see that Mr (Dr?) Cairns-Smith has actually published something since then : "Evolving the Mind: On the Nature of Matter and the Origin of Consciousness" Publisher: Cambridge University Press (21 Mar 1996) ISBN-10: 0521402204 . I think I'll read some of my other books before feeling the temptation to that though. (Did you see the new Ediacara book from Geol.Soc.Lond.? I won a copy a couple of weeks back, and it's cluttering up the bedside table under 'A Clockwork Orange'. Sounds fun. For certain (geological) values of "fun".)
Finally, there's no way that phyllosilicates, or any mineral, are going to "preserve organic matter". Organic matter preservation is simply related to the history of the material (e.g., temperature, pressure, time).
Ummm, I think there are indications that the nature of clay mineralogy can have stabilising (or de-stabilising) influences on the maturation of organic matter in oil source rocks. It's not a 100% preservation (or destruction) thing, but I'm pretty sure that the effect is non-trivial. Minor quibble.
Our biggest threats are population control and wasteful use of our non-renewable resources.
A way to reduce, er control, the population is to increase education, equality, and economic opportunities.
Improved education etc, while desirable for many other reasons, doesn't directly or rapidly reduce population. And the effects it does have are typically delayed by one or two generations. which means that whatever impossible things we do tomorrow (or even today), the global population is going to exceed 10 billion, possibly 12 billion, by 2050.
ie the birth rate declines.
Which doesn't reduce the population, it only reduces the rate of population growth.
In the "Western World" or First World if it wasn't for immigration the population would be declining.
That's certainly true for some countries (Italy I recall as being the strongest example in the G8), and maybe even for a majority of countries. But it's not true for all countries. In this respect, I think America is still one of the relatively small number of first world countries with intrinsic population growth.
...or they could fit their own microchips with a metal jacket which shields it from this sort of thing.
You'd probably need to cut all those little antennae that stick out of the chip too. You know - all the little metallic stripes on the plastic support card; the ones which are the same colour as the top of a Duracell cell ("Energizer" in American English?). All of those will need to be cut, otherwise they'd pick up and inject the microwave evilness into the chip and fry it nonetheless.
Of course, the bad guy could do that too, if they have foresight.
Despite what you see on the movies, most criminals are pretty stupid. The ones who aren't tend to not waste their time on crimes that would get them involved in car chases. Why risk getting shot for a 10,000[currency] bank robbery every few months if you can get the same monthly by credit card fraud from a desk and a phone line? NOT the hardest decision in the world, is it (assuming that you've got an IQ numerically higher than your shoe size, in European measure)?
the local data centre there had a 15 degree C ambient baseline
Well that's just incompetent. For one thing, commercial electronics experience increased failure as you move away from an ambient 70 degrees F regardless of which direction you move. Running them at 59 degrees F (15 C) is just as likely to induce intermittent failures as running it at 80 degrees F.
I was considering asking why the GP poster was bothering with a sweater when working (as opposed to sleeping) in his server room at 15centigrade, but decided that he must just be one of those people who can't stand normal temperatures. But electrical engineers know that a lot of their equipment is going to be used in "ambient" conditions which are not the "ambient" of their climate-controlled office. In my work, for example, 20C would be an abnormally hot temperature for our sensor equipment ; -20C would be by no means unknown; -50C quite credible. On the other hand, some of our analytic equipment has to run for months between service visits at +50C in 90%+ condensing humidity and with forced ventilation carrying salt dust and oil spray. You design your equipment for the conditions that it's going to face, not the conditions in your office today. Additionally, you appear to be conflating the air temperature in the data centre (15C) with the temperature of the components. Since having a heat flux requires having a thermal gradient, then the components will be warmer than your heat sink. In this town, we can tell the nationality of the boss of any office instantly on walking in - European bosses keep the HVAC (heating ventilation air-conditioning, or climate control) set to about 20C ; American bosses have it re-set to 25C (until over-ruled for wasting money).
For another, you're supposed to design your cooling system to accommodate all of the planned heat load in the environment. If your generators will be adding heat then the A/C needs to have sufficient capacity to take that heat back out.
There's an Indian HVAC company (in Abu Dhabi), and a instrumentation engineer (last heard of in Houston, America) who need to be taught this lesson. Again. If you meet them, please apply the clue-bat before agreeing to take the equipment they design out to the Empty Quarter to rig it up.
[your generators] should be walled off from the data center with exterior air exchange. Otherwise an error in the exhaust ducting risks killing your operators with CO poisoning.
Your carbon dioxide flood for fire suppression would be as effectively lethal. Operators would need to be kept out of the controlled zone while enclosed generators are running; the fire suppression system should be overridden while operators are in the controlled zone, or you need to be rigged up with cascade air supplies and work-pack SCBA while working in the control zone. This isn't rocket science - there are plenty of corpses that point the way to proper management of work in potentially lethal atmospheres. (Of course, there are plenty of work places that like to cut corners and put their workers at risk. Don't work there and do report them to the relevant authorities.)
Submarines aren't in any way comparable RPGs or dusty Soviet-era rockets sold through arms merchants. To keep an expensive, complex piece of hardware like an attack sub running, you *must* have parts, a fully-trained crew, ad naseum.
That's an untested assertion. Quite possibly correct, but untested nonetheless. There are strong forces pushing towards reducing the supply chain for keeping hardware in the firing line, and I wouldn't be so blase as to be certain that commoditisation isn't and hasn't been taking place. For example, many of the sensors and hydraulics used in a submarine have at least a logical equivalent in the ROV world, without the costs and volume of a human-controlled sub. Even if the current designs of torpedo-packing subs still require crews etc, I wouldn't bet on that remaining the case for much longer. A decade ago, if something in the sky shot at you, you could safely deduce the presence of a human pilot, and all the other junk that follows from that ; now you have to seriously consider the prospect of an UAV being on the blunt end of the bullets, at around an order of magnitude smaller than a human-controlled plane.
So, jump your frequency. They can't jam the entire spectrum at once, you know.
They can, but only for short periods (which actually puts a low limit on the frequency of jamming ; could you jam a 1Hz carrier wave with a noise source that operates for 0.3 seconds? Since I spend a good part of my working day using signals transmitted over 1Hz links against 0.5~0.25Hz noise sources, I know it's going to be difficult). But the integrated power output from gamma rays to low-frequency radio waves is comparable to the power output of a nuclear weapon. Which strangely is exactly what they use to power this "ElectroMagnetic Pulse" or EMP.
Also, remember how long ago this happened. There was an expedition there but they didn't have the technology we did. I'm not sure if the tree patterns would help you 100 years later.
The first expedition to the area of "ground zero" got there approximately 20 years after the event. They were guided by local memories and reports of the fireball (which they had to triangulate) ; they had reports form some local hunters that "there were flattened trees three valleys over thattaway...", etc. And, of course, they had only the crudest of reconnaissance maps. So as part of their expedition, they had to make their own maps without even aerial oversight and photography. And this was in the brief taiga summer, so you can imagine what the mosquitoes were like. Actually, since I've probably got several months more Siberian summer experience than you have, I doubt that you can imagine what the mosquitoes were like. I had the fun of surviving them with modern insect repellents, masks etc, while doing fieldwork and I don't want to think what they're like without the repellents and living in tents.
This claimed discovery is at least 6 months old as news, may well be a full year. Nice to see Nat.Geo keeping up to date.
"Phoenix Technologies, a developer of BIOS software, is working on a new technology called Hyperspace that will allow you to instantly load certain applications like email, web browser and media player, without loading windows.
Well, whoopy-doo. That sounds so much like the Psion in my pocket, that it's even more incredible that they stopped producing the platform... what was it - 8 years ago now? I'm trying to get something that approaches this level of functionality, and I have been looking for that mythical device all millennium. And the best I've found is still this 2xAA-powered grey-scale machine. As long as I remember a spare pair of batteries, I'm set for the next month.
The point here isn't legal liability. [SNIP] Its a matter of it being irresponsible to walk around blocking communication because you are inconvenienced by it.
The topic under discussion was the use of fixed "jammers" to disable mobile phone use on specific private private property. It wasn't the use of portable "jammers" in public places. As you (or someone pretending to your 'Anonymous Coward' stage name) imply, that's a very different question. Another very different question is how you're going to carry the batteries for the portable versions - they're not the most power-thrifty devices in the world.
"Oh, somebody got shot in the chest and
Oh, please stop projecting America's insanities on the civilised world. It's your country's problem, so you deal with it, and don't waste the time of the rest of the world over problems of your own making.
died waiting for the paramedics because after a couple minutes of fittering around with everybody's cell phones to see whose was working, somebody finally had the sense to run in one direction until they had a signal. Maybe they could have been saved, but I'm not legally responsible so that's ok."
The phrase I used about 3 messages up-thread was "being reliant on your own internal resources". If your internal resources extend to to entering "headless chicken" mode, running in circles and flapping your arms, then that's fine for you. Just don't expect to be considered for any sort position of responsibility. Mind you, I can see why you describe yourself as "Anonymous Coward".
There is less coverage in less populated areas, but that also means that there will be fewer accidents there too.
And the accidents tend to have higher potential for serious outcomes, largely because of the greater distances involved. Which re-balances the equation significantly. If you can bleed to death from a fracture in 25 minutes (car crash example), then it matters a lot whether you're 10 minutes travel time from a hospital or 30 minutes.
The only exception is the helicopters and oil rigs you mentioned. First of all, a 911
I'm not talking about America.
call isn't going to save you from a helicopter crash anyway. Second, oil rigs have either radio or hard line data links to the mainland for T.V., phone, Internet, etc. Both for the enjoyment for the people working there (they're isolated [SNIP].
Tell me something I haven't known for a decade, in my work on the oil rigs of the North Sea. When I started there was no such thing as a mobile phone (except for the likes of James Bond) and all calls to shore had to have the client representative listening in to prevent you from discussing any propriatory information. More recently, to quote a rig manager on a job I returned to after "an incident"
"I want to be able to walk into that radio room with an axe and cut one cable to ensure that no information leaves MY rig without MY permission"
. More recently still, to quote the signs on every door out of the accommodation of the rig I left 6 days ago "Anyone found using a mobile phone outside the accomodation is liable to summary dismissal for gross misconduct and removal from the rig at the first opportunity." To clarify - gross misconduct means you've lost your career and your pension ; they do accept that most people keep phone numbers in mobiles instead of ink-on-paper address books these days. Of course, this in also counterbalanced by the fact that almost all Norwegian installations do have mobile phone access, as little as 2 miles away across the Median Line. They're licensed by the same electrical safety authority (or an equivalent ; Det Norske Veritas for the Norwegian rigs, same for many UK rigs, or the equivalent American Coast Guard/ UL for American-built rigs), so the only reason for the bans on the UK rigs are respect for human rights (in Norway, not in the UK), not technical issues. Doesn't stop people getting the sack though.
You also have to consider the fact that the only people on a oil rig have already signed wavers and such acknowledging the inherent danger of working there.
Maybe in your country; not in Britain, and to the best of my knowledge not in Norway (I don't think the Dutch would take it either). In Europe (but not Britain, that's the stupidity of the anti-Europeans of Little England), it's illegal to discriminate against someone on the basis of where they work. Which is why my Norwegian colleagues work a 2-week-on, 3-week-off, 2-week-on, 4-week-off rota while I work 3-and-3, if I'm lucky. They work the same hours per annum as their office-based colleagues for the same pay ; we work around 400 hours more per year for less pay. (The work is less directly comparable for my sort of professional work than for the labourers, but the same principles apply ; the labourers don't have to work 24-hour on-call cover. I do.) The only waivers that we have signed off are granting permission for the company to search our belongings for contraband, both on access to the rig (i.e. at the heliport) and in "random" searches of the accomodation and fabric of the rig. People ASSUME that their internet communications and telephone communications are private, but the contracts are explicit : all communication to and from the rig belongs to the rig's owners or the operating company that hires the rig. The provision for personal communication (or confidential communication with your e
Someone upthread suggested that there would be trouble when an emergency occurred in a place where cellphones were blocked. I wonder on exactly what grounds.
I think on grounds that the blocking was intentional, whereas all the scenarios you mentioned were unplanned.
And the reduced coverage in some areas isn't intentional? It's unplanned that base stations are only put in where there is unsatisfied need, and that they're removed where there's unsufficient usage to justify the expenditure on running them. There is after all a comprehensive set of accounting procedures within the companies for assessing where to site them, when to remove them, and a huge (and increasing!) swathe of planning regulations to be worked through (often against formal legal objections, at least in Britain) before a station can be sited.
I don't see any significant difference between the degree of intentionality in either circumstance. Any half-way competent lawyer would be able to get a case on those grounds chucked before it even got to court. (Again, I'm talking about Britain here. Your legal system might be different.)
Does it run Linux... I mean minix.. I mean... Oh forget it!
FTFA : Additionally, it "supports user and supervisor modes,..."
From that alone, you should be able to deduce that it could in theory run a multitasking OS. Supervisor mode for when the OS needs to do things, user mode for userland stuff. If it's got the grunt of an 8086 with a couple of megs of RAM, then it's up there with the machines on which the Internet was developed and considerably after (in computing generation terms) the machines on which multitasking and Unix-alike operating systems were developed.
Or make a handy exploit... just get the guy riding in the car behind you to bump you a few times and he's out of 'gas'. Or as another prank, find a way to fully discharge the capacitor of a stationary car in a few seconds, rendering it underivable without a booster charge.
"Un-derivable"? As in, the stated proposition cannot be derived from the axioms provided?
Oh, you mean un-DRIVEable. Oh yeah, well, the pool of molten slag under the car where the battery/capacitor used to be might be a bit of a give away. There's a lot of energy stored in these devices (capacitors or batteries, it doesn't matter for this point). A lot more energy than is stored in a standard car battery, and that is quite capable of turning a 15mm combination steel spanner into a red-hot soft steel bar. Try discharging a car battery in a few seconds some time - you might not like it yourself, but your smouldering acid-burned screaming wreckage will be very educational for the onlookers. Taking a lot of energy and releasing it in a short time in a confined space and you will get significant heating. Energy can be moved around, altered in form, but it cannot be destroyed. First Law of Thermodynamics. People have been trying (and failing) to find a way around the Second Law for a long time, but I've not yet heard of anyone even contemplating doing away with the First Law. I suspect that there's some sort of cosmic exclusion principle - like, "if someone discovers a way around the First Law, they'll suddenly lose track of all the negative energy they've neglected in their previous generations of calculations. From a survivable distance, the result will be indistinguishable from a large Gamma-Ray Burst."
The rudeness does not give you the right (in the opinion of anyone who matters, I.E. a judge) to "do what [you] damn well please". In fact, using this as your defense in front of a court is likely to land you the maximum sentence (or largest fine) for demonstrated lack of respect for the law.
IF you can get it to a jury trial, then the opinion of the judge doesn't particularly matter - it's the opinion of your "peers" in the jury that matters. Of course, that is, IF you can get it to jury trial. Which is getting rapidly harder. I don't particularly see that expressing this sort of opinion in court would be particularly harmful to your case though, or to the sentence were you convicted. Or to the sentence after you'd appealed over-sentencing.
Someone upthread suggested that there would be trouble when an emergency occurred in a place where cellphones were blocked. I wonder on exactly what grounds. Cellphones aren't certified as emergency equipment (so there's no come-back on the manufacturers in the event that they don't work) ; cellphone networks aren't certified or advertised as emergency equipment, so the operators can't be held liable in the event of the networks being unavailable in an emergency (remember that when the July-the-whenever bombings went on in The Smoke, the mobile networks were overwhelmed by people sending "I'm OK" and "I'm un-OK" messages, rendering the network unusable in exactly the same way that some of these jammers work). It might also be a good idea for people pursuing this line to stop showing their metropolitan prejudices for a few seconds and read up on the actual coverage levels of the country : covering 99%+ of the population can be done with around 70% coverage of the land area. And since it costs significant money and effort to service base stations, that's a situation which isn't likely to change significantly in the foreseeable future. Mobile phones are only going to be usable where there is significant population density. So, if you have a an emergency in an area of low population density, then you're not going to get mobile service. And you're pretty unlikely to get landline service either. Which throws you back where you've always been - relying on your own internal resources.
[I suppose I should enlighten people to my experience of life-threatening incidents : a number of NDEs doing variations on the theme of mountaineering ; a guest at my aunt's guest house having a heart attack (the ambulance took 45 minutes to get to the house from receiving the call and some tens of minutes to receive the call from the nearest landline. Which is a long time to do CPR unassisted. DOA.) ; lift-threatening helicopter failures every half-decade or so, over sea or threatening to crash us into oil drilling rigs a hundred miles or so from a base station, and up to 10 metres and an aluminium chassis away from our mobile phones ; oh, and flying a car off a snow-covered road which did have mobile coverage because it has a significant population density. I know perfectly well how useful emergency services a long way away are compared to my "internal resources".]
Concerning whether businesses are liable, in some way for communications lost due to having jammed mobile access in their volume... what's the issue. As long as they've advertised the fact adequately (I'm sure the manufacturers of jammers could come up with some legally satisfying wordage to go onto a "We don't like inconsiderate mobile users" signs, so you can kill three birds with one stone), then there's nothing for the de-phoned person to complain about. After all, coverage is far from universal. The deep reason that mobile phone jammers are illegal in the UK is that the Government don't want private citizen to go around using (or abusing) the radio waves, except in ways which the government has sanctioned. Part of this might be the technical concern that inept circuit designers w
Another 1960s experiment, in which ten soldiers on a training flight were told by the pilot that the aircraft was disabled, and about to ditch in the ocean. They were then required to fill in insurance forms before the crash -- ostensibly so the Army was not financially liable for any deaths or injuries.
1) I would assume I had already signed such a waiver when I first enlisted.
You would assume? You mean that you think that you'd not remember signing such a contract? Or that you'd sign a contract without reading it reasonably thoroughly. Or that clauses with such far-reaching implications would escape your mental alarms.
Sounds to me like you've already surrendered your powers of thought to the authority-figure that puts papers in front of you along with a pen. That's an excuse that has been tried before. But "I was just following orders" didn't work at Nuremburg and can't be expected to work again in the future, when you end up on the losing side.
The more energetic the volcano, the more likely it would have a net cooling effect, as the more particulate matter/SO2/etc would be sent high enough to matter long term.
You're forgetting (or not mentioning) that the residence time of the particulates in the atmosphere is at most a year or two ; the corresponding residence time for CO3 is decades to centuries.
No. Well, not directly. The BBC receives most of it's funding from the annual license that you are required to have for each dwelling where a system capable of receiving and decoding TV signals is in use. So, if you don't have such equipment, then you don't need a license and you don't fund the BBC.
Of course, proving that you don't have such equipment and defeating the bureaucracy that assumes that there is such equipment (and therefore the obligation to get and annually renew such a license) in every dwelling is another question. Having fought that battle for a decade myself, I can tell you that it's a tedious grind and they never go away. But you do get a certain pleasure from laughing at the "enforcers" as they stand outside your door in the driving snow. It's particularly nice telling them that if they want to take it further they can come back with their warrant, their lawyers, their locksmith, and the police to secure the site. Everyone knows that the police won't support such commercial wastes of time.
Anyway, I'm not allowed to be completely honest on Citizendium. I just tried to sign up for an account... it wont let me because my name is so common that someone else has already used it. [SNIP] was issued a subpoena that accused me of some serious wrongs, [SNIP] another guy on the floor above me had the same name, [SNIP] My credit reports have been semi-trashed by at least three a-holes who happen to share my name.
Blame your parents.
If your parents claim the "it's a family name" excuse, tell them that they can live with the name, and you go off and change your name to whatever you want which is sufficiently uncommon for your needs.
It doesn't make the manifest injustices that adhere to the inefficient matching of names and identities correct. In a Slashdot mode of thought, the naming convention of GivenName FamilyName was designed for a relatively small namespace - a village where there was unlikely to be more than one Mr Smith, because there was only enough blacksmith work to support one smith (and family). These days, the namespaces we live in are larger, which are simply going to require larger names. There are several ways this can be tackled:
we could all be named with 64-bit integers ;
you could increase the number of elements in your pool of names (effectively, counting in a higher base);
you could use more elements in one name (as in the Russian imya/ patronymic/ familiya system or the Hebridean first-name/ middle-name/ clan-name system ; both systems which have worked fine for many generations).
What you can't do is continue to use an outmoded namespace in a current situation. The world can only support so-many "John Smith the Fifth" without running into exactly the problems you describe.
Exercising rationality in name choice doesn't (necessarily) mean rejecting cultural or family traditions ; my father was left in no doubt that I had to have saint's names (which I don't care about despite my atheism), in no doubt that I needed an Irish name (following family history), and in British tradition it is decidedly unusual for a child to not be given the family name of one or both parents. So the solution was simple - go through the dictionary of saints to find the first Irish-born saint who my father had never heard of. Throw in another whose only purpose is to disambiguate me from people with the same initials. End result is a name that hasn't ever resulted in a name collision, and initials that only rarely collide ; all family traditions are maintained ; and I get a number of uncontroversial conversation lines for lubricating those first few minutes of "who are you" introductions. And I've never suffered the way that Dweezil Zappa does (or would have if his father wasn't so famous. And rich.). Or that the OP has.
I guess the corollary to "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" has to be applied : It's broke. Fix it.
They make their money by controlling access to TRANSMITTERS and screwing: [SNIP] * advertisers, (the
scum of the earth, lying, thieving, moronicity-peddaling bastards.
I never feel terribly happy about paying the BBC license tax, but I feel less unhappy about it every time I'm reminded of the dreck that passes for TV in the US.
They first show that gets to solicit money directly from the audience is going to slaughter them; absolutely slaughter them.
So, in your model of the economics of TV, the likes of NBC, CBC, ABC and whatever other broadcasting cartels you deal with over there have been "slaughtered" since the mid- to early- 1980s, when the idiot-suckers of religion started demanding money with menaces from their audiences. Or was it even earlier? I'm not a student of foreign televised extortion rackets.
Or maybe your model of TV economics isn't a good reflection of reality.
The newest stuff should go to the testers you know new code testing on new hardware to TEST for flaws.
What changes about hardware? Hard drives get faster, but that's not a concern to application land. Video cards change, but monitors stay at 1024x768 (OK, some laptops are going up to something like 1400x1050 or whatever the numbers are for widescreen. But since our documents are typically 10^5 pixels high by 4500 pixels wide, the size of screen they're displayed on is pretty unimportant. Unless you know of a vendor of 100000-pixel high monitors. Printers change. But we print to a propriatory bitmap format (cough! spit!) at the work site, and the client (where ever they are in the world takes that to their local reprographics company, or the corporate flat-bed plotter and prints the bitmap on expensive archive-quality rolls of drafting film. We're trying to drag the industry kicking and screaming to 300dpi, but it's a hard struggle, since the product has to be legible after 4 generations of copying by dyeline copier. (That's the ones that stink of ammonia and gave the name to "blueprints".) Keyboards change. While we're typing, if some muppet spill drilling mud into them. Who cares?
This isn't gaming, this is industry. There have been no significant changes in computing hardware in the last decade. Sure things get faster, but that's made up for by the developers throwing more bells and whistles onto the program. In practice, things are maybe... (thinks) 1/3 faster now than in the early 1990s.
Sorry - one exception : cryptographic USB dongles have disposed of the problems of printing *through* parallel dongles (which was a significant part of the motivation to develop the propriatory (cough! spit!) bitmap image format as an intermediate output stage). We did that when some of our machines used DOS 4 (PC-DOS or MS-DOS, who cared?) At ~£100 each, the dongles are a significant cost. But by enabling us to charge per month of use of our software, the result is well worth it.
I don't know which country you're working in, but here the tax man requires us to keep hardware on the register for the full 5 years of it's tax-write-off lifetime. What that means is that there's 5-year-old machines still in the warehouse. And they're the ones that get sent offshore, while the office staff negotiate for new goodies. The office staff see themselves as the company, but in reality the revenue comes from us in the field. With the exception of the coding people, the office are a cost, not an asset. But they get the good stuff.
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Sounds to me like someone is cruising for a (neo-)Darwin award.
Did you know that one of the GRIP projects (atmosphere sampling from gas pockets trapprd in Greenland ice and snow) also picks up the consequences of atmospheric dust. So the major volcanic events get picked out quite nicely. As well as a nice, broad peak of lead pollution from the Roman era which wasn't matched again until the Industrial revolution was well under way.
Of course, unlike us, the Romans do have the excuse that they didn't realise that they were shitting on their own doorsteps to a significant degree.
That depends a lot on how carefully you select the thirty places that you're going to look at. Landing at thirty similar sites is likely to yield LESS data than landing at two highly diverse sites.
I attended a conference last week which was (in part) about planning and selecting sites for oil exploration in the South Atlantic. Such explorations are highly expensive just like your Mars Rovers, so you don't go around with a scatter-gun approach. You put a lot of effort into site selection to get as much information as possible for your buck.
BTW : yes, the Elephant (seal) in the room did get mentioned. Several times. Just because we can't drill in Antarctica yet doesn't mean that we can't think about where we would drill if we could.
Anything right about it ?
Actually I was wondering what to do about that comment - it is significantly confusing. You beat me to it.
"Seven Clues to the Origin of Life : A Scientific Detective Story" Publisher: Cambridge University Press (29 Aug 1985)ISBN-10: 0521275229 or
"Genetic Takeover And the Mineral Origins of Life" Publisher: Cambridge University Press New edition (28 Aug 1987) ISBN-10: 0521346827. He's been working on this thesis (in between his day job as a research chemist) for a long time, the first publication of his on the topic that I can find is
"Life Puzzle: Crystals and Organisms and on the Possibility of a Crystal as an Ancestor" Publisher: Oliver & B (Sep 1971) ISBN-10: 0050022970). I remember "Seven Clues" as being one of the first books I ever ordered from Amazon. And guess what - I can't find my damned copy now either!
I see that Mr (Dr?) Cairns-Smith has actually published something since then :
"Evolving the Mind: On the Nature of Matter and the Origin of Consciousness" Publisher: Cambridge University Press (21 Mar 1996) ISBN-10: 0521402204 . I think I'll read some of my other books before feeling the temptation to that though. (Did you see the new Ediacara book from Geol.Soc.Lond.? I won a copy a couple of weeks back, and it's cluttering up the bedside table under 'A Clockwork Orange'. Sounds fun. For certain (geological) values of "fun".)
Improved education etc, while desirable for many other reasons, doesn't directly or rapidly reduce population. And the effects it does have are typically delayed by one or two generations. which means that whatever impossible things we do tomorrow (or even today), the global population is going to exceed 10 billion, possibly 12 billion, by 2050.
Which doesn't reduce the population, it only reduces the rate of population growth. That's certainly true for some countries (Italy I recall as being the strongest example in the G8), and maybe even for a majority of countries. But it's not true for all countries. In this respect, I think America is still one of the relatively small number of first world countries with intrinsic population growth.
Which ones? I don't recall any of Asimov's universes being based on a hydrogen combustion economy.
Additionally, you appear to be conflating the air temperature in the data centre (15C) with the temperature of the components. Since having a heat flux requires having a thermal gradient, then the components will be warmer than your heat sink.
In this town, we can tell the nationality of the boss of any office instantly on walking in - European bosses keep the HVAC (heating ventilation air-conditioning, or climate control) set to about 20C ; American bosses have it re-set to 25C (until over-ruled for wasting money). There's an Indian HVAC company (in Abu Dhabi), and a instrumentation engineer (last heard of in Houston, America) who need to be taught this lesson. Again. If you meet them, please apply the clue-bat before agreeing to take the equipment they design out to the Empty Quarter to rig it up.Your carbon dioxide flood for fire suppression would be as effectively lethal. Operators would need to be kept out of the controlled zone while enclosed generators are running; the fire suppression system should be overridden while operators are in the controlled zone, or you need to be rigged up with cascade air supplies and work-pack SCBA while working in the control zone. This isn't rocket science - there are plenty of corpses that point the way to proper management of work in potentially lethal atmospheres. (Of course, there are plenty of work places that like to cut corners and put their workers at risk. Don't work there and do report them to the relevant authorities.)
That's an untested assertion. Quite possibly correct, but untested nonetheless.
There are strong forces pushing towards reducing the supply chain for keeping hardware in the firing line, and I wouldn't be so blase as to be certain that commoditisation isn't and hasn't been taking place. For example, many of the sensors and hydraulics used in a submarine have at least a logical equivalent in the ROV world, without the costs and volume of a human-controlled sub.
Even if the current designs of torpedo-packing subs still require crews etc, I wouldn't bet on that remaining the case for much longer. A decade ago, if something in the sky shot at you, you could safely deduce the presence of a human pilot, and all the other junk that follows from that ; now you have to seriously consider the prospect of an UAV being on the blunt end of the bullets, at around an order of magnitude smaller than a human-controlled plane.
They can, but only for short periods (which actually puts a low limit on the frequency of jamming ; could you jam a 1Hz carrier wave with a noise source that operates for 0.3 seconds? Since I spend a good part of my working day using signals transmitted over 1Hz links against 0.5~0.25Hz noise sources, I know it's going to be difficult). But the integrated power output from gamma rays to low-frequency radio waves is comparable to the power output of a nuclear weapon. Which strangely is exactly what they use to power this "ElectroMagnetic Pulse" or EMP.
The first expedition to the area of "ground zero" got there approximately 20 years after the event. They were guided by local memories and reports of the fireball (which they had to triangulate) ; they had reports form some local hunters that "there were flattened trees three valleys over thattaway
Actually, since I've probably got several months more Siberian summer experience than you have, I doubt that you can imagine what the mosquitoes were like. I had the fun of surviving them with modern insect repellents, masks etc, while doing fieldwork and I don't want to think what they're like without the repellents and living in tents.
This claimed discovery is at least 6 months old as news, may well be a full year. Nice to see Nat.Geo keeping up to date.
Well, whoopy-doo. That sounds so much like the Psion in my pocket, that it's even more incredible that they stopped producing the platform
I'm trying to get something that approaches this level of functionality, and I have been looking for that mythical device all millennium. And the best I've found is still this 2xAA-powered grey-scale machine. As long as I remember a spare pair of batteries, I'm set for the next month.
The topic under discussion was the use of fixed "jammers" to disable mobile phone use on specific private private property. It wasn't the use of portable "jammers" in public places. As you (or someone pretending to your 'Anonymous Coward' stage name) imply, that's a very different question. Another very different question is how you're going to carry the batteries for the portable versions - they're not the most power-thrifty devices in the world.
Oh, please stop projecting America's insanities on the civilised world. It's your country's problem, so you deal with it, and don't waste the time of the rest of the world over problems of your own making.
The phrase I used about 3 messages up-thread was "being reliant on your own internal resources". If your internal resources extend to to entering "headless chicken" mode, running in circles and flapping your arms, then that's fine for you. Just don't expect to be considered for any sort position of responsibility. Mind you, I can see why you describe yourself as "Anonymous Coward".
And the accidents tend to have higher potential for serious outcomes, largely because of the greater distances involved. Which re-balances the equation significantly. If you can bleed to death from a fracture in 25 minutes (car crash example), then it matters a lot whether you're 10 minutes travel time from a hospital or 30 minutes.
I'm not talking about America.
Tell me something I haven't known for a decade, in my work on the oil rigs of the North Sea. When I started there was no such thing as a mobile phone (except for the likes of James Bond) and all calls to shore had to have the client representative listening in to prevent you from discussing any propriatory information. More recently, to quote a rig manager on a job I returned to after "an incident"
"I want to be able to walk into that radio room with an axe and cut one cable to ensure that no information leaves MY rig without MY permission"
More recently still, to quote the signs on every door out of the accommodation of the rig I left 6 days ago "Anyone found using a mobile phone outside the accomodation is liable to summary dismissal for gross misconduct and removal from the rig at the first opportunity." To clarify - gross misconduct means you've lost your career and your pension ; they do accept that most people keep phone numbers in mobiles instead of ink-on-paper address books these days.
Of course, this in also counterbalanced by the fact that almost all Norwegian installations do have mobile phone access, as little as 2 miles away across the Median Line. They're licensed by the same electrical safety authority (or an equivalent ; Det Norske Veritas for the Norwegian rigs, same for many UK rigs, or the equivalent American Coast Guard/ UL for American-built rigs), so the only reason for the bans on the UK rigs are respect for human rights (in Norway, not in the UK), not technical issues. Doesn't stop people getting the sack though.
Maybe in your country; not in Britain, and to the best of my knowledge not in Norway (I don't think the Dutch would take it either).
In Europe (but not Britain, that's the stupidity of the anti-Europeans of Little England), it's illegal to discriminate against someone on the basis of where they work. Which is why my Norwegian colleagues work a 2-week-on, 3-week-off, 2-week-on, 4-week-off rota while I work 3-and-3, if I'm lucky. They work the same hours per annum as their office-based colleagues for the same pay ; we work around 400 hours more per year for less pay. (The work is less directly comparable for my sort of professional work than for the labourers, but the same principles apply ; the labourers don't have to work 24-hour on-call cover. I do.)
The only waivers that we have signed off are granting permission for the company to search our belongings for contraband, both on access to the rig (i.e. at the heliport) and in "random" searches of the accomodation and fabric of the rig. People ASSUME that their internet communications and telephone communications are private, but the contracts are explicit : all communication to and from the rig belongs to the rig's owners or the operating company that hires the rig. The provision for personal communication (or confidential communication with your e
And the reduced coverage in some areas isn't intentional? It's unplanned that base stations are only put in where there is unsatisfied need, and that they're removed where there's unsufficient usage to justify the expenditure on running them. There is after all a comprehensive set of accounting procedures within the companies for assessing where to site them, when to remove them, and a huge (and increasing!) swathe of planning regulations to be worked through (often against formal legal objections, at least in Britain) before a station can be sited.
I don't see any significant difference between the degree of intentionality in either circumstance. Any half-way competent lawyer would be able to get a case on those grounds chucked before it even got to court. (Again, I'm talking about Britain here. Your legal system might be different.)
FTFA :
Additionally, it "supports user and supervisor modes,..."
From that alone, you should be able to deduce that it could in theory run a multitasking OS. Supervisor mode for when the OS needs to do things, user mode for userland stuff.
If it's got the grunt of an 8086 with a couple of megs of RAM, then it's up there with the machines on which the Internet was developed and considerably after (in computing generation terms) the machines on which multitasking and Unix-alike operating systems were developed.
Oh, you mean un-DRIVEable. Oh yeah, well, the pool of molten slag under the car where the battery/capacitor used to be might be a bit of a give away.
There's a lot of energy stored in these devices (capacitors or batteries, it doesn't matter for this point). A lot more energy than is stored in a standard car battery, and that is quite capable of turning a 15mm combination steel spanner into a red-hot soft steel bar. Try discharging a car battery in a few seconds some time - you might not like it yourself, but your smouldering acid-burned screaming wreckage will be very educational for the onlookers.
Taking a lot of energy and releasing it in a short time in a confined space and you will get significant heating. Energy can be moved around, altered in form, but it cannot be destroyed. First Law of Thermodynamics. People have been trying (and failing) to find a way around the Second Law for a long time, but I've not yet heard of anyone even contemplating doing away with the First Law. I suspect that there's some sort of cosmic exclusion principle - like, "if someone discovers a way around the First Law, they'll suddenly lose track of all the negative energy they've neglected in their previous generations of calculations. From a survivable distance, the result will be indistinguishable from a large Gamma-Ray Burst."
IF you can get it to a jury trial, then the opinion of the judge doesn't particularly matter - it's the opinion of your "peers" in the jury that matters.
... what's the issue. As long as they've advertised the fact adequately (I'm sure the manufacturers of jammers could come up with some legally satisfying wordage to go onto a "We don't like inconsiderate mobile users" signs, so you can kill three birds with one stone), then there's nothing for the de-phoned person to complain about. After all, coverage is far from universal.
Of course, that is, IF you can get it to jury trial. Which is getting rapidly harder.
I don't particularly see that expressing this sort of opinion in court would be particularly harmful to your case though, or to the sentence were you convicted. Or to the sentence after you'd appealed over-sentencing.
Someone upthread suggested that there would be trouble when an emergency occurred in a place where cellphones were blocked. I wonder on exactly what grounds. Cellphones aren't certified as emergency equipment (so there's no come-back on the manufacturers in the event that they don't work) ; cellphone networks aren't certified or advertised as emergency equipment, so the operators can't be held liable in the event of the networks being unavailable in an emergency (remember that when the July-the-whenever bombings went on in The Smoke, the mobile networks were overwhelmed by people sending "I'm OK" and "I'm un-OK" messages, rendering the network unusable in exactly the same way that some of these jammers work). It might also be a good idea for people pursuing this line to stop showing their metropolitan prejudices for a few seconds and read up on the actual coverage levels of the country : covering 99%+ of the population can be done with around 70% coverage of the land area. And since it costs significant money and effort to service base stations, that's a situation which isn't likely to change significantly in the foreseeable future. Mobile phones are only going to be usable where there is significant population density. So, if you have a an emergency in an area of low population density, then you're not going to get mobile service. And you're pretty unlikely to get landline service either. Which throws you back where you've always been - relying on your own internal resources.
[I suppose I should enlighten people to my experience of life-threatening incidents : a number of NDEs doing variations on the theme of mountaineering ; a guest at my aunt's guest house having a heart attack (the ambulance took 45 minutes to get to the house from receiving the call and some tens of minutes to receive the call from the nearest landline. Which is a long time to do CPR unassisted. DOA.) ; lift-threatening helicopter failures every half-decade or so, over sea or threatening to crash us into oil drilling rigs a hundred miles or so from a base station, and up to 10 metres and an aluminium chassis away from our mobile phones ; oh, and flying a car off a snow-covered road which did have mobile coverage because it has a significant population density. I know perfectly well how useful emergency services a long way away are compared to my "internal resources".]
Concerning whether businesses are liable, in some way for communications lost due to having jammed mobile access in their volume
The deep reason that mobile phone jammers are illegal in the UK is that the Government don't want private citizen to go around using (or abusing) the radio waves, except in ways which the government has sanctioned. Part of this might be the technical concern that inept circuit designers w
You would assume?
You mean that you think that you'd not remember signing such a contract? Or that you'd sign a contract without reading it reasonably thoroughly. Or that clauses with such far-reaching implications would escape your mental alarms.
Sounds to me like you've already surrendered your powers of thought to the authority-figure that puts papers in front of you along with a pen. That's an excuse that has been tried before. But "I was just following orders" didn't work at Nuremburg and can't be expected to work again in the future, when you end up on the losing side.
You're enlisting soon?
You're forgetting (or not mentioning) that the residence time of the particulates in the atmosphere is at most a year or two ; the corresponding residence time for CO3 is decades to centuries.
No.
Well, not directly.
The BBC receives most of it's funding from the annual license that you are required to have for each dwelling where a system capable of receiving and decoding TV signals is in use. So, if you don't have such equipment, then you don't need a license and you don't fund the BBC.
Of course, proving that you don't have such equipment and defeating the bureaucracy that assumes that there is such equipment (and therefore the obligation to get and annually renew such a license) in every dwelling is another question. Having fought that battle for a decade myself, I can tell you that it's a tedious grind and they never go away. But you do get a certain pleasure from laughing at the "enforcers" as they stand outside your door in the driving snow. It's particularly nice telling them that if they want to take it further they can come back with their warrant, their lawyers, their locksmith, and the police to secure the site. Everyone knows that the police won't support such commercial wastes of time.
Blame your parents.
If your parents claim the "it's a family name" excuse, tell them that they can live with the name, and you go off and change your name to whatever you want which is sufficiently uncommon for your needs.
It doesn't make the manifest injustices that adhere to the inefficient matching of names and identities correct. In a Slashdot mode of thought, the naming convention of GivenName FamilyName was designed for a relatively small namespace - a village where there was unlikely to be more than one Mr Smith, because there was only enough blacksmith work to support one smith (and family). These days, the namespaces we live in are larger, which are simply going to require larger names.
There are several ways this can be tackled
What you can't do is continue to use an outmoded namespace in a current situation. The world can only support so-many "John Smith the Fifth" without running into exactly the problems you describe.
Exercising rationality in name choice doesn't (necessarily) mean rejecting cultural or family traditions ; my father was left in no doubt that I had to have saint's names (which I don't care about despite my atheism), in no doubt that I needed an Irish name (following family history), and in British tradition it is decidedly unusual for a child to not be given the family name of one or both parents. So the solution was simple - go through the dictionary of saints to find the first Irish-born saint who my father had never heard of. Throw in another whose only purpose is to disambiguate me from people with the same initials. End result is a name that hasn't ever resulted in a name collision, and initials that only rarely collide ; all family traditions are maintained ; and I get a number of uncontroversial conversation lines for lubricating those first few minutes of "who are you" introductions. And I've never suffered the way that Dweezil Zappa does (or would have if his father wasn't so famous. And rich.). Or that the OP has.
I guess the corollary to "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" has to be applied :
It's broke. Fix it.
scum of the earth, lying, thieving, moronicity-peddaling bastards.
I never feel terribly happy about paying the BBC license tax, but I feel less unhappy about it every time I'm reminded of the dreck that passes for TV in the US.
So, in your model of the economics of TV, the likes of NBC, CBC, ABC and whatever other broadcasting cartels you deal with over there have been "slaughtered" since the mid- to early- 1980s, when the idiot-suckers of religion started demanding money with menaces from their audiences. Or was it even earlier? I'm not a student of foreign televised extortion rackets.
Or maybe your model of TV economics isn't a good reflection of reality.
Also known as the Ghengis Khan Lesson, after the first tactician to so spectacularly fail by deploying it.
Oh.
Errr.
Maybe not.
What changes about hardware?
Hard drives get faster, but that's not a concern to application land.
Video cards change, but monitors stay at 1024x768 (OK, some laptops are going up to something like 1400x1050 or whatever the numbers are for widescreen. But since our documents are typically 10^5 pixels high by 4500 pixels wide, the size of screen they're displayed on is pretty unimportant. Unless you know of a vendor of 100000-pixel high monitors.
Printers change. But we print to a propriatory bitmap format (cough! spit!) at the work site, and the client (where ever they are in the world takes that to their local reprographics company, or the corporate flat-bed plotter and prints the bitmap on expensive archive-quality rolls of drafting film. We're trying to drag the industry kicking and screaming to 300dpi, but it's a hard struggle, since the product has to be legible after 4 generations of copying by dyeline copier. (That's the ones that stink of ammonia and gave the name to "blueprints".)
Keyboards change. While we're typing, if some muppet spill drilling mud into them. Who cares?
This isn't gaming, this is industry. There have been no significant changes in computing hardware in the last decade. Sure things get faster, but that's made up for by the developers throwing more bells and whistles onto the program. In practice, things are maybe
Sorry - one exception : cryptographic USB dongles have disposed of the problems of printing *through* parallel dongles (which was a significant part of the motivation to develop the propriatory (cough! spit!) bitmap image format as an intermediate output stage). We did that when some of our machines used DOS 4 (PC-DOS or MS-DOS, who cared?) At ~£100 each, the dongles are a significant cost. But by enabling us to charge per month of use of our software, the result is well worth it.
I don't know which country you're working in, but here the tax man requires us to keep hardware on the register for the full 5 years of it's tax-write-off lifetime. What that means is that there's 5-year-old machines still in the warehouse. And they're the ones that get sent offshore, while the office staff negotiate for new goodies. The office staff see themselves as the company, but in reality the revenue comes from us in the field. With the exception of the coding people, the office are a cost, not an asset. But they get the good stuff.