Isn't this how "Stranger in a Strange Land" started out? A trip to mars with infidelity and murder?
Not by Valentine Michael Smith's standards. Maybe it did by by your standards, but then again, that's the whole point of the book (and Heinlein's myriad inferior repetitions of the theme). Try reading it a second time tomorrow, with your Mike-influenced perceptions from your first reading of it, and you'll see how trivial that theme was (to the V.Michael Smith character, and later to everyone).
But in the case of vintage aircraft, the owners are legally required to maintain them to manufacturer specifications that the owners cannot legally obtain: an expensive and potentially lethal dilemma.
This is simply criminal! The FAA must be stopped from doing this. If they carry on down this road, then the ultimate end will be the destruction of the use-once-only airplane we all know and love and it's replacement with some shoddy horrible clap-trap assembly of a resusable airplane. Not only would you not get that "fresh paint" smell when you board your pristine plane at the terminal, but your little bits of pornography stashed down the side of the seat could be found by the next person to use the plane. I say that we should defend to the death the right to fly on a brand new plane every time that we fly, and to know that the plane will be destroyed, smashed and rendered into small particles of road-covering by third-world pollution eaters at the end of our journey. I think this is some sort of Marxist-Leninist plot to outsource the jobs of our poor underpaid aircraft builders and potentially to replace them with massively overpaid (and probably filthy, and foreign !!!) cleaning staff. Who would probably be unionised too. The whole idea of a "reusable" aircraft is horrible. It's the transportation equivalent of renting a condom at the cash desk of a busy brothel.
ABSOLUTELY. I gave up on AV programs some time ago. A good firewall, firewall-like execution protection such as Process Guard, not using the most popular email programs or web browsers, and severely restricting web-based application execution (i.e., boycott ActiveX and hamstring Java and Javascript) are far more effective techniques for tripping up a virus
Oh, ABSOLUTELY^BIGNUM. Don't forget also to think carefully about your partitioning scheme and use anything that is not "chuck everything into one partition, system code, application code, data, swap and temporary files". Where you put the stuff and what you call it is entirely up to you, but you must not under any circumstances (OK, honeypots excepted) use the OS installer's default. VIRUS to OS "execute C:\Program Files\Outlook\Outlook.exe/print_addressbook > C:\WINDOWS\TEMP\spamminglist.txt" OS to VIRUS "Cannot find file or folder C:\Program Files" (OK, maybe I've got the command line for LookOut wrong. Do I look like the sort of prick who would actually use the thing?)
When I have to set up a machine that can run Windows (which I have to, for Work), it's out with the Linux install CD (you DID get a bootable CD with your OS, didn't you?), partition up a couple of drives for OS and applications (say 2GB each, more than enough for a work machine), another for swap (2xRAM, more than enough), another for data (the rest, maybe doubled to make for easy backing up. Mark them all as FAT32 (no need for anything more than 137GB for work), format and reboot. Then install your OS, choosing whatever arrangement of partitions seems appropriate for your situation. You'll have to do some manual hammering of the OS to make it accept filling the swap partition, but eventually it'll do it.
On the subject of Work, I suppose I'd better go and do some.
Actually, it's unbelievably complicated. Why do I need to call anyone when installing software? Needless complications imposed by the manufacturer is why.
Why should you need to call someone when installing software? Well, you need to tell the the serial number of the dongle you've received along with your install pack, the contract number and maintenance agreement numbers, they need to check thet your copies fees have been paid for the month, then using the public key for your dongle, contract and maintenance agreement, they can generate the encrypted unlocking key so that your installation of the software will work for the next number of occasions you've paid for [20 software restarts | 20 separate days running | 30 calendar days | whatever other term you've negotiated]. You then enter that key (it's only 256 pairs of hexadecimal digits, so you can easily get it over the phone, if you don't have email, or can't be bothered installing learning how to update your keys by email), and voila - your software will work. Until the money in the meter runs out. We are, of course, talking about software of moderate value. The dongles alone cost about the same as a copy of Windows.
What is the purpose of software? Why, it's to make money for the businesses who sell it. If you've got some other purpose to writing software, that's fine by me, but you're going to need something else to pay the rent with.
The only higher plane that MPAA (and RIAA, the people who thought up region-coding for DVDs and such like retards) are on is regularly shedding wing parts, engines, chunks of undercarriage, and generally approaching the aerodynamics of a brick.
How did Douglas Adam's whale put it? "What's that big round thing coming up to meet me? It needs a big round word, like `ground`. That's it, I'll call it the ground. I wonder if it'll be friendly?"
... and if the politicians don't want to pay enough for the maintenance of the repository, then THEY will be the first people to die knee-deep in the glowing green sludge.
(This is my considered opinion as a geologist ; it certainly is workable for the UK and the London Clay; without further study it might not be applicable to other countries. Do your own homework, and if necessary, move *your* capital city.)
You run the software on four identical computers and make sure they all agree.
Four dissimilar computers built by four different teams from four different chains of suppliers of hardware, with only the specification in common. If I recall correctly. That may be slight overkill, but the general point is plain - the interfaces are defined ; people implement the hardware to the specification separately ; if software works (including the OS) from separate teams, then it's more likely that both software and OS and hardware are correctly implemented to the specification.
I take it means that likely the instructions come on letter-formatted pdfs etc. and the printer (like most printers in Europe) only has a4 sheets loaded (hence the 'load letter' message)
I think that you'll find that it's printers in the Rest Of The World, not just in Europe. TTBOMK, America is the only country in the world that uses "Letter" size paper as a matter of course. Oh, Wikipedia adds Canada and Mexico (unsurprisingly) to the list, and mentions that Colombia and the Phillipenes also still use Letter-sized paper. Possibly Iraq too - assuming that they haven't been bombed back to using clay tablets yet.
The whole point of ordering online is to make it easier...
Yes. If only. Do you have any friends who you could use as a delivery address in one of the neighbouring countries is the point I was trying to get across. Do the online ordering to their address, and when it arrives, you've got a good excuse to go see your friend, have a few beers, nad come home with a nice new gadget too. (The wife has cottened on to me when I try this with my mate who works at PC World! )
If they use their VoIP system to call the bank, they will be calling the modified number, where a friendly automated system will record all their details.
There's a problem with my bank account. So I go to the branch, walk through the doors, and talk to the manager. Who would even think to call the branch about something like that.
There's a damned good reason that my bank has neither my phone number nor any of my email addresses. The reason is so that I know exactly how many valid phone calls and emails they're going to send to me.
Other people don't take elementary security steps and get caught by a retarded-child level of scam? Not a problem, just a redistribution of wealth from morons to the (slightly) more intelligent. Laudable.
Grand Duchy of Luxemburg. Nice country, but the market is so small that it really has a lot of downsides.
Surprising. We have (sometimes) similar problems with people shipping to the Islands (Hebrides, Orkeny, Shetland), but I've only the once encountered it with shipping to Aberdeen. How much is the bus fare to Metz, or Saabrücken? And do they search the buses to prevent shipping contraband?
If you do actually know how it works, you'll be more nervous about false positives than about any actual lying
Exactly. I've taken the counter-inteligence poly several times. (and I'm breaking the rules by posting this) I was far more afraid of false positives - particularly since I know I didn't do anything! I've read a good bit about polygraphs - and the false alarm rate is absurdly high, particularly for "fishing expedition" types of exams such as the counter-intel poly.
Now, the failure rate for these tests isn't nearly what the documented false alarm rates would suggest they should be.
Without going all "Clinton" on us, what do you mean by "failure rate" ? What I think you mean by "failure rate" would probably be something like [(total number of tests)-(number of detected crimes which were detected or proven using data originating in the polygraph, not some other investigative technique)] / (total number of tests). But the polygraph operators would be looking at a "failure" which would be any test which doesn't produce clear evidence of wrongdoing by the tested person. Again, you and I might interpret a test that gave no evidence of wrongdoing as possibly meaning that the person tested is innocent of any wrongdoing. But to people in the testing industry it would be clear evidence of sophisticated anti-polygraph training in the person tested. After all, you know that they're guilty already, because they're being polygraphed. Innocence is not an option.
Because, where I live, these things are unavailable retail... and buying online is impossible because most online shops do not ship to my country and *if* they do, I have to pay over 33% import taxes.
As a matter of interest, which country? I have just (yesterday) taken delivery of a mini-ITX from an eBay seller, and I'd be surprised if you couldn't find a seller somewhere who'd be willing to ship to your country. Obviously you'd pay for shipping, and the taxes would probably get applied too, but I'd be sure that there's a way to do it if you're keen enough.
A couple of years ago we had real fun trying to ship a demo CD of our in-house software to a (potential) client in Siberia, and to our astonishment had DHL tell us that they'd search any package shipped to Russia and remove any CDs included in the package "to prevent software piracy". No, we didn't believe it either. Even when we told them that it was our software, and that it was up to us if we were worried about piracy, still they refused to handle the package. Crazy bastards. Eventually I stuck the CDs and manuals into my bag when I was travelling over to see my girlfriend anyway and got a couple of days pay for demo-ing the system to the client. And we've never used DHL since.
Do you know how big that barcode would have to be to hold 40KiB of data?
40KiB ? 40 KiB is 40 x 1024 x 8 = 327680 bits. Allow about 10% for error-correcting redundancy. 350000 bits. Put it onto a two dimensional array of monochrome dots - around 350 high by a thousand dots wide. Make the dots fit into your grid at 4 to the millimeter - 87.5mm high by 250mm wide. That's a fairly large barcode, but not particularly incredible. Comparable in size with a European passport (I don't know what size US passports are). A scanner for it would be around the size of those hand-held scanners that were popular a decade ago and were bloody useless.
As long as someone can be entertained by reading and posting on websites, usenet and such, it will take away time from buying / watching / listening to TV, music, DVDs, whatever. I don't want the media companies to do to the internet what they did to radio.
You have advertising on radio? [MODE = Scotty ON] How quaint. [MODE = Scotty OFF]
You just have to wait until those kids parents put their new government sponsored laptops on ebay.
Dude, like, I think you haven't quite understood the OLPC project. The kids parents can't get onto eBay to sell the laptop before the laptop arrives in the house. They can't do it in as profound a sense that as people CAN'T transmit computer viruses by standing in the middle of a field waving flags. (Not without a few carrier pigeons, at least.) Before they get the laptop, they have no (zero, nada, zilch, zip, diddly-squat) computing devices capable of connecting to the internet and running an ebay auction. After they've dispatched the laptop, they've got no way of getting back onto ebay/ to spend their ill-gotten gains. In any case, it shouldn't be too difficult to put special rules into the built-in browser to redirect all requests for data from http://*.ebay.*/* to read from/dev/random . That'll fox them. Seriously - it probably will. Once the target audience has reached the point of being able to fix something like this, then they're probably good enough to man a telephone at Dell's Helpdesk warehouse in Karachi, or New Delhi, or down Patpong Road, or Manila or Rio.
All of this "The Net IS the OS" stuff is just ridiculous. This kind of thing doesn't even have a chance until broadband is as ubiquitous and as reliable as electricity. I think that we're still a good 10 years out from this even beginning to happen.
10 years? And the rest. Regardless of what the rest of the internet thinks, there are still going to be places where the internet doesn't reach because the people who own the connectivity have a real and definite need to not have people communicating without their control. To quote a previous supervisor of mine "I want to be able to walk up to that radio room with an axe, cut a cable, and know that no information is leaving this rig without me knowing about it." That's the phone system disconnected and under guard, mobile phones out of range of a network (in addition to being several hours flying time away, locked in a safe at the heliport), and radio transceivers issued on a need-to-use basis. Internet access is just an unnecessary luxury, and if it comes to a choice between internet access and information about the well leaking out, the internet link will get cut. Someone is going to bleat about "but I'll lose contact with my friends and family". Well that's fine - don't enter this business. Having to get a supervisor out of bed so that you can receive a call from the police informing you of a death in the family is nothing unusual (it's happened to me). "Leisure time" is fine - you can sleep, wank, eat, watch telly, play cards. And if you don't like the options, leave and don't collect your pay packet as the door hits you on the ass.
If there were a place on earth where life could encouter vacuum, it would be a very good bet that life would evolve to cope with it.
While I'd hesitate to say that it's impossible, that's a very steep barrier to cross. "Life" that is anything even vaguely like life on Earth is going to involve fairly dilute solutions of molecules and macromolecules in comparatively volatile solvents, and to construct biological films that function as cell membranes, those solvents are going to be exposed to the vacuum. Bye bye, solvents. That is a very steep barrier to cross for both origin of life (I'd suspect that origin of life, de novo, in a vacuum is impossible, in the "impossible" sense of "impossible", not in the "inconceivably unlikely" sense of "impossible"), and a very steep barrier to cross for the development of organisms or the evolution of life in vacuum. For transmission of life through vacuum, it's a much more crossable barrier: going inert for a few tens of millions of years seems to be significantly within the capabilities of life as we know it. (There is evidence (disputed) of organisms surviving in isolation for up to 250 million years, though with lesser radiation challenges than in space. I suppose I should "do" this for Wikipedia, when I've time : (from my notes) Isolation of a 250 million-year-old halotolerant bacterium from a primary salt crystal." Vreeland, Rosenzweig & Powers, Nature, v407, p897- 900, 2000 Further information: If there is a website, it will probably be a descendant from wcupa.edu, where Vreeland and Rosenzweig work. )
The more chemically sophisticated of Slashdot's readers will have noted that I use the term "solvent", not "water". This is not an accident.
Trees split water and create sugar using sunlight, animals create water and eat sugar. If you can conceive of a lifeform that can do both of these things, vacuum is a perfectly acceptable environment.
How are you going to get your nutients into and out of your vacuum-living, non-inert organism? Without running into the vacuum + solvent => vacuum problem discussed above? Sorry to piss on your parade, but unless you're going to go to really obscure sf concepts like Dark Star's "Pheonix Asteroids" (self-sustaining plasma fields, yeah, right), you're going to have to do chemistry in the solid phase (extremely slow), or in very high temperature oxide/ silicate liquids (very limited chemistry, compared to [C,H,O,N,S,P]-polymer chemistry in small-molecule solvents).
In fact there are quite a few "anaerobic" microbes that prefer to not be around oxygen - if they could evolve to handle lower pressures they could make a good candidate for interstellar life travel.
Anaerobic life is almost certainly the original life on the planet (I'm quite tempted to delete that "almost"; but I'm being cautious). The oxygen rich atmosphere we have this gigayear is a pretty late event in the history of life. The poisoning of the atmosphere by oxygen took a couple of gigayears to complete, courtesy of the polluting output of those filthy cyanobacteria. Look up "banded iron formation". Vacuum does not mean "absence of oxygen", it means "absence of any gas", including all of nitrogen, methane, carbon dioxide, ammonia, hydrogen, helium and oxygen (in decreasing order of their likely contribution to the Earth's pre-oxygen-pollution atmosphere).
I love sf stories about space-crossing organisms. But I understand what the "f" in "sf" means.
He has to train her to use all the software she needs, and support her when anything goes wrong - that or risk getting cut out of her will for being an ingrate.
What will? Remember, her house and all assets are going to be sold to pay for her care in a nursing home in her last 3 or 4 years. She'll be lucky to get a headstone out of the estate. Seriously.
Unless of course, Little Johnny is planning to hock his most productive career years, family-starting years, etc wiping the shit off a demented Granny's arse while living in a part of the country he's no longer got any association with. Didn't think so, somehow.
If I were in charge, we'd be profiling for sanctimonious left-wing Euro-trash whose perception of America is based on little more than their exposure to Hollywood movies, the Guardian opinion page, and articles on IndyMedia.
As well as having visited the country, had numerous American friends, colleagues and cow-orkers (note - the classes do not overlap ; specifically, cow-orkers are not necessarily friends) in many countries around the world, and multitudinous casual contacts with the more educated, well-travelled parts of the American population. Oh, and I give Hollywood and comparable credence to the #1 movie-production centre of the world (Bollywood) - zilch. What makes you think that one would be wanting to visit America again? If the boss paid me, I'd go there. Same for Uzbekistan and anywhere south of Hungary but north of Patagonia. I can read the weather forecast as well as anyone else. I've no further friends planning to marry in the States (which was my last reason for travelling there).
Ahem. Proteins can replicate. I refer you to my friend Prion. Better known as CJD, scabies, or Kuru.
That would be SCRAPIE, not SCABIES.
Scrapie is a moderately transmissible disease of sheep that makes them (slightly) more stupid (there's not a lot of "room at the bottom" for ovine stupidity);
Scabies is an itchy condition of the (human) skin caused by a tiny mite (Sarcoptes scabiei).
After the treatment I received in O'Hare, I wish never to return to America. And I am as white and middle class as can be. I can't imagine what it would be like to be a profiled minority.
It is precisely because the TSA is bending over backwards NOT to profile that you ran into such difficulty. If they were doing an efficient job of profiling, you would have sailed through in a few moments, and there would be essentially nobody from Muslim countries allowed to set foot here.
So, for example, my white-middle-class university co-graduate (and his Venuzuelan wife) would have problems getting into America because they live in Saudi Arabia? Riiight. How to give the impression of a confident superpower and dispel rumours of being a paranoid, close-bordered police state.
For comparison, before I got rid of my last car I was doing averages of under 8,000/year. That's 8 years ago, since when I've hired a car when I perceived a sufficient need (i.e. holidays). Needless to say, the wife isn't even bothering to learn to drive. What use is it?
Although most biochemical processes wouldn't care less which carbon atom was used, would there not be a bias towards one isotope rather than the other. C12 has less mass, therefore would have an ever so slightly different activation energy. Could this bias distort carbon dating ages?
Carbon has two stable isotopes (C12 and C13), and a number of unstable isotopes (several with half-lives less than a second, C10 (19s), C11 (20min), C14 (5703a), C15 (2.449s) and C16 (0.747s)) So, for anything more than around 50,000 years old (approximately one mid-length Milankovitch Cycle, just to tie it to geological observables and astronomy), the only isotopes that matter are C12 and C13. Variations in the C12:C13 ratio are routinely used for correlation within and between geological sections, and have been used as evidence of variations in photosynthetic productivity across the rock record (since the core part of the carbon-fixing system is sensitive to the masses of the atoms involved, as you suspect). For example, evidence from the C12:C13 ratio has been cited in support of the thesis that North Sea Oil is partly sourced from Fammemian-Frasnian lacustrine laminites as contradiction to the common working model that it's sourced in Callovian-Oxfordian-Kimmeridgian-Tithonian of a more widespread and somewhat richer source rock (that's part of my area of competence, and (apart from Nigel Trewin) few care terribly deeply about the question. Certainly not me, certainly not since Nigel retired.). The shifts in C12:C13 ratio that one sees on cycling inorganic carbon through photosynthetic organisms are a few parts per thousand ; the abundance of C14 ranges around one part per trillion. Therefore, the disappearence of C14 from a system would distort C12:C13 ratios by (approximately) one part per million of the value of the ratio. That's around a thousandth of the level of the variations introduced by the experimentally observed isotopic shifts due to photosynthetic activity.
Or, to put it another way - it's noise. Faint noise. At it's maximum. [Damn, Slashdot isn't letting me get a preview through. Got to go to work, so I'll just have to post blind. Typos etc are brought to you by the letter Q and the number (googleplex++)] 4th try fixed it... Typos etc are now mine!
Slashdot Mirror
Not by Valentine Michael Smith's standards. Maybe it did by by your standards, but then again, that's the whole point of the book (and Heinlein's myriad inferior repetitions of the theme). Try reading it a second time tomorrow, with your Mike-influenced perceptions from your first reading of it, and you'll see how trivial that theme was (to the V.Michael Smith character, and later to everyone).
This is simply criminal! The FAA must be stopped from doing this. If they carry on down this road, then the ultimate end will be the destruction of the use-once-only airplane we all know and love and it's replacement with some shoddy horrible clap-trap assembly of a resusable airplane. Not only would you not get that "fresh paint" smell when you board your pristine plane at the terminal, but your little bits of pornography stashed down the side of the seat could be found by the next person to use the plane.
I say that we should defend to the death the right to fly on a brand new plane every time that we fly, and to know that the plane will be destroyed, smashed and rendered into small particles of road-covering by third-world pollution eaters at the end of our journey.
I think this is some sort of Marxist-Leninist plot to outsource the jobs of our poor underpaid aircraft builders and potentially to replace them with massively overpaid (and probably filthy, and foreign !!!) cleaning staff. Who would probably be unionised too.
The whole idea of a "reusable" aircraft is horrible. It's the transportation equivalent of renting a condom at the cash desk of a busy brothel.
Oh, ABSOLUTELY^BIGNUM.
Don't forget also to think carefully about your partitioning scheme and use anything that is not "chuck everything into one partition, system code, application code, data, swap and temporary files". Where you put the stuff and what you call it is entirely up to you, but you must not under any circumstances (OK, honeypots excepted) use the OS installer's default.
VIRUS to OS "execute C:\Program Files\Outlook\Outlook.exe
OS to VIRUS "Cannot find file or folder C:\Program Files"
(OK, maybe I've got the command line for LookOut wrong. Do I look like the sort of prick who would actually use the thing?)
When I have to set up a machine that can run Windows (which I have to, for Work), it's out with the Linux install CD (you DID get a bootable CD with your OS, didn't you?), partition up a couple of drives for OS and applications (say 2GB each, more than enough for a work machine), another for swap (2xRAM, more than enough), another for data (the rest, maybe doubled to make for easy backing up. Mark them all as FAT32 (no need for anything more than 137GB for work), format and reboot. Then install your OS, choosing whatever arrangement of partitions seems appropriate for your situation. You'll have to do some manual hammering of the OS to make it accept filling the swap partition, but eventually it'll do it.
On the subject of Work, I suppose I'd better go and do some.
We are, of course, talking about software of moderate value. The dongles alone cost about the same as a copy of Windows.
What is the purpose of software? Why, it's to make money for the businesses who sell it. If you've got some other purpose to writing software, that's fine by me, but you're going to need something else to pay the rent with.
How did Douglas Adam's whale put it? "What's that big round thing coming up to meet me? It needs a big round word, like `ground`. That's it, I'll call it the ground. I wonder if it'll be friendly?"
... and if the politicians don't want to pay enough for the maintenance of the repository, then THEY will be the first people to die knee-deep in the glowing green sludge.
(This is my considered opinion as a geologist ; it certainly is workable for the UK and the London Clay; without further study it might not be applicable to other countries. Do your own homework, and if necessary, move *your* capital city.)
Four dissimilar computers built by four different teams from four different chains of suppliers of hardware, with only the specification in common. If I recall correctly.
That may be slight overkill, but the general point is plain - the interfaces are defined ; people implement the hardware to the specification separately ; if software works (including the OS) from separate teams, then it's more likely that both software and OS and hardware are correctly implemented to the specification.
I think that you'll find that it's printers in the Rest Of The World, not just in Europe. TTBOMK, America is the only country in the world that uses "Letter" size paper as a matter of course. Oh, Wikipedia adds Canada and Mexico (unsurprisingly) to the list, and mentions that Colombia and the Phillipenes also still use Letter-sized paper. Possibly Iraq too - assuming that they haven't been bombed back to using clay tablets yet.
Yes. If only.
Do you have any friends who you could use as a delivery address in one of the neighbouring countries is the point I was trying to get across. Do the online ordering to their address, and when it arrives, you've got a good excuse to go see your friend, have a few beers, nad come home with a nice new gadget too.
(The wife has cottened on to me when I try this with my mate who works at PC World! )
Surprising.
We have (sometimes) similar problems with people shipping to the Islands (Hebrides, Orkeny, Shetland), but I've only the once encountered it with shipping to Aberdeen.
How much is the bus fare to Metz, or Saabrücken? And do they search the buses to prevent shipping contraband?
Without going all "Clinton" on us, what do you mean by "failure rate" ?
What I think you mean by "failure rate" would probably be something like [(total number of tests)-(number of detected crimes which were detected or proven using data originating in the polygraph, not some other investigative technique)] / (total number of tests). But the polygraph operators would be looking at a "failure" which would be any test which doesn't produce clear evidence of wrongdoing by the tested person.
Again, you and I might interpret a test that gave no evidence of wrongdoing as possibly meaning that the person tested is innocent of any wrongdoing. But to people in the testing industry it would be clear evidence of sophisticated anti-polygraph training in the person tested. After all, you know that they're guilty already, because they're being polygraphed.
Innocence is not an option.
Cynical? Moi?
As a matter of interest, which country?
I have just (yesterday) taken delivery of a mini-ITX from an eBay seller, and I'd be surprised if you couldn't find a seller somewhere who'd be willing to ship to your country. Obviously you'd pay for shipping, and the taxes would probably get applied too, but I'd be sure that there's a way to do it if you're keen enough.
A couple of years ago we had real fun trying to ship a demo CD of our in-house software to a (potential) client in Siberia, and to our astonishment had DHL tell us that they'd search any package shipped to Russia and remove any CDs included in the package "to prevent software piracy". No, we didn't believe it either. Even when we told them that it was our software, and that it was up to us if we were worried about piracy, still they refused to handle the package. Crazy bastards. Eventually I stuck the CDs and manuals into my bag when I was travelling over to see my girlfriend anyway and got a couple of days pay for demo-ing the system to the client. And we've never used DHL since.
40KiB ?
40 KiB is 40 x 1024 x 8 = 327680 bits.
Allow about 10% for error-correcting redundancy. 350000 bits.
Put it onto a two dimensional array of monochrome dots - around 350 high by a thousand dots wide.
Make the dots fit into your grid at 4 to the millimeter - 87.5mm high by 250mm wide.
That's a fairly large barcode, but not particularly incredible. Comparable in size with a European passport (I don't know what size US passports are). A scanner for it would be around the size of those hand-held scanners that were popular a decade ago and were bloody useless.
You have advertising on radio?
[MODE = Scotty ON]
How quaint.
[MODE = Scotty OFF]
Dude, like, I think you haven't quite understood the OLPC project.
The kids parents can't get onto eBay to sell the laptop before the laptop arrives in the house. They can't do it in as profound a sense that as people CAN'T transmit computer viruses by standing in the middle of a field waving flags. (Not without a few carrier pigeons, at least.) Before they get the laptop, they have no (zero, nada, zilch, zip, diddly-squat) computing devices capable of connecting to the internet and running an ebay auction. After they've dispatched the laptop, they've got no way of getting back onto ebay/ to spend their ill-gotten gains.
In any case, it shouldn't be too difficult to put special rules into the built-in browser to redirect all requests for data from http://*.ebay.*/* to read from
Seriously - it probably will. Once the target audience has reached the point of being able to fix something like this, then they're probably good enough to man a telephone at Dell's Helpdesk warehouse in Karachi, or New Delhi, or down Patpong Road, or Manila or Rio.
10 years? And the rest.
Regardless of what the rest of the internet thinks, there are still going to be places where the internet doesn't reach because the people who own the connectivity have a real and definite need to not have people communicating without their control.
To quote a previous supervisor of mine "I want to be able to walk up to that radio room with an axe, cut a cable, and know that no information is leaving this rig without me knowing about it." That's the phone system disconnected and under guard, mobile phones out of range of a network (in addition to being several hours flying time away, locked in a safe at the heliport), and radio transceivers issued on a need-to-use basis. Internet access is just an unnecessary luxury, and if it comes to a choice between internet access and information about the well leaking out, the internet link will get cut.
Someone is going to bleat about "but I'll lose contact with my friends and family". Well that's fine - don't enter this business. Having to get a supervisor out of bed so that you can receive a call from the police informing you of a death in the family is nothing unusual (it's happened to me). "Leisure time" is fine - you can sleep, wank, eat, watch telly, play cards. And if you don't like the options, leave and don't collect your pay packet as the door hits you on the ass.
Almost certainly you are. Certainly it sounds like you are.
While I'd hesitate to say that it's impossible, that's a very steep barrier to cross. "Life" that is anything even vaguely like life on Earth is going to involve fairly dilute solutions of molecules and macromolecules in comparatively volatile solvents, and to construct biological films that function as cell membranes, those solvents are going to be exposed to the vacuum. Bye bye, solvents.
That is a very steep barrier to cross for both origin of life (I'd suspect that origin of life, de novo, in a vacuum is impossible, in the "impossible" sense of "impossible", not in the "inconceivably unlikely" sense of "impossible"), and a very steep barrier to cross for the development of organisms or the evolution of life in vacuum. For transmission of life through vacuum, it's a much more crossable barrier: going inert for a few tens of millions of years seems to be significantly within the capabilities of life as we know it. (There is evidence (disputed) of organisms surviving in isolation for up to 250 million years, though with lesser radiation challenges than in space. I suppose I should "do" this for Wikipedia, when I've time : (from my notes) Isolation of a 250 million-year-old halotolerant bacterium from a primary salt crystal." Vreeland, Rosenzweig & Powers, Nature, v407, p897- 900, 2000 Further information: If there is a website, it will probably be a descendant from wcupa.edu, where Vreeland and Rosenzweig work. )
The more chemically sophisticated of Slashdot's readers will have noted that I use the term "solvent", not "water". This is not an accident.
How are you going to get your nutients into and out of your vacuum-living, non-inert organism? Without running into the vacuum + solvent => vacuum problem discussed above?
Sorry to piss on your parade, but unless you're going to go to really obscure sf concepts like Dark Star's "Pheonix Asteroids" (self-sustaining plasma fields, yeah, right), you're going to have to do chemistry in the solid phase (extremely slow), or in very high temperature oxide/ silicate liquids (very limited chemistry, compared to [C,H,O,N,S,P]-polymer chemistry in small-molecule solvents).
Anaerobic life is almost certainly the original life on the planet (I'm quite tempted to delete that "almost"; but I'm being cautious). The oxygen rich atmosphere we have this gigayear is a pretty late event in the history of life. The poisoning of the atmosphere by oxygen took a couple of gigayears to complete, courtesy of the polluting output of those filthy cyanobacteria. Look up "banded iron formation". Vacuum does not mean "absence of oxygen", it means "absence of any gas", including all of nitrogen, methane, carbon dioxide, ammonia, hydrogen, helium and oxygen (in decreasing order of their likely contribution to the Earth's pre-oxygen-pollution atmosphere).
I love sf stories about space-crossing organisms. But I understand what the "f" in "sf" means.
What will?
Remember, her house and all assets are going to be sold to pay for her care in a nursing home in her last 3 or 4 years. She'll be lucky to get a headstone out of the estate.
Seriously.
Unless of course, Little Johnny is planning to hock his most productive career years, family-starting years, etc wiping the shit off a demented Granny's arse while living in a part of the country he's no longer got any association with.
Didn't think so, somehow.
As well as having visited the country, had numerous American friends, colleagues and cow-orkers (note - the classes do not overlap ; specifically, cow-orkers are not necessarily friends) in many countries around the world, and multitudinous casual contacts with the more educated, well-travelled parts of the American population. Oh, and I give Hollywood and comparable credence to the #1 movie-production centre of the world (Bollywood) - zilch.
What makes you think that one would be wanting to visit America again? If the boss paid me, I'd go there. Same for Uzbekistan and anywhere south of Hungary but north of Patagonia. I can read the weather forecast as well as anyone else. I've no further friends planning to marry in the States (which was my last reason for travelling there).
That would be SCRAPIE, not SCABIES.
So, for example, my white-middle-class university co-graduate (and his Venuzuelan wife) would have problems getting into America because they live in Saudi Arabia?
Riiight. How to give the impression of a confident superpower and dispel rumours of being a paranoid, close-bordered police state.
For comparison, before I got rid of my last car I was doing averages of under 8,000/year. That's 8 years ago, since when I've hired a car when I perceived a sufficient need (i.e. holidays).
Needless to say, the wife isn't even bothering to learn to drive. What use is it?
Use more compact cities, dudes!
Carbon has two stable isotopes (C12 and C13), and a number of unstable isotopes (several with half-lives less than a second, C10 (19s), C11 (20min), C14 (5703a), C15 (2.449s) and C16 (0.747s)) So, for anything more than around 50,000 years old (approximately one mid-length Milankovitch Cycle, just to tie it to geological observables and astronomy), the only isotopes that matter are C12 and C13.
Variations in the C12:C13 ratio are routinely used for correlation within and between geological sections, and have been used as evidence of variations in photosynthetic productivity across the rock record (since the core part of the carbon-fixing system is sensitive to the masses of the atoms involved, as you suspect). For example, evidence from the C12:C13 ratio has been cited in support of the thesis that North Sea Oil is partly sourced from Fammemian-Frasnian lacustrine laminites as contradiction to the common working model that it's sourced in Callovian-Oxfordian-Kimmeridgian-Tithonian of a more widespread and somewhat richer source rock (that's part of my area of competence, and (apart from Nigel Trewin) few care terribly deeply about the question. Certainly not me, certainly not since Nigel retired.).
The shifts in C12:C13 ratio that one sees on cycling inorganic carbon through photosynthetic organisms are a few parts per thousand ; the abundance of C14 ranges around one part per trillion. Therefore, the disappearence of C14 from a system would distort C12:C13 ratios by (approximately) one part per million of the value of the ratio. That's around a thousandth of the level of the variations introduced by the experimentally observed isotopic shifts due to photosynthetic activity.
Or, to put it another way - it's noise. Faint noise. At it's maximum.
[Damn, Slashdot isn't letting me get a preview through. Got to go to work, so I'll just have to post blind. Typos etc are brought to you by the letter Q and the number (googleplex++)]
4th try fixed it