Maybe I'm not fully understanding this, but with all that "in-and-out" tracking of partial licemse plate numbers and parsing time differences, etc, isn't is far simpler for those machines to simply measer the speed of the cars coming at them in real time (as opposed to delayed time) and report that figure?
I suspect that you're right about not fully understanding the system. The speed of cars coming at the sensors in real time is going to be approximately zero for half the time. (At some junctions, it'll be more than half the time.) The devices are situated at traffic lights, where the right-of-passage shifts from route to route every few (tens-of) seconds. So cars passing the sensor are either braking to a halt, accelerating from standstill, or driving at reduced speed through the junction. The point of measuring the "time of flight" between junctions is that the measurement will be much less affected by the relatively low speed at junctions.
You're right about the privacy implications of mobile telephony having been well covered on SlashDot before. I remember it being discussed as a serious restriction on people's willingness to use this technology back in the 1980s when the technology before this was being developed. However, it appears that people have actually been willing to give away this information, and the technologies have become popular. It is possible to have some of the benefits of mobile telephony without giving away much information about your movements : (1) switch the phone off by disconnecting the battery, travel to a location from which you wish to make a call, switch the phone back on, make your call, return to step (1). What you can't have (using GSM or the analogue systems it replaced) is absolute privacy and the ability to receive calls at random times and locations. You have no option, in the GSM system, but to trust the operator to not release this data. Whether the government (any government, anywhere) would permit the deployment of any mobile telephony system that did not give them access to this sort of information is moot. I doubt that I would, were I in a position of power and responsibility.
synthetics have a mix of 8 (which is normal) and 4 (which is not) sided internal structures
Actually diamond is a pure carbon crystal with 4-sided (tetrahedral, 4 equilateral triangles) structure grid, unlike other naturally occuring elementary pure carbon mineral, graphite, which has hexagonal prismatic grid (8 sides: 6 rectangles connecting two hexagons).
Therefore, it is assumed that you made a slight permutation in your comments: for a diamond, 4 sided grid cell is normal, 8 sided grid cell is not normal, but it would be normal for graphite, cheap mineral which is likely a base material for synthetic diamond.
Someone is getting confused over 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional cells in elemental carbon, while someone else is unaware of the Platonic solids which have cubic symmetry.
The commonest natural form for diamonds to take up (due to the comparatively slow growth rates of the {111} form of the diamond structure) is the octahedron, which has 8 identical sides, each an equilateral triangle. The tetrahedron (4 faces, each an equilateral triangle) is not normally found as a natural shape of diamond crystals (I can't think of an example, but I have heard of stellated octahedra being found, which in an extreme could resemble tetrahedra. Be weird though.) Octahedra have 4-fold axes of rotational symmetry that tetrahedra don't have.
in the 7+ years of using the program it never once protected me from getting a virus.
Hmmm, that's about the time since I last had to rebuild my entire system from original discs and a few dozen floppies of backed-up stuff. Not because of a virus, I should add, but because of a brick through the window letting people in and a hammer (my hammer!) through the front door lock to let them out, laden with computers, monitors, keyboards, etc. They left behind a keyboard switch only. But that 7-something years is somewhat less than the time since I last had a virus. I think I got caught by a boot-sector virus back in the early 90s. Of course, it's only just a year since I actually started using an anti-virus system of any sort, and that was primarily due to acquiring a wife and teenage child one day. It's a bit difficult to persuade them that they should be using an antivirus if you don't do it yourself. It's a bit amusing watching the virus checker dutifully report, once a week, that it's found virus X, trojan Y and backDoor.Z lurking in the data files from the newsreader. I mean, yeah, so there are strings of bits in the data files that nidicate a virus there. But hey, it's not as if the newsreader is going to uuDecode the message and execute the content without my telling it to, is it? Who would be so foolish as to design a newsreader like that?
yet you still see some idiots suggesting you run 2-4 different AV applications just to "be sure you're safe".
I don't normally see them, but I do sometimes hear it being said behind me at the bar, or in the bus queue. Sometimes the timing is right that it makes me choke on my beer, but not very often.
Assuming there is some inherent benefit to going to the moon/mars/wherever, is it really necessary to send *HUMANS*? Could we not fund 10x as many unmanned missions and learn probably close to 10x as much?
To me, one of the unavoidable, if not essential, results of extended-duration human space flight, which could not be replicated by a couple of dozen unmanned flights on the same budget, is learning-by-doing just how complex the ecological requirements for maintaining a human-friendly environment really are. As an education in what our environment does for us, and how much it costs to maintain, this lesson should be "an inconvenient but hugely valuable truth" (to mis-quote a Terrestrial politician of recent noisiness). In the 1990s a facility was established in Arizona (IIRC) to try to address this point, under the name of "Biosphere 2" (pointing out that all humans live on Biosphere 1, Terra) link here, Wikipedia article with much more information here. Despite considerable care and attention into it's design to be a self-contained biosphere, within days or weeks the system was oscillating severely as unexpected causes started to have their effects on the environment inside. So they opened the window. In space, no-one can hear you scream. Even if you do open the window.
Oh, by the way, Velcro was developed on Earth, for Earthly purposes, in consequence of a Swiss engineer finding plant-seed burrs in his dog's coat. See this site. Perhaps you're thinking of Teflon. Whose history is probably a lot more clouded than the popular "invented for the space race" version would suggest. [Searches] Indeed, a 1945 trademark would suggest a slight pre-dating of the space race too.
I thought Neanderthal was classified as a large modern human that had arthritis.
I'd like to know what your sources for that opinion are. So that I can avoid them.
The Neanderthal race appeared in the Levant (follow the sound of landing shells and Uzi-fire) and europe some time after the first appearence of AMH (Anatomically Modern Humans) in Africa; they were shorter in height, but deeper of chest; more strongly muscled; It's a toss-up who weighed more.
Most adult fossils from this pre-modern period had significant wear and tear on the bones and joints. (Note - I do not restrict my statement to hominids, or primates, or mammals. It applies to all skeletalised animals. Concerning skeletalised non-animals... I'd have to think about that.) These days it might be attributed to arthritis, but I doubt it, because few anatomists today would be incapable of recognising the skeletal marks of hard, lifelong, physical labour. It may be an uncommon lifestyle this century, in the West, but for the overwhelming humanoid population through the history of our genus the choice of lifestyle has been "death" or "grinding grunt labour, every day". (That said, some AMH fossils, and some Neanderthal fossils, have been found with abnormally badly damaged bones by the standards of their contemporaries. This is indicative of social care of the crippled, invalided and elderly. These were our relatives, beyond doubt.)
I had a conversation with a fool last week who denied the existence of fossils at all, and did not believe me when I said that I saw no reason for believing in any sort of god or gods. (How he knew the state of my internal thoughts better than I do is left as an exercise for the reader.) Popular speech habits might tempt me to describe this dull-witted braggart as being a "Neanderthal". But since Neanderthals had (on average) larger brains than AMH, complex societies, and an understanding of their fellows as thinking, feeling, empathising individuals, then describing this idiotic god-botherer as a "Neanderthal" would be an insult - to the Neanderthals.
I don't know anyone who's NOT Anti-DRM. All DRM does is make buying music miserable for the people who are doing it legally. People who don't care about the legality of it will just torrent the CD or get it off some other file sharing network.
What is it about DRM, and music in general, that makes people think that music is the only use for DRM? Am I allowed to care passionately about the effects of DRM despite having dumped my entire music collection in a rubbish bin about a dozen years ago because I was fed up with friends visiting to listen to my musinc instead of to talk with me?
The evil that is DRM is far and away more important than music. OK, I have some belly button fluff here that is more important than "music" too, but I think you get the point.
As an aside - how many other commentators on this story made a typo "musinc" for "music"? Isn't that poetic justice. Or is it subliminal suggestion at work?
Actually, I've been thinking of the story for its own sake a bit recently too, just because I argue with so many idiot creationists these days...
Sledegehammer + testicles (*) = how long an argument ??? (* insert breeding organs of choice if target creationist is not conventionally male) Inertia is your friend [G], or your hammer's friend.
In other SF trivia, the questioner character in that story is obviously based on a real-life friend of his.
Robert Forward ?? of the Cheela and JPL and a few other things.
The same guy was also used as a model for a character in the "Pink elephants invade Kansas" book whose title I'm obviously forgetting for a moment.
Footfall. Civilised aliens who just happen to look like pink baby elephandt in high-heeled boots as they parachute into Kansas. I believe Larry when he claims to not take drugs. That idea must have been Pournelle's.
Travel broadens the mind - if you don't mind a few minor risks. Hmmm, now why'd I not think of that? [Looks at passport. Looks at visas for Norway, Azerbaidjan, several trips to Russia (for work and for pleasure), Tanzania.] [Looks at schedule for next year : Back to Tanzania, North Korea, Russia again (different bits of taiga), possibly America.] Oh, I had thought of that.
None the less, I'd be deeply suspicious of an airport that considered itself to be so at risk as to buy a system of this sort. And I'd suspect that the cost of the system would come out of the budget for some other more important (and less dramatic) service. Toilet cleaning being one possiblity, but baggage handling is a perfectly plausible alternative budget to plunder. More significantly, the costs of such systems would put the airports that invested in them at quite a considerable competitive disadvantage. So I'd expect someone to be trying to get them legislatively mandated. At which point, I'd probably be flying into Canada and taking a train. Actually, with Uncle Tez in Toronto, I might just do that anyway. Good idea, well done that man!
"CNN Money web site has a story about Northrop Grumman forecasting development of a laser shield 'bubble' for airports and other installations in the United States within 18 months.
I take it that, in this rational world, the development of this system means that there have been many cases of civilian aircraft being shot down by missiles near US airports. Many more cases than, for example, East Africa, Afghanistan, or Iran.
Naturally, in the unlikely event that I choose to travel to America, I'm going to scour the Internet to find out which airports have purchased this system. It will be really effective advertising - "Hey, airport X thinks that it's so likely to have it's flights shot down that it has brought this expensive anti-missile system, in preference to cleaning the toilets. Wow, I'm really going to travel there, in preference to [[anywhere else]].
1) Ebay isn't an auction site. and 2) Paypal isn't a bank. This gets them around a lot of nasty local and national laws involving auctions and banks.
3) Iraq war isn't a war. This gets them around a lot of nasty national and international laws involving rules of war.
So what happened to the defence that "Inter" and "America" are not both nations, so the concept of "international law" is a non sequiteur in respect of American actions?
OIC, it's a fallback position. Boy, am I glad I'm not a lawyer.
And the prize for this week's most horrible strained nautical metaphor goes to... [drumroll]... Each additional degree of Microsoft's ship's list translates into that much more level of a playing field.
Ohhh, I can see this one is going to be fun! So, some time in September I'll go up to the office, hook up a perfectly legal laptop to a perfectly legal network and perfectly legally grab all updates, then perfectly legally I'll go out to the oil rig and perfectly legally go about doing my job. Then perfectly legally the perfectly legal machine will stop working, making it impossible for me to do my job.
"Hello, are you from Microsoft"
<Indian accent>"Yes"</Indian accent> "Can you spell 'consequential losses'"
<Indian accent>"No"</Indian accent> "OK. Well, for your information, Microsoft are running up consequential losses of the rental rate of this drilling rig, because I can't do my job. That's approximately $10,000/hour, and counting. What's the re-activation code?"
<Indian accent>"Please to be telling me your IP address and we'll see what can be done"</Indian accent> "Please to be telling you that the machine isn't on a network of any sort, and there isn't an internet connection within an hour's flying time. $10,000 more"
<Indian accent>"Please to be connecting to the modem and going online"</Indian accent> "Please to be booking me the helicopter at $5,000 call-out charge to be getting computers sorry arse to where there is a data-capable phone line instead of this crappy InMarSat connection. $10,000 more."
<Indian accent>"Please to be telling me that this isn't our fault."</Indian accent> "Please to be telling you that our lawyers will be round to visit your lawyers. With cricket bats." <CLICK>
Someone else's problem - the best sort of problem. I told the Boss he should take the departure from DOS as an opportunity to go multi-platform.
Computer malware doesn't thrive in the wild, mutating randomly. Yet!
There's enough work going on with genetic algorithms as ways of learning how to control systems that a computer "bacterium" (as opposed to a "virus") is becoming increasingly credible. Such an organism would be a very interesting piece of code in itself, regardless of it's potential for nefarious uses. Whether such an organism could only survive in a homogenous environment (vaguely analogous to the stereospecificity of all complex metabolic chemicals in the Earth's biosphere), or whether organisms could develop that can adapt to function in different environments is a very interesting question. But by analogy with the many modern groups of organisms that feature alternation of generations between widely different environments, a need for different environments is not incredible. Read into that a [L|U][i|]n[u|i]x | Windoze debate if you want, but it could equally be a debate between TCP/IP and IPX network "thin organic soups" (to mis-quote Darwin) if both environments included the equivalents of metabolites and energy flows.
Has it ever heated up this quickly before? Probably not since the Earth first coalesced. I hate saying this, since as an oilfield geologist I'm going to sound like I'm a Global-Warming Denier (in the same sense as "Holocaust Denier"), which I'm not, but... I think you're wrong. The Late Palaeocene Thermal Maximum probably had higher temperatures than we presently have, but it achieved them at somewhat slower maximum rates than we're changing climate at the moment and it took maybe 10 or 15 thousand years to achieve what we've not yet achieved in under 2 thousand years (causing thermal instability of submarine methane hydrates). You're not wrong by much, and your children or grandchildren will quite possibly be able to make the same claim and be perfectly correct, but at the moment you're just on the incorrect side of being strictly correct.
What am I doing today? trying to place the casing for a new oilfield's first well precisely on an Early Eocene boundary while avoiding drilling into the Late Palaeocene.
What was I doing two months ago? - working on a different oilfield, where a number of workers had recently come close to being killed by a problem with a methane hydrate plug in a wellbore.
Methane hydrates and Palaeocene-Eocene boundary stratigraphy are of more concern to some people than to others.
"may be impossible to see" are the operative words there. Ever used a Sharpie to black out the routing number on the bottom of a check? You can still make out the numbers.
I've no idea what a "Sharpie" is in the RoTW, but guessing that it's a thick-tipped, dark-ink marker-pen of some sort, this is a really bad example. Those numbers along the bottom of a cheque are not intended or designed to be human readable - they're for machine reading by automated cheque-reading machines. The bank details and account details go into the bank's records (and thence to payment instructions etc) by the mechanised reader and the human(-ish) operator only has to enter the amount. The receiving bank should have already sorted the cheques in some way so that they know who the payee is. I'm carefully not using the phrase "optical character recognition" in this description, because the character recognition is not done optically. The ink is magnetic. You want to try fouling up one of these cheque readers? If you can't find the ink of the appropriate magnetic susceptibility, try finding a non-magnetic viscous ink of similar colour and replacing the magnetic ink with that in the right shapes. The teller will swipe it several times, give up, and punch the numbers in by hand, because it's quicker than trying a long complex procedure. That's why they don't use transparent magnetic ink - system redundancy.
If you claim your children as dependents on your tax return over here, Tax return? I thought they were only for people who own businesses and so on, not normal people. So, how much is a kid worth to the tax man? Can you get discounts for buying them in bulk?
7) What are the Names, DOB's, SSN's, etc of your children?
What, if any, right or reason would a parent have to know the State Security Number of their children? (I'm assuming that the SSN in LeftPondica has approximately the same meaning as the National Insurance number over here in Britain - tracking taxes paid and benefits received.) Also, is having children compulsory in America now?
What i really dont get is why they hell *cant* thermite or some other exothermic, dangerous, explosive, acid, etc method be used on a military plane...
Its not like they dont already carry thermite, tnt, gunpowder, phosphorous, gasoline, oil, napalm, magnesium (to burn), uranium depleted or otherwise etc etc SPY plane. Biggest armaments are probably hand guns for the security Neanderthal and pyrotechnics (i.e. flares) in the liferafts. BTW, aircraft structural magnesium isn't particularly flammable, and it's bloody difficult to get started. (Yes, it does go with a blast when it gets going. WHEN!)
I'm still surprised that there wasn't more mention of considering more physical methods of destruction. E.g. specifying hard drives with glass platters, and positioning the drives in close proximity to appropriately oriented nail-guns powered by compressed air. But that's their choice.
I do like the idea of using a solvent susceptable binder for the oxide layer though... This is the military too, so they are not using off-the-shelf components for this (or they dont have to).
There's an implicit datum in the article too - the methods described are (apparently) suitable for COTS (Commodity-Off-The-Shelf) hard drives. That means 3.5inch form-factor, significant magnetic shielding in the housing, and you can't be sure what exactly will be in the next box load you open. I read two things into that - firstly, they were designing a system that could be sold to the general public as well as SpookAir (www.blackprojects.gov.us)(TM); and secondly that for reasons of cost or performance, SpookAir choose to use COTS drives. For that matter, it could be that simple familiarity is an issue too.
Solvent susceptibility would be working "smart", not working "hard". Very un-military. The big problem would be, what if "COTS HardDrive Co." changed the specification of the binder used on it's ABC-PQR-320GB hard drives, without changing the model number. And why should they change the hard drive model number? The drives have not changed in any way that would be visible to the average user... the perils of COTS.
In related news - I was repairing my daughter's sunglasses last night. The damned sunglasses makers use different sized bolts to every other pair of spectacles I've ever repaired (many pairs). Damn these COTS sunglasses with their hidden specification changes!
If you'd read the article, you'd realise the time constraints that were part of the problem. You're on a spy plane over enemy territory ; you've suffered a mechanical problem (be it crashing into an enemy plane, shot down, or somone didn't put the filler-cap on; whatever) and you are going to land on enemy territory in the NEXT 3 MINUTES. You do not have time for more than a single-pass wipe.
I found the original article a bit surprising in not considering chemical methods (thermite, acid, etc), but in a flight context, that's not unreasonable. If you started to put up lots of planes carrying (high-tech) buckets of acid strong enough to dissolve into hard drives in a couple of minutes, you'd get a lot of planes falling out of the sky (or needing very expensive, time-consuming rebuilding - these are spy planes, not off-the-shelf planes, with horribly complex wiring looms) before you got your next (sorry) acid test of the system.
Someone suggested an acid that can strip the oxide off the platters. Hmm, substitute a targeted solvent at a specific plastic/ adhesive in the binder that holds the oxide onto the platters and holds the oxide into films, and you could have something which would be interesting, but you'd then be constrained to a particular model (or even batch) of hard drives to be assured of the ability to wipe them in a couple of minutes.
It's a thornier problem than it appears at first glance.
Or we could put all lunar colonies under a good couple of metres of bedrock.
Bedrock on the Moon is mostly tens or hundreds of metres down. Assuming that you're talking about material that's well-enough compacted to tunnel through without needing to support the roof. Obviously, you'd still need to line any tunnels before you'd made them gas-tight. Now, if you're talking about uniform, compact, hard rock then you'll have to get down below the regolith, which is hundreds of kilometers thick.
What I think you mean is that lunar colonies will need to be covered by several metres of surface dust and loose rock after the chambers and connecting tunnels are built. And I can see that making life really interesting when one of the joints needs to be repaired and all the radiation shielding has to be dug out again to get to the repair site. Or maybe you'd need to put several metres of compacted lunar rock (pressed? partly melted?) on some sort of platform above the lunar base, with suitable security against being dislodged by vibration.
Jesus, the point he was making is not that anyone would insert dynamite and then blow it up. That's not what the GP post said. He was just talking about inserting the stick of dynamite, not about detonating it. I've *seen* photos of people using sticks of (what purported to be) dynamite as dildos. I've also seen the obligatory advertising photos of big-titted quines sucking the covering off a sausage of PowerGel (a descendant of the better known "Gelignite") ; these products are, after all, sold to men in the mining industry with small penises, so sex is almost as powerful an advertising tool as in selling cars.
Why would sexbots pose any moral issue, anyway? Just make sure they can read a humans age from their implanted RFID chip, and only sell (lease?) them in married couples. Which one you use is between you, your video camera, and the whole Internet.
Actually, this is completely a user problem and - as much as I hate to sound like a troll - you shouldn't be throwing around an acronym like DRM if you can't at least RTFM. You ever tried getting all the manuals out of a box that Her Ladyship is shredding to find all the goodies?
The problem with your USB ports has nothing to do with any Apple "DRM." I've had the same problem happen to a friend, and it was because she tried to plug in the iPod without installing the iPod software first. I eventually just reinstalled Windows for her. OK, I suspected that was going to be the solution. Not worth worrying about - I'll just tell her to put all her stuff over onto the file server and vape and rebuild it at the weekend. As it is, if she wants the iPod to work without having to take it to a school friend's to recharge it (more deliberate obfuscation of user's expectations) she can install the damn stuff herself. Meanwhile - Apple 0 ; Any Other USB/ mass storage device 1. Actually Apple (as a supplier of any sort of computing goods) 0 ; Any Other Supplier 1.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that you're right about not fully understanding the system. The speed of cars coming at the sensors in real time is going to be approximately zero for half the time. (At some junctions, it'll be more than half the time.) The devices are situated at traffic lights, where the right-of-passage shifts from route to route every few (tens-of) seconds. So cars passing the sensor are either braking to a halt, accelerating from standstill, or driving at reduced speed through the junction. The point of measuring the "time of flight" between junctions is that the measurement will be much less affected by the relatively low speed at junctions.
You're right about the privacy implications of mobile telephony having been well covered on SlashDot before. I remember it being discussed as a serious restriction on people's willingness to use this technology back in the 1980s when the technology before this was being developed. However, it appears that people have actually been willing to give away this information, and the technologies have become popular.
It is possible to have some of the benefits of mobile telephony without giving away much information about your movements : (1) switch the phone off by disconnecting the battery, travel to a location from which you wish to make a call, switch the phone back on, make your call, return to step (1). What you can't have (using GSM or the analogue systems it replaced) is absolute privacy and the ability to receive calls at random times and locations. You have no option, in the GSM system, but to trust the operator to not release this data.
Whether the government (any government, anywhere) would permit the deployment of any mobile telephony system that did not give them access to this sort of information is moot. I doubt that I would, were I in a position of power and responsibility.
Someone is getting confused over 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional cells in elemental carbon, while someone else is unaware of the Platonic solids which have cubic symmetry.
The commonest natural form for diamonds to take up (due to the comparatively slow growth rates of the {111} form of the diamond structure) is the octahedron, which has 8 identical sides, each an equilateral triangle. The tetrahedron (4 faces, each an equilateral triangle) is not normally found as a natural shape of diamond crystals (I can't think of an example, but I have heard of stellated octahedra being found, which in an extreme could resemble tetrahedra. Be weird though.) Octahedra have 4-fold axes of rotational symmetry that tetrahedra don't have.
Hmmm, that's about the time since I last had to rebuild my entire system from original discs and a few dozen floppies of backed-up stuff. Not because of a virus, I should add, but because of a brick through the window letting people in and a hammer (my hammer!) through the front door lock to let them out, laden with computers, monitors, keyboards, etc. They left behind a keyboard switch only. But that 7-something years is somewhat less than the time since I last had a virus. I think I got caught by a boot-sector virus back in the early 90s.
Of course, it's only just a year since I actually started using an anti-virus system of any sort, and that was primarily due to acquiring a wife and teenage child one day. It's a bit difficult to persuade them that they should be using an antivirus if you don't do it yourself.
It's a bit amusing watching the virus checker dutifully report, once a week, that it's found virus X, trojan Y and backDoor.Z lurking in the data files from the newsreader. I mean, yeah, so there are strings of bits in the data files that nidicate a virus there. But hey, it's not as if the newsreader is going to uuDecode the message and execute the content without my telling it to, is it? Who would be so foolish as to design a newsreader like that?
I don't normally see them, but I do sometimes hear it being said behind me at the bar, or in the bus queue. Sometimes the timing is right that it makes me choke on my beer, but not very often.
To me, one of the unavoidable, if not essential, results of extended-duration human space flight, which could not be replicated by a couple of dozen unmanned flights on the same budget, is learning-by-doing just how complex the ecological requirements for maintaining a human-friendly environment really are. As an education in what our environment does for us, and how much it costs to maintain, this lesson should be "an inconvenient but hugely valuable truth" (to mis-quote a Terrestrial politician of recent noisiness).
In the 1990s a facility was established in Arizona (IIRC) to try to address this point, under the name of "Biosphere 2" (pointing out that all humans live on Biosphere 1, Terra) link here, Wikipedia article with much more information here. Despite considerable care and attention into it's design to be a self-contained biosphere, within days or weeks the system was oscillating severely as unexpected causes started to have their effects on the environment inside. So they opened the window. In space, no-one can hear you scream. Even if you do open the window.
Oh, by the way, Velcro was developed on Earth, for Earthly purposes, in consequence of a Swiss engineer finding plant-seed burrs in his dog's coat. See this site. Perhaps you're thinking of Teflon. Whose history is probably a lot more clouded than the popular "invented for the space race" version would suggest. [Searches] Indeed, a 1945 trademark would suggest a slight pre-dating of the space race too.
I'd like to know what your sources for that opinion are. So that I can avoid them.
The Neanderthal race appeared in the Levant (follow the sound of landing shells and Uzi-fire) and europe some time after the first appearence of AMH (Anatomically Modern Humans) in Africa; they were shorter in height, but deeper of chest; more strongly muscled; It's a toss-up who weighed more.
Most adult fossils from this pre-modern period had significant wear and tear on the bones and joints. (Note - I do not restrict my statement to hominids, or primates, or mammals. It applies to all skeletalised animals. Concerning skeletalised non-animals
(That said, some AMH fossils, and some Neanderthal fossils, have been found with abnormally badly damaged bones by the standards of their contemporaries. This is indicative of social care of the crippled, invalided and elderly. These were our relatives, beyond doubt.)
I had a conversation with a fool last week who denied the existence of fossils at all, and did not believe me when I said that I saw no reason for believing in any sort of god or gods. (How he knew the state of my internal thoughts better than I do is left as an exercise for the reader.) Popular speech habits might tempt me to describe this dull-witted braggart as being a "Neanderthal". But since Neanderthals had (on average) larger brains than AMH, complex societies, and an understanding of their fellows as thinking, feeling, empathising individuals, then describing this idiotic god-botherer as a "Neanderthal" would be an insult - to the Neanderthals.
I don't know anyone who's NOT Anti-DRM. All DRM does is make buying music miserable for the people who are doing it legally. People who don't care about the legality of it will just torrent the CD or get it off some other file sharing network.
What is it about DRM, and music in general, that makes people think that music is the only use for DRM? Am I allowed to care passionately about the effects of DRM despite having dumped my entire music collection in a rubbish bin about a dozen years ago because I was fed up with friends visiting to listen to my musinc instead of to talk with me?
The evil that is DRM is far and away more important than music. OK, I have some belly button fluff here that is more important than "music" too, but I think you get the point.
As an aside - how many other commentators on this story made a typo "musinc" for "music"? Isn't that poetic justice. Or is it subliminal suggestion at work?
Sledegehammer + testicles (*) = how long an argument ???
(* insert breeding organs of choice if target creationist is not conventionally male)
Inertia is your friend [G], or your hammer's friend.
Robert Forward ?? of the Cheela and JPL and a few other things.
Footfall.
Civilised aliens who just happen to look like pink baby elephandt in high-heeled boots as they parachute into Kansas. I believe Larry when he claims to not take drugs. That idea must have been Pournelle's.
Travel broadens the mind - if you don't mind a few minor risks.
Hmmm, now why'd I not think of that?
[Looks at passport. Looks at visas for Norway, Azerbaidjan, several trips to Russia (for work and for pleasure), Tanzania.]
[Looks at schedule for next year : Back to Tanzania, North Korea, Russia again (different bits of taiga), possibly America.]
Oh, I had thought of that.
None the less, I'd be deeply suspicious of an airport that considered itself to be so at risk as to buy a system of this sort. And I'd suspect that the cost of the system would come out of the budget for some other more important (and less dramatic) service. Toilet cleaning being one possiblity, but baggage handling is a perfectly plausible alternative budget to plunder.
More significantly, the costs of such systems would put the airports that invested in them at quite a considerable competitive disadvantage. So I'd expect someone to be trying to get them legislatively mandated. At which point, I'd probably be flying into Canada and taking a train. Actually, with Uncle Tez in Toronto, I might just do that anyway.
Good idea, well done that man!
"CNN Money web site has a story about Northrop Grumman forecasting development of a laser shield 'bubble' for airports and other installations in the United States within 18 months.
I take it that, in this rational world, the development of this system means that there have been many cases of civilian aircraft being shot down by missiles near US airports. Many more cases than, for example, East Africa, Afghanistan, or Iran.
Naturally, in the unlikely event that I choose to travel to America, I'm going to scour the Internet to find out which airports have purchased this system. It will be really effective advertising - "Hey, airport X thinks that it's so likely to have it's flights shot down that it has brought this expensive anti-missile system, in preference to cleaning the toilets. Wow, I'm really going to travel there, in preference to [[anywhere else]].
So what happened to the defence that "Inter" and "America" are not both nations, so the concept of "international law" is a non sequiteur in respect of American actions?
OIC, it's a fallback position. Boy, am I glad I'm not a lawyer.
Remember, folks, racism is A-OK if it's trying to prevent terrorism or 419 scams.
</sarcasm>
Errr, you missed the "start sarcasm" "<sarcasm>" tag there. Didn't you?
Oh dear. Oh very dear.
And the prize for this week's most horrible strained nautical metaphor goes to ... [drumroll] ...
Each additional degree of Microsoft's ship's list translates into that much more level of a playing field.
Ohhh, I can see this one is going to be fun!
So, some time in September I'll go up to the office, hook up a perfectly legal laptop to a perfectly legal network and perfectly legally grab all updates, then perfectly legally I'll go out to the oil rig and perfectly legally go about doing my job. Then perfectly legally the perfectly legal machine will stop working, making it impossible for me to do my job.
"Hello, are you from Microsoft"
<Indian accent>"Yes"</Indian accent>
"Can you spell 'consequential losses'"
<Indian accent>"No"</Indian accent>
"OK. Well, for your information, Microsoft are running up consequential losses of the rental rate of this drilling rig, because I can't do my job. That's approximately $10,000/hour, and counting. What's the re-activation code?"
<Indian accent>"Please to be telling me your IP address and we'll see what can be done"</Indian accent>
"Please to be telling you that the machine isn't on a network of any sort, and there isn't an internet connection within an hour's flying time. $10,000 more"
<Indian accent>"Please to be connecting to the modem and going online"</Indian accent>
"Please to be booking me the helicopter at $5,000 call-out charge to be getting computers sorry arse to where there is a data-capable phone line instead of this crappy InMarSat connection. $10,000 more."
<Indian accent>"Please to be telling me that this isn't our fault."</Indian accent>
"Please to be telling you that our lawyers will be round to visit your lawyers. With cricket bats."
<CLICK>
Someone else's problem - the best sort of problem.
I told the Boss he should take the departure from DOS as an opportunity to go multi-platform.
Yet!
There's enough work going on with genetic algorithms as ways of learning how to control systems that a computer "bacterium" (as opposed to a "virus") is becoming increasingly credible. Such an organism would be a very interesting piece of code in itself, regardless of it's potential for nefarious uses. Whether such an organism could only survive in a homogenous environment (vaguely analogous to the stereospecificity of all complex metabolic chemicals in the Earth's biosphere), or whether organisms could develop that can adapt to function in different environments is a very interesting question. But by analogy with the many modern groups of organisms that feature alternation of generations between widely different environments, a need for different environments is not incredible. Read into that a [L|U][i|]n[u|i]x | Windoze debate if you want, but it could equally be a debate between TCP/IP and IPX network "thin organic soups" (to mis-quote Darwin) if both environments included the equivalents of metabolites and energy flows.
Has it ever heated up this quickly before? Probably not since the Earth first coalesced. ... I think you're wrong.
I hate saying this, since as an oilfield geologist I'm going to sound like I'm a Global-Warming Denier (in the same sense as "Holocaust Denier"), which I'm not, but
The Late Palaeocene Thermal Maximum probably had higher temperatures than we presently have, but it achieved them at somewhat slower maximum rates than we're changing climate at the moment and it took maybe 10 or 15 thousand years to achieve what we've not yet achieved in under 2 thousand years (causing thermal instability of submarine methane hydrates). You're not wrong by much, and your children or grandchildren will quite possibly be able to make the same claim and be perfectly correct, but at the moment you're just on the incorrect side of being strictly correct.
What am I doing today? trying to place the casing for a new oilfield's first well precisely on an Early Eocene boundary while avoiding drilling into the Late Palaeocene.
What was I doing two months ago? - working on a different oilfield, where a number of workers had recently come close to being killed by a problem with a methane hydrate plug in a wellbore.
Methane hydrates and Palaeocene-Eocene boundary stratigraphy are of more concern to some people than to others.
"may be impossible to see" are the operative words there. Ever used a Sharpie to black out the routing number on the bottom of a check? You can still make out the numbers.
I've no idea what a "Sharpie" is in the RoTW, but guessing that it's a thick-tipped, dark-ink marker-pen of some sort, this is a really bad example. Those numbers along the bottom of a cheque are not intended or designed to be human readable - they're for machine reading by automated cheque-reading machines. The bank details and account details go into the bank's records (and thence to payment instructions etc) by the mechanised reader and the human(-ish) operator only has to enter the amount. The receiving bank should have already sorted the cheques in some way so that they know who the payee is.
I'm carefully not using the phrase "optical character recognition" in this description, because the character recognition is not done optically. The ink is magnetic.
You want to try fouling up one of these cheque readers? If you can't find the ink of the appropriate magnetic susceptibility, try finding a non-magnetic viscous ink of similar colour and replacing the magnetic ink with that in the right shapes. The teller will swipe it several times, give up, and punch the numbers in by hand, because it's quicker than trying a long complex procedure. That's why they don't use transparent magnetic ink - system redundancy.
If you claim your children as dependents on your tax return over here,
Tax return? I thought they were only for people who own businesses and so on, not normal people.
So, how much is a kid worth to the tax man? Can you get discounts for buying them in bulk?
Subject says it all really.
7) What are the Names, DOB's, SSN's, etc of your children?
What, if any, right or reason would a parent have to know the State Security Number of their children? (I'm assuming that the SSN in LeftPondica has approximately the same meaning as the National Insurance number over here in Britain - tracking taxes paid and benefits received.)
Also, is having children compulsory in America now?
What i really dont get is why they hell *cant* thermite or some other exothermic, dangerous, explosive, acid, etc method be used on a military plane...
... the perils of COTS.
Its not like they dont already carry thermite, tnt, gunpowder, phosphorous, gasoline, oil, napalm, magnesium (to burn), uranium depleted or otherwise etc etc
SPY plane. Biggest armaments are probably hand guns for the security Neanderthal and pyrotechnics (i.e. flares) in the liferafts.
BTW, aircraft structural magnesium isn't particularly flammable, and it's bloody difficult to get started. (Yes, it does go with a blast when it gets going. WHEN!)
I'm still surprised that there wasn't more mention of considering more physical methods of destruction. E.g. specifying hard drives with glass platters, and positioning the drives in close proximity to appropriately oriented nail-guns powered by compressed air. But that's their choice.
I do like the idea of using a solvent susceptable binder for the oxide layer though... This is the military too, so they are not using off-the-shelf components for this (or they dont have to).
There's an implicit datum in the article too - the methods described are (apparently) suitable for COTS (Commodity-Off-The-Shelf) hard drives. That means 3.5inch form-factor, significant magnetic shielding in the housing, and you can't be sure what exactly will be in the next box load you open. I read two things into that - firstly, they were designing a system that could be sold to the general public as well as SpookAir (www.blackprojects.gov.us)(TM); and secondly that for reasons of cost or performance, SpookAir choose to use COTS drives. For that matter, it could be that simple familiarity is an issue too.
Solvent susceptibility would be working "smart", not working "hard". Very un-military.
The big problem would be, what if "COTS HardDrive Co." changed the specification of the binder used on it's ABC-PQR-320GB hard drives, without changing the model number. And why should they change the hard drive model number? The drives have not changed in any way that would be visible to the average user
In related news - I was repairing my daughter's sunglasses last night. The damned sunglasses makers use different sized bolts to every other pair of spectacles I've ever repaired (many pairs). Damn these COTS sunglasses with their hidden specification changes!
If you'd read the article, you'd realise the time constraints that were part of the problem. You're on a spy plane over enemy territory ; you've suffered a mechanical problem (be it crashing into an enemy plane, shot down, or somone didn't put the filler-cap on; whatever) and you are going to land on enemy territory in the NEXT 3 MINUTES.
You do not have time for more than a single-pass wipe.
I found the original article a bit surprising in not considering chemical methods (thermite, acid, etc), but in a flight context, that's not unreasonable. If you started to put up lots of planes carrying (high-tech) buckets of acid strong enough to dissolve into hard drives in a couple of minutes, you'd get a lot of planes falling out of the sky (or needing very expensive, time-consuming rebuilding - these are spy planes, not off-the-shelf planes, with horribly complex wiring looms) before you got your next (sorry) acid test of the system.
Someone suggested an acid that can strip the oxide off the platters. Hmm, substitute a targeted solvent at a specific plastic/ adhesive in the binder that holds the oxide onto the platters and holds the oxide into films, and you could have something which would be interesting, but you'd then be constrained to a particular model (or even batch) of hard drives to be assured of the ability to wipe them in a couple of minutes.
It's a thornier problem than it appears at first glance.
Or we could put all lunar colonies under a good couple of metres of bedrock.
Bedrock on the Moon is mostly tens or hundreds of metres down. Assuming that you're talking about material that's well-enough compacted to tunnel through without needing to support the roof. Obviously, you'd still need to line any tunnels before you'd made them gas-tight. Now, if you're talking about uniform, compact, hard rock then you'll have to get down below the regolith, which is hundreds of kilometers thick.
What I think you mean is that lunar colonies will need to be covered by several metres of surface dust and loose rock after the chambers and connecting tunnels are built. And I can see that making life really interesting when one of the joints needs to be repaired and all the radiation shielding has to be dug out again to get to the repair site. Or maybe you'd need to put several metres of compacted lunar rock (pressed? partly melted?) on some sort of platform above the lunar base, with suitable security against being dislodged by vibration.
Nobody ever said it would be easy.
Let them hold the judging of the "fashions" on the "Vomit Comet" . I so want to see a whole row of the fashion bullshiterati vomiting in synchrony.
Jesus, the point he was making is not that anyone would insert dynamite and then blow it up.
That's not what the GP post said. He was just talking about inserting the stick of dynamite, not about detonating it.
I've *seen* photos of people using sticks of (what purported to be) dynamite as dildos. I've also seen the obligatory advertising photos of big-titted quines sucking the covering off a sausage of PowerGel (a descendant of the better known "Gelignite") ; these products are, after all, sold to men in the mining industry with small penises, so sex is almost as powerful an advertising tool as in selling cars.
Why would sexbots pose any moral issue, anyway? Just make sure they can read a humans age from their implanted RFID chip, and only sell (lease?) them in married couples. Which one you use is between you, your video camera, and the whole Internet.
Actually, this is completely a user problem and - as much as I hate to sound like a troll - you shouldn't be throwing around an acronym like DRM if you can't at least RTFM.
You ever tried getting all the manuals out of a box that Her Ladyship is shredding to find all the goodies?
The problem with your USB ports has nothing to do with any Apple "DRM." I've had the same problem happen to a friend, and it was because she tried to plug in the iPod without installing the iPod software first. I eventually just reinstalled Windows for her.
OK, I suspected that was going to be the solution. Not worth worrying about - I'll just tell her to put all her stuff over onto the file server and vape and rebuild it at the weekend. As it is, if she wants the iPod to work without having to take it to a school friend's to recharge it (more deliberate obfuscation of user's expectations) she can install the damn stuff herself. Meanwhile - Apple 0 ; Any Other USB/ mass storage device 1.
Actually Apple (as a supplier of any sort of computing goods) 0 ; Any Other Supplier 1.