Uh, actually, watts sucked per hour/minute/etc has been very easy to measure for many decades now.
Perhaps you'd like to review your physics text books from age 12 or 13, approximately. Check out the section where the distinction is drawn between ENERGY and POWER. Done your revision? Good. So let's all sing together : "Energy is the capacity to do work ; power is the energy dissipated divided by the time taken." And the meaning of power per unit time is... ? That's right - meaningless.
What a flawed argument! I just explained how Apple's DRM wasn't like handcuffs at all, and how you don't come across any restrictions in normal use.
I was given an iPod last week. Since it's an MP3 player, I plugged it into the daughter's computer to transfer her music collection to it. Now her computer doesn't appear to have any ability to use any of it's USB ports. This, I take it, is what you mean by 'not having any restrictions you come across in normal use'. The MP3 player the wife got me last year works just perfectly like that - therefore there is something profoundly wrong with either that particular iPod, or Apple's DRM. Since it was a gift, then I don't intend to waste any more of my time finding out. Nor will I be wasting any of my money on Apple goods in future.
I suppose I'll have to explain to Her Ladyship why she should store her personal data on the network, not on her personal box. Or should I just vape and rebuild, to teach her to keep her own backups?
That's like Associate VP. I mean, A 16-bit slashdot id... looks like you're doing great work:)
Eh? What? Someone actually cares about those IDs? Wow, someone is easily impressed. If you were of an appropriate gender, what would you do for a Fistful of Peanuts? Or a 2N2004?
Thus the "Siberian Traps", which formed at about the same time as the Permian Extinction. All we need to solidify that speculation is to study the positions of the continents at that time (not where they have drifted to, today). I think the two areas were (approximately) at quadrature - 90 degrees apart, not in opposition.
More evidence for this sort of Double Disaster comes from the Chixulub impact, which, when it happened, it is known that India was on the opposite side of the world, and the "Deccan Traps" were formed at the same time as the K-T boundary. Both the end Cretaceous extinctions and the Chixulub impact occurred after the start of the Deccan traps episode. Dinosaur skeletons (too complete to be re-worked bones) have been known from palaeosol horizons (literally ancient soil) between lava flows since the 1890s. Similarly, evidence of the Chixulub impact has been reported from between other lavas. The "contre coup" theory of Large Igneous Province triggering doesn't get much support from my fellow geologists. It's theoretically possible, but no reasonable clear examples have been reported. Meanwhile a considerable number of examples of long-drawn-out internal processes leading to Large Igneous Province formation without extraterrestrial input have been documented.
Well, since as you correctly say the radioactivity is "zero sum", why bury the still-potent stuff at all?
I said that it's not a "zero sum" game. Waste reprocessing is actually very complex, because some of the highly radioactive fission products (i.e. highly poisonous) are solids, some liquids, some gases, and some change from one for to another at modest temperatures (e.g. caesium and iodine are an alpha decay apart in one direction, and two beta decays apart in the other direction. And there's xenon between the two). And the chemistry of a mix changes with time, as one element changes to another. Of course, you never have to deal with one problem at a time - it's always dirty mixtures. The UK's old re-processing plant (at Douneray) will take 20 to 30 years more to complete decomissioning and no-one has any idea how much it'll cost; the current reprocessing plant (THORP, at Calder Hall/ Windscale/ Sellafield/ Seascale - the name changes with each major fire/ political controversy/ international-border-crossing radioactivity release) has cost on the order of 20 thousand million USD and still only works intermittently. So doing it safely, without releases is not easy - if anything it's harder than doing isotopic purification. The really nasty stuff that's still undergoing energetic fission could probably be used to generate power in different types of reactor - after all if it's still "hot" enough to be dangerous, then we oughta be able to do more with it than just burial. The only such thing I've heard of as a 'possible' is the RTG (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator) used on some space craft. And they're few and far enough between. I suspect that the big problem is, again, the "dirtiness" of the mixes - if you don't have well-purified starting materials, you're not going to be able to predict things like neutron absorbtion spectra or modulation responses in advance. My wife is having health problems possibly consequent on a misunderstanding of modulation response factors some 20 years ago - she was doing vacation work down-wind from Chernobyl. And it's not like fuel is the greatest expense in a reactor, so even if we double or triple the cost of fuel by using reproccessing/sorting techniques to get the waste down to something manageable, it'll still be cheaper than the rest of the operating expenses of the power plant. I agree that, with current technology, then nuclear can be done better. That doesn't mean that we can relax the push for fusion (fewer high atomic number nuclei around means fewer possible reaction routes, means simpler interactions, will mean clean-up will be simpler. Plus almost everything that does get affected by radiation flux is likely to be near the Fe-56 stability maximum.), but it's going to be necessary. Don't have to like it (hey - I don't exactly like working in Big Oil!), but it's necessary. The stuff you're left over with, the low level radioactives and contaminated equipment and such, THAT gets buried. You either dilute it, vitrify it, or just bury it deep under the water table in a subduction zone. It'll last a long time (after all, this is the stuff with the lowest radiation, ergo the longest halflife), but it can be gotten rid of. There's a fallacy that you can take waste "away". This place "away" appears on no atlas that I've seen - it goes from Awatere(NZ) to Awbari(Lybia), and even if it did it wouldn't be "away" to it's neighbours. You can sort and separate low-level radioactive waste to the point that it's a lower-than-cosmic-radiation risk (I live in the "Granite City" - 3 to 5 times the background radiation of some other cities), at which point it becomes trivial. Intermediate and higher level wastes are a smaller (physically) problem. But they can be handled, given the political will. Unfortunately, most politicians don't want to grasp that nettle. Which is why I think they should be the ones sitting in the firing line.
Simplest is to pulverize the waste, mix it with mine tailings until it is as dilute as the original ore, then bury it where the uranium was originally mined. The net has to be less radioactive then the ore was when it was mined, since you don't get something for nothing. Sorry, that doesn't work. Since the intensity of radioactivity is primarily a function of half-life, which is a measure of the stability of nuclei, then it's not a "zero sum" game. Fissioning some of the U-235 nuclei in a block of uranium will produce 2 or 3 daughter nuclei, each one of which can be more unstable than the parent U-235 nucleus. Plus there's induced radioactivity in otherwise stable (non-radioactive) nuclei which absorb neutrons and/ or small nuclei from the high flux inside the reactor. To make nuclear waste unusable from the point of view of extracting highly-enriched uranium salts (bombs for the making of), you only need to mix it with depleted uranium (a byproduct of uranium enrichment processing, surprisingly) in the same chemical form as the waste (e.g. melted into the same sort of silicate glass). However that will do nothing to make the waste unusable as a source of (e.g.) plutonium, if it contains plutonium, or strontium-90 (if it contains strontium)... and of course, you could still use boring bog-standard moderately radioctive waste as the scary stuff in a dirty bomb. Threaten to release some of that in a major city and you'd achieve far more with the panic abandonment than you'd ever achieve with an "amateur" nuke, even if you could build one.
Me - I'm for storing nuclear waste under centres of government. The only way that politicians can be trusted to maintain proper containment of dangerous materials is if they are definitely going to be the first people to die in screaming agony if the stuff leaks out. If it makes the politicians into pariahs who no civilised person would approach unless absoilutely necessary... well, who'd notice the difference?
Thought they already had that Google Romance Sounds like the left hand at Google doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Most people have to lay on their arm for 5 minutes to make the nerves go numb, but Google, they can get that "just like real" sensation straight away.
Several users have provided us with the direct link to the auction site for easy viewing. Well, if you think that a black screen which doesn't even hint that you need Flash installed is "easy viewing", then maybe so. Even easier to not view it and not waste your money.
On a more serious note, this is obviously a purely political step - but why? Racism. Pure, simple, unadulterated racism. Call it bigotry or nationalism if you want - they're the same thing at heart. People from anywhere other than my home town are sub-human baby-eating morons who need to be subjugated utterly. Cut the balls off the men, abort all the pregnant women, and line them up to get a dose of proper seed. It's what we're evolved to do (because that's what the people we're descended from did) ; the people who got culled from the population didn't leave descendants, by definition. Not nice, but true.
Tonight's film at 11 is... bloody hell! "Indiana Jones and the temple of Doom" for the fiftieth bloody time this week!
That's will, not might or could, but will. It's in their nature - as soon as something becomes a significant killer of organisms, then some will turn out to be more resistant and will be positively selected for. It's called evolution, folks, and it takes hundreds of generations to work. Which for a bacterium could be just a few months (the oft-cited "divide every 20 minutes" growth rate for bacteria is under ideal conditions ; average rates in non-ideal conditions are several times slower). But that's still faster than a human generation of 20-30 years.
Manipulating the media with "leaks" is one thing, but leaks endangering field agents or operatives is different.
A significant part of the reason that America is in the shit, world-wide, is that there are next to no Americans with the ability to function in any society other than their own. Add to that their deep and obvious contempt for any societies other than their own, and you can see just why America (in the "man on the Clapham omnibus" sense) was unaware that the events of 2001-09-11 were looming until they hit. So don't worry, there are very, very few Americans "out there" as "field agents". Most of America's "field agents" are either local criminals or mercenaries, who know what they are getting because they count the notes (not USD - too easily forged and too hard to spend!) before they accept the job.
The iPod's sole purpose in life is to play music. So it plays music. That's strange - I thought that the Ipod's sole purpose, along with any other MP3 player, was to play MP3-formatted files, regardless of their content. [I go aside and load my MP3 player with 95MB of radio discussion articles including an interview with a palaeontologist about a new book. Shameless plug.] I hardly ever waste my time, ears or battery power on music, and I do get rather annoyed at my MP3 player's controls being designed on the assumption of short audio files. It also makes it difficult to use the machine for practicising my Russian on the bus - poorly implemented scrolling facilities.
How in the cock-eyed world of Slashdotter's priorities could posting the actual text of the formal paper at the root of a story be considered redundant ? Since the story itself doesn't link to a primary reference, and nor does the article which the story does link to. So the AC who posted this obviously did some research to get to the source article.
My bet is, the person (or persons) who modded this article down was either being spiteful (in which case, where are the meta-moderators?) or wasn't aware that 'Science' costs US$150 a year for a personal subscription. No subscription, and you get
YOU DO NOT HAVE ACCESS TO THIS ITEM:
Biologically Inspired Artificial Compound Eyes
Jeong et al. Science 28 April 2006: 557-561 DOI: 10.1126/science.1123053
accompanied by an offer to buy 24 hours access for $10.
Oh, hang on. I get it. There's only been one person modding this article, and that person has spent their entire online life in a place with a site license, or something similar.
Join the real world people! I'm wrestling with the question of can I justify $100 for a cut-price-special-offer-never-to-be-repeated subscription for a year of Science, and I'm very reluctantly coming to the conclusion that I can't justify it while I've got driving lessons for the wife and purchase of a car to pay for. Sheesh!, at least I do use the mod points when I get them. (Well, I do if I have Internet access while the points are active.)
Discovery's cryptography expert describes it as a code that 'will keep your kid sister out' A Caeser cypher wouldn't keep my kid sister out. My older sister, maybe, but not my kid sister.
It could be minor malware plus a dieing power supply, dont let your best IT guy spend a entire day re-building, and flashing BIOS to recover a 1Ghz celeron that may crap in a month anyway.
And when the TaxMan comes along to do an audit and finds that your company has X (where X is a substantial positive non-zero integer) fewer computers on it's premises which you're claiming depreciation tax relief on... your best IT guy, his manager who OK'd him taking the machine, three trolls from Accounts, the MD (CEO in American?), Unclt Tom Cobbley and all, are going to spend a really productive week locating and explaining every piece of missing inventory. That's why my work has approximately 3 cubic metres of dead laptops, dead printers, dead desktops and dead (or shit) monitors piled up in the corner of the stores, under lock and key. We got tax relief on buying the hardware (buying them at VAT-free prices, 17.5% below street price) on the condition that we don't dispose of them to the retail market. They depreciate over the next 5 years (maybe 4 years for printers. Someone else's problem.) but until the end of those 5 years we have to be able to demonstrate to the TaxMan where they are. 5 years and one day after purchase, we can throw them in the hazardous waste skip, but not until. (OK, in theory we could pass them to a licensed disposal company, but because of the necessary paperwork, that turns out to be more expensive than 3 cubic metres of Stores cage.)
Miniaturization is a problem, but it seems mostly for people trying to make many-purpose devices like these ones. It's not as difficult to build a very usable, very tiny interface on something that only performs one or a few specialized functions, such as the iPod or a cell phone.
My memory is reaching back to those digital wrist watches that were popular in the late 1970s/ early 1980s. The ones with the built-in calculator, and the 12- or 16- key input pad. You remember them - the ones that you had to find a match, or a pencil tip, to press the keys with. Point made - even tiny, simple interfaces have a definite minimum size. For finger-tip operation, you need a bit less than 1 square cm per key. I've used a Psion (5 series) for nearly a decade now, and that's the smallest keyboard that I'm even vaguely comfortable using. I gather that those black emaily-telephone-combination things are just about usable, and I think their keypads are slightly smaller. I can't see that you'll get much smaller.
Since the US government is representing in open court that he's not going to go to Guantanamo (read the article), what he's doing is asserting that the US government is lying
And you have some grounds for people to disbelieve his assertion? Not many people outside the US electorate would believe much that comes out of the public mouth of the US government. Well done, Dubya, for doing such good to your country's international profile.
No problem. We shed skin constantly. Whatever gets stuck on you, wait a day or so and it will come off.
Gosh Darn! I just stuck this 10gram button of Cobalt-60 to me. Oh well, wait a day and it'll come off. No problem. [Scenario #2] Gosh Darn! The tube of SuperDuper Glue burst as I was putting it in the hip pocket of my unrippable jeans and my hand is stuck. Oh well, I wasn't planning to have a shit in the next day anyway. [Scenario #3] Gosh Darn! I'm a little kid and I just stuck my fingers into my eyes and I'm really scared and I'm going to scream and scream until I make myself sick and my mommy sues your rotten SuperDuper Glue Incorp. into the ground.
Someone will develop a skin-unsticker procedure, if only to give emergency room staff something reassuring to do while that day's skin shedding happens.
Using Windows garbage for any Homeland Security tasks means that every Windows vulnerability (and there are many, many, many of them) becomes a National Security vulnerability. That's a fact, PERIOD.
Yup. You're right. It gets better - you've just drawn public attention to many, many significant issues of National Security. The only possible reason for you doing that is that you're an evil Al-Quaeda operative. Hear that banging on the door? That's The Man coming with your shackles and hood for your one-way ticket to Guantanamo. Have a nice day. Don't bother to pack any toilet paper - you won't be using a toilet for years to come, just your coveralls.
how Apple's domination of the online media market is continuing to grow Some incredible degree of domination, I'm sure. I think I saw an Ipod on the bus last week (well, the girl with the big tits was wearing white earpieces - so that means it's an iPod, doesn't it?), so I guess there's somewhere in town that sells them. Can't say that I've noticed the place though. Apple computers? Well, my friend Bob used to have one. And I saw a second-hand one on sale a couple of years ago at a computer fair. Never seen one actually being used though. There's a lot of room for growth with a market domination like that.
FTFA : On April 11, the new version of IE will be distributed as a mandatory download. So MS are going to send the goons round to put a gun to my head and make me download this? Or they're going to send the cops round to arrest me if I don't download it? And can their servers handle the massive slashdotting they're going to get when the mandatory deadline comes due?
Because the pay-outs are higher.
Regardless of the reasons for or the effects of the US's litigation-happiness and the often insane levels of fines imposed, the fact remains that any competent lawyer should be looking for a US-angle in order to maximise the benefits for their clients.
Equally, any competent corporate lawyer should use the maximum of the law that they can to prevent a case being pursued in the States. If that means having the British police threaten a 3-year old child with jail at 2 o'clock in the morning, then you do it. (Yes, it was legal to do this. And no, the policemen weren't happy. But they had to do it. No, I can't identify the case or the participants due to the terms of the settlement.)
Oh, and they [are] messing up the results including the 18 and 19 year olds, who are legally allowed to look at porn.
Actually I think you'll find that the 18- and 19-year-olds are legally allowed to buy porn, and therefore to view (feel, hear, read ?) porn; but I'm not at all sure if an offence is being committed if a (say) 13-year-old views porn. There are distinct offences ["attermpting to corrupt and deprave by..." under Scottish law ; probably something similar in English law, where this article is published] concerning uses that might be made of porn, but the actual simple viewing (reading etc....) of porn per se isn't illegal in itself.
Consider the case of someone who disposes of a jazz mag (good grief, there's even a Wikipedia entry for that! And is there one for Profanisaurus? But of course!) by chucking it in the rubbish bin. (Reasonably disposed of.) Then the bin falls over due to high winds and the neighbour's 9-year-old finds the porn blowing through the garden and reads it. Has an offense been committed? I don't think so. The Procurator would laugh the case out of the door long before it got to court, and any sane jury would return "not proven"
they also said that about cars, computers, video games, television, space flight, electric cars. all those are still around, and probably will be for as long as we are.
Of course, they also said that about the cravatte, off-white nylon shirts with huge collars, pet rocks, steam cars and
Hang on - I've still got my pet rock. He's a 4 kilo banded vein of barytes and galena from the Bellshill mine at Strontian. Nicely sectioned to show off the banding. Country rock of granodiorite on one facet. Trust me on this - I'm a geologist - pet rocks are nice.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, actually, watts sucked per hour/minute/etc has been very easy to measure for many decades now.
... ? That's right - meaningless.
Perhaps you'd like to review your physics text books from age 12 or 13, approximately. Check out the section where the distinction is drawn between ENERGY and POWER.
Done your revision? Good. So let's all sing together : "Energy is the capacity to do work ; power is the energy dissipated divided by the time taken." And the meaning of power per unit time is
[SIGH] You did do physics at school, didn't you?
What a flawed argument! I just explained how Apple's DRM wasn't like handcuffs at all, and how you don't come across any restrictions in normal use.
I was given an iPod last week. Since it's an MP3 player, I plugged it into the daughter's computer to transfer her music collection to it. Now her computer doesn't appear to have any ability to use any of it's USB ports. This, I take it, is what you mean by 'not having any restrictions you come across in normal use'. The MP3 player the wife got me last year works just perfectly like that - therefore there is something profoundly wrong with either that particular iPod, or Apple's DRM. Since it was a gift, then I don't intend to waste any more of my time finding out. Nor will I be wasting any of my money on Apple goods in future.
I suppose I'll have to explain to Her Ladyship why she should store her personal data on the network, not on her personal box. Or should I just vape and rebuild, to teach her to keep her own backups?
Who, what, where, when or why are "Blizzard, and so why should I care what their "secret sauce" is?
That's like Associate VP. I mean, A 16-bit slashdot id... looks like you're doing great work :)
Eh? What? Someone actually cares about those IDs? Wow, someone is easily impressed. If you were of an appropriate gender, what would you do for a Fistful of Peanuts? Or a 2N2004?
Thus the "Siberian Traps", which formed at about the same time as the Permian Extinction. All we need to solidify that speculation is to study the positions of the continents at that time (not where they have drifted to, today).
I think the two areas were (approximately) at quadrature - 90 degrees apart, not in opposition.
More evidence for this sort of Double Disaster comes from the Chixulub impact, which, when it happened, it is known that India was on the opposite side of the world, and the "Deccan Traps" were formed at the same time as the K-T boundary.
Both the end Cretaceous extinctions and the Chixulub impact occurred after the start of the Deccan traps episode. Dinosaur skeletons (too complete to be re-worked bones) have been known from palaeosol horizons (literally ancient soil) between lava flows since the 1890s. Similarly, evidence of the Chixulub impact has been reported from between other lavas.
The "contre coup" theory of Large Igneous Province triggering doesn't get much support from my fellow geologists. It's theoretically possible, but no reasonable clear examples have been reported. Meanwhile a considerable number of examples of long-drawn-out internal processes leading to Large Igneous Province formation without extraterrestrial input have been documented.
Well, since as you correctly say the radioactivity is "zero sum", why bury the still-potent stuff at all?
I said that it's not a "zero sum" game.
Waste reprocessing is actually very complex, because some of the highly radioactive fission products (i.e. highly poisonous) are solids, some liquids, some gases, and some change from one for to another at modest temperatures (e.g. caesium and iodine are an alpha decay apart in one direction, and two beta decays apart in the other direction. And there's xenon between the two). And the chemistry of a mix changes with time, as one element changes to another. Of course, you never have to deal with one problem at a time - it's always dirty mixtures. The UK's old re-processing plant (at Douneray) will take 20 to 30 years more to complete decomissioning and no-one has any idea how much it'll cost; the current reprocessing plant (THORP, at Calder Hall/ Windscale/ Sellafield/ Seascale - the name changes with each major fire/ political controversy/ international-border-crossing radioactivity release) has cost on the order of 20 thousand million USD and still only works intermittently. So doing it safely, without releases is not easy - if anything it's harder than doing isotopic purification.
The really nasty stuff that's still undergoing energetic fission could probably be used to generate power in different types of reactor - after all if it's still "hot" enough to be dangerous, then we oughta be able to do more with it than just burial.
The only such thing I've heard of as a 'possible' is the RTG (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator) used on some space craft. And they're few and far enough between. I suspect that the big problem is, again, the "dirtiness" of the mixes - if you don't have well-purified starting materials, you're not going to be able to predict things like neutron absorbtion spectra or modulation responses in advance. My wife is having health problems possibly consequent on a misunderstanding of modulation response factors some 20 years ago - she was doing vacation work down-wind from Chernobyl.
And it's not like fuel is the greatest expense in a reactor, so even if we double or triple the cost of fuel by using reproccessing/sorting techniques to get the waste down to something manageable, it'll still be cheaper than the rest of the operating expenses of the power plant.
I agree that, with current technology, then nuclear can be done better. That doesn't mean that we can relax the push for fusion (fewer high atomic number nuclei around means fewer possible reaction routes, means simpler interactions, will mean clean-up will be simpler. Plus almost everything that does get affected by radiation flux is likely to be near the Fe-56 stability maximum.), but it's going to be necessary. Don't have to like it (hey - I don't exactly like working in Big Oil!), but it's necessary.
The stuff you're left over with, the low level radioactives and contaminated equipment and such, THAT gets buried. You either dilute it, vitrify it, or just bury it deep under the water table in a subduction zone. It'll last a long time (after all, this is the stuff with the lowest radiation, ergo the longest halflife), but it can be gotten rid of.
There's a fallacy that you can take waste "away". This place "away" appears on no atlas that I've seen - it goes from Awatere(NZ) to Awbari(Lybia), and even if it did it wouldn't be "away" to it's neighbours. You can sort and separate low-level radioactive waste to the point that it's a lower-than-cosmic-radiation risk (I live in the "Granite City" - 3 to 5 times the background radiation of some other cities), at which point it becomes trivial. Intermediate and higher level wastes are a smaller (physically) problem. But they can be handled, given the political will. Unfortunately, most politicians don't want to grasp that nettle. Which is why I think they should be the ones sitting in the firing line.
Simplest is to pulverize the waste, mix it with mine tailings until it is as dilute as the original ore, then bury it where the uranium was originally mined. The net has to be less radioactive then the ore was when it was mined, since you don't get something for nothing. ... and of course, you could still use boring bog-standard moderately radioctive waste as the scary stuff in a dirty bomb. Threaten to release some of that in a major city and you'd achieve far more with the panic abandonment than you'd ever achieve with an "amateur" nuke, even if you could build one.
... well, who'd notice the difference?
Sorry, that doesn't work.
Since the intensity of radioactivity is primarily a function of half-life, which is a measure of the stability of nuclei, then it's not a "zero sum" game. Fissioning some of the U-235 nuclei in a block of uranium will produce 2 or 3 daughter nuclei, each one of which can be more unstable than the parent U-235 nucleus. Plus there's induced radioactivity in otherwise stable (non-radioactive) nuclei which absorb neutrons and/ or small nuclei from the high flux inside the reactor.
To make nuclear waste unusable from the point of view of extracting highly-enriched uranium salts (bombs for the making of), you only need to mix it with depleted uranium (a byproduct of uranium enrichment processing, surprisingly) in the same chemical form as the waste (e.g. melted into the same sort of silicate glass). However that will do nothing to make the waste unusable as a source of (e.g.) plutonium, if it contains plutonium, or strontium-90 (if it contains strontium)
Me - I'm for storing nuclear waste under centres of government. The only way that politicians can be trusted to maintain proper containment of dangerous materials is if they are definitely going to be the first people to die in screaming agony if the stuff leaks out. If it makes the politicians into pariahs who no civilised person would approach unless absoilutely necessary
Thought they already had that Google Romance
Sounds like the left hand at Google doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Most people have to lay on their arm for 5 minutes to make the nerves go numb, but Google, they can get that "just like real" sensation straight away.
Several users have provided us with the direct link to the auction site for easy viewing.
Well, if you think that a black screen which doesn't even hint that you need Flash installed is "easy viewing", then maybe so. Even easier to not view it and not waste your money.
On a more serious note, this is obviously a purely political step - but why?
... bloody hell! "Indiana Jones and the temple of Doom" for the fiftieth bloody time this week!
Racism. Pure, simple, unadulterated racism.
Call it bigotry or nationalism if you want - they're the same thing at heart. People from anywhere other than my home town are sub-human baby-eating morons who need to be subjugated utterly. Cut the balls off the men, abort all the pregnant women, and line them up to get a dose of proper seed. It's what we're evolved to do (because that's what the people we're descended from did) ; the people who got culled from the population didn't leave descendants, by definition. Not nice, but true.
Tonight's film at 11 is
That's will, not might or could, but will.
It's in their nature - as soon as something becomes a significant killer of organisms, then some will turn out to be more resistant and will be positively selected for. It's called evolution, folks, and it takes hundreds of generations to work. Which for a bacterium could be just a few months (the oft-cited "divide every 20 minutes" growth rate for bacteria is under ideal conditions ; average rates in non-ideal conditions are several times slower). But that's still faster than a human generation of 20-30 years.
Manipulating the media with "leaks" is one thing, but leaks endangering field agents or operatives is different.
A significant part of the reason that America is in the shit, world-wide, is that there are next to no Americans with the ability to function in any society other than their own. Add to that their deep and obvious contempt for any societies other than their own, and you can see just why America (in the "man on the Clapham omnibus" sense) was unaware that the events of 2001-09-11 were looming until they hit.
So don't worry, there are very, very few Americans "out there" as "field agents". Most of America's "field agents" are either local criminals or mercenaries, who know what they are getting because they count the notes (not USD - too easily forged and too hard to spend!) before they accept the job.
The iPod's sole purpose in life is to play music. So it plays music.
That's strange - I thought that the Ipod's sole purpose, along with any other MP3 player, was to play MP3-formatted files, regardless of their content.
[I go aside and load my MP3 player with 95MB of radio discussion articles including an interview with a palaeontologist about a new book. Shameless plug.]
I hardly ever waste my time, ears or battery power on music, and I do get rather annoyed at my MP3 player's controls being designed on the assumption of short audio files. It also makes it difficult to use the machine for practicising my Russian on the bus - poorly implemented scrolling facilities.
How in the cock-eyed world of Slashdotter's priorities could posting the actual text of the formal paper at the root of a story be considered redundant ? Since the story itself doesn't link to a primary reference, and nor does the article which the story does link to. So the AC who posted this obviously did some research to get to the source article.
My bet is, the person (or persons) who modded this article down was either being spiteful (in which case, where are the meta-moderators?) or wasn't aware that 'Science' costs US$150 a year for a personal subscription. No subscription, and you get accompanied by an offer to buy 24 hours access for $10.
Oh, hang on. I get it. There's only been one person modding this article, and that person has spent their entire online life in a place with a site license, or something similar.
Join the real world people! I'm wrestling with the question of can I justify $100 for a cut-price-special-offer-never-to-be-repeated subscription for a year of Science, and I'm very reluctantly coming to the conclusion that I can't justify it while I've got driving lessons for the wife and purchase of a car to pay for. Sheesh!, at least I do use the mod points when I get them. (Well, I do if I have Internet access while the points are active.)
Discovery's cryptography expert describes it as a code that 'will keep your kid sister out'
A Caeser cypher wouldn't keep my kid sister out. My older sister, maybe, but not my kid sister.
It could be minor malware plus a dieing power supply, dont let your best IT guy spend a entire day re-building, and flashing BIOS to recover a 1Ghz celeron that may crap in a month anyway.
... your best IT guy, his manager who OK'd him taking the machine, three trolls from Accounts, the MD (CEO in American?), Unclt Tom Cobbley and all, are going to spend a really productive week locating and explaining every piece of missing inventory.
And when the TaxMan comes along to do an audit and finds that your company has X (where X is a substantial positive non-zero integer) fewer computers on it's premises which you're claiming depreciation tax relief on
That's why my work has approximately 3 cubic metres of dead laptops, dead printers, dead desktops and dead (or shit) monitors piled up in the corner of the stores, under lock and key. We got tax relief on buying the hardware (buying them at VAT-free prices, 17.5% below street price) on the condition that we don't dispose of them to the retail market. They depreciate over the next 5 years (maybe 4 years for printers. Someone else's problem.) but until the end of those 5 years we have to be able to demonstrate to the TaxMan where they are. 5 years and one day after purchase, we can throw them in the hazardous waste skip, but not until. (OK, in theory we could pass them to a licensed disposal company, but because of the necessary paperwork, that turns out to be more expensive than 3 cubic metres of Stores cage.)
Miniaturization is a problem, but it seems mostly for people trying to make many-purpose devices like these ones. It's not as difficult to build a very usable, very tiny interface on something that only performs one or a few specialized functions, such as the iPod or a cell phone.
My memory is reaching back to those digital wrist watches that were popular in the late 1970s/ early 1980s. The ones with the built-in calculator, and the 12- or 16- key input pad. You remember them - the ones that you had to find a match, or a pencil tip, to press the keys with.
Point made - even tiny, simple interfaces have a definite minimum size. For finger-tip operation, you need a bit less than 1 square cm per key.
I've used a Psion (5 series) for nearly a decade now, and that's the smallest keyboard that I'm even vaguely comfortable using. I gather that those black emaily-telephone-combination things are just about usable, and I think their keypads are slightly smaller. I can't see that you'll get much smaller.
Since the US government is representing in open court that he's not going to go to Guantanamo (read the article), what he's doing is asserting that the US government is lying
And you have some grounds for people to disbelieve his assertion?
Not many people outside the US electorate would believe much that comes out of the public mouth of the US government. Well done, Dubya, for doing such good to your country's international profile.
No problem. We shed skin constantly. Whatever gets stuck on you, wait a day or so and it will come off.
Gosh Darn! I just stuck this 10gram button of Cobalt-60 to me. Oh well, wait a day and it'll come off. No problem.
[Scenario #2] Gosh Darn! The tube of SuperDuper Glue burst as I was putting it in the hip pocket of my unrippable jeans and my hand is stuck. Oh well, I wasn't planning to have a shit in the next day anyway.
[Scenario #3] Gosh Darn! I'm a little kid and I just stuck my fingers into my eyes and I'm really scared and I'm going to scream and scream until I make myself sick and my mommy sues your rotten SuperDuper Glue Incorp. into the ground.
Someone will develop a skin-unsticker procedure, if only to give emergency room staff something reassuring to do while that day's skin shedding happens.
Using Windows garbage for any Homeland Security tasks means that every Windows vulnerability (and there are many, many, many of them) becomes a National Security vulnerability. That's a fact, PERIOD.
Yup. You're right.
It gets better - you've just drawn public attention to many, many significant issues of National Security. The only possible reason for you doing that is that you're an evil Al-Quaeda operative. Hear that banging on the door? That's The Man coming with your shackles and hood for your one-way ticket to Guantanamo.
Have a nice day. Don't bother to pack any toilet paper - you won't be using a toilet for years to come, just your coveralls.
how Apple's domination of the online media market is continuing to grow
Some incredible degree of domination, I'm sure. I think I saw an Ipod on the bus last week (well, the girl with the big tits was wearing white earpieces - so that means it's an iPod, doesn't it?), so I guess there's somewhere in town that sells them. Can't say that I've noticed the place though.
Apple computers? Well, my friend Bob used to have one. And I saw a second-hand one on sale a couple of years ago at a computer fair. Never seen one actually being used though.
There's a lot of room for growth with a market domination like that.
FTFA : On April 11, the new version of IE will be distributed as a mandatory download.
So MS are going to send the goons round to put a gun to my head and make me download this? Or they're going to send the cops round to arrest me if I don't download it? And can their servers handle the massive slashdotting they're going to get when the mandatory deadline comes due?
Why in a US court?
Because the pay-outs are higher.
Regardless of the reasons for or the effects of the US's litigation-happiness and the often insane levels of fines imposed, the fact remains that any competent lawyer should be looking for a US-angle in order to maximise the benefits for their clients.
Equally, any competent corporate lawyer should use the maximum of the law that they can to prevent a case being pursued in the States. If that means having the British police threaten a 3-year old child with jail at 2 o'clock in the morning, then you do it. (Yes, it was legal to do this. And no, the policemen weren't happy. But they had to do it. No, I can't identify the case or the participants due to the terms of the settlement.)
Oh, and they [are] messing up the results including the 18 and 19 year olds, who are legally allowed to look at porn. ..." under Scottish law ; probably something similar in English law, where this article is published] concerning uses that might be made of porn, but the actual simple viewing (reading etc. ...) of porn per se isn't illegal in itself.
Actually I think you'll find that the 18- and 19-year-olds are legally allowed to buy porn, and therefore to view (feel, hear, read ?) porn; but I'm not at all sure if an offence is being committed if a (say) 13-year-old views porn. There are distinct offences ["attermpting to corrupt and deprave by
Consider the case of someone who disposes of a jazz mag (good grief, there's even a Wikipedia entry for that! And is there one for Profanisaurus? But of course!) by chucking it in the rubbish bin. (Reasonably disposed of.) Then the bin falls over due to high winds and the neighbour's 9-year-old finds the porn blowing through the garden and reads it. Has an offense been committed? I don't think so. The Procurator would laugh the case out of the door long before it got to court, and any sane jury would return "not proven"
they also said that about cars, computers, video games, television, space flight, electric cars. all those are still around, and probably will be for as long as we are.
Of course, they also said that about the cravatte, off-white nylon shirts with huge collars, pet rocks, steam cars and
Hang on - I've still got my pet rock. He's a 4 kilo banded vein of barytes and galena from the Bellshill mine at Strontian. Nicely sectioned to show off the banding. Country rock of granodiorite on one facet.
Trust me on this - I'm a geologist - pet rocks are nice.