FTFA : Case in point: One guy I contacted to tell him his site was serving up this exploit code went to check his home page and then told me his browser just crashed on him. I had to ask: "Don't tell me you just visited the site in IE?" He had. I could only shake my head and sigh.
BEATS HEAD SLOWLY AGAINST BRICK WALL. THIS IS UNSATISFACTORY. GOES OUT AND FINDS granite WALL. BEATS HEAD AGAINST IT. MUCH BETTER!
We're the internet here, and if this hacker gets found, make an example of him.. he should be in deep debt for the rest of his life. THAT'll scare these script idiots...
You're assuming that the DDoS is being run by a script kiddy. But if the script kiddy is in the employ of a Romanian mafiosa gang who're trying to extort a couple of million of protection money from Joker (or a Joker client)... oh, there's someone at the door for you. Don't answer that call!
Load a moderately complex document, get NullPointerException. Load a less complex document, get NullPointerException. Load an even less complex document (the table of contents from the manual in question. You think I'm going to trust a client's confidential data to the web!??), get the application to admit being unable to open the document.
Move on to next story. Will come back in a month or two.
Any commercial Internet site or online service that "has as its principal or primary business the making available of material that is harmful to minors" would
Err, so that would be where you "corral" sites advocating critical thinking (since it's lethal to one's career prospects) while you put the materials promoting a healthy attitude to sex into the corresponding ".health" domain. Right.
Oh, this is an American law isn't it. No need to worry agbout it then.
When I was last in exams, for work not for trivial stuff like degrees, passing grade was C, like it had been all my life. Less than half marks, no pass. KISS.
For certain product categories, it has to be some of the most effective advertising available, I take it this means that you've, errr, succumbed to the evil advertising genius of the Slashdot mafiosi then. What did you buy?
[MAXIMS, with elements of truth]
There's no such thing as BAD publicity.
There's no good advert like a satisfied customer.
and, the scary corollary that could make Slashdont the worst advertising medium in the world...
There's no bad advert like a dissatisfied sustomer.
With Slashdot being (at most) lightly moderated, the prospect of getting bad reviews from people with real experiences should be enough to give any intelligent marketing 'droid the dry heavings.
Yeah, I know : "Intelligent marketing 'droid" = "contradiction in terms".
When I was in college, I bartended. I could have easily written down every credit card number that was handed to me....
Strange... in the 20-odd (sometimes very odd) years I've been drinking in bars, and in the hundreds of bars and 11 countries I've drunk in, I've never yet once noticed someone paying with a credit card. Correction - 12 countries - I forgot I'd been to America for a couple of weeks too. Cash, on the nail, when you place your order, has always been the deal. It's faster and it removes the possibility of the customer getting hammered and then not paying up.
Buying meals in pubs - yes, plastic is common there. In those places that serve food. But not at the bar.
To quote a colleague, way back when, before I got a credit card myself (actually for the trip to America, as it happens), "Beer is just about the only thing I use cash for these days."
There was never a problem with global warming, pollution, or any of this stuff until we fell in love with cars. There were plenty of problems with pollution long before there were cars. Just as a for-instance, the Romans had a sufficiently intense lead mining industry that the atmospheric pollution of lead dust they produced can be seen in the ice layers in Greenland. The surface pollution they produced is less well known because their mining areas tend to have been re-used for millennia afterwards, so the pollution has been blamed on more recent people.
Back in the early days of America, people got around by horse. Horses fart and shit all the time, even when you're not using them to go anywhere. The point about cows (well, bullocks for hauling wagons), horses etc for transport is that the CO2, CH4, etc that they produce is from plants that grew (from atmospheric CO2) in the last year or two. Cars by contrast (and steam engines etc.) use "fossil fuels", so called because they are made with carbon that was last in the atmosphere tens of millions of years ago, at the most recent (for the North Sea, more like 130 million years; for West Siberian oil 150 to 130 million; for Arabian oil it varies from under 100 million to over 350 million... ). But that old carbon is being put into the present day atmosphere, increasing the total carbon content in the atmosphere. If we could produce a hydrocarbon fuel from last years crops - say "biodiesel" of some sort - then it would be more-or-less carbon-neutral. There would still be very real issues of the energetic cost of manufacturing the cars, local atmospheric issues (smog etc.), overcrowding of the roads...
Why didn't we have global warming in 1885? Who says that we didn't? Proving it to anyone's satisfaction (let alone a SUV-driving moron) is another question.
On the other hand - the mammals didn't originate from nothing 65 million years ago, but they were at the time more adaptable than the reptiles.
No one in the subject has claimed that for I-don't-know-how-long. Fossil mammals have been known from Creataceous, Jurassic and Triassic deposits for years. But they've mostly been small fossils, implying small animals. Actually, one of the commonest types of fossil has been teeth, for the taphonomic reasons you give: Unfortunately - small dead animals are likely to dissolve completely or have been eaten to the very last piece. This means that finding small fossilized animals will help us to understand the evolution better - so start digging!
The enamel of teeth survives the slings and arrows of acid soils and digestive juices much better than most bones. Unfortunately, teeth alone do not give a very good understanding of the whole organism.
Without any sort of accountability, why should companies care?
Legal accountability is not the only sort of accountability. This company (whoever they are - I'm not in America and I'm not a student and I don't need a loan, so I've no interest in even finding out who they are) is going to have to spend a lot on PR to try to counteract the bad publicity they'll get from this. Words like "spend" don't go down very well with the accountants, so they'll make sure that someone suffers.
Why would the joke be on me? It's my wife who's made a genetic investment in the future (with some guy I've never met, nor am I ever likely to). She's trying to persuade me to risk someone else's life, but she's not making much progress on even getting me to the urologist.
I saw the whole of the problem when I learned how to do the maths of exponentials. Unfortunately, most people can't (or won't) do the basic maths, or interpret the results in personal terms.
To them I say.. its useless. Your puny little voices will not be heard. The only way to stop global warming were for the people of the world to collectively reduce their usage of energy and lower their standard of living. Its not happening. It simply is not going to happen.
Of course it's not going to happen. People will continue to pollute their environments (and of course, everyone elses' environment at the same time). After all, they won't pay the whole price of their actions - most of the price will be paid by their children. And of course, by the children of people in countries with lower incomes and lower altitudes. But that's alright - suffering in a distant place isn't important in our coccooned western world.
You go ahead and punish your children. It's definitely their fault.
If you look at hunter/gatherers, their reproduction patterns are like modern nuclear families. A woman might have 3-4 children.... which is something that's got to change if Homo sapiens is to survive for any significant period into the future. (I'm a geologist - I don't worry unduly about time periods less than a millennium or several.) As it is, my bet would be that we're already a number of gigadeaths on the wrong side of sustainable numbers.
And before anyone accuses me of being a doom-mongering tree-hugger, I'm actually a doom-mongering oilfield geologist. Sorry to disturb your stereotypes.
Why aren't board-level manufacturers producing...
on
The Great HDCP Fiasco
·
· Score: 1
... HDCP-enabled cards for the retail market yet.... probably because they want to sell one design around the world, and they think that not all parts of the world will require HDCP in the same way that the US will, so they're hanging back from producing US-only designs. They also probably fear getting caught up in someone else's train-wreck (DRM in general) and getting the blame for it.
Me... I'm contemplating having to get something newer than my VooDoo3, because the playback of the DVDs that I author from my own video footage, is pretty rough without hardware MPEG decoding. That's the sort of thing that will be scareing the video and TV manufacturers shitless.
J.K Rowling merely has been granted an exclusive (but temporary) lease by the U.S Government.
Errr, I think you'll find that she was granted an exclusive but temporary license by the British Government (under an agreement signed in Berne? with multi-national effects).
This misunderstanding seems to be me likely to be a large part of the reason for this "outrageous" hole in the DRM toolchain. I'm just scrolling the Slashdottery to see if anyone else makes the point, so look for another comment by me in this thread.
After about 3-4 "tags" the cops can pull them over and give them a "asshole" ticket. Even better would be if these tags had a memory in them that recorded the time and GPS coordinates of the event you tagged them for. Maybe even allow selection of event types such as speeding, reckless driving, drunk driving, blocking traffic, too slow, etc.
Hmmm, there's the kernel of a good idea in there, but with problems. Someone else mentioned (and was modded up for) pointing out that fast/ flashy/ offensive cars might well become targets simply because they're fast/ flashy/ offensive. So a simple "tag count" metric might not work too well.
However... GPS + memory + battery + glue in a package that's cheap enough to throw away if you're moderately pissed off has some interesting implications. Since GPS includes technologically "for free" highly accurate time keeping, then a device that sticks to the car and simply records position and time every couple of seconds for [function of battery and memory size] would record the time and place of the vehicle's every speeding violation (over- and under- speed), as well as high accelerations and decelerations (accidents, crashes, or cut-ups ? ; general moving traffic violations). And of course, since it's outside the vehicle and evidently not the proporty of the driver, then there shouldn't be any legal objection to the police retrieving the "lost property" and reading it to establish the owner...
[Scene : asshole in car is pulled over for some asshole-like behavior.]
Policeman : "Engine off, keys out, show me your paper work!" (different countries, different paperwork)... "Got to do a vehicle check over the radio. Oh, and by the way, someone has stuck a tracker on you. While I check the vehicle for defects, on the probable cause of your asshole-like behaviour 5 minutes ago, my colleague is going to read the tracker. [10 minutes later] Policeman : "OK, asshole. You've one tyre which is marginal road-legal, so we're going to ticket you for that. Your behaviour on the road this afternoon has been highly reprehensible, and we're going to caution you for that. But the tracker you've been carrying for the last week indicates you jumped 3 red lights, were speeding on this that and the-other occasions, so we're going to book you for that. AND you violently decelerated at the same time and place as a granny was hit-and-run at closing time last Friday. So on the basis of that, ASSUME THE POSITION, ASSHOLE."
The one thing not mentioned so far is... how are the cops going to know the "tracker" is there? And will they be able to read it? Open standards needed there, and a modicum of wireless? But that would make it easy to "sweep" your vehicle if you plan to be an asshole this evening. Interesting ideas, but they would need a lot more thinking out. Probably it would be easier to mandate the installation of a police-readable GPS in all new cars, then arrest everyone in an old car for not carrying proof of their good driving.
If they are just trying these techniques now, then paleontologists need to start visiting with other departments. The sciences have evolved so much over they last 20 years that in order to do any real work you have to associate with people outside your discipline.
You're missing the point that most fossils are almost opaque.
Laser Scanning Confocal Microscopy improves your Z resolution by eliminating light from above and below the plane of focus. This helps in thick biological samples. Usually you can only image up to 300 microns into a sample (sometimes up to 700 depending on objective and wavelength).
A standard geological thin section is 30 microns thick. Also, standard optical microscopy (for geological purposes) rarely goes much above 500 diameters. On the rare occasions that you need to go down to finer structures, you might as well go for SEM or ion microprobes (to combine microscopy with chemical data), which are totally different preparation techniques.
There's a big difference between inspection of an engineered material to verify that it's as-designed and the study of a natural material whose composition, history and structure you don't know yet. One of the requirements of optical geological microscopy that the biological microscopist doesn't have to contend with is that their materials are of more-or-less uniform composition (dirty dishwater) and optical properties (isotropic), while a lot of the composition and structure of a geological sample can be read or interpreted under plane-polarised light, with more details of the composition coming from crossed-polars and convergent polarised light. Geology students (mostly) hate the compulsory several hundred hours of optics theory and microscopy practice, because it's hard work.
Totally neglected in the calcuation is the choking cloud of CO2 and nitrogen at 100 atmospheres pressure measured on the surface, which traps the energy quite nicely.
... Yes, these important parameters are totally neglected. Which is something that the original poster stated, and which I read.
The context in which I was thinking "Ohh, useful" was of designing SF worlds, so getting a ballpark figure is perfectly fine for me. If I can get a world to within reasonable reach of the latent heat of fusion of water, then I can posit a set of Earth-like tectono-climatic interplays and a broadly Earth-like (as opposed to Venusian, Martian or Titanic) climate.
That's useful, thanks. Just playing around with some different values, for that "earth-like planet" reported a couple of days ago around an M-type star. Ball park figures give
It was hard getting the list down to ten, but we did; here's the top ten: *enumerating 12 items*
It was indeed pretty hard, so hard that the editor couldn't resist the temptation to slip 12 in there! It's inverse decimalisation : 12 of the old items equals 1.2 of the new decimalised "long" Items.
(Idea stolen from Flanders & Swann http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flanders_and_Swann , but old long before then. But that's probably before the parents of most Slashdotters were born, let alone the Slashdotties themselves.)
It would seem not. Oh well - I've a few hours to kill before I lose connectivity, so I'll d/l direct. But a BitTorrent would be a good idea. (And no, I don't have the facilities to do it myself ; see "lose connectivity" above.).
An aspect of this case that I've not seen mentioned in the commentary is that the student in question was required to give his State Security Number (some form of American national ID code? Is it what you get put on your passports... no hang on, that wouldn't work because most of you don't have passports. Whatever.) in order to make a request through the university's Inter-Library Loans system.
Things may have changed since I was a student, but way back then, ILL was only available to registered students (FT or PT didn't matter), and the only ID that was needed was to write down the 16 digits of your matriculation number, sign the form, and pay the money (IIRC £2.50 - over two pints of beer worth!). After all, we all know the difficulty students have remembering 4-digit numbers like the "09:00" in the phrase "the lecture starts at 09:00", so the chances of one student knowing another student's matriculation number were... well, I can't remember it ever happening. There's absolutely no need for the university to have gone outside it's own private identification system in offering this private service (ILL). -- I am not a number! I am a Free Man!! From 'The Collected Thoughts of No. 6'
(Before the Yanks knee-jerk : I do know what "SSN" means in American English - I'm deliberately misconstruing the acronym to reflect the changing use to which this UPI is being put.)
I contacted his webhost, who are a bunch of Russian guys living in London... draw your own conclusions:-)
OK, I'm drawing conclusions... these are people who I'd maybe like to marry?
I'm married to a Russian lady, living in Britain, and I find your attitude to be fucking racist. I get enough of that shit from my government, particularly the Department of Racism and Bigotry (otherwise known as the Immigration And Naturalisation Department).
I hope you meet and fall in love with a foreigner, so that you too can have the years of stress it entails.
I don't see the speed of reaction (growth) of these prokaryotes addressed anywhere in the cited article (or in the original PLoS article, but IANABiologist, so I could have missed it). Which does beg the question of whether these bugs can chew CO (or any of the other substrates that the PLoS article suggests the prokaryote may be able to subsist on) at a rate that's likely to be industrially interesting.
Why oh why do people, who feel they have somethin to tell that involves references to species ALWAYS abbreviate the generic name? How the hell is anybody to guess WTF things like 'E. coli', 'D. radiourans' I do know the feeling. Correct form is that the first time in an item, you quote the full binomial designation, and in later mentions of that organism, you abbreviate the generic name. It makes the paper easier to write and easier to read. If there are multiple organisms mentioned in the work with possible ambiguity in the abbreviated forms, then you might use two-lettered abbreviations, or a whole syllable. If a writer quoting a formal press release (or for that matter, reading one) can't get their head round this to produce something like "C.[Carboxydothermus] hydrogenoformans" when they're quoting snippets, then they don't deserve the extra 3% on their pay check for being a "science" writer.
Slashdot Mirror
FTFA : Case in point: One guy I contacted to tell him his site was serving up this exploit code went to check his home page and then told me his browser just crashed on him. I had to ask: "Don't tell me you just visited the site in IE?" He had. I could only shake my head and sigh.
BEATS HEAD SLOWLY AGAINST BRICK WALL.
THIS IS UNSATISFACTORY.
GOES OUT AND FINDS granite WALL.
BEATS HEAD AGAINST IT.
MUCH BETTER!
We're the internet here, and if this hacker gets found, make an example of him.. he should be in deep debt for the rest of his life. THAT'll scare these script idiots...
... oh, there's someone at the door for you. Don't answer that call!
You're assuming that the DDoS is being run by a script kiddy. But if the script kiddy is in the employ of a Romanian mafiosa gang who're trying to extort a couple of million of protection money from Joker (or a Joker client)
Load a moderately complex document, get NullPointerException.
Load a less complex document, get NullPointerException.
Load an even less complex document (the table of contents from the manual in question. You think I'm going to trust a client's confidential data to the web!??), get the application to admit being unable to open the document.
Move on to next story. Will come back in a month or two.
Any commercial Internet site or online service that "has as its principal or primary business the making available of material that is harmful to minors" would
Err, so that would be where you "corral" sites advocating critical thinking (since it's lethal to one's career prospects) while you put the materials promoting a healthy attitude to sex into the corresponding ".health" domain.
Right.
Oh, this is an American law isn't it. No need to worry agbout it then.
When I was last in exams, for work not for trivial stuff like degrees, passing grade was C, like it had been all my life. Less than half marks, no pass. KISS.
For certain product categories, it has to be some of the most effective advertising available,
...
I take it this means that you've, errr, succumbed to the evil advertising genius of the Slashdot mafiosi then. What did you buy?
[MAXIMS, with elements of truth]
There's no such thing as BAD publicity.
There's no good advert like a satisfied customer.
and, the scary corollary that could make Slashdont the worst advertising medium in the world
There's no bad advert like a dissatisfied sustomer.
With Slashdot being (at most) lightly moderated, the prospect of getting bad reviews from people with real experiences should be enough to give any intelligent marketing 'droid the dry heavings.
Yeah, I know : "Intelligent marketing 'droid" = "contradiction in terms".
When I was in college, I bartended. I could have easily written down every credit card number that was handed to me....
... in the 20-odd (sometimes very odd) years I've been drinking in bars, and in the hundreds of bars and 11 countries I've drunk in, I've never yet once noticed someone paying with a credit card. Correction - 12 countries - I forgot I'd been to America for a couple of weeks too.
Strange
Cash, on the nail, when you place your order, has always been the deal. It's faster and it removes the possibility of the customer getting hammered and then not paying up.
Buying meals in pubs - yes, plastic is common there. In those places that serve food. But not at the bar.
To quote a colleague, way back when, before I got a credit card myself (actually for the trip to America, as it happens), "Beer is just about the only thing I use cash for these days."
There was never a problem with global warming, pollution, or any of this stuff until we fell in love with cars.
... ). But that old carbon is being put into the present day atmosphere, increasing the total carbon content in the atmosphere. ...
There were plenty of problems with pollution long before there were cars. Just as a for-instance, the Romans had a sufficiently intense lead mining industry that the atmospheric pollution of lead dust they produced can be seen in the ice layers in Greenland. The surface pollution they produced is less well known because their mining areas tend to have been re-used for millennia afterwards, so the pollution has been blamed on more recent people.
Back in the early days of America, people got around by horse. Horses fart and shit all the time, even when you're not using them to go anywhere.
The point about cows (well, bullocks for hauling wagons), horses etc for transport is that the CO2, CH4, etc that they produce is from plants that grew (from atmospheric CO2) in the last year or two. Cars by contrast (and steam engines etc.) use "fossil fuels", so called because they are made with carbon that was last in the atmosphere tens of millions of years ago, at the most recent (for the North Sea, more like 130 million years; for West Siberian oil 150 to 130 million; for Arabian oil it varies from under 100 million to over 350 million
If we could produce a hydrocarbon fuel from last years crops - say "biodiesel" of some sort - then it would be more-or-less carbon-neutral. There would still be very real issues of the energetic cost of manufacturing the cars, local atmospheric issues (smog etc.), overcrowding of the roads
Why didn't we have global warming in 1885?
Who says that we didn't? Proving it to anyone's satisfaction (let alone a SUV-driving moron) is another question.
On the other hand - the mammals didn't originate from nothing 65 million years ago, but they were at the time more adaptable than the reptiles.
No one in the subject has claimed that for I-don't-know-how-long. Fossil mammals have been known from Creataceous, Jurassic and Triassic deposits for years. But they've mostly been small fossils, implying small animals. Actually, one of the commonest types of fossil has been teeth, for the taphonomic reasons you give:
Unfortunately - small dead animals are likely to dissolve completely or have been eaten to the very last piece. This means that finding small fossilized animals will help us to understand the evolution better - so start digging!
The enamel of teeth survives the slings and arrows of acid soils and digestive juices much better than most bones. Unfortunately, teeth alone do not give a very good understanding of the whole organism.
Without any sort of accountability, why should companies care?
Legal accountability is not the only sort of accountability. This company (whoever they are - I'm not in America and I'm not a student and I don't need a loan, so I've no interest in even finding out who they are) is going to have to spend a lot on PR to try to counteract the bad publicity they'll get from this. Words like "spend" don't go down very well with the accountants, so they'll make sure that someone suffers.
Why would the joke be on me? It's my wife who's made a genetic investment in the future (with some guy I've never met, nor am I ever likely to). She's trying to persuade me to risk someone else's life, but she's not making much progress on even getting me to the urologist.
I saw the whole of the problem when I learned how to do the maths of exponentials. Unfortunately, most people can't (or won't) do the basic maths, or interpret the results in personal terms.
To them I say.. its useless. Your puny little voices will not be heard. The only way to stop global warming were for the people of the world to collectively reduce their usage of energy and lower their standard of living. Its not happening. It simply is not going to happen.
Of course it's not going to happen. People will continue to pollute their environments (and of course, everyone elses' environment at the same time). After all, they won't pay the whole price of their actions - most of the price will be paid by their children. And of course, by the children of people in countries with lower incomes and lower altitudes. But that's alright - suffering in a distant place isn't important in our coccooned western world.
You go ahead and punish your children. It's definitely their fault.
And before anyone accuses me of being a doom-mongering tree-hugger, I'm actually a doom-mongering oilfield geologist. Sorry to disturb your stereotypes.
... HDCP-enabled cards for the retail market yet. ... probably because they want to sell one design around the world, and they think that not all parts of the world will require HDCP in the same way that the US will, so they're hanging back from producing US-only designs.
... I'm contemplating having to get something newer than my VooDoo3, because the playback of the DVDs that I author from my own video footage, is pretty rough without hardware MPEG decoding. That's the sort of thing that will be scareing the video and TV manufacturers shitless.
They also probably fear getting caught up in someone else's train-wreck (DRM in general) and getting the blame for it.
Me
J.K Rowling merely has been granted an exclusive (but temporary) lease by the U.S Government.
Errr, I think you'll find that she was granted an exclusive but temporary license by the British Government (under an agreement signed in Berne? with multi-national effects).
This misunderstanding seems to be me likely to be a large part of the reason for this "outrageous" hole in the DRM toolchain. I'm just scrolling the Slashdottery to see if anyone else makes the point, so look for another comment by me in this thread.
After about 3-4 "tags" the cops can pull them over and give them a "asshole" ticket. Even better would be if these tags had a memory in them that recorded the time and GPS coordinates of the event you tagged them for. Maybe even allow selection of event types such as speeding, reckless driving, drunk driving, blocking traffic, too slow, etc. ... GPS + memory + battery + glue in a package that's cheap enough to throw away if you're moderately pissed off has some interesting implications. Since GPS includes technologically "for free" highly accurate time keeping, then a device that sticks to the car and simply records position and time every couple of seconds for [function of battery and memory size] would record the time and place of the vehicle's every speeding violation (over- and under- speed), as well as high accelerations and decelerations (accidents, crashes, or cut-ups ? ; general moving traffic violations). And of course, since it's outside the vehicle and evidently not the proporty of the driver, then there shouldn't be any legal objection to the police retrieving the "lost property" and reading it to establish the owner ...
... "Got to do a vehicle check over the radio. Oh, and by the way, someone has stuck a tracker on you. While I check the vehicle for defects, on the probable cause of your asshole-like behaviour 5 minutes ago, my colleague is going to read the tracker.
... how are the cops going to know the "tracker" is there? And will they be able to read it? Open standards needed there, and a modicum of wireless? But that would make it easy to "sweep" your vehicle if you plan to be an asshole this evening.
Hmmm, there's the kernel of a good idea in there, but with problems. Someone else mentioned (and was modded up for) pointing out that fast/ flashy/ offensive cars might well become targets simply because they're fast/ flashy/ offensive. So a simple "tag count" metric might not work too well.
However
[Scene : asshole in car is pulled over for some asshole-like behavior.]
Policeman : "Engine off, keys out, show me your paper work!" (different countries, different paperwork)
[10 minutes later]
Policeman : "OK, asshole. You've one tyre which is marginal road-legal, so we're going to ticket you for that. Your behaviour on the road this afternoon has been highly reprehensible, and we're going to caution you for that. But the tracker you've been carrying for the last week indicates you jumped 3 red lights, were speeding on this that and the-other occasions, so we're going to book you for that. AND you violently decelerated at the same time and place as a granny was hit-and-run at closing time last Friday. So on the basis of that, ASSUME THE POSITION, ASSHOLE."
The one thing not mentioned so far is
Interesting ideas, but they would need a lot more thinking out. Probably it would be easier to mandate the installation of a police-readable GPS in all new cars, then arrest everyone in an old car for not carrying proof of their good driving.
If they are just trying these techniques now, then paleontologists need to start visiting with other departments. The sciences have evolved so much over they last 20 years that in order to do any real work you have to associate with people outside your discipline.
You're missing the point that most fossils are almost opaque.
Laser Scanning Confocal Microscopy improves your Z resolution by eliminating light from above and below the plane of focus. This helps in thick biological samples. Usually you can only image up to 300 microns into a sample (sometimes up to 700 depending on objective and wavelength).
A standard geological thin section is 30 microns thick. Also, standard optical microscopy (for geological purposes) rarely goes much above 500 diameters. On the rare occasions that you need to go down to finer structures, you might as well go for SEM or ion microprobes (to combine microscopy with chemical data), which are totally different preparation techniques.
There's a big difference between inspection of an engineered material to verify that it's as-designed and the study of a natural material whose composition, history and structure you don't know yet. One of the requirements of optical geological microscopy that the biological microscopist doesn't have to contend with is that their materials are of more-or-less uniform composition (dirty dishwater) and optical properties (isotropic), while a lot of the composition and structure of a geological sample can be read or interpreted under plane-polarised light, with more details of the composition coming from crossed-polars and convergent polarised light.
Geology students (mostly) hate the compulsory several hundred hours of optics theory and microscopy practice, because it's hard work.
Totally neglected in the calcuation is the choking cloud of CO2 and nitrogen at 100 atmospheres pressure measured on the surface, which traps the energy quite nicely.
... Yes, these important parameters are totally neglected. Which is something that the original poster stated, and which I read.
The context in which I was thinking "Ohh, useful" was of designing SF worlds, so getting a ballpark figure is perfectly fine for me. If I can get a world to within reasonable reach of the latent heat of fusion of water, then I can posit a set of Earth-like tectono-climatic interplays and a broadly Earth-like (as opposed to Venusian, Martian or Titanic) climate.
That's useful, thanks.
... which is in the right ball park for what was reported for that planet - around 220 degrees below zero (for the popular press).
Just playing around with some different values, for that "earth-like planet" reported a couple of days ago around an M-type star. Ball park figures give
Temp.Primary 3,000.00
Rad.Primary 400,000.00
Sat.Albedo 0.36
Sat.Range 375,000,000.00
Satellite Surface temperature (K) 61.97
Very handy - that goes into my "useful calculations" file.
It was hard getting the list down to ten, but we did; here's the top ten: *enumerating 12 items*
It was indeed pretty hard, so hard that the editor couldn't resist the temptation to slip 12 in there!
It's inverse decimalisation : 12 of the old items equals 1.2 of the new decimalised "long" Items.
(Idea stolen from Flanders & Swann http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flanders_and_Swann , but old long before then. But that's probably before the parents of most Slashdotters were born, let alone the Slashdotties themselves.)
It would seem not. Oh well - I've a few hours to kill before I lose connectivity, so I'll d/l direct. But a BitTorrent would be a good idea. (And no, I don't have the facilities to do it myself ; see "lose connectivity" above.).
An aspect of this case that I've not seen mentioned in the commentary is that the student in question was required to give his State Security Number (some form of American national ID code? Is it what you get put on your passports
Things may have changed since I was a student, but way back then, ILL was only available to registered students (FT or PT didn't matter), and the only ID that was needed was to write down the 16 digits of your matriculation number, sign the form, and pay the money (IIRC £2.50 - over two pints of beer worth!). After all, we all know the difficulty students have remembering 4-digit numbers like the "09:00" in the phrase "the lecture starts at 09:00", so the chances of one student knowing another student's matriculation number were
--
I am not a number! I am a Free Man!!
From 'The Collected Thoughts of No. 6'
(Before the Yanks knee-jerk : I do know what "SSN" means in American English - I'm deliberately misconstruing the acronym to reflect the changing use to which this UPI is being put.)
I contacted his webhost, who are a bunch of Russian guys living in London... draw your own conclusions :-)
... these are people who I'd maybe like to marry?
OK, I'm drawing conclusions
I'm married to a Russian lady, living in Britain, and I find your attitude to be fucking racist. I get enough of that shit from my government, particularly the Department of Racism and Bigotry (otherwise known as the Immigration And Naturalisation Department).
I hope you meet and fall in love with a foreigner, so that you too can have the years of stress it entails.
I don't see the speed of reaction (growth) of these prokaryotes addressed anywhere in the cited article (or in the original PLoS article, but IANABiologist, so I could have missed it). Which does beg the question of whether these bugs can chew CO (or any of the other substrates that the PLoS article suggests the prokaryote may be able to subsist on) at a rate that's likely to be industrially interesting.
Why oh why do people, who feel they have somethin to tell that involves references to species ALWAYS abbreviate the generic name? How the hell is anybody to guess WTF things like 'E. coli', 'D. radiourans'
I do know the feeling.
Correct form is that the first time in an item, you quote the full binomial designation, and in later mentions of that organism, you abbreviate the generic name. It makes the paper easier to write and easier to read. If there are multiple organisms mentioned in the work with possible ambiguity in the abbreviated forms, then you might use two-lettered abbreviations, or a whole syllable.
If a writer quoting a formal press release (or for that matter, reading one) can't get their head round this to produce something like "C.[Carboxydothermus] hydrogenoformans" when they're quoting snippets, then they don't deserve the extra 3% on their pay check for being a "science" writer.