Inkjets are good for home use only or in LARGE format photo quality printing.
Define "LARGE". Or for that matter, "photo". Our in-house print shop spends all day every day churning out 350mm by 25,000mm line-art-type final product on both paper and archival drafting film. Each print needs to be continuous (yes, we do have a checking system for weighing near-empty media rolls to use them on the shorter printouts. We also have to train people to work in pairs to manipulate the storage rolls when we change media), and occasionally we have to go up to 920mm by 10,000mm when we're doing specials.
Believe me, if you could find a laser printer that can handle drafting film (hint : it's a plastic sheet with a softening point lower than acetate), you would love to give someone else the task of taping together the 800 or so sheets of output from a laser into a strip ready for the copying machine. (BTW, the copiers are analogue. A 19th century process called dyeline.)
Lesson : there are a lot more printing tasks out there than you see in the standard office. If you don't have a maintenance contract which sees the printer manufacturer's engineers in, by booking, every couple of weeks, you're not really in the game.
We would like to see a CIFS system for our big printers. But we don't expect to see it this side of the Big Crunch.
And why do modern boards still have serial and Parralell ports? They aren't used by 75% of the rest of the world, why are they even included as standard on ALL boards?
Firstly, as other people have pointed out, not all motherboards do have serial and/ or parallel ports. Make that doubly-true for laptops.
Secondly, a significant proportion of users (note that word "significant", it's not "many" or "most", and includes "willing to pay") still require those hardware features. I had to do a hard-drive-ectomy a couple of months ago on a works laptop that we use to interface with about $20,000 worth of equipment. The necessary software required a classic parallel port to run it's dongle. No, we don't have time to dig out the source and re-build the security to use a USB dongle. It's easier to keep the old machine working. When the laptop dies, I'll have to bolt an antique desktop into the 55U 19" rack with the rest of the gear and I'll be glad that I left the space there.
"Most" users don't have to deal with that sort of question ; some users do. Those users who do have to deal with those things will pay for the hardware thay consider necessary.
A few years ago now, I had to trawl the Souk in Abu Dhabi to find a working CGA graphics card, because the program's wrote to those specific addresses. Found one; got the system back up and earning $350/day revenue ; earned my $500/day fee. But I'd have been stuffed if the hardware hadn't been available at all.
Thanks to the internet, I can cram the equivalent of a year of study on WWII into about a week of off-hand research.
Many people, including myself, would dispute your use of the word "research" here. In fact the entire phrase "off-hand research" looks pretty suspect.
Would your week of "off-hand research" include spending several years working with a colleague who blew his hand to pieces melting the TNT out of a WWII shell? Or talking to your grandfather one night trying to persuade him to get up to see the Northern Lights, only to find that he saw them last on the Far North convoys? How about the guilty feeling of walking down a street in Siberia and stopping to adjust your shoe laces... then realising you were resting your boot on the town's war memorial. It would have been right if I'd been shot for that.
The clouds parted at Dachau KZ about 20 seconds before the start of totality on 1999-08-11 ; I think it should obligatory for anyone aspiring to the title "civilised human being" to ponder at one of these monuments to uncivilisation. [No excuse for passport-free Americans ; you've got your own KZs where you can ponder.]
If you research something, it becomes part of you. This is not "off-hand".
Then again, I wonder what a t-rex steak tastes like.
Quite likely it'll taste somewhat like chicken. The avian dinosaurs are close cousins to the tyrannosaurid theropods (including T. rex). Actually, since the maniraptorian theropods (slightly closer to the avians than the tyrannosaurs, but not by much) have plenty of species which are more comparable with ostriches in size, then they'd be the more credible targets for dino-burgers.
Trust me, I'm a geologist. (I love it when I get a chance to say that!)
Frankly, I hate the idea of "free" websites with ads. You want to espouse your views? Pay to do so. You can share a server with a bunch of folks for a pittance a month. I don't have a problem with the first part of this, but I meet a lot of kooks who would be incredibly disturbed by the second part. How are you expected to rant on about how the black helicopters are turning everyone against you if you actually have to
find people who are not against you and
join with them to put up a website about how (almost) everyone is against you (and your group of friends).
You see, the qualifications totally destroy the effects of your rant. Where would the Internet be without it's free speech for the ragingly insane sociopaths of the world? Making them socialise to this extent might actually reduce the regular diet of news programs about people going postal. It's a conspiracy, I tell you!
1. Bandwidth hungry (Bad for the many people still on Dail Up) 2. Allows for the most annoying of Advertising gimmics 3. Disabled unfriendly, as screen readers for the blind can't read flash. 4. Google and most (all?) search engines don't do flash either.
and now:
5. Allows for privacy invasion.
But it's still
0. Not installed on my system.
Q. What's the point of Flash? A. Making money for Macromedia.
I occasionally get links from/. and other places that go to Flash-only pages. I move on. Life is too short. If someone's got a point to make and they can't do it in writing, then I can't be bothered reading it. They'll need to do comparable amounts of writing (typing/ mousing) to express themselves in Flash (or any other image technology), so WTF not provide the text too?
I suppose that artists might wish to present their "completed conception" without justification or intermediate developmental steps. That's alright - I don't go to the Art Gallery either.
If a house is broken into, they have an instant record of every car that's been into the neighborhood.
Terrrible thing, forcing burglars to walk to work. Or to steal a car to drive to their work. Shocking!
How about speeding tickets? If you go from one mile marker to the next in less than 60 seconds, you're going more than 60 miles per hour.
I am informed that this is already being done in Britain using camera pairs, image processing, and central computing to read the license plates of cars in real time. There was an article about it in a newspaper I was reading on the plane home from work last night, but I didn't notice the paper's name. (Tabloid, tits on page 3, that doesn't restrict the field very much.) The article said that "the government" (not clear which one, Britain or Scotland?) had purchased several hundred pairs. The numbers would suggest that it's a Britain-wide thing, not a Scottish-only thing.
Do you own a car? If so then you are part of the automotive infrastructure of whatever state/country you live in. What would you say if a government agency unilaterally required that all members of the automotive infrastructure post their name, address and telephone number in big bold letters on all their vehicles? That way all the other members of the automotive infrastructure can clearly see your identity so that if/when you cause problems, you can be contacted. Sound good to you?
Well, you know, it does sound kind-of good. Just imagine how those "cops chasing crack-head driver" videos will change... the helicopter cuts away from the chase to film the smashing down of the door of the driver's house, the extraction of any living people in the building followed by it's bulldozing. That would deal with the responsible proportion of the crack-head drivers of the world. The less responsible ones... in the words of Niven and Pournelle "Just Think Of It As Evolution In Action".
Personally, I'd add another piece of data to what you have to write on the car - the date of your last and next driving tests. About 5 years apart.
Yep, you heard correctly - your driving license requires passing the driving test every 5 years. Now there's radical. (You'd have to add a provision that your car is immobilised before you get into the test centre's vehicle to be re-examined. Can't allow failed drivers on the road without an instructor.)
Back to the original point though... why should the administrator/ owner of a domain be anonymous? You're standing up in public shouting what you're opinions are. So you ought to be willing to defend your opinions publically. If that means that you have a gun-toting god-squadder come round and put a cap in your less-than-reverential non-god-fearing ass, then equally that exposes the gun-toting god-squadders to a drive-by shooting or two on their own. Just roll that frag grenade down the aisle next holy-day and improve humanity immesurably.
(Bloody septics with their guns and gods and cars. We should have shot them instead of transporting the deviants.)
I may be misunderstanding this, but leaving aside the legal niceties of where the CherryOS people are getting the code they sell from, isn't the strong implication of their advertising that they're encouraging people to illegally use Apple's OS (in various flavours?). So isn't this a clear encouragement to the legal team at Apple to be picking up a clue-by-four and hiking over to Maui?
I doubt that the PearPC people really need to do any karma-whoring amongst the computerati (a PowerPC emulator is a worthwhile concept in itself), but corporate PR departments should always be on the lookout for places where they can line up some good PR.
Why would life on mars necessarily be DNA-based, and why would protiens and lipids nessarily evolve if life evolves? Certainly, other methods of reproduction may have evolved.
The markers that were sprayed to be illuminated with the UV source were chosen with detection of DNA etc specifically in mind, but the approach is more general. Since Mars has a (slightly) oxidising atmosphere (from photolytic dissociation of water in the upper atmosphere), then the successful detection of any appreciable quantity of organic compounds should be considered highly suspicious, and the detection of something complex (lipids, sugars?) would be even better. So a dye that fluoresces on combination with a lipid backbone in a molecule, or a sugar-like molecule would be one of the materials sent on a real mission. It's a proof of concept, not a final design.
Coming up with a broad definition of what is and what is not "life" is surprisingly tricky. Outside Star Trek, no one seriously believes that a "life" would be based on anything other than carbon (even if it were possible with something else, at temperatures that are credible, carbon based life would probably get started first), and the simplest way of building a cell wall is with lipids, so they're a pretty good thing to target in this sort of search.
More generally, life requires chemical disequilibria. That's what makes the recently reported patchy distribution of methane on Mars very interesting.
IANA Biologist either. But as a geologist I've been very interested in the origin of life for many years. These are not new discussions.
Bugger - must have hit the AC checkbox without noticing it. That's me with the.RU address. I was working there as a RockDoctor. Oh, bowdlerise this silly 2 minute rule!
No. Would I pay zero for a song? No. Would I download a song if it were free? No.
I gave up wasting my time with music (in the loose sense as practised in the late 80s) in the late 80s, and from the lot I've been subjected to since, I see no reason to waste my money on the shite again.
Are you saying that you're routinely visited by guys to check if you have a TV license?!? For air broadcast?!?!?!? Yes. What kind of law allows that?!? Wireless Telegraphy Act, 1948. (Or was it '49?) In my country you need a judge to order it. Nobody can enter your house if you do not give your permission (or have a judge order to do so).
Same in this country (some caveats for "hot pursuit", "public danger" like fires).
What actually happens is that employees of a private company with access to the database of people who have paid for a TV license will turn up on your doorstep if your license goes out of date and "ask" for permission to enter and verify that you don't have and equipment which requires to be licensed. (Note that there is no official consideration that you might not actually have such equipment - that's not something that enters into official thought.) At this point you are perfectly at liberty to say [deep breath]:
"I told you fuckwits 5 fucking years ago that I don't have a license because I don't fucking need one because I don't have any fucking equipment to receive and decode the signals for the crap that you transmit, as described in the Wireless Telegraphy Act 1948. And when your dim-witted masters wrote to tell me that according to their records, I still did not have a license, I wrote back to tell them that there records were correct and for my reasons they'd better read their own fucking records because I fucking explained it to them then and if the crap on the TV had got any better, which it hasn't, then I'd have told them if I thought their fucking product was worth even considering watching. But as for their request to come into my home they can fuck right off and if they do want to fucking search the place they can fucking well go to court and go and get a fucking warrant and come back with it and the police in attendance to ensure that public order is maintained. And if every dot, comma and jottle of the warrent is correct, which my soliciter would verify while they and the police officers stood shivering outside in the driving sleet then they would get the exact minimum of cooperation that was specified by the court so don't expect any light in the house. And in the meantime would you two parasites get your fucking feet off my fucking property immediately and never fucking darken my doorstep again unless you've got the fucking court paperwork and the coppers else you'll find out what tools a mountaineer keeps hanging on the back of his front door for ventilating the calvaria of unwelcome visitors. Don't fucking come back."
Since the normal modus operandii of License Enforcement Officers is to terrorise grannies, they were somewhat taken aback to be identified immediately and responded to firmly by someone who was tapping the back of his door with the ice axe that hangs there (it's good for double-glazing salesmen too). The fact that the rain was hammering down sideways, running off the tips of their sodden noses in continual streams, didn't help them. And when they tried sentence 2 of their standard script ("Could we come in to talk about this?") and received an emphatic refusal and instruction to get their illegal arses off my property before they find out what the Tony Martin School of Hospitality teaches people, they decided to find an easier target.
TV licensing people are not very popular. And they're very, very obvious.
Another friend had a visitation while he was knobbing a whore in his living room. The licensing people hammer on the door; he comes to the door with shirt undone and tadger hanging out: -- "We're the TV people." "Thank fuck - I thought you were her husband!" -- "We'll come back later." They never came back.
What's the difference between that and inspecting your computer to check if you have illegal stuff in it?
so why don't you just move into an apartment, then?
Because it doesn't necessarily work. Years ago when I was flat hunting I had specified to my lawyer to only send me information about places that did not have a garden. Two years after I'd moved in, I got a letter from the council informing me that I was responsible for a considerable area of ground around the flat. The lawyer flatly denied that he had received any instruction about "no gardens", and I didn't have the money to force the lawyer take the shithole of a flat back (it had dropped 20-30% in value by then and was effectively unsaleable). Still stuck there, and probably will be for life.
What's wrong with cutting the grass?
The problem is that the damned stuff won't stay cut, and if I go to work on a different continent for 2 months (a normal occurrence), I would return to a jungle. Local bylaws won't allow me to concrete the place over (I have to maintain "amenity" for the drug dealers in the flat upstairs), so I'm fucked.
Even though it's about half the cost of renting, DO NOT BUY A HOUSE. It's endless grief and even burning the place to the ground won't normally get you away from the hell hole.
... but with him and his baby getting a kicking like that in the respected press, I have this irresistable urge to check my Hotmail account (which predates MS's purchase of them, BTW) and to not click on any adverts there. Mark up a few more spams for reporting, do a few other things to soak up the processor cycles. Increased costs for no increased revenue. Nothing personal, Bill.
There are lots of things in the parent post that I could argue with, but I'll stick to the fields of my professional competence (makes a change for SlashDot ): We could drill out pressure of volcanoes No we couldn't. We don't have the materials to withstand the sustained temperatures. We don't have the drilling fluids that can maintain the necessary properties (in any replies please list the nine basic functions of a drilling fluid as you learned in your drilling engineering course) at the bottom hole conditions necessary. And we don't have rigs that are sufficiently automated to deliberately drill into a "lava blowout" as you seem to be envisaging. I had friends who died in rig fires, and you sure as fuck aren't going to get me working on a suicide job like that.
Minor nit-picks:
some astronomers think that the pre-red giant stage of the Sun might only last another 500 to 1000 million years, and as the Sun's temperature will rise in that time the Earth's habitability may be compromised long before then;
Current human population is closer to 7 billion than it is to 5 billion.
My cheerful expectation is that many people reading this comment will live through times that will see around 4 gigadeaths. That'll put that penny-ante jerk-off Hitler in perspective. My not-so-cheerful expectation is for more like 8 or 9 gigadeaths.
how come my cat isn't smart enough to get a degree?
Your cat is smart enough to get a degree. Unfortunately it has been dumb enough to get staff (you) that won't listen to it's instructions to send in the necessary paperwork. Listen carefully - do you hear the order "Buy me a degree, and use an Ebay-thief's ill-gotten gains to finance it!"
A couple of weeks ago I had a Jessops (own brand) 2000 mAh NiMH (Nickel- Metal Hydride) cell explode in the charger after about 5 hours of a 15 hour charge. Totalled the cell, the charger and made a stain on the recently-painted wall.
As usual, excellent service from Jessops staff - immediate acceptance of there being a problem; replacement of entire cell set (I had brought a pack of 4 cells) and charger) and offer of recompense appopriate to the damage caused (I asked them to send it to a charity of their choice). Jessops are considering a recall, but have already taken the offending stock off their store shelves.
The offending cells can be identified by a WHITE plastic surround to the positive contact; the replacement stock has a BLACK plastic surround to the anode. Take your old stock in for replacement.
TTBOMK, this only applies to Jessops own-brand 2000 mAh NiMH cells. But if you know the manufacturer (the plastic anode surrounds are quite distinctive), then they may have other lines with similar problems. Jessops website
Hmm.. I wonder how long it will be before we're not allowed to take cellphones on planes for fear of them being used as bombs? Err, dude, like I've been banned from taking my mobile to work (on offshore oil production platforms) for, like, six years now, and it's been X-rayed just about every time I've flown (for work; "flying" and "pleasure" are not words I use in the same sentence) since 1996. Why? Well in part because Mossad have been using doctored (and fully functional) mobile phones for assassinations since mobiles became popular. Hell, I worked out how to use a mobile to remotely trigger a bomb last millennium - it's not that difficult. >/dude-speak<
Errr, because not all people who find and submit something interesting have BOTH the technical skills necessary to mirror a site, AND the facilities to do it. So you're proposing to silence the voice of people purely because they lack particular skills, or particular facilities, or both?
(This comment is not mirrored anywhere because I don't know how to do it, and don't have anywhere to do it.)
Any Americans stationed outside the contiguous US are paid-for already. Their votes are superfluous, and may (and will be) discounted. If you can't walk to Washington, you haven't any need to vote. Just bleed.
Or a sound card that doesn't work when Direct3D is initialized.
Errr, as an IT director, what are you doing buying computers for work which include a sound card? OK, let's leave aside uncommon situations like you're working in an audio-creative business, or you've got to support a couple of staff who use speech-engines to render their output - them you'll have to get specialist kit for, substituting the cost of a video card and monitor for the necessary speech synthesis hardware. Outside these relatively rare situations, the only sound output that is actually needed are a small reportiore of beeps to indicate one of a number of error conditions, or possibly (if your users use email for their productivity ) to indicate the arrival of emails. Otherwise... for background muzac there are things called radios (copyright issues? in some countries they're dealt with by on-station advertising, in others they're part of progressive taxation. Swapping of illegal MP3s in the office? Not here, Mr RIAA/ PRS/ Draco, no sound hardware, and a network policy to delete-or-corrupt-in-transit all *.MP3 files.). CD reader-writer on an office machine which is networked? Why would you want one of those - if you need software installed, you need to speak to the HellDesk; if you need to back-up data from your machine,We've told you- ALL files must be stored on the servers. Local storage is a disciplinary offence.
These are business machines, brought for a purpose. They are not personal machines; they are not games machines (maybe you'd want to put a couple of games-capable machines in the tea-shack, with web-connectivity for people to check their hotmail - that's their reasonable personal time), they're not entertainment centres.
I remember seeing a TV review a few years ago of a flat-bed truck (= USA "pick-up"?) from IIRC Lada, being marketed in the west -- one of the reviewers was laughing that this perfectly functional work vehicle had linoleum lining the floor pan - "stupid Russians!"; the other reviewer squelched around on a muddy building site for a bit, getting the car dirty inside, then he took a hose and just hosed the mud out of the vehicle. Tool functional for the job required. Apply the same thinking here.
If you're going to try for a cooling gas, just go the whole hog and go for hydrogen. Boiling point is lower than methane, and the specific thermal conductivity is higher. Plus, it is an absolute bastard to plumb in, so you're practically guaranteed a leak and you can get your bang and flash. Hmmm, maybe helium. Then you can scare the neighbours by saying that you use nuclear decay products in your house. That'll get you a trip to Guantanamo PDQ.
Slashdot Mirror
Define "LARGE". Or for that matter, "photo". Our in-house print shop spends all day every day churning out 350mm by 25,000mm line-art-type final product on both paper and archival drafting film. Each print needs to be continuous (yes, we do have a checking system for weighing near-empty media rolls to use them on the shorter printouts. We also have to train people to work in pairs to manipulate the storage rolls when we change media), and occasionally we have to go up to 920mm by 10,000mm when we're doing specials.
Believe me, if you could find a laser printer that can handle drafting film (hint : it's a plastic sheet with a softening point lower than acetate), you would love to give someone else the task of taping together the 800 or so sheets of output from a laser into a strip ready for the copying machine. (BTW, the copiers are analogue. A 19th century process called dyeline.)
Lesson : there are a lot more printing tasks out there than you see in the standard office. If you don't have a maintenance contract which sees the printer manufacturer's engineers in, by booking, every couple of weeks, you're not really in the game.
We would like to see a CIFS system for our big printers. But we don't expect to see it this side of the Big Crunch.
Yes, it is the same Colin Percival (we swapped emails - I was a PiHex contributor). Interesting guy.
Firstly, as other people have pointed out, not all motherboards do have serial and/ or parallel ports. Make that doubly-true for laptops.
Secondly, a significant proportion of users (note that word "significant", it's not "many" or "most", and includes "willing to pay") still require those hardware features. I had to do a hard-drive-ectomy a couple of months ago on a works laptop that we use to interface with about $20,000 worth of equipment. The necessary software required a classic parallel port to run it's dongle. No, we don't have time to dig out the source and re-build the security to use a USB dongle. It's easier to keep the old machine working. When the laptop dies, I'll have to bolt an antique desktop into the 55U 19" rack with the rest of the gear and I'll be glad that I left the space there.
"Most" users don't have to deal with that sort of question ; some users do. Those users who do have to deal with those things will pay for the hardware thay consider necessary.
A few years ago now, I had to trawl the Souk in Abu Dhabi to find a working CGA graphics card, because the program's wrote to those specific addresses. Found one; got the system back up and earning $350/day revenue ; earned my $500/day fee. But I'd have been stuffed if the hardware hadn't been available at all.
Many people, including myself, would dispute your use of the word "research" here. In fact the entire phrase "off-hand research" looks pretty suspect.
Would your week of "off-hand research" include spending several years working with a colleague who blew his hand to pieces melting the TNT out of a WWII shell? Or talking to your grandfather one night trying to persuade him to get up to see the Northern Lights, only to find that he saw them last on the Far North convoys? How about the guilty feeling of walking down a street in Siberia and stopping to adjust your shoe laces ... then realising you were resting your boot on the town's war memorial. It would have been right if I'd been shot for that.
The clouds parted at Dachau KZ about 20 seconds before the start of totality on 1999-08-11 ; I think it should obligatory for anyone aspiring to the title "civilised human being" to ponder at one of these monuments to uncivilisation. [No excuse for passport-free Americans ; you've got your own KZs where you can ponder.]
If you research something, it becomes part of you. This is not "off-hand".
Quite likely it'll taste somewhat like chicken. The avian dinosaurs are close cousins to the tyrannosaurid theropods (including T. rex). Actually, since the maniraptorian theropods (slightly closer to the avians than the tyrannosaurs, but not by much) have plenty of species which are more comparable with ostriches in size, then they'd be the more credible targets for dino-burgers.
Trust me, I'm a geologist.
(I love it when I get a chance to say that!)
I don't have a problem with the first part of this, but I meet a lot of kooks who would be incredibly disturbed by the second part. How are you expected to rant on about how the black helicopters are turning everyone against you if you actually have to
- find people who are not against you and
- join with them to put up a website about how (almost) everyone is against you (and your group of friends).
You see, the qualifications totally destroy the effects of your rant.Where would the Internet be without it's free speech for the ragingly insane sociopaths of the world? Making them socialise to this extent might actually reduce the regular diet of news programs about people going postal.
It's a conspiracy, I tell you!
1. Bandwidth hungry (Bad for the many people still on Dail Up)
2. Allows for the most annoying of Advertising gimmics
3. Disabled unfriendly, as screen readers for the blind can't read flash.
4. Google and most (all?) search engines don't do flash either.
and now:
5. Allows for privacy invasion.
But it's still
0. Not installed on my system.
Q. What's the point of Flash?
A. Making money for Macromedia.
I occasionally get links from
I suppose that artists might wish to present their "completed conception" without justification or intermediate developmental steps. That's alright - I don't go to the Art Gallery either.
Terrrible thing, forcing burglars to walk to work. Or to steal a car to drive to their work. Shocking!
How about speeding tickets? If you go from one mile marker to the next in less than 60 seconds, you're going more than 60 miles per hour.
I am informed that this is already being done in Britain using camera pairs, image processing, and central computing to read the license plates of cars in real time. There was an article about it in a newspaper I was reading on the plane home from work last night, but I didn't notice the paper's name. (Tabloid, tits on page 3, that doesn't restrict the field very much.) The article said that "the government" (not clear which one, Britain or Scotland?) had purchased several hundred pairs. The numbers would suggest that it's a Britain-wide thing, not a Scottish-only thing.
Must be horrible having a car these days.
Well, you know, it does sound kind-of good. Just imagine how those "cops chasing crack-head driver" videos will change ... the helicopter cuts away from the chase to film the smashing down of the door of the driver's house, the extraction of any living people in the building followed by it's bulldozing. That would deal with the responsible proportion of the crack-head drivers of the world. The less responsible ones ... in the words of Niven and Pournelle "Just Think Of It As Evolution In Action".
Personally, I'd add another piece of data to what you have to write on the car - the date of your last and next driving tests. About 5 years apart.
Yep, you heard correctly - your driving license requires passing the driving test every 5 years. Now there's radical. (You'd have to add a provision that your car is immobilised before you get into the test centre's vehicle to be re-examined. Can't allow failed drivers on the road without an instructor.)
Back to the original point though ... why should the administrator/ owner of a domain be anonymous? You're standing up in public shouting what you're opinions are. So you ought to be willing to defend your opinions publically. If that means that you have a gun-toting god-squadder come round and put a cap in your less-than-reverential non-god-fearing ass, then equally that exposes the gun-toting god-squadders to a drive-by shooting or two on their own. Just roll that frag grenade down the aisle next holy-day and improve humanity immesurably.
(Bloody septics with their guns and gods and cars. We should have shot them instead of transporting the deviants.)
Should I post anonymously? I don't think so.
I doubt that the PearPC people really need to do any karma-whoring amongst the computerati (a PowerPC emulator is a worthwhile concept in itself), but corporate PR departments should always be on the lookout for places where they can line up some good PR.
The markers that were sprayed to be illuminated with the UV source were chosen with detection of DNA etc specifically in mind, but the approach is more general. Since Mars has a (slightly) oxidising atmosphere (from photolytic dissociation of water in the upper atmosphere), then the successful detection of any appreciable quantity of organic compounds should be considered highly suspicious, and the detection of something complex (lipids, sugars?) would be even better. So a dye that fluoresces on combination with a lipid backbone in a molecule, or a sugar-like molecule would be one of the materials sent on a real mission.
It's a proof of concept, not a final design.
Coming up with a broad definition of what is and what is not "life" is surprisingly tricky. Outside Star Trek, no one seriously believes that a "life" would be based on anything other than carbon (even if it were possible with something else, at temperatures that are credible, carbon based life would probably get started first), and the simplest way of building a cell wall is with lipids, so they're a pretty good thing to target in this sort of search.
More generally, life requires chemical disequilibria. That's what makes the recently reported patchy distribution of methane on Mars very interesting.
IANA Biologist either. But as a geologist I've been very interested in the origin of life for many years. These are not new discussions.
Bugger - must have hit the AC checkbox without noticing it. That's me with the .RU address. I was working there as a RockDoctor.
Oh, bowdlerise this silly 2 minute rule!
No.
Would I pay zero for a song? No.
Would I download a song if it were free? No.
I gave up wasting my time with music (in the loose sense as practised in the late 80s) in the late 80s, and from the lot I've been subjected to since, I see no reason to waste my money on the shite again.
Yes.
What kind of law allows that?!?
Wireless Telegraphy Act, 1948. (Or was it '49?)
In my country you need a judge to order it. Nobody can enter your house if you do not give your permission (or have a judge order to do so).
Same in this country (some caveats for "hot pursuit", "public danger" like fires).
What actually happens is that employees of a private company with access to the database of people who have paid for a TV license will turn up on your doorstep if your license goes out of date and "ask" for permission to enter and verify that you don't have and equipment which requires to be licensed. (Note that there is no official consideration that you might not actually have such equipment - that's not something that enters into official thought.) At this point you are perfectly at liberty to say [deep breath]:
Since the normal modus operandii of License Enforcement Officers is to terrorise grannies, they were somewhat taken aback to be identified immediately and responded to firmly by someone who was tapping the back of his door with the ice axe that hangs there (it's good for double-glazing salesmen too). The fact that the rain was hammering down sideways, running off the tips of their sodden noses in continual streams, didn't help them. And when they tried sentence 2 of their standard script ("Could we come in to talk about this?") and received an emphatic refusal and instruction to get their illegal arses off my property before they find out what the Tony Martin School of Hospitality teaches people, they decided to find an easier target.
TV licensing people are not very popular. And they're very, very obvious.
Another friend had a visitation while he was knobbing a whore in his living room. The licensing people hammer on the door; he comes to the door with shirt undone and tadger hanging out:
-- "We're the TV people."
"Thank fuck - I thought you were her husband!"
-- "We'll come back later."
They never came back.
What's the difference between that and inspecting your computer to check if you have illegal stuff in it?
Not a lot.
Because it doesn't necessarily work. Years ago when I was flat hunting I had specified to my lawyer to only send me information about places that did not have a garden. Two years after I'd moved in, I got a letter from the council informing me that I was responsible for a considerable area of ground around the flat. The lawyer flatly denied that he had received any instruction about "no gardens", and I didn't have the money to force the lawyer take the shithole of a flat back (it had dropped 20-30% in value by then and was effectively unsaleable). Still stuck there, and probably will be for life.
What's wrong with cutting the grass?
The problem is that the damned stuff won't stay cut, and if I go to work on a different continent for 2 months (a normal occurrence), I would return to a jungle. Local bylaws won't allow me to concrete the place over (I have to maintain "amenity" for the drug dealers in the flat upstairs), so I'm fucked.
Even though it's about half the cost of renting, DO NOT BUY A HOUSE. It's endless grief and even burning the place to the ground won't normally get you away from the hell hole.
... but with him and his baby getting a kicking like that in the respected press, I have this irresistable urge to check my Hotmail account (which predates MS's purchase of them, BTW) and to not click on any adverts there. Mark up a few more spams for reporting, do a few other things to soak up the processor cycles. Increased costs for no increased revenue. Nothing personal, Bill.
We could drill out pressure of volcanoes
No we couldn't. We don't have the materials to withstand the sustained temperatures. We don't have the drilling fluids that can maintain the necessary properties (in any replies please list the nine basic functions of a drilling fluid as you learned in your drilling engineering course) at the bottom hole conditions necessary. And we don't have rigs that are sufficiently automated to deliberately drill into a "lava blowout" as you seem to be envisaging. I had friends who died in rig fires, and you sure as fuck aren't going to get me working on a suicide job like that.
Minor nit-picks:
My cheerful expectation is that many people reading this comment will live through times that will see around 4 gigadeaths. That'll put that penny-ante jerk-off Hitler in perspective. My not-so-cheerful expectation is for more like 8 or 9 gigadeaths.
Your cat is smart enough to get a degree. Unfortunately it has been dumb enough to get staff (you) that won't listen to it's instructions to send in the necessary paperwork. Listen carefully - do you hear the order "Buy me a degree, and use an Ebay-thief's ill-gotten gains to finance it!"
As usual, excellent service from Jessops staff - immediate acceptance of there being a problem; replacement of entire cell set (I had brought a pack of 4 cells) and charger) and offer of recompense appopriate to the damage caused (I asked them to send it to a charity of their choice). Jessops are considering a recall, but have already taken the offending stock off their store shelves.
The offending cells can be identified by a WHITE plastic surround to the positive contact; the replacement stock has a BLACK plastic surround to the anode. Take your old stock in for replacement.
TTBOMK, this only applies to Jessops own-brand 2000 mAh NiMH cells. But if you know the manufacturer (the plastic anode surrounds are quite distinctive), then they may have other lines with similar problems.
Jessops website
Hmm.. I wonder how long it will be before we're not allowed to take cellphones on planes for fear of them being used as bombs?
Err, dude, like I've been banned from taking my mobile to work (on offshore oil production platforms) for, like, six years now, and it's been X-rayed just about every time I've flown (for work; "flying" and "pleasure" are not words I use in the same sentence) since 1996. Why? Well in part because Mossad have been using doctored (and fully functional) mobile phones for assassinations since mobiles became popular. Hell, I worked out how to use a mobile to remotely trigger a bomb last millennium - it's not that difficult.
>/dude-speak<
Errr, because not all people who find and submit something interesting have BOTH the technical skills necessary to mirror a site, AND the facilities to do it.
So you're proposing to silence the voice of people purely because they lack particular skills, or particular facilities, or both?
(This comment is not mirrored anywhere because I don't know how to do it, and don't have anywhere to do it.)
Any Americans stationed outside the contiguous US are paid-for already. Their votes are superfluous, and may (and will be) discounted. If you can't walk to Washington, you haven't any need to vote. Just bleed.
[SNIP]
Or a sound card that doesn't work when Direct3D is initialized.
... for background muzac there are things called radios (copyright issues? in some countries they're dealt with by on-station advertising, in others they're part of progressive taxation. Swapping of illegal MP3s in the office? Not here, Mr RIAA/ PRS/ Draco, no sound hardware, and a network policy to delete-or-corrupt-in-transit all *.MP3 files.). CD reader-writer on an office machine which is networked? Why would you want one of those - if you need software installed, you need to speak to the HellDesk; if you need to back-up data from your machine,We've told you- ALL files must be stored on the servers. Local storage is a disciplinary offence.
Errr, as an IT director, what are you doing buying computers for work which include a sound card? OK, let's leave aside uncommon situations like you're working in an audio-creative business, or you've got to support a couple of staff who use speech-engines to render their output - them you'll have to get specialist kit for, substituting the cost of a video card and monitor for the necessary speech synthesis hardware. Outside these relatively rare situations, the only sound output that is actually needed are a small reportiore of beeps to indicate one of a number of error conditions, or possibly (if your users use email for their productivity ) to indicate the arrival of emails. Otherwise
These are business machines, brought for a purpose. They are not personal machines; they are not games machines (maybe you'd want to put a couple of games-capable machines in the tea-shack, with web-connectivity for people to check their hotmail - that's their reasonable personal time), they're not entertainment centres.
I remember seeing a TV review a few years ago of a flat-bed truck (= USA "pick-up"?) from IIRC Lada, being marketed in the west -- one of the reviewers was laughing that this perfectly functional work vehicle had linoleum lining the floor pan - "stupid Russians!"; the other reviewer squelched around on a muddy building site for a bit, getting the car dirty inside, then he took a hose and just hosed the mud out of the vehicle. Tool functional for the job required. Apply the same thinking here.
Who on earth are all these people?
I don't see anything in this listing that would even have my *think* about going into the cinema. Straight to DVD release for this one is my guess.
If you're going to try for a cooling gas, just go the whole hog and go for hydrogen. Boiling point is lower than methane, and the specific thermal conductivity is higher. Plus, it is an absolute bastard to plumb in, so you're practically guaranteed a leak and you can get your bang and flash.
Hmmm, maybe helium. Then you can scare the neighbours by saying that you use nuclear decay products in your house. That'll get you a trip to Guantanamo PDQ.