Hey, some of us can remember using Xenix. On Compaq workstations, in 1989 or 1990. And seriously considering buying a personal copy, or a copy of Coherent Unix (from a company called SCO ; remember them?), or maybe Minix (but I couldn't get a floppy from anywhere ; this was 4 years before I got either a phone line, a modem or an Internet connection). Then I heard about this mad Finnish guy...
By the Seven Meaty Balls of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (Sauce Be Upon Them), does no one here know how to speak even rudimentary French?
that picked my curiosity
It's "piqued my interest", from the verb "piquer" meaning "to prick" or "to sting."
And the previous thread had some fool confusing "cache" (an Anglicised term from French meaning a storage area) with "cach-ê-t" (still a French word for "the state of being respected or admired; prestige").
I mean, it's not too much to fucking ask. Just pay fucking attention in school, then fucking well remember it. Simples?
NK is the perfect troll. There are days when I think we should just poke them till they level SK.
You've obviously thought this through far more in the last 30 seconds than I have in the decade that I've been trying to get employment in DPRK. In which case you've got a good explanation why DPRK have changed from wanting to reunite the two Koreas to wanting to destroy one, and from wanting to destroy America to wanting to leave it alone.
Their system will collapse pretty quickly. Their own people will fix it to stop the suffering.
History is not on your side. Most dictatorships, particularly in the Orient, survive for centuries.
"The company sold modified telephones for about 1,500 euros each and used its own servers for the encrypted data traffic," the prosecutors said. "The phones had been modified so that they could not be used to make calls or use the Internet."
The phones had turned up repeatedly in investigations into drug cases, criminal motorcycle gangs, and gangland killings, prosecutors said.
Now, that sounds like someone doing some moderately deep hacking into the OS of the phones.
On the other hand, I'm also reminded of the warnings that went out with the initial releases of PGP about "snake oil", and the bad habit of general computing programmers to believe that they've invented a foolproof method of encryption which in reality is a pile of dreck.
My guess - the police were watching this system carefully, and at some point the operator put out an update with a flaw in either his encryption or his key-handling. Then once they knew they could recover significant amounts of data from the system, then they shut it down. Which would tell us more about the (accused, not convicted) "Danny Manupassa" and his abilities at encryption or key-handling programming, not the main stream of encryption engineering.
Hearing aids cost an average of nearly $2,400 each, or close to $5,000 a pair,
That is insane. The actual cost is more like 1/10th of that.
and Medicare does not pay for them
So - vote for a sane health policy.
nor do most insurers.
And don't buy insurance once you do have a sane health policy.
By the seven meaty balls of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (Sauce be upon Them), have you people learned nothing since you ran away from the mother country?
If you buy shit chargers (for example, proprietary ones made for particular devices, rather than ones designed for industrial use on standard, interchangeable cells) that is likely to be your experience. It's the buying into proprietary systems that is the point. If you can't replace one part of your system with one from a different supplier, you're screwed.
My original pocket computer - which would link by IR to any of my first three mobile phones - would do it's stuff for a month on 2xAA cells. Which I could recharge, or buy at a shop.
buy a new camera still need to buy a new battery as the old doesn't fit or has different voltage.
You have a cart and horse positional re-arrangement issue. Different voltages and current capabilities are put into different "form factors" precisely to prevent connecting a 10V source to a circuit designed to take 3V ; or, to connect a current source with a 0.1 Ohm internal resistance to a current sink with an internal resistance of 0.01 Ohm, and thereby melting it.
Oh yes, individual companies use the same technique to lock you in to their purchases. But that's because they are capitalists wanting to anally rape their customers. Like all good capitalists do.
Cool. I've worked in Tanzania, Gabon and Benin. Gabon I'd probably avoid returning to given a choice, but the others were great. I'm actually looking at a couple of jobs in Tanzania at the moment, if the funding comes off.
I was considering getting into "drones" with a friend a year or so ago (the logic - we could both afford an interesting device at 500 (currency) ; but if we pooled for 1000, we could probably get considerably better / more capable). One thing we discussed then (and almost certainly more relevant today) was the aircraft's internal capabilities. Self-stabilisation ; automatic Return-To-Base (RTB) on battery decline ; pointless tricks like auto-barrel roll. Things like that.
As we were both geologists, one of our interests for use was in examining otherwise inaccessible rock outcrops (quicker than me rigging up ropes for an abseil inspection ; I know my ropes), so things like "RTB on impact" or "controlled crash" self-protection facilities were in our minds.
Soil is a complex and very variable material. Well colour me surprised, not.
Most people who have never had to deal with it underestimate the complexities of soil. I've seen if cost companies... 40 to 50 million dollars in the last decade. Well, I get paid to give advice, not to have attention paid to it. Doesn't fuss me. The other contractors who lost their jobs in the resultant debacle know who red-flagged the issue (me) while the spend was within the contingency budget. After I'd been poo-poohed, but retained, they sunk another 30 million bucks into the project before the soil support fell apart. The initial 10 million, they had contingency for ; 40 million they couldn't cover.
You know, that raises a really interesting question, which I will pose to the professional seismology community as and when I get the opportunity. The question being, "outside the immediate effects of landslides (non-trivial, accepted), is their evidence of damage to trees in active seismic zones?"
There is potential to use tree growth (and tree damage), combined with dendrochronology (dating events by analysis of tree growth rings), as a tool for extending earthquake records beyond the precise knowledge of written history.
Actually, it's not a new technique. E.g. : in the 80s (approx), studies of salt-water killed coastal trees in Cascadia helped to tie down the last large Cascadia earthquake to the winter of 1700, and then tie that to the 26th January from (written) Japanese records of an "Orphan" tsunami.
Even so... yes there is potentially useful data there. What would I do? Using the "jaw-cracker words" in Google (since long words are eschewed by casual writers, generally). So... "dendrochronology" and "seismology" should be a good start... https://www.google.co.uk/searc... gives, a course description from Silesia (that's home to the "Silesian" period - Mississippian or Pennsyllvanian in the US) of "Application and importance of dendrochronological methods in climatology, geomorphology, hydrology, archaeology, forest ecology, volcanology, seismology." (It's an early undergrad course ; probably the Cascadia example.)
APPLICATION OF TREE RING ANALYSIS TO PALEOSEISMOLOGY
Abstract. Knowledge of a region's seismicity is one of the keys to estimating earthquake hazards. Unfortunately, historical records are generally inadequate for evaluations of seismicity.
Paleoseismology addresses this problem using various techniques for dating earthquake- disturbed materials. Trees, with widespread distribution, identifiable annual growth increments, and sensitivity to environmental change, can provide a unique tool for dating past earthquake events
Interesting point. I'll pay more attention to it in the future. It isn't exactly ignored at the moment, but might deserve more attention.
The Kivu plant I'd primarily for power generation from the methane, the CO2 is separated at surface (reversible amine solution is the SOP for this) then vented. Reduction in hazard is a beneficial side effect. Without it, the high per - joule emissions would lead to a political minefield.
Still don't know where Kenya came into the subject though.
The 'instrumentation' idea is right on. Where in the crust do you put them? since the surface of the fault is a 3 dimensional thing, you can't go straight down from the surface. And of course that instrumentation likely gets crushed during any movement:)
One word : Parkfield. Nice idea, not a lot of useful data.
Another factor we don't know anything about is the forces driving the tectonics. Sure we know the concepts but nothing of the details of what I assume to be magma/whatever pushing India north.
Fair point. A CEO was stirring the pot at last week's East Africa conference on that very point. Got a polite hearing and a good handful of questions, because he has turned in a discovery using his approach. Very interesting.
Hell what shape are the bottoms of continents:)
Yeah, that's a good question. Gravity mapping doesn't give a unique solution. Nor does magnetics. Inverting the gravity data with surface wave velocities from far-field earthquakes does give a stiffness-pressure map, but inverting that to composition-density-depth has horizontal uncertainties of hundreds of kilometres and vertical uncertainties of the order of 50 - 75km. It gives a "shape" for certain values of "shape". (I'm trying to remember if that was published or pre-publication data... the abstract doesn't actually say ; hmmm, and neither do my notes. I think they said they that it had been submitted, but not yet accepted in one of the geophysics journals.)
They should be able to predict when earthquakes will occur well, well in advance, like 100 years.
Well, a hundred years or so after we have a technology that makes solid rock as transparent as air, to a resolution of a few centimetres, at 10 kilometres range.
We can't predict where the next flood will be, or when, but I can predict with absolute certainty that a major flood coupled with millions dead from choking on CO2 will happen in central Africa in the near future. We know there is a massive CO2 bubble building under a lake.
References, please.
I think you're referring to Lake Nyos in Cameroon (I was discussing this with a limnologist at a conference last week ; he did some of the sonic and seismic surveying on Lake Malawi). The degassing programme at Lake Nyos is well underway, though not complete (it probably never will be complete).
If on the other hand you are referring to the Lake Kivu hazard, then the methane extraction plant is having an effect on the deep water chemistry, though I'm not aware if it is actually out pacing the injection of gases from the lake bed and hydrothermal systems.
We don't know when either is going to happen, and it is far from clear if either hazard will be realised (again, Lake Nyos).
you can't scuba dive in a boiling lake
Irrelevant. The thermocline / chemocline is far deeper than can be safely dived, given the surface altitude. Any exploration will need to be by machinery, not humans.
OK, caveat: you might be able to do it with a full saturation diving spread. What the price tag for that is going to be, I don't know. Start at 7 figures ; go up.
Why don't we have the information to create the models? Because we do not explore the earth enough.
And continue your analysis...
Why don't we have enough information? Because rock is opaque, to gamma radiation on thicknesses more than a half-metre or so. It is opaque to X-rays on similar scales. It is opaque to UV on a scale of centimetres, and for most minerals, to visible and IR on even shorter scales. The only tecnhniques which can penetrate more than a few metres into rock are magnetics, gravity and acoustic. Of which, the shortest wavelength, and therefore highest resolution, is the acoustic wave. Typically the wavelengths involved are around 10 m. Which means that it is very difficult to "see" anything smaller than about 5m.
I steer oil wells for a living. 5m resolution is extremely expensive in terms of failed wells. Unfortunately, if the frequency of the acoustic wave is increased, then the attenuation - the proportion of the wave's energy diffusely reflected or absorbed at the interfaces of each rock unit - also increases. Which means that the reflected waves are not powerful enough to pick up and distinguish from background noise from deeper in the rock pile.
If you have a suggestion how to un-square this circle, you're sitting on a billion-dollar idea. No. more.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I'll go back to trimming my beard.
It's "piqued my interest", from the verb "piquer" meaning "to prick" or "to sting."
And the previous thread had some fool confusing "cache" (an Anglicised term from French meaning a storage area) with "cach-ê-t" (still a French word for "the state of being respected or admired; prestige").
I mean, it's not too much to fucking ask. Just pay fucking attention in school, then fucking well remember it. Simples?
Mutter, grouch. Partez-vous de l'herbe!
You've obviously thought this through far more in the last 30 seconds than I have in the decade that I've been trying to get employment in DPRK. In which case you've got a good explanation why DPRK have changed from wanting to reunite the two Koreas to wanting to destroy one, and from wanting to destroy America to wanting to leave it alone.
History is not on your side. Most dictatorships, particularly in the Orient, survive for centuries.
Now, that sounds like someone doing some moderately deep hacking into the OS of the phones.
On the other hand, I'm also reminded of the warnings that went out with the initial releases of PGP about "snake oil", and the bad habit of general computing programmers to believe that they've invented a foolproof method of encryption which in reality is a pile of dreck.
My guess - the police were watching this system carefully, and at some point the operator put out an update with a flaw in either his encryption or his key-handling. Then once they knew they could recover significant amounts of data from the system, then they shut it down. Which would tell us more about the (accused, not convicted) "Danny Manupassa" and his abilities at encryption or key-handling programming, not the main stream of encryption engineering.
I'm still expecting to see the crackpots doing the logical equivalent of reading from a book held upside down.
That is insane. The actual cost is more like 1/10th of that.
So - vote for a sane health policy.
And don't buy insurance once you do have a sane health policy.
By the seven meaty balls of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (Sauce be upon Them), have you people learned nothing since you ran away from the mother country?
Are you sure it wasn't a sparrow? They are flying, and autonomous too.
If you buy shit chargers (for example, proprietary ones made for particular devices, rather than ones designed for industrial use on standard, interchangeable cells) that is likely to be your experience. It's the buying into proprietary systems that is the point. If you can't replace one part of your system with one from a different supplier, you're screwed.
My original pocket computer - which would link by IR to any of my first three mobile phones - would do it's stuff for a month on 2xAA cells. Which I could recharge, or buy at a shop.
You have a cart and horse positional re-arrangement issue. Different voltages and current capabilities are put into different "form factors" precisely to prevent connecting a 10V source to a circuit designed to take 3V ; or, to connect a current source with a 0.1 Ohm internal resistance to a current sink with an internal resistance of 0.01 Ohm, and thereby melting it.
Oh yes, individual companies use the same technique to lock you in to their purchases. But that's because they are capitalists wanting to anally rape their customers. Like all good capitalists do.
Cool. I've worked in Tanzania, Gabon and Benin. Gabon I'd probably avoid returning to given a choice, but the others were great. I'm actually looking at a couple of jobs in Tanzania at the moment, if the funding comes off.
... or human, probably. After all, only Americans can be humans.
Don't worry, the record will be broken again in a year or two.
Doesn't matter.
Not enough to supply you without dropping quality. At least, not in the next few years.
There are Kenyans who might disagree. Ugandans who are likely to applaud. Welcome to Africa!
[SELF] Nails feet to perch. Fish is not happy.
As we were both geologists, one of our interests for use was in examining otherwise inaccessible rock outcrops (quicker than me rigging up ropes for an abseil inspection ; I know my ropes), so things like "RTB on impact" or "controlled crash" self-protection facilities were in our minds.
In the end ... well, we may do it yet.
Most people who have never had to deal with it underestimate the complexities of soil. I've seen if cost companies ... 40 to 50 million dollars in the last decade. Well, I get paid to give advice, not to have attention paid to it. Doesn't fuss me. The other contractors who lost their jobs in the resultant debacle know who red-flagged the issue (me) while the spend was within the contingency budget. After I'd been poo-poohed, but retained, they sunk another 30 million bucks into the project before the soil support fell apart. The initial 10 million, they had contingency for ; 40 million they couldn't cover.
Oh dear.
What a pity.
Never mind.
There is potential to use tree growth (and tree damage), combined with dendrochronology (dating events by analysis of tree growth rings), as a tool for extending earthquake records beyond the precise knowledge of written history.
Actually, it's not a new technique. E.g. : in the 80s (approx), studies of salt-water killed coastal trees in Cascadia helped to tie down the last large Cascadia earthquake to the winter of 1700, and then tie that to the 26th January from (written) Japanese records of an "Orphan" tsunami.
Even so ... yes there is potentially useful data there. What would I do? Using the "jaw-cracker words" in Google (since long words are eschewed by casual writers, generally). So ... "dendrochronology" and "seismology" should be a good start ... https://www.google.co.uk/searc... gives, a course description from Silesia (that's home to the "Silesian" period - Mississippian or Pennsyllvanian in the US) of "Application and importance of dendrochronological methods in climatology, geomorphology, hydrology, archaeology, forest ecology, volcanology, seismology." (It's an early undergrad course ; probably the Cascadia example.)
Oh, this looks like the dog's dangly bits : http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
Interesting point. I'll pay more attention to it in the future. It isn't exactly ignored at the moment, but might deserve more attention.
The Kivu plant I'd primarily for power generation from the methane, the CO2 is separated at surface (reversible amine solution is the SOP for this) then vented. Reduction in hazard is a beneficial side effect. Without it, the high per - joule emissions would lead to a political minefield. Still don't know where Kenya came into the subject though.
One word : Parkfield. Nice idea, not a lot of useful data.
Fair point. A CEO was stirring the pot at last week's East Africa conference on that very point. Got a polite hearing and a good handful of questions, because he has turned in a discovery using his approach. Very interesting.
Yeah, that's a good question. Gravity mapping doesn't give a unique solution. Nor does magnetics. Inverting the gravity data with surface wave velocities from far-field earthquakes does give a stiffness-pressure map, but inverting that to composition-density-depth has horizontal uncertainties of hundreds of kilometres and vertical uncertainties of the order of 50 - 75km. It gives a "shape" for certain values of "shape". (I'm trying to remember if that was published or pre-publication data ... the abstract doesn't actually say ; hmmm, and neither do my notes. I think they said they that it had been submitted, but not yet accepted in one of the geophysics journals.)
Well, a hundred years or so after we have a technology that makes solid rock as transparent as air, to a resolution of a few centimetres, at 10 kilometres range.
Information is necessary to prediction.
A change in the laws of physics. See my comments on acoustic impedance versus wavelength above.
Sorry, hang on. Kenya doesn't border either Lake Kivu or Nyos. What are you on about?
References, please.
I think you're referring to Lake Nyos in Cameroon (I was discussing this with a limnologist at a conference last week ; he did some of the sonic and seismic surveying on Lake Malawi). The degassing programme at Lake Nyos is well underway, though not complete (it probably never will be complete).
If on the other hand you are referring to the Lake Kivu hazard, then the methane extraction plant is having an effect on the deep water chemistry, though I'm not aware if it is actually out pacing the injection of gases from the lake bed and hydrothermal systems.
We don't know when either is going to happen, and it is far from clear if either hazard will be realised (again, Lake Nyos).
Irrelevant. The thermocline / chemocline is far deeper than can be safely dived, given the surface altitude. Any exploration will need to be by machinery, not humans.
OK, caveat: you might be able to do it with a full saturation diving spread. What the price tag for that is going to be, I don't know. Start at 7 figures ; go up.
And continue your analysis ...
Why don't we have enough information? Because rock is opaque, to gamma radiation on thicknesses more than a half-metre or so. It is opaque to X-rays on similar scales. It is opaque to UV on a scale of centimetres, and for most minerals, to visible and IR on even shorter scales. The only tecnhniques which can penetrate more than a few metres into rock are magnetics, gravity and acoustic. Of which, the shortest wavelength, and therefore highest resolution, is the acoustic wave. Typically the wavelengths involved are around 10 m. Which means that it is very difficult to "see" anything smaller than about 5m.
I steer oil wells for a living. 5m resolution is extremely expensive in terms of failed wells. Unfortunately, if the frequency of the acoustic wave is increased, then the attenuation - the proportion of the wave's energy diffusely reflected or absorbed at the interfaces of each rock unit - also increases. Which means that the reflected waves are not powerful enough to pick up and distinguish from background noise from deeper in the rock pile.
If you have a suggestion how to un-square this circle, you're sitting on a billion-dollar idea. No. more.
Awww, come on. Be a bit more subtle with setting up the Python skits. Even I could see that coming.