You just came up with the best single-sentence slogan against electronic voting. "If voters don't understand the voting system, then they might as well not even be voting." When you look at the recent events this way, it's like watching them with X-ray glasses. "They might as well not even be voting" is the whole point. Making people not understand the process is actually more important (for the stability of an oligocratic system) than outright changing the totals.
Personally, I don't like this stupid shenaniganary to circumvent the democratic process. Back in the 19th century, the King or Czar, or people directly commissioned by him, told you what to do. Legally, the King was directly authorized by God. There was no B.S. like this involved. No one today would support the absolutist system, but the absolutist system was at least simple and unambiguous. Today, pseudo-democracies are only more complex for no good reason. Elect a King and be done with it!
It does follow common sense. Both glucose and fatty acids metabolize into acetyl CoA (which is just plain acetic acid in a more suitable form) before they are "burned" in the citric acid cycle. You'll get acetate whatever you eat.
Giving dichloroacetate instead of acetate is a throwing the monkeywrench (DCA) into the works of Krebs cycle. Instead of hydrogen atoms on the methyl carbon, you have nasty electrophilic chlorines. Metabolism gives poisons like oxalic acid.
Except that bills in the U.S. congress that's about the way it's done. Before a bill can be approved, it is printed on parchment paper (they used to print them on real parchment).
A simple improvement: why use a giant crane? The seating area would be on wheels and rails. The tail of the airplane would open up like a front visor in a ferry, and the seating area would slide in. Passengers could find their way to their seats from the sides, not just from the center as inside the airplane. (To do the same without this, correspondingly, you'd remove the roof from the airplane and build rather unusually structured gates to accommodate the wings.) Also, the seating area could be expanded (split and separated between the rows) to give more room between the seats. This would also help the exiting passangers leave quickly. People would arrive in their usual random order, but that wouldn't be a problem.
If the same seating area is used, this only improves the boarding speed, but doesn't really remove the fundamental problem. A second, more complex and failure-prone option is to have two seatings areas that are interchanged. An engineering challenge would be this: there are two seating areas, one on the ground for entering passangers and one on the arriving plane. This would require some way to remove the seats from plane and immediately add new seats. The giant crane is not practical; lifting with a crane is very slow. The seats or the plane could turn around a pivot, or they would be lifted onto different levels. For example, the exiting seating area is slid out, lowered to ground level, and the "boarding" seating area can be now slid in, above the exiting area. I imagine airlines wouldn't like the idea of being dependent on having a ready seating area waiting in the terminal, though.
Always when someone uses the "nanotech" buzzword, I'm reminded of a study (from Helsinki Univ of Tech) that nanotech isn't a field of technology. It's just a marketing trick. When you actually dig up the patents, social networks and case studies from corporations, the conclusion emerges that "nanotech" is consists of four different fields of technology that don't "talk to each other". They are measurement instrumentation, materials, pharma/chemicals and semiconductors. For example, a pharmaceutical chemist doesn't talk to the semiconductor physicist. Only instrumentation is actually applied in all fields.
"Advanced materials" doesn't sound as cool as "nanotechnology".
I agree. My favorite sentence from the article was this:
By giving so much control to Jobs, Cingular risked turning its vaunted -- and expensive -- network into a "dumb pipe," a mere conduit for content rather than the source of that content.
My first thought on this was that it's about f—ng time that American telcos are finally forced take it up the "dumb pipe" and scream. Too bad it's Steve enjoying it, rather than the customers.
I'm a chemist, but I think I can explain this. So, please confirm, is this explanation correct:
After the Michelson-Morley experiment definitively showed that the speed of light is not variable, this observation had to be shoehorned into the framework of physics, and Einstein did this by developing the mathematics to distort the spacetime coordinates to make speed of light appear constant. This meant that space and time had to distort. So, in the voids, "time slows down". If we just naively de-Einsteinify this by making a "coordinate transform" into a pseudo-Galilean view, then it means that light goes faster in the voids. (I'm not saying Einstein is incorrect, mind you; you can also construct force fields for virtual forces like the centrifugal force, even though they don't really exist.) I'll call this the virtual velocity of light.
Now, what we've been assuming is that light has one virtual velocity. Therefore, when we look at a star, the age of light linearly depends on its distance. This is an incorrect assumption. When we look through a void, we see older light than elsewhere, because in the void, the virtual velocity of light is higher. We can, essentially, see into an earlier age by looking through a "lens", a void that is, where the virtual velocity of light is higher. This has an immediate implication with respect to redshift: in an older universe, expansion was faster, giving a higher redshift. Therefore, the relationship between distance and redshift (corrected for expansion of space) should not be linear like we have previously assumed.
So, please explain how this implies that we should see an illusion of an accelerated expansion. I can almost grasp it.
In related news, indium, gallium and selenium just got so expensive it's pointless to produce these things.
I mean, most rare metals are purified by some extremely energy-consuming process, like electrolysis or so. For example, the noble metals (noble means unavoidably "more difficult and expensive to refine") used in automobile catalytic converters have become very expensive when governments passed "legistlation mandating their use (implicitly by setting emission standards so low they can't be achieved without). Currently, for example, the United States leads the way by standardizing platinum catalyst for diesel engines. Platinum production is not energetically "free". In contrast, or more precisely, in lack of contrast, spraying urea into the exhaust gas, stoichiometrically with respect to the pollutant, is the European idea of emission control. Urea is produced from ammonia, which is produced from hydrogen, which is produced from natural gas. Replacing a pollutant stoichiometrically with a CO2 emitter is a typical "feelgood measure".
Furthermore, all of these elements, indium, gallium and selenium, are currently produced as byproducts of more voluminous processes. How are you going to scale up? Scale up is not painless.
The problem isn't solved in general. They found the right solution for them. Since they have mostly American books, they can afford to ignore the rest. What if American books with a LCC classification are a small minority in your bookshelf?
So to completely overshoot it, notice also the context "runs on Nokia's". In Finnish, this is expressed with the inessive case "-ssa". So, skip the "on" and use "runs Nokioissa".
You could also use the adessive "-lla", but a cellphone is a small object and the software is definitely inside it, so it'd be unusual to use an external locative case. For some reason, the external locative cases ("on" -lla, "from" -lta, "to" -lle) are sometimes used when talking about desktop computers and operating systems (as in "the game works with Vista" peli toimii Vistalla vs. Vistassa). Also, because Nokia is the name of a city, you should not mix it up and say "Nokialla", because then in unambiguously refers to the city.
Note also that Nokia (although a proper name) is not an atomic word, but already a partitive plural of nois, "pine marten".
What you're describing reminds me of an optical version of a delay line memory. These usually stored data in waves propagating in media such as liquid mercury, and the speed of sound in the media set painfully low lower bounds for the seek times. In fact, I find it interesting that using electromagnetic radiation might revive the technology.
I assume you confuse proportional representation with a particular, common type that has a closed list. The option is open list, where a candidate increases the vote count for his party, and after the proportion of the party in the parliament is calculated from this, the seats are given in the voter's order of preference (the "open list"). In a closed list system, the party decides beforehand the order of candidates, and in a counter-democratic manner, individuals get to decide only which list they prefer, not which people they prefer.
By the way, all the ballots in this country are the same. They have a circle, which reads "number:", and into which you write the number of the candidate. These are then hand-counted (the count is supervised by people from different parties, so each party sees that other parties aren't cheating). Such a system assumes that voters can read and write, though.
It'd be difficult to image the "what if" scenario for United States using proportional representation.
"Tehokkaalla teknisellä toimenpiteellä tarkoitetaan tekniikkaa, laitetta tai osaa, joka on suunniteltu tavanomaisessa käyttötarkoituksessa estämään tai rajoittamaan teoksiin ilman tekijän tai oikeuksien muun haltijan lupaa kohdistuvia tekoja ja jolla tavoiteltu suoja saavutetaan."
Or, translated from not Finnish, but Finnish Legalese to English, with my emphases:
An "effective" technical measure refers to a technology, device or component that has been designed to block or restrict actions without the permission of the copyright holder, and which do accomplish the intended protection.
The really worrying part is the telic definition: if the copyright holder INTENDS it to protect his copyright, then it's effective; and if it protects against anything AGAINST THE WILL of the copyright holder, then it's an "effective countermeasure". So, it doesn't have to be good, the copyright holder just has to wish it, and it doesn't have to protect against illegal copying, but ANYTHING the copyright holder doesn't want. However, the Finnish lawmakers made it milder by a contradictory addition (not the only one, see below the "right to watch even by countermeasure circumvention") that it must actually accomplish protection. The Helsinki District Court applies this: the effective protection must be accomplished. CSS isn't effective; it isn't even really copy-protection, it's DVD zone enforcement.
Nevertheless, this isn't a Finland-wide precedent, even less a EU-wide precedent. If this ruling was made by the Supreme Court or the Supreme Administrative Court of Finland, it could be used as an argument by a District or Appeals court, but the ruling of a District Court, as is, doesn't have any specific legal force outside that specific case. In fact, the Common Law concept of legal precedent is NOT APPLIED in countries which have Roman Law. This includes the EU, except for the UK.
Nevertheless, when reading thru the (Karpela's 2005 changes to the) copyright and criminal law, you can't help to notice the focus on commercial distribution of anti-copying measures. It appears that the intent was to extend the old prohibition of stealing cable TV with an analog descrambler to digital descrambling. Also, the law gives the user the right to circumvent copy-protection in order to listen or watch the copy-protected work, but not to copy it. So, effectively, you can't circumvent copy-protection, except if there's no other way. Lex Karpela is a contradictory, outright strange piece of legistlation.
When there's porn in 3D, then it'll take off. Just look at VHS and the Internet. I mean, since when "Disney uses the technology" has been a reason to adopt a new technology?
In Finland, "bundling" of different goods was outlawed in the 1970's, when the businesses overshot it and started giving free washing powder with gasoline and so on. Bundling was disallowed; legistlation permitted basically only deals like "pen with a notepad". An operator bundling a cellphone with a contract would've clearly violated this law. The practice of bundling the cellphone with the contract is clearly anticompetetive, as you can see from TFA.
Also, if we're talking about Nokia, the company's main problem is the problem of getting these contracts with cellphone operators. This requires a lot of shady backroom deals and is very anti-democratic in the sense that the consumers are not the ones who get to decide. My theory is that Nokia has enormously benefited from a home market where you must provide quality phones and where you can charge the matching price. It'd be one of the "thirteen in a dozen" cellphone manufacturers without a competetive, democratic home market.
Unfortunately, the poor sales of expensive 3G phones led to extensive lobbying and finally, the anticompetetive practice was allowed again in 2006. Now, operators have two-year contracts where you may not change operators, with a small price discount (about 40 euros). The hard-core libertarians actually see this as a "liberalization": see this blog.
I just realized that there's this really new way to store hydrogen. It contains as much as 15% hydrogen, much more than the article's 9%, and is perfectly suitable for today's automobile motors. It is a clear liquid, boiling at 99 C, and can be easily pumped. It burns cleanly, and is safe to transport. It is available from biological sources. Hydrogen doesn't evaporate off it.
The magic compound is called iso-octane, which contains 85% carbon and 15% hydrogen. If we could only solve the small technological problem of getting the carbon from non-fossil sources, then we're all set!
Hydrogen economy is much like the age-old idea of powering a power plant by the obvious, plugging it into a wall socket. (This reality bite brought to you by your resident industrial chemist.)
It seems like the status of "official sea smell" is contested. Now dimethyl thioether doesn't smell like sea, it smell like cabbage. (Note that technical grade thioethers typically contain extremely malodourous impurities.) It's a component in seawater smell, but not the defining one. The characteristic smell of seawater comes from exciting molecules called dictyopterenes, particularly the cyclopropane dictyopterene A.
They are exciting because they are products of natural carbocation rearrangement, when carbocation rearrangement in the lab requires extreme acidity (one I did was catalyzed by sulfuric acid with anhydrous acetic acid as the solvent). Also, the cyclopropanes have not only unusual structures (carbon triangles), but unusual reactivity, resembling alkenes more than cyclic alkanes, because are actually more like double-bonded than single-bonded (exactly: a three-center two-electron bond of three carbenes).
Ahh, Schadenfreude towards the Swedes. Nordea Finland states [in English] that this attack does not work for Nordea customers in Finland. The reason is rather simple: Nordea Finland uses, unlike Nordea Sweden, an one-time pad. The customer has a codebook, which is spent: you must enter a single-use code to validate a transaction. Because the codes are one-use only, harvesting login details is a pointless pursuit for criminals. Sure, it's a chore entering those codes, but so is locking one's house, so trading security for convenience (all 10 seconds of it) is, in my opinion, plain irresponsible in this case.
I'm not sure if I should be surprised or not, when the same company uses a secure system in one country and a different, probably incompatible, insecure system in another. Formerly, some Finnish banks didn't use an one-time pad, and were promptly scammed in the exact same manner. The fact that Nordea didn't heed the warning doesn't speak highly of its internal corporate synergy.
"Something like 98% of spam can be pinned down to 0.01% of the world"
No, you got this wrong. 99% of demand for spam can be pinned down to 0.5% of singular countries in the world. And that isn't Nigeria, South Korea or Indonesia.
Actually, I could block 100% of spam with only a handful of possible false-positive sources that can be easily whitelisted by blocking all messages in English.
No, not this anti-France tirade again. France is a part of the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union and French farmers receive their agricultural subsidies from the EU, not the state of France itself. I find it vastly oversimplified to suggest that EU farming subsidies directly cause higher unemployment rates.
"To illustrate his point, he notes that computer programmers tend to prefer manual transmissions. But not even 15 percent of the cars sold in the United States last year had that feature."
Well, in this country, the automatic transmission license is (was?) officially called "disabled person's license", often shortened to "tard's card". Maybe the problem is this: the point of view is that the user is either completely ignorant or a programmer. There is a large population of experts (non-IT) who use complex software daily: these people are of regular intelligence and ability, but they're not programmers. Their eyes don't glaze over when you explain them the minutiae of the operation of the program; they listen, but don't necessarily get everything right the first time.
I was seriously hoping for an article about how even the software intended for daily professional use still sucks, not one of these rants about not understanding words like "file" and "directory" or how tabbed browsing is a too complicated paradigm.
Humans are able to distinguish the smells of different chemicals, bad-smelling or not. In fact, human flatus has a highly variable composition and depends on the diet, individual microflora composition, physiology and diseases (if any). You are familiar with the smells originating from your original diet, but not with those of others.
To crank up the disgustingness factor, I've noticed that when I'm traveling, farts change their smell. The creepiest example was when I visited a Russian sewer (don't ask), and noticed a certain similarity afterwards. It has a lot to do with the local pervasive microflora.
Slashdot Mirror
You just came up with the best single-sentence slogan against electronic voting. "If voters don't understand the voting system, then they might as well not even be voting." When you look at the recent events this way, it's like watching them with X-ray glasses. "They might as well not even be voting" is the whole point. Making people not understand the process is actually more important (for the stability of an oligocratic system) than outright changing the totals.
Personally, I don't like this stupid shenaniganary to circumvent the democratic process. Back in the 19th century, the King or Czar, or people directly commissioned by him, told you what to do. Legally, the King was directly authorized by God. There was no B.S. like this involved. No one today would support the absolutist system, but the absolutist system was at least simple and unambiguous. Today, pseudo-democracies are only more complex for no good reason. Elect a King and be done with it!
It does follow common sense. Both glucose and fatty acids metabolize into acetyl CoA (which is just plain acetic acid in a more suitable form) before they are "burned" in the citric acid cycle. You'll get acetate whatever you eat.
Giving dichloroacetate instead of acetate is a throwing the monkeywrench (DCA) into the works of Krebs cycle. Instead of hydrogen atoms on the methyl carbon, you have nasty electrophilic chlorines. Metabolism gives poisons like oxalic acid.
Except that bills in the U.S. congress that's about the way it's done. Before a bill can be approved, it is printed on parchment paper (they used to print them on real parchment).
A simple improvement: why use a giant crane? The seating area would be on wheels and rails. The tail of the airplane would open up like a front visor in a ferry, and the seating area would slide in. Passengers could find their way to their seats from the sides, not just from the center as inside the airplane. (To do the same without this, correspondingly, you'd remove the roof from the airplane and build rather unusually structured gates to accommodate the wings.) Also, the seating area could be expanded (split and separated between the rows) to give more room between the seats. This would also help the exiting passangers leave quickly. People would arrive in their usual random order, but that wouldn't be a problem.
If the same seating area is used, this only improves the boarding speed, but doesn't really remove the fundamental problem. A second, more complex and failure-prone option is to have two seatings areas that are interchanged. An engineering challenge would be this: there are two seating areas, one on the ground for entering passangers and one on the arriving plane. This would require some way to remove the seats from plane and immediately add new seats. The giant crane is not practical; lifting with a crane is very slow. The seats or the plane could turn around a pivot, or they would be lifted onto different levels. For example, the exiting seating area is slid out, lowered to ground level, and the "boarding" seating area can be now slid in, above the exiting area. I imagine airlines wouldn't like the idea of being dependent on having a ready seating area waiting in the terminal, though.
Always when someone uses the "nanotech" buzzword, I'm reminded of a study (from Helsinki Univ of Tech) that nanotech isn't a field of technology. It's just a marketing trick. When you actually dig up the patents, social networks and case studies from corporations, the conclusion emerges that "nanotech" is consists of four different fields of technology that don't "talk to each other". They are measurement instrumentation, materials, pharma/chemicals and semiconductors. For example, a pharmaceutical chemist doesn't talk to the semiconductor physicist. Only instrumentation is actually applied in all fields.
"Advanced materials" doesn't sound as cool as "nanotechnology".
I'm a chemist, but I think I can explain this. So, please confirm, is this explanation correct:
After the Michelson-Morley experiment definitively showed that the speed of light is not variable, this observation had to be shoehorned into the framework of physics, and Einstein did this by developing the mathematics to distort the spacetime coordinates to make speed of light appear constant. This meant that space and time had to distort. So, in the voids, "time slows down". If we just naively de-Einsteinify this by making a "coordinate transform" into a pseudo-Galilean view, then it means that light goes faster in the voids. (I'm not saying Einstein is incorrect, mind you; you can also construct force fields for virtual forces like the centrifugal force, even though they don't really exist.) I'll call this the virtual velocity of light.
Now, what we've been assuming is that light has one virtual velocity. Therefore, when we look at a star, the age of light linearly depends on its distance. This is an incorrect assumption. When we look through a void, we see older light than elsewhere, because in the void, the virtual velocity of light is higher. We can, essentially, see into an earlier age by looking through a "lens", a void that is, where the virtual velocity of light is higher. This has an immediate implication with respect to redshift: in an older universe, expansion was faster, giving a higher redshift. Therefore, the relationship between distance and redshift (corrected for expansion of space) should not be linear like we have previously assumed.
So, please explain how this implies that we should see an illusion of an accelerated expansion. I can almost grasp it.
In related news, indium, gallium and selenium just got so expensive it's pointless to produce these things.
I mean, most rare metals are purified by some extremely energy-consuming process, like electrolysis or so. For example, the noble metals (noble means unavoidably "more difficult and expensive to refine") used in automobile catalytic converters have become very expensive when governments passed "legistlation mandating their use (implicitly by setting emission standards so low they can't be achieved without). Currently, for example, the United States leads the way by standardizing platinum catalyst for diesel engines. Platinum production is not energetically "free". In contrast, or more precisely, in lack of contrast, spraying urea into the exhaust gas, stoichiometrically with respect to the pollutant, is the European idea of emission control. Urea is produced from ammonia, which is produced from hydrogen, which is produced from natural gas. Replacing a pollutant stoichiometrically with a CO2 emitter is a typical "feelgood measure".
Furthermore, all of these elements, indium, gallium and selenium, are currently produced as byproducts of more voluminous processes. How are you going to scale up? Scale up is not painless.
The problem isn't solved in general. They found the right solution for them. Since they have mostly American books, they can afford to ignore the rest. What if American books with a LCC classification are a small minority in your bookshelf?
So to completely overshoot it, notice also the context "runs on Nokia's". In Finnish, this is expressed with the inessive case "-ssa". So, skip the "on" and use "runs Nokioissa".
You could also use the adessive "-lla", but a cellphone is a small object and the software is definitely inside it, so it'd be unusual to use an external locative case. For some reason, the external locative cases ("on" -lla, "from" -lta, "to" -lle) are sometimes used when talking about desktop computers and operating systems (as in "the game works with Vista" peli toimii Vistalla vs. Vistassa). Also, because Nokia is the name of a city, you should not mix it up and say "Nokialla", because then in unambiguously refers to the city.
Note also that Nokia (although a proper name) is not an atomic word, but already a partitive plural of nois, "pine marten".
What you're describing reminds me of an optical version of a delay line memory. These usually stored data in waves propagating in media such as liquid mercury, and the speed of sound in the media set painfully low lower bounds for the seek times. In fact, I find it interesting that using electromagnetic radiation might revive the technology.
I assume you confuse proportional representation with a particular, common type that has a closed list. The option is open list, where a candidate increases the vote count for his party, and after the proportion of the party in the parliament is calculated from this, the seats are given in the voter's order of preference (the "open list"). In a closed list system, the party decides beforehand the order of candidates, and in a counter-democratic manner, individuals get to decide only which list they prefer, not which people they prefer.
By the way, all the ballots in this country are the same. They have a circle, which reads "number:", and into which you write the number of the candidate. These are then hand-counted (the count is supervised by people from different parties, so each party sees that other parties aren't cheating). Such a system assumes that voters can read and write, though.
It'd be difficult to image the "what if" scenario for United States using proportional representation.
Or, translated from not Finnish, but Finnish Legalese to English, with my emphases:
The really worrying part is the telic definition: if the copyright holder INTENDS it to protect his copyright, then it's effective; and if it protects against anything AGAINST THE WILL of the copyright holder, then it's an "effective countermeasure". So, it doesn't have to be good, the copyright holder just has to wish it, and it doesn't have to protect against illegal copying, but ANYTHING the copyright holder doesn't want. However, the Finnish lawmakers made it milder by a contradictory addition (not the only one, see below the "right to watch even by countermeasure circumvention") that it must actually accomplish protection. The Helsinki District Court applies this: the effective protection must be accomplished. CSS isn't effective; it isn't even really copy-protection, it's DVD zone enforcement.
Nevertheless, this isn't a Finland-wide precedent, even less a EU-wide precedent. If this ruling was made by the Supreme Court or the Supreme Administrative Court of Finland, it could be used as an argument by a District or Appeals court, but the ruling of a District Court, as is, doesn't have any specific legal force outside that specific case. In fact, the Common Law concept of legal precedent is NOT APPLIED in countries which have Roman Law. This includes the EU, except for the UK.
Nevertheless, when reading thru the (Karpela's 2005 changes to the) copyright and criminal law, you can't help to notice the focus on commercial distribution of anti-copying measures. It appears that the intent was to extend the old prohibition of stealing cable TV with an analog descrambler to digital descrambling. Also, the law gives the user the right to circumvent copy-protection in order to listen or watch the copy-protected work, but not to copy it. So, effectively, you can't circumvent copy-protection, except if there's no other way. Lex Karpela is a contradictory, outright strange piece of legistlation.
When there's porn in 3D, then it'll take off. Just look at VHS and the Internet. I mean, since when "Disney uses the technology" has been a reason to adopt a new technology?
In Finland, "bundling" of different goods was outlawed in the 1970's, when the businesses overshot it and started giving free washing powder with gasoline and so on. Bundling was disallowed; legistlation permitted basically only deals like "pen with a notepad". An operator bundling a cellphone with a contract would've clearly violated this law. The practice of bundling the cellphone with the contract is clearly anticompetetive, as you can see from TFA.
Also, if we're talking about Nokia, the company's main problem is the problem of getting these contracts with cellphone operators. This requires a lot of shady backroom deals and is very anti-democratic in the sense that the consumers are not the ones who get to decide. My theory is that Nokia has enormously benefited from a home market where you must provide quality phones and where you can charge the matching price. It'd be one of the "thirteen in a dozen" cellphone manufacturers without a competetive, democratic home market.
Unfortunately, the poor sales of expensive 3G phones led to extensive lobbying and finally, the anticompetetive practice was allowed again in 2006. Now, operators have two-year contracts where you may not change operators, with a small price discount (about 40 euros). The hard-core libertarians actually see this as a "liberalization": see this blog.
Hey, this means that the bad ppt is a perfect recipe for reporting to management.
I just realized that there's this really new way to store hydrogen. It contains as much as 15% hydrogen, much more than the article's 9%, and is perfectly suitable for today's automobile motors. It is a clear liquid, boiling at 99 C, and can be easily pumped. It burns cleanly, and is safe to transport. It is available from biological sources. Hydrogen doesn't evaporate off it.
The magic compound is called iso-octane, which contains 85% carbon and 15% hydrogen. If we could only solve the small technological problem of getting the carbon from non-fossil sources, then we're all set!
Hydrogen economy is much like the age-old idea of powering a power plant by the obvious, plugging it into a wall socket. (This reality bite brought to you by your resident industrial chemist.)
To the list of things that are not fundamental human rights, add "Everyone shall not have the right to have their income tied to a price index."
It seems like the status of "official sea smell" is contested. Now dimethyl thioether doesn't smell like sea, it smell like cabbage. (Note that technical grade thioethers typically contain extremely malodourous impurities.) It's a component in seawater smell, but not the defining one. The characteristic smell of seawater comes from exciting molecules called dictyopterenes, particularly the cyclopropane dictyopterene A.
They are exciting because they are products of natural carbocation rearrangement, when carbocation rearrangement in the lab requires extreme acidity (one I did was catalyzed by sulfuric acid with anhydrous acetic acid as the solvent). Also, the cyclopropanes have not only unusual structures (carbon triangles), but unusual reactivity, resembling alkenes more than cyclic alkanes, because are actually more like double-bonded than single-bonded (exactly: a three-center two-electron bond of three carbenes).
See: Chirality & Odour Perception and Angewandte Chemie, Volume 39, Issue 17, Pages 2980-3010.
Ahh, Schadenfreude towards the Swedes. Nordea Finland states [in English] that this attack does not work for Nordea customers in Finland. The reason is rather simple: Nordea Finland uses, unlike Nordea Sweden, an one-time pad. The customer has a codebook, which is spent: you must enter a single-use code to validate a transaction. Because the codes are one-use only, harvesting login details is a pointless pursuit for criminals. Sure, it's a chore entering those codes, but so is locking one's house, so trading security for convenience (all 10 seconds of it) is, in my opinion, plain irresponsible in this case.
I'm not sure if I should be surprised or not, when the same company uses a secure system in one country and a different, probably incompatible, insecure system in another. Formerly, some Finnish banks didn't use an one-time pad, and were promptly scammed in the exact same manner. The fact that Nordea didn't heed the warning doesn't speak highly of its internal corporate synergy.
No, you got this wrong. 99% of demand for spam can be pinned down to 0.5% of singular countries in the world. And that isn't Nigeria, South Korea or Indonesia.
Actually, I could block 100% of spam with only a handful of possible false-positive sources that can be easily whitelisted by blocking all messages in English.
No, not this anti-France tirade again. France is a part of the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union and French farmers receive their agricultural subsidies from the EU, not the state of France itself. I find it vastly oversimplified to suggest that EU farming subsidies directly cause higher unemployment rates.
In TFA, this sticks out:
"To illustrate his point, he notes that computer programmers tend to prefer manual transmissions. But not even 15 percent of the cars sold in the United States last year had that feature."
Well, in this country, the automatic transmission license is (was?) officially called "disabled person's license", often shortened to "tard's card". Maybe the problem is this: the point of view is that the user is either completely ignorant or a programmer. There is a large population of experts (non-IT) who use complex software daily: these people are of regular intelligence and ability, but they're not programmers. Their eyes don't glaze over when you explain them the minutiae of the operation of the program; they listen, but don't necessarily get everything right the first time.
I was seriously hoping for an article about how even the software intended for daily professional use still sucks, not one of these rants about not understanding words like "file" and "directory" or how tabbed browsing is a too complicated paradigm.
The Soviets actually did so. A standard daily ration of vodka was 200 grams.
Reportedly, it caused signing the Internationale and chargingly blindly at the enemy.
No two farts smell the same.
(That was poetic.)
Humans are able to distinguish the smells of different chemicals, bad-smelling or not. In fact, human flatus has a highly variable composition and depends on the diet, individual microflora composition, physiology and diseases (if any). You are familiar with the smells originating from your original diet, but not with those of others.
To crank up the disgustingness factor, I've noticed that when I'm traveling, farts change their smell. The creepiest example was when I visited a Russian sewer (don't ask), and noticed a certain similarity afterwards. It has a lot to do with the local pervasive microflora.