odds are very good that you are within a few tens of meters of an OMG RADIOACTIVE! substance.
No, the odds are close to 100% that you have an OMG RADIOACTIVE! substance inside your body right now. The main one is potassium (K40). It's not very radioactive, but that means that OMG, it has a half life of over a billion years! Then there's C14, which occurs naturally in the atmosphere (via cosmic ray interaction with nitrogen), is absorbed by plants, which you (or your food) then eat(s).
Then for those living (or flying) at altitude, there's cosmic rays. For those in granite buildings or living atop granite bedrock (Manhatten, for example) there's uranium in the granite.
Ignorance of relative levels aside, I think one of the factors that makes radiation so scary (to some people) is that it's not detectable by human senses (at least not at levels that haven't killed you already by the time you notice it). That makes it "magic". An acute dose is also not a pleasant way to go (but nor are a lot of other things). Acute doses are hard to get, though. Marie Curie worked and lived with some pretty intensively radioactive materials, and she lived to just a few months shy of 67.
I wouldn't recommend it, but metallic mercury isn't really that bad. It's mercury compounds that are nasty, and stuff like methyl mercury is really nasty -- it'll seep through a rubber glove and be absorbed through the skin.
The toxin in Destroying Angel toadstools is close to what you want. There are some initial symptoms that look like a minor case of food poisoning -- nausea and such -- but those pass in a day and you apparently recover. A few days to a week later you die because the toxin has destroyed your liver.
There are plenty of others. Somewhere around here I've got a whole book on poisons (including radiological). Some are pretty nasty ways to go (although hardly undetectable). Oxalic acid (found in rhubarb leaves, some other inedible parts of certain plants) for example, reacts with calcium ions in your cells to form needle-like, insoluble crystals of calcium oxalate. That book is more toxicology oriented, but I've seen one for mystery writers that concentrates on the hard-to-detect (or misleading) stuff.
If you do want to go the radiation route, an x-ray machine is the easiest to conceal from radiological detection because it can be switched off, and fairly portable if you omit the six inches or so of lead shielding that commercial models have. Don't know how long you'd need to expose the victim for, though. Maybe you can hide it under his bed...
'Some 2.4 billion years ago when the Milky Way started upping its star production, cosmic rays -- high-speed atomic particles -- started pouring onto our planet [...]' Causes one to wonder what the probability for life arising on a planet is given that our own seemed to be in a very unique situation on many different counts."
While Earth does seem to be unique amongst the hundred or so planets that we're aware of, the above circumstance is not one of the reasons. Those cosmic rays would have been pouring onto every planet in the galaxy, or at least this corner of it. If that cosmic ray flux did have an effect on jump starting the primitive life that was around at the time, it may have done so on tens of thousands of planets.
It may also have wiped out the local equivalent of the dinosaurs - or even intelligent species - on some other planets.
Most so-called houses in North America are more like wooden tents. There's the frame, and then some fairly thin covering (it hasn't been plywood in decades) that helps hold the frame together and keep the wind and moisture out (mostly). Sounds like a tent to me. You could cut a hole in the wall -- even an exterior wall -- with a good knife.
The chemical smell you noted may have been from the glue used to hold the pieces of wood together in the particle board used these days. Most new construction isn't designed to last any longer than the first mortgage.
(As a kid I lived in part of Toronto where they were tearing down old houses (circa 70 or so years old) to clear the way for construction of the Bloor St subway line. Good solid double-thickness brick with slate roofs -- with lathe and plaster on the interior walls. The wiring was downright scary, though -- cloth insulated wires slung on ceramic insulators nailed to the studs. Grounding? We don' need no steenking grounding!)
That would require them to sue those competitors, or else the patent would become invalid.
Nope, that only applies to trademarks - defend them or lose them.
Patents and copyrights you can selectively enforce. Patent trolls frequently do this, going after the easily intimidated companies first to build up a warchest before tackling someone who is more likely to fight back. There are some limitations on damages if you can be shown to have known about the infringement for a while before suing, but that in no way invalidates the patent.
Taste being (primarily) a chemical phenomenon, I'd imagine it tastes the same as regular water. Drinking it is relatively harmless (but expensive) in small doses, cool if you like your ice cubes to sink rather than float.
In experiments with animals on a D2O enriched diet (not cheap!), the change in chemical reaction rates (because D2O is about 11% heavier than H2O) starts to seriously interfere with metabolism at around 30% replacement with D2O, less for more complex animals, and not at all for simple unicellular organisms. (This from memory, do not try this at home without more research.)
However my understanding of patents is that an IP owner has to go after the original infringer for redress before it can go after a third party that uses something that infringes on IP distributed by the infringer
That's not the case. A patent holder can go after anyone and everyone (at anytime, in no particular order) that "exercises" (uses) the patent, whether they bought the infringing device/software from somebody else or not. It's just that the patent holder is more likely to win worthwile amounts of damages going after a manufacturer/distributer. There was a case a couple of years ago where the holder of some web (or database? forget the details) patents was threatening to go after Microsoft's customers because their settlement with Microsoft only covered Microsoft, not the customers.
Bussard himself is relatively famous as is, btw. His 'Bussard ramscoops' were adopted into science fiction with Star Trek: TNG
Oh please. Someone who equates ST:TNG with science fiction? GMAFB.
Bussard ramjets hit science fiction soon after he invented the concept in the early 1960s -- they were a critical feature of Poul Anderson's Tau Zero circa 1970, and Niven had already coined the name "ramscoop" at least as early as 1968, and the concept was familiar enought to fans even then that it didn't need much explanation.
In general any SF idea in a TV series has been around in print SF for a decade or two, at least. Long enough for the writers of the show to be familiar with it and also long enough that they can be sure a reasonable percentage of the audience has heard of it. A TV episode doesn't have the time (or inclination) to go into explanations, it just throws out a few phrases that the audience better understand (or at least recognize in context) or they'll lose that audience.
Anecdote related to heavy water and its cost: 1000 tons of heavy water. [...]. The water has a value of $300 million
Thats about $333/L, Not a bad price, especially if that's Canadian dollars. Helps to buy in bulk.
UnitedNuclear will sell you 5 litres at US$400/L, but the price goes up to over $1111/L in small quantities (ie $10 for a 10 gram vial, about a third of the way down this page.).
MS has patented the double-click, did you know that?
I wouldn't put it past the USPTO to grant a patent on that, especially if it were misleadin^Wcleverly worded.
But in 1984 -- 22 years ago -- Apple introduced the Mac, and it certainly had double-click (only one mouse button, it had to!). There was Lisa and Xerox Star etc. before the Mac, but I don't recall if they had double click. Even if Apple had patented it, that patent would have expired years ago. Actually I hope they did patent it, an earlier (especially expired) patent is about the easiest way to prove prior art.
Does our government have any constitutional right to outlaw gambling?
Probably not, but it's amazing what the Supreme Court has let Congress get away with under the coloring of the interstate commerce clause. (Congress is constitutionally authorized to regulate interstate commerce, so they throw some fiction about same into almost every bill they think might be a little dodgy. Works, too, except where they're trying to do something explicitly forbidden to them by the constitution.)
Nowadays Java is mostly used in systems and applications for companies, not for home users.
Actually in terms of numbers of installed JVMs, most Java is probably in mobile phones. There's a lot of J2ME out there, although J2EE gets the visibility because of the web-based server role.
Java shows up in some other interesting places: my wife had a couple of x-rays done a week ago and they included a printout (screen dump) of the patient info metadata from whatever application they used to control the system; the GUI was clearly Java Swing (platinum plaf).
But when scaling up a transaction to even just hundreds of thousands of dollars in a medium sized transaction, it becomes impossible to count _every_ dollar. It's just a statistical impossibility.
When confronted with such large numbers, it has become standard practice for accountants to concern themselves not with each individual dollar but with verifying flow for any particular transaction. That is, what matters is whether the balance is positive or negative, not specific dollars in the process.
Voting machines (or processes) will never reliably count one hundred million votes. Or one hundred thousand. There is always a margin of error.
Why not? One hundred million can easily be represented in a 32-bit int, with bits to spare (use them for a checksum).
How would you feel about your bank or your credit card company saying something like "accounting machines (or processes) will never reliably count your balance, there's always a margin of error".
To a certain extent that is true -- people mistype entries, etc -- but you'd be pretty pissed if you called the bank on it and they said something like "ah, it's only a $9 error, the process isn't perfect" without offering to fix the problem. (Or even "hey, we only got the sign bit wrong, this isn't something to freak out over.")
The first question, the fundamental question: Was this an isolated incident or was this systematic?
If you don't know the answer to that, you can't properly answer whether the error (the root cause) affected the outcome of a race or whether or not it was intentional.
If the machine wasn't recording votes for this guy in the one case we know about, how do we know for certain that it didn't fail to record every vote for this guy? We don't. Perhaps he should have won in a 16-10-10 count, but the machine took his 16 votes and distributed them amongst the other candidates. (Unlikely, but if we based elections on probabilities, we'd just do random sampling instead of (allegedly) counting every vote.)
This should be a simple tabulation issue, integers only. No fractions, no rounding errors, just simple integer counting. If there's a mistake, the root cause needs to be determined. Yeah, maybe the guy fat-fingered it and just thought he voted for himself. Maybe it really was just a random glitch (cosmic rays?). Maybe somebody subverted the vote software. You need to know which before you can make decisions about any of the other questions.
So if this agreement can allow Linux and MS to finally actually talk to each other,
The only thing that has ever stopped Linux and MS from "finally actually talk[ing] to each other" is Microsoft. Every protocol and file format that Linux and Linux software uses (except 3rd party proprietary stuff that just happens to run on Linux) is open and published. Further, copyrights aren't infringed by code that re-implements an interface (see "abstraction, filtration, comparison") so Microsoft has always been free to write code that interoperates with Linux kernel and applications.
The fact is, Microsoft has deliberately gone out of its way to change file formats and protocols to make such interoperation as difficult as possible.
- - - -
Because they said they wouldn't in the agreement.
Bwa ha ha ha!! LOL! This is Microsoft we're talking about. Besides which, they reserved the right to revoke that agreement any time they want.
Remember Vader's lines: "I am altering the terms of our agreement. Pray that I do not alter them again." Or as an MSFT exec said to Bob Metcalfe of 3com after MSFT screwed 3com on OS/2 LAN Manager: "You made a mistake, you trusted us".
See also the fable of the frog and the scorpion (and variations thereof).
Slashdot Mirror
odds are very good that you are within a few tens of meters of an OMG RADIOACTIVE! substance.
No, the odds are close to 100% that you have an OMG RADIOACTIVE! substance inside your body right now. The main one is potassium (K40). It's not very radioactive, but that means that OMG, it has a half life of over a billion years! Then there's C14, which occurs naturally in the atmosphere (via cosmic ray interaction with nitrogen), is absorbed by plants, which you (or your food) then eat(s).
Then for those living (or flying) at altitude, there's cosmic rays. For those in granite buildings or living atop granite bedrock (Manhatten, for example) there's uranium in the granite.
Ignorance of relative levels aside, I think one of the factors that makes radiation so scary (to some people) is that it's not detectable by human senses (at least not at levels that haven't killed you already by the time you notice it). That makes it "magic". An acute dose is also not a pleasant way to go (but nor are a lot of other things). Acute doses are hard to get, though. Marie Curie worked and lived with some pretty intensively radioactive materials, and she lived to just a few months shy of 67.
If you want my Polonium 210 you'll have to pry it from my hot dead hands.
There, fixed it for you.
I wouldn't recommend it, but metallic mercury isn't really that bad. It's mercury compounds that are nasty, and stuff like methyl mercury is really nasty -- it'll seep through a rubber glove and be absorbed through the skin.
The toxin in Destroying Angel toadstools is close to what you want. There are some initial symptoms that look like a minor case of food poisoning -- nausea and such -- but those pass in a day and you apparently recover. A few days to a week later you die because the toxin has destroyed your liver.
There are plenty of others. Somewhere around here I've got a whole book on poisons (including radiological). Some are pretty nasty ways to go (although hardly undetectable). Oxalic acid (found in rhubarb leaves, some other inedible parts of certain plants) for example, reacts with calcium ions in your cells to form needle-like, insoluble crystals of calcium oxalate. That book is more toxicology oriented, but I've seen one for mystery writers that concentrates on the hard-to-detect (or misleading) stuff.
If you do want to go the radiation route, an x-ray machine is the easiest to conceal from radiological detection because it can be switched off, and fairly portable if you omit the six inches or so of lead shielding that commercial models have. Don't know how long you'd need to expose the victim for, though. Maybe you can hide it under his bed...
I wonder if there could ever be a similar way of engineering electronics.
;-)
Sure there is. Ever hear of fuses? They're the things that the transistors are in there to protect by failing first.
No, it's fair use. That song has an infinite number of verses, so the one he copied is a negligible fraction thereof.
Besides, it was a parody (also fair use), not a direct copy.
'Some 2.4 billion years ago when the Milky Way started upping its star production, cosmic rays -- high-speed atomic particles -- started pouring onto our planet [...]' Causes one to wonder what the probability for life arising on a planet is given that our own seemed to be in a very unique situation on many different counts."
While Earth does seem to be unique amongst the hundred or so planets that we're aware of, the above circumstance is not one of the reasons. Those cosmic rays would have been pouring onto every planet in the galaxy, or at least this corner of it. If that cosmic ray flux did have an effect on jump starting the primitive life that was around at the time, it may have done so on tens of thousands of planets.
It may also have wiped out the local equivalent of the dinosaurs - or even intelligent species - on some other planets.
Most so-called houses in North America are more like wooden tents. There's the frame, and then some fairly thin covering (it hasn't been plywood in decades) that helps hold the frame together and keep the wind and moisture out (mostly). Sounds like a tent to me. You could cut a hole in the wall -- even an exterior wall -- with a good knife.
The chemical smell you noted may have been from the glue used to hold the pieces of wood together in the particle board used these days. Most new construction isn't designed to last any longer than the first mortgage.
(As a kid I lived in part of Toronto where they were tearing down old houses (circa 70 or so years old) to clear the way for construction of the Bloor St subway line. Good solid double-thickness brick with slate roofs -- with lathe and plaster on the interior walls. The wiring was downright scary, though -- cloth insulated wires slung on ceramic insulators nailed to the studs. Grounding? We don' need no steenking grounding!)
Exactly.
I'm not broken, just unintelligently designed.
Yes, that's what I meant by "some limitations on damages".
That would require them to sue those competitors, or else the patent would become invalid.
Nope, that only applies to trademarks - defend them or lose them.
Patents and copyrights you can selectively enforce. Patent trolls frequently do this, going after the easily intimidated companies first to build up a warchest before tackling someone who is more likely to fight back. There are some limitations on damages if you can be shown to have known about the infringement for a while before suing, but that in no way invalidates the patent.
Taste being (primarily) a chemical phenomenon, I'd imagine it tastes the same as regular water. Drinking it is relatively harmless (but expensive) in small doses, cool if you like your ice cubes to sink rather than float.
In experiments with animals on a D2O enriched diet (not cheap!), the change in chemical reaction rates (because D2O is about 11% heavier than H2O) starts to seriously interfere with metabolism at around 30% replacement with D2O, less for more complex animals, and not at all for simple unicellular organisms. (This from memory, do not try this at home without more research.)
However my understanding of patents is that an IP owner has to go after the original infringer for redress before it can go after a third party that uses something that infringes on IP distributed by the infringer
That's not the case. A patent holder can go after anyone and everyone (at anytime, in no particular order) that "exercises" (uses) the patent, whether they bought the infringing device/software from somebody else or not. It's just that the patent holder is more likely to win worthwile amounts of damages going after a manufacturer/distributer. There was a case a couple of years ago where the holder of some web (or database? forget the details) patents was threatening to go after Microsoft's customers because their settlement with Microsoft only covered Microsoft, not the customers.
Bussard himself is relatively famous as is, btw. His 'Bussard ramscoops' were adopted into science fiction with Star Trek: TNG
Oh please. Someone who equates ST:TNG with science fiction? GMAFB.
Bussard ramjets hit science fiction soon after he invented the concept in the early 1960s -- they were a critical feature of Poul Anderson's Tau Zero circa 1970, and Niven had already coined the name "ramscoop" at least as early as 1968, and the concept was familiar enought to fans even then that it didn't need much explanation.
In general any SF idea in a TV series has been around in print SF for a decade or two, at least. Long enough for the writers of the show to be familiar with it and also long enough that they can be sure a reasonable percentage of the audience has heard of it. A TV episode doesn't have the time (or inclination) to go into explanations, it just throws out a few phrases that the audience better understand (or at least recognize in context) or they'll lose that audience.
Anecdote related to heavy water and its cost:
1000 tons of heavy water. [...]. The water has a value of $300 million
Thats about $333/L, Not a bad price, especially if that's Canadian dollars. Helps to buy in bulk.
UnitedNuclear will sell you 5 litres at US$400/L, but the price goes up to over $1111/L in small quantities (ie $10 for a 10 gram vial, about a third of the way down this page.).
MS has patented the double-click, did you know that?
I wouldn't put it past the USPTO to grant a patent on that, especially if it were misleadin^Wcleverly worded.
But in 1984 -- 22 years ago -- Apple introduced the Mac, and it certainly had double-click (only one mouse button, it had to!). There was Lisa and Xerox Star etc. before the Mac, but I don't recall if they had double click. Even if Apple had patented it, that patent would have expired years ago. Actually I hope they did patent it, an earlier (especially expired) patent is about the easiest way to prove prior art.
Does our government have any constitutional right to outlaw gambling?
Probably not, but it's amazing what the Supreme Court has let Congress get away with under the coloring of the interstate commerce clause. (Congress is constitutionally authorized to regulate interstate commerce, so they throw some fiction about same into almost every bill they think might be a little dodgy. Works, too, except where they're trying to do something explicitly forbidden to them by the constitution.)
So you say. How do we know who you are?
;-)
(Nothing personal, just illustrating the chains of trust necessarily involved in any security.)
Thanks for checking. If you really did
Java is not an acronym,
;-)
Don't you mean "Java's A Void Acronym"?
Nowadays Java is mostly used in systems and applications for companies, not for home users.
Actually in terms of numbers of installed JVMs, most Java is probably in mobile phones. There's a lot of J2ME out there, although J2EE gets the visibility because of the web-based server role.
Java shows up in some other interesting places: my wife had a couple of x-rays done a week ago and they included a printout (screen dump) of the patient info metadata from whatever application they used to control the system; the GUI was clearly Java Swing (platinum plaf).
The only thing that stops Linux and MS from talking is Microsoft.
...) from working with Linux.
Well... and the GPL.
Funny, the GPL hasn't stopped hundreds of other proprietary software vendors (IBM, HP, Oracle, Sun, Adobe,
Are you suggesting that Microsoft is too stupid to properly understand the GPL? I suppose that's a possibility, but they can afford lawyers.
But when scaling up a transaction to even just hundreds of thousands of dollars in a medium sized transaction, it becomes impossible to count _every_ dollar. It's just a statistical impossibility.
When confronted with such large numbers, it has become standard practice for accountants to concern themselves not with each individual dollar but with verifying flow for any particular transaction. That is, what matters is whether the balance is positive or negative, not specific dollars in the process.
Fixed that for you. Now how do you feel?
Voting machines (or processes) will never reliably count one hundred million votes. Or one hundred thousand. There is always a margin of error.
Why not? One hundred million can easily be represented in a 32-bit int, with bits to spare (use them for a checksum).
How would you feel about your bank or your credit card company saying something like "accounting machines (or processes) will never reliably count your balance, there's always a margin of error".
To a certain extent that is true -- people mistype entries, etc -- but you'd be pretty pissed if you called the bank on it and they said something like "ah, it's only a $9 error, the process isn't perfect" without offering to fix the problem. (Or even "hey, we only got the sign bit wrong, this isn't something to freak out over.")
The first question, the fundamental question: Was this an isolated incident or was this systematic?
If you don't know the answer to that, you can't properly answer whether the error (the root cause) affected the outcome of a race or whether or not it was intentional.
If the machine wasn't recording votes for this guy in the one case we know about, how do we know for certain that it didn't fail to record every vote for this guy? We don't. Perhaps he should have won in a 16-10-10 count, but the machine took his 16 votes and distributed them amongst the other candidates. (Unlikely, but if we based elections on probabilities, we'd just do random sampling instead of (allegedly) counting every vote.)
This should be a simple tabulation issue, integers only. No fractions, no rounding errors, just simple integer counting. If there's a mistake, the root cause needs to be determined. Yeah, maybe the guy fat-fingered it and just thought he voted for himself. Maybe it really was just a random glitch (cosmic rays?). Maybe somebody subverted the vote software. You need to know which before you can make decisions about any of the other questions.
So if this agreement can allow Linux and MS to finally actually talk to each other,
The only thing that has ever stopped Linux and MS from "finally actually talk[ing] to each other" is Microsoft. Every protocol and file format that Linux and Linux software uses (except 3rd party proprietary stuff that just happens to run on Linux) is open and published. Further, copyrights aren't infringed by code that re-implements an interface (see "abstraction, filtration, comparison") so Microsoft has always been free to write code that interoperates with Linux kernel and applications.
The fact is, Microsoft has deliberately gone out of its way to change file formats and protocols to make such interoperation as difficult as possible.
- - - -
Because they said they wouldn't in the agreement.
Bwa ha ha ha!! LOL! This is Microsoft we're talking about. Besides which, they reserved the right to revoke that agreement any time they want.
Remember Vader's lines: "I am altering the terms of our agreement. Pray that I do not alter them again." Or as an MSFT exec said to Bob Metcalfe of 3com after MSFT screwed 3com on OS/2 LAN Manager: "You made a mistake, you trusted us".
See also the fable of the frog and the scorpion (and variations thereof).