It's jerks like you that the rest of us well-meaning geeks a bad name.
Are you being so very condescending because you can't explain what an electron is? Are you afraid that makes you no better than the rest of the unwashed masses? Do you have deep-seated insecurities about your fundamental particles?
And 'for the record' we still haven't figured out how to define the physical size of an electron--it may well have zero effective volume.
As for military applications, what happens diplomatically when the frenchies or the belgians or some other group of fruity bastards mandate that their system be left on while the US is fighting the next war for them?
Perhaps the fruity bastards want a system that they know won't be withdrawn by the warmongering yahoos across the ocean.
Ahem. Pardon the hint of flame. But with recent nonsense like the Capitol cafeterias purging 'French' fries from the menu, and more worrying talk of punitive economic measures directed at France and Germany, perhaps the Europeans feel that they need a positioning system that cannot be shut down by a foreign power.
Can't Europe do something orginal. Sure copy GPS, but do you need to copy our mission/ship names too?
I note that Galileo himself was European. Maybe the Americans should stop attaching the names of prominent Europeans to their projects. Can you imagine the European Space Agency launching a spacecraft named Ben Franklin?
If you've got a troublesome ex-employee, I'd think they should be able to handle something like this with a civil suit.
How is a disgruntled (and probably unemployed) ex-employee going to pay a hypothetical $20 million settlement? The company is still out-of-pocket that amount. Somebody has to pay to rebuild lost files. Also, insurance pays relatively quickly (in most cases) compared to a lawsuit. If you need to do data recovery to stay in business, you don't want to have to wait through several years' worth of appeals before someone cuts you a cheque.
This is what insurance is for--to protect entities (individuals and corporations) from ruinous losses due to one-off incidents. Everybody pays a little bit in premiums, everybody is protected from catastrophic losses in the event of disaster. If you never make an insurance claim, you're still ahead--because you get to sleep soundly at night.
Besides, in most jurisdictions, insurance companies are allowed to sue to recover losses. If the disgruntled ex-employee from our example does have some assets worth going after, believe you me, the insurance guys will be relentless.
For confused Canadian readers, the CAA is the British Civil Aviation Authority--it has nothing to do with the Canadian Automobile Association (see also AAA for U.S. readers).
On the other hand, if these balloons ever need roadside assistance, I don't know where they're going to get it.
It's actually not a problem. If your voice were to pass from air to helium and back to air again, it would sound exactly the same. Actually, even if the listener were immersed in helium the perceived pitch should be the same.
It is only when the speaker is breathing helium (raising the speed of sound around the vocal cords) that there will be a higher pitch observed.
Yes, but DSL in most areas is on the order of twenty times faster than that old 56K modem. A further factor of two is going to be virtually unnoticed by most users. I suppose there may be a few power users who need the extra bandwidth. Of course, their total bandwidth usage--in GB per month--is probably way above average, so they'll have to pay for that, as well...
This kind of story makes you want to stick your head in the sand and not buy any critical applications from corporations...
From whom would you buy your critical applications software (and hardware)? What if the guy down the street starts building them in his garage? Would you trust him? Would you trust your life with him?
Let's say he's very responsive to customer issues. Whenever there's a serious incident, he tracks down the bug in the software, issues a patch, and moves on. Unfortunately, there are a lot of bugs, and a lot of deaths, because he couldn't do proper QA by himself in his garage...
Well, you say, let him hire some QA people. Maybe a few marketing guys--he has to make a living, after all. Perhaps an engineer or two. Pretty soon, it starts to sound like he's running a *gasp* corporation.
You're right--directors and executives of companies that suppress reports of safety concerns should be drawn and quartered. To suggest that all corporations are reckless, deceptive, and grossly irresponsible is unfair.
Then there are some damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't cases. I'm familiar with the Therac-25 accidents in the mid-1980s, but I'm not going to ask the pharmacy for cobalt-60 so I can do home radiotherapy. I have to accept that there is a probability that somewhere, someone screwed up--and my life might be at risk because of it, and there is little (if anything) I can do about it.
...If you started drinking a lot of D2O, the differently shaped molecules wouldn't fit together correctly and you would begin breaking down at the cellular level...
No! Deuterium behaves chemically exactly like hydrogen-1 (protium) in the compounds that it forms. The physical properties are slightly different (heavy water--deuterium oxide--is denser, and has higher freezing and boiling points. Heavy water ice cubes will sink in a glass of regular water.) Problems arise simply because of its added mass. It's chemical kinetics are different--reactions involving deuterium run more slowly than reactions involving protium.
In the delicately balanced biochemical environment of the body, this slight slowing of reactions by the involvement of a heavier isotope would likely cause unpleasant symptoms. This has never been tested (to my knowledge) in any system larger than a cell culture. In those cases, replacement of roughly half the light water with heavy water prevented the formation of microtubules, blocking cell division.
Heavy water costs about three hundred U.S. dollars per liter--so poisoning a human being by this technique would be extremely costly. Not only that, the effect would be reversible with consumption of regular water. The effects would be like radiation poisoning or chemo, because rapidly dividing cells (in hair follicles, digestive tract, bone marrow) would be affected first.
Imagine my surprise at finding that Slashdot got something right: forii wrote that a "bottle of Pepto-Bismol contains one decay event" every 36 hours, and it does! Those alpha particles can't get through the glass...
...whether it or Iridium is the heaviest element.
Look, if you're going to sarcastic, I'm afraid that I have to nitpick your post. The question is whether osmium or iridium is the densest element, not the heavest.
Quite right that the alphas can't get through the glass--they won't even travel an appreciable distance through the liquid Pepto in the bottle.
Of course, the expense and the value of ECG is in the physician interpretation. Likewise, an aspirin in the hospital will cost you dollars instead of cents due to administration costs, nursing costs, insurance, etc.
Reminds me of a story to which technically-minded readers might better relate...
Nikola Tesla visited Henry Ford at his factory, which was having some kind of difficulty. Ford asked Tesla if he could help identify the problem area. Tesla walked up to a wall of boilerplate and made a small X in chalk on one of the plates. Ford was thrilled, and told him to send an invoice.
The bill arrived, for $10,000. Ford asked for a breakdown. Tesla sent another invoice, indicating a $1 charge for marking the wall with an X, and $9,999 for knowing where to put it.
The story and its variants are likely apocryphal, but they illustrate an important point. When you pay for a professional to do something, you're not paying for the specific work that they do--you're paying for the expertise that they bring to the task. (See also this old joke.)
That's why I'll hide if I want to get any research done.
For many (most?) researchers in the sciences, it just isn't possible to do research in the office. It is possible to write grant proposals, draft manuscripts, and grade papers, and when those tasks are being performed, one may find the scientist in the office. Otherwise...
"I have a timepoint in four minutes. I can talk until then. Then I need to collect data for seven minutes; then you can talk to me for another six minutes. Is that okay?"
"I have three days on the accelerator; I'll be down there 24/7 with my grad students until Tuesday. No, you can't visit--you don't have a dosimeter badge."
"Of course I'll regrade your term paper. Drop by my lab--oh, does your paper contain any flammable material?"
"I'm doing work with photomultiplier tubes. If you open the door and let light in then I'll bill you six thousand dollars for new tubes."
Many undergrads are under the impression that professors are at a university to teach courses. This is often a fallacy--teaching is frequently the third or fourth priority at best. The teaching is strictly a part-time sideline. The research is why professors are hired, why they are funded, and really what they do for a living. Good professors take their teaching duties as seriously as their research work--as they should--but they cannot be expected to spend forty hours a week in the office waiting for students to show up.
still ran to ten or so pages, most having two or fewer paragraphs. Maybe that's why the site wasn't Slashdotted--nobody had the patience to click through the whole article.
And with the price of porn these days, who's strong enough to haul around that much change?
Well, it helps that euro coins are available in denominations up to 2 euro. A roll of those is worth fifty euro; and not particularly heavy. How much porn do you need to buy at one time?
If America and Canada got into a war, where would all the draft dodgers go?
Canadian draft dodgers would go to Cuba; they should be safe there, and flights are readily available. Despite decades of effort, the Americans still haven't been able to bring down their government.
Draft dodgers from the U.S. would have to travel to Cuba by raft, I suppose.
It's too late. We're already being thought of as terrrorists. GWB and his ambassador have snubbed the Canadian Prime Minister over Canada's refusal to participate in the invasion of Iraq.
Now John Ashcroft is pissed off at Canada because our government is considering the decriminalization of possession of small quantities (less than an ounce) of marijuana. Not legalization; just decriminalization--you get a ticket and a fine, rather than an arrest, prison sentence, and criminal record. There are currently twelve U.S. states that do the same thing. Sheesh.
Perhaps these kids can 'correct' the vote tallies this November. I can think of a few states where nobody would notice...
I've learned of a few neat tricks that the gov't was able to do with their technology, though no specifics (for obvious, classified reasons), like being able to pick up EM radiation from a monitor cable and reconstruct the video -- from a few hundred feet away.
This isn't just something the government can do--this is something that a dedicated amateur can do with a little time and money. In addition to some expertise, you will need the following equipment:
A good commercial wide band radio receiver preferably designed for surveillance (requires a little modification) with spectrum display. Sensitivity and selectivity are paramount. Not all receivers will do the job adequately
Horizontal and vertical sync generator. Commercially available and will require some modification.
Multi-Scan Video Monitor with Shielded cables
Active Directional Antenna (phased antenna array) with shielded cables. Think radio telescope.
Video tape recording equipment.
This stuff will all fit in a van. The government may have more effective purpose-built tools, but there's nothing preventing a compentent technician from building such a device.
You don't secure systems against viruses. You have to secure people against them.
Shouldn't you do both? By only doing one, you're creating a single point of failure. (Very loosely speaking.) And I'd hate to have my company's security dependent solely on none of my employees ever doing something stupid.
I use the analogy that current virus writers are like Palestinians strapping bombs to themselves and blowing themselves up -- any fool can do it, you just have to sneak past. You haven't seen the Al Quaeda of viruses yet.
Despite propaganda to the contrary (tip of the hat to GWB) Al Quaeda just doesn't use particularly sophisticated methods. At least, not yet. Box cutters and a plan lifted from a Tom Clancy novel. That's it.
Hezbollah isn't exactly made up of amateurs; give them some credit. If it were possible to hijack an Israeli jet, I'm sure that they would have by now--but El-Al is generally acknowledged to have the world's best screening and security procedures. (No hijackings since 1968.)
The article is going to be published in the Physical Review Letters -- This is significantly different than saying the article has been published in the PRL's.
Well, no, it's not different. The article states "soon to be published" and names a specific journal--Phys. Rev. Lett. It seems that they've already been peer-reviewed, and the journal is in press.
You're right that it's unusual to call a press conference before they publication hits the streets, but maybe they're just enthusiastic.
In fact it is illegal for many regions of France to water vineyards.
Makes sense. With too much water, you get large, juicy grapes--which in turn produce dilute, watery wines. The chief cause of disappointing vintage years (in France) is excessive rain.
Which is not to say that watering the grapes leads to poor wines. In some wine regions (parts of California, for example) the weather is just too dry, and irrigation is necessary. Excellent wines can be produced through judicious watering--and year over year consistency is sometimes better because of the greater degree of control.
Someone spoofing these plants' state could seriously write-off the crop.
Well...growing anything--grapes included--will always require the grower to go outside and look at the plants periodically. If a grower gets messages from his plants saying they need water, and this happens while it's raining, he would probably be suspicious.
There's lots of feedback in this system--the grower can use the wireless network to monitor very closely the conditions in the vineyard, but he has to go out and physically examine the grapes.
The only way to sabotage a vineyard is to walk into the field and poison the plants. Or bribe someone who works the fields to do it. Or employ biological warfare. Ontario wineries have had to discard roughly a million liters of wine from the 2001 vintage because of an infestation of Asian ladybugs. (The ladybugs took shelter from the cold nestled among the bunches of grapes. They ended up pressed and vinified with the grape juice. Though nontoxic, they add an unpleasant aftertaste.) Someone bent on sabotage might be smarter to raise ladybugs.
Re:Liquid that really flows uphill...kind of
on
Water Flows Uphill
·
· Score: 1
I know, I shouldn't reply to my own posts...but I missed out a critical number. It should have been "Liquid helium 3"...
You can actually also get superfluid properties with garden variety helium-4. Below 2.2 K, liquid helium-4 undergoes a phase change to the (confusingly labelled) helium-II. Helium-II is currently believed to be a combination of superfluid and 'conventional' helium-4, so it can sneak out of containers, too. Here's a very brief blurb.
Yeah, except that threatening to file a lawsuit is illegal. You can inform somebody that what they are doing is in violation of some contract, but you can't say that you will sue them if they don't do what you want.
Eh? Such a threat is best phrased as follows: "You used my software without respecting the terms of the license. Either release the source per the contract, or I will sue your ass into the middle of next week."
You can't threaten violence ("release the source or I'll break your kneecaps") or use blackmail ("release the source or I'll put these incriminating photographs into the public domain")--in short, you can't threaten to do anything illegal. You can't ask the other party to do something illegal to avoid being sued, either. You can most assuredly threaten a lawsuit. The cease-and-desist letter is one of the most common (and more formal) methods by which one can threaten another party with a lawsuit.
You may be thinking of barratry--which is a definite no-no. It involves persistent incitement of (frivolous) litigation*, and it does not apply here.
*another definition of barratry involves certain illegal acts by the master of a ship--but that's not important to this discussion.;)
Slashdot Mirror
It's jerks like you that the rest of us well-meaning geeks a bad name.
Are you being so very condescending because you can't explain what an electron is? Are you afraid that makes you no better than the rest of the unwashed masses? Do you have deep-seated insecurities about your fundamental particles?
And 'for the record' we still haven't figured out how to define the physical size of an electron--it may well have zero effective volume.
Perhaps the fruity bastards want a system that they know won't be withdrawn by the warmongering yahoos across the ocean.
Ahem. Pardon the hint of flame. But with recent nonsense like the Capitol cafeterias purging 'French' fries from the menu, and more worrying talk of punitive economic measures directed at France and Germany, perhaps the Europeans feel that they need a positioning system that cannot be shut down by a foreign power.
I note that Galileo himself was European. Maybe the Americans should stop attaching the names of prominent Europeans to their projects. Can you imagine the European Space Agency launching a spacecraft named Ben Franklin?
How is a disgruntled (and probably unemployed) ex-employee going to pay a hypothetical $20 million settlement? The company is still out-of-pocket that amount. Somebody has to pay to rebuild lost files. Also, insurance pays relatively quickly (in most cases) compared to a lawsuit. If you need to do data recovery to stay in business, you don't want to have to wait through several years' worth of appeals before someone cuts you a cheque.
This is what insurance is for--to protect entities (individuals and corporations) from ruinous losses due to one-off incidents. Everybody pays a little bit in premiums, everybody is protected from catastrophic losses in the event of disaster. If you never make an insurance claim, you're still ahead--because you get to sleep soundly at night.
Besides, in most jurisdictions, insurance companies are allowed to sue to recover losses. If the disgruntled ex-employee from our example does have some assets worth going after, believe you me, the insurance guys will be relentless.
For confused Canadian readers, the CAA is the British Civil Aviation Authority--it has nothing to do with the Canadian Automobile Association (see also AAA for U.S. readers).
On the other hand, if these balloons ever need roadside assistance, I don't know where they're going to get it.
It is only when the speaker is breathing helium (raising the speed of sound around the vocal cords) that there will be a higher pitch observed.
And yes, I know you were kidding. ;)
Yes, but DSL in most areas is on the order of twenty times faster than that old 56K modem. A further factor of two is going to be virtually unnoticed by most users. I suppose there may be a few power users who need the extra bandwidth. Of course, their total bandwidth usage--in GB per month--is probably way above average, so they'll have to pay for that, as well...
From whom would you buy your critical applications software (and hardware)? What if the guy down the street starts building them in his garage? Would you trust him? Would you trust your life with him?
Let's say he's very responsive to customer issues. Whenever there's a serious incident, he tracks down the bug in the software, issues a patch, and moves on. Unfortunately, there are a lot of bugs, and a lot of deaths, because he couldn't do proper QA by himself in his garage...
Well, you say, let him hire some QA people. Maybe a few marketing guys--he has to make a living, after all. Perhaps an engineer or two. Pretty soon, it starts to sound like he's running a *gasp* corporation.
You're right--directors and executives of companies that suppress reports of safety concerns should be drawn and quartered. To suggest that all corporations are reckless, deceptive, and grossly irresponsible is unfair.
Then there are some damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't cases. I'm familiar with the Therac-25 accidents in the mid-1980s, but I'm not going to ask the pharmacy for cobalt-60 so I can do home radiotherapy. I have to accept that there is a probability that somewhere, someone screwed up--and my life might be at risk because of it, and there is little (if anything) I can do about it.
No! Deuterium behaves chemically exactly like hydrogen-1 (protium) in the compounds that it forms. The physical properties are slightly different (heavy water--deuterium oxide--is denser, and has higher freezing and boiling points. Heavy water ice cubes will sink in a glass of regular water.) Problems arise simply because of its added mass. It's chemical kinetics are different--reactions involving deuterium run more slowly than reactions involving protium.
In the delicately balanced biochemical environment of the body, this slight slowing of reactions by the involvement of a heavier isotope would likely cause unpleasant symptoms. This has never been tested (to my knowledge) in any system larger than a cell culture. In those cases, replacement of roughly half the light water with heavy water prevented the formation of microtubules, blocking cell division.
Heavy water costs about three hundred U.S. dollars per liter--so poisoning a human being by this technique would be extremely costly. Not only that, the effect would be reversible with consumption of regular water. The effects would be like radiation poisoning or chemo, because rapidly dividing cells (in hair follicles, digestive tract, bone marrow) would be affected first.
Look, if you're going to sarcastic, I'm afraid that I have to nitpick your post. The question is whether osmium or iridium is the densest element, not the heavest.
Quite right that the alphas can't get through the glass--they won't even travel an appreciable distance through the liquid Pepto in the bottle.
Reminds me of a story to which technically-minded readers might better relate...
The story and its variants are likely apocryphal, but they illustrate an important point. When you pay for a professional to do something, you're not paying for the specific work that they do--you're paying for the expertise that they bring to the task. (See also this old joke.)For many (most?) researchers in the sciences, it just isn't possible to do research in the office. It is possible to write grant proposals, draft manuscripts, and grade papers, and when those tasks are being performed, one may find the scientist in the office. Otherwise...
"I have a timepoint in four minutes. I can talk until then. Then I need to collect data for seven minutes; then you can talk to me for another six minutes. Is that okay?"
"I have three days on the accelerator; I'll be down there 24/7 with my grad students until Tuesday. No, you can't visit--you don't have a dosimeter badge."
"Of course I'll regrade your term paper. Drop by my lab--oh, does your paper contain any flammable material?"
"I'm doing work with photomultiplier tubes. If you open the door and let light in then I'll bill you six thousand dollars for new tubes."
Many undergrads are under the impression that professors are at a university to teach courses. This is often a fallacy--teaching is frequently the third or fourth priority at best. The teaching is strictly a part-time sideline. The research is why professors are hired, why they are funded, and really what they do for a living. Good professors take their teaching duties as seriously as their research work--as they should--but they cannot be expected to spend forty hours a week in the office waiting for students to show up.
The linked
[Next Page]
article was at
[Next Page]
ExtremeTech, and it
[Next Page]
still ran to ten or so pages, most having two or fewer paragraphs. Maybe that's why the site wasn't Slashdotted--nobody had the patience to click through the whole article.
For what it's worth, those posts are up now. /. readers just happened to be more keen on the discussing the potential for improved mugging efficiency.
Well, it helps that euro coins are available in denominations up to 2 euro. A roll of those is worth fifty euro; and not particularly heavy. How much porn do you need to buy at one time?
Canadian draft dodgers would go to Cuba; they should be safe there, and flights are readily available. Despite decades of effort, the Americans still haven't been able to bring down their government.
Draft dodgers from the U.S. would have to travel to Cuba by raft, I suppose.
It's too late. We're already being thought of as terrrorists. GWB and his ambassador have snubbed the Canadian Prime Minister over Canada's refusal to participate in the invasion of Iraq.
Now John Ashcroft is pissed off at Canada because our government is considering the decriminalization of possession of small quantities (less than an ounce) of marijuana. Not legalization; just decriminalization--you get a ticket and a fine, rather than an arrest, prison sentence, and criminal record. There are currently twelve U.S. states that do the same thing. Sheesh.
Perhaps these kids can 'correct' the vote tallies this November. I can think of a few states where nobody would notice...
I'll get off my soapbox now.
This isn't just something the government can do--this is something that a dedicated amateur can do with a little time and money. In addition to some expertise, you will need the following equipment:
- A good commercial wide band radio receiver preferably designed for surveillance (requires a little modification) with spectrum display. Sensitivity and selectivity are paramount. Not all receivers will do the job adequately
- Horizontal and vertical sync generator. Commercially available and will require some modification.
- Multi-Scan Video Monitor with Shielded cables
- Active Directional Antenna (phased antenna array) with shielded cables. Think radio telescope.
- Video tape recording equipment.
This stuff will all fit in a van. The government may have more effective purpose-built tools, but there's nothing preventing a compentent technician from building such a device.Shouldn't you do both? By only doing one, you're creating a single point of failure. (Very loosely speaking.) And I'd hate to have my company's security dependent solely on none of my employees ever doing something stupid.
Despite propaganda to the contrary (tip of the hat to GWB) Al Quaeda just doesn't use particularly sophisticated methods. At least, not yet. Box cutters and a plan lifted from a Tom Clancy novel. That's it.
Hezbollah isn't exactly made up of amateurs; give them some credit. If it were possible to hijack an Israeli jet, I'm sure that they would have by now--but El-Al is generally acknowledged to have the world's best screening and security procedures. (No hijackings since 1968.)
Well, no, it's not different. The article states "soon to be published" and names a specific journal--Phys. Rev. Lett. It seems that they've already been peer-reviewed, and the journal is in press.
You're right that it's unusual to call a press conference before they publication hits the streets, but maybe they're just enthusiastic.
Makes sense. With too much water, you get large, juicy grapes--which in turn produce dilute, watery wines. The chief cause of disappointing vintage years (in France) is excessive rain.
Which is not to say that watering the grapes leads to poor wines. In some wine regions (parts of California, for example) the weather is just too dry, and irrigation is necessary. Excellent wines can be produced through judicious watering--and year over year consistency is sometimes better because of the greater degree of control.
Well...growing anything--grapes included--will always require the grower to go outside and look at the plants periodically. If a grower gets messages from his plants saying they need water, and this happens while it's raining, he would probably be suspicious.
There's lots of feedback in this system--the grower can use the wireless network to monitor very closely the conditions in the vineyard, but he has to go out and physically examine the grapes.
The only way to sabotage a vineyard is to walk into the field and poison the plants. Or bribe someone who works the fields to do it. Or employ biological warfare. Ontario wineries have had to discard roughly a million liters of wine from the 2001 vintage because of an infestation of Asian ladybugs. (The ladybugs took shelter from the cold nestled among the bunches of grapes. They ended up pressed and vinified with the grape juice. Though nontoxic, they add an unpleasant aftertaste.) Someone bent on sabotage might be smarter to raise ladybugs.
You can actually also get superfluid properties with garden variety helium-4. Below 2.2 K, liquid helium-4 undergoes a phase change to the (confusingly labelled) helium-II. Helium-II is currently believed to be a combination of superfluid and 'conventional' helium-4, so it can sneak out of containers, too. Here's a very brief blurb.
Eh? Such a threat is best phrased as follows: "You used my software without respecting the terms of the license. Either release the source per the contract, or I will sue your ass into the middle of next week."
You can't threaten violence ("release the source or I'll break your kneecaps") or use blackmail ("release the source or I'll put these incriminating photographs into the public domain")--in short, you can't threaten to do anything illegal. You can't ask the other party to do something illegal to avoid being sued, either. You can most assuredly threaten a lawsuit. The cease-and-desist letter is one of the most common (and more formal) methods by which one can threaten another party with a lawsuit.
You may be thinking of barratry--which is a definite no-no. It involves persistent incitement of (frivolous) litigation*, and it does not apply here.
*another definition of barratry involves certain illegal acts by the master of a ship--but that's not important to this discussion. ;)