First of all, they will dissipate almsot instantly due to Hawking radiation. Second of all, they are so tiny that they will rarely (if ever) get close enough to swallow something else.
Third of all: The kind of (and energy of) collision in question occurs with non-trivial frequency when cosmic rays hit atoms in the atmosphere. If it created a long-lived black hole that could suck down a planet in a geologically short time we would have been down the drain LONG ago.
Good thing Intel put in those nice debugging registers that let you dump the contents of SSE registers at arbitrary intervals (e.g. after every SSE operation by the debugged process).
Also: Having the keys only in the registers shrinks the search space to microscopic proportions, while expanding the time window of vulnerability (along with labeling it - as the code has to work around the "missing" registers for everything else it's doing.)
Trains put buggy makers out of work, did the governments do anything?
Yes, they did: Laws like: "When two trains approach each other at a track crossing, each must stop until the other is clear." (Not an error: A deliberate attempt to make it impossible to run the railroad legally.)
Similarly (when automobiles were putting buggy makers out of work): Laws like the one requiring a man with a red warning flag to precede the auto.
You can get most of the same effect as the (un)"fair tax" with less downsides (including avoiding the double-tax effect of switching):
- Stick with an income tax but make it DEAD flat. Collect the full amount as withholding at paycheck time. Everybody pays the same percentage, so there's no need to track I.D.
- Do the flat "rebate/dole" as a separate (though related) item: One to a customer, regardless of income. Registration is voluntary, as is picking up the payment. Anybody who wishes to trade in the money for anonymity can simply refuse to sign up or to collect his check that year.
This would also eliminate much of the financial incentive for illegal immigration / "undocumented workers" and their cost advantage over citizens and legals under the current "look the other way" system (which amounts to a subsidy to business paid for by the documented/citizen workers.)
- They'd be paying their taxes regardless of whether the rest of the money was spent locally or sent back to the old country.
- They couldn't get the "rebate" unless they went through the normal immigration channels.
- Decriminalizing their working would eliminate an employer's ability to impose unconscionable (but cheaper) working conditions and fire or arrange the deportation of any who complain.
- With the "rebate" replacing welfare most "services" and "programs" (and their costly bureaucracies) could be eliminated. "Undocumented" dependents would, of course, be ineligible, eliminating the major income "redistribution" from legal workers to the families of illegals.
Well, you can do that today by inventing extra children for more deductions, and that's just one of the countless ways to cheat on income taxes. And I don't see why we'd need a national ID other than the existing SSN.
The point is not whether you'd need any additional ID number.
With the current SSN, while it's not legal to register more than once, there's little incentive to do so, because benefits are largely proportional to pay-in. Somebody who switches identities loses his accumulation in return for anonymity. (Yes there are ways to scam it, but they're complicated and tend to leave other tracks if attempted.) So there isn't a big need to impose SSN as a "Your PAPERS!" national ID system with massive and intrusive enforcement.
With something like the "Fair Tax" proposal having a second ID number automatically means having a second payout of the "rebate" - which is a major chunk of cash. Criminals jump on it right away, putting a major drain on the system. So the government jumps on investigation and enforcement (with the approval and encouragement of much of the taxpaying base, which sees it as a ripoff of themselves).
EVERYBODY gets identified and all the IDs cross-checked. Fingerprints, retina and iris patterns, life history investigation, databases,... And of course lifelong updates and tracking (to "make sure the dead go off the roles rather than a crook appropriating their dole".)
I am quite skeptical of the claim that heavy water slows down a plant's metabolism. It is far more likely that sufficient heavy water to have a real effect on a plant would simply kill it outright.
Back when my wife was working her way through college, one of her summer jobs was working in just such a plant gene bank, in Corvallis Oregon.
It's my understanding that archeologists have sprouted and grown millet seeds found in Egyptian tombs.
According to the Wikipedia article cited above that was an old hoax - but there have been more reliable reports of some seeds over a thousand years old sprouting.
And while we're at it, let's also overhaul the tax system [linking to the "fair tax" {a national sales tax proposal} wikipedia page].
Federal sales taxes have a number of problems.
The biggest, IMHO, is that switching to them ends up taxing people's savings - especially retirement savings - twice. It was taxed once, at various rates, while it was was being squirreled away. Then it gets taxed again, at confiscatory rates, when it is spent.
Right now is especially nasty, since you've got the entire baby boom just reaching retirement age. They've already been massively soaked by the Social Security pyramid scheme to give bread and circuses to previous generations - amid constant predictions that it would collapse when THEY retired. So they had to build their own retirement nest-eggs on top of it, while paying the ever-climbing interest on the national debt (which first became intractable when their parents ran the Vietnam War on credit, back when the bulk of the boomers were opposing it). Now, as they're about to retire and have to live on what little they were able to save: And people talk about "replacing" the income tax (which they already paid on much of that money) with a similar percentage of sales tax.
That's one big voting block that will oppose such a measure until they die - by which time additional generations will be in a similar situation.
Next: Like all taxes, once imposed it will never go away and will always go up. Sales taxes, being largely hidden, make it much easier for the government to jack the rates. (See the "value added tax" debacle on the other side of the Atlantic pond for details.)
And: Sales taxes zap the lower income earners harder than the upper (since the lower-income people are working hand-to-mouth and need to spend pretty much all of it, while the upper can avoid spending much of it - investing it to make more, moving it to places and situations where the tax can be avoided before spending it, etc.). This scheme attempts to avoid the effect by "rebating" a certain amount of tax to each individual - approximating a flat-tax plus dole scheme. What a massive opportunity for cheating (by creating multiple fake identities to get multiple "rebates".) What a massive excuse for the government to impose a national ID / registration / citizen tracking system.
Guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people.
Knives don't kill people. People with knives kill people. Clubs don't kill people. People with clubs kill people. Fists don't kill people. People with fists kill people. Poisons don't kill people. People with poisons kill people. Cars don't kill people. People with cars kill people. Cans of gasoline don't kill people. People with cans of gasoline kill people. If you try to disarm people, where do you stop?
Why do I object? Because guns (or "people with guns") also protect people (including the person with the gun). They do this in several ways, including by opposing unprovoked attacks. Apparently, in that case alone, they prevent more death and injury than they cause, by a factor of several.
The quoted formulation leads to the false belief that killing can be reduced by banning guns (when in fact such attempts apparently greatly increase it "in the wild").
Dropping it into a discussion of another subject, if the poster is not called on it, propagates the dangerous meme.
The extension I posted above is intended to
Yes, my posting is off-topic. So is the parent. If I had mod points at this time I'd have just modded the parent down as off-topic. So instead I'm putting my own karma on the line to oppose the propagation of a meme that has killed countless people and continues to do so to this day.
I request any moderator that choses to mod THIS post down to do the same to the parent. I also request that any moderator who finds the parent posting has less off-topic down-mods than this one to add another down-mod to just the parent. To do otherwise is to take sides in the political debate injected into a different topic's discussion by the parent poster.
As you'll note from the article, some seeds (such as those of cocoa and rubber) are "recalcitrant" and can't be banked at all. Many others can be banked for a few years but need to be sprouted and new seeds grown from time to time.
Yes, the seeds of some plants can go for centuries. But that's outliers, not something you can count on for seeds of arbitrary crops.
How long will a post-apocalyptic population last on seeds that are buried in a mountain on a remote island? Provided they can get there, how many big macs can they make from those seeds?
And they might as well make them into bread, because they are unlikely to sprout.
Seeds stay fertile only for a limited time. You can stretch that somewhat by keeping them frozen - provided that the particular seeds can survive freezing, of course. But short of cryonic preservation (after perfusing them with cryoprotectants) you're not going to get them to last more than a few years.
That's why REAL plant gene banks work by growing the plants with heavy water. This drastically slows their metabolism (along with that of any bugs that might attack them), resulting in these tiny bonsai-like specimens that live very slowly - and thus very long - and eventually make seeds you can use to continue the cycle. Grow their seeds in normal water and you're back to normal plants - or gradually switch the plants over to normal water and they may revert to normal growth patterns.
The ice on Antarctica and Greenland, along with a few glaciers elsewhere, are the only significant contributors to sea level from ice melting. (The rest of the north polar ice is floating.)
The average and year-round snow lines lower with increasing latitude. Once the first reaches ground level you switch to permafrost, the second and you switch to polar ice caps. Global warming will move those boundary poleward only slightly. It would take a HELL of a lot of global warming to move it far enough to start thawing the Antarctic cap, and even afterward you're talking a thousand years or more to melt it off the continent. (Fossil fuels run out well before that.) Meanwhile, once it snows there the only way for the snow to leave is as a glacier crawling (at "glacial speed") to the ocean. If it weren't for glaciers the water would all end up on the cap as ice and the seas would become salt flats. B-)
Greenland might melt off a significant amount of ice with the projected warming - as it did during the Medieval Warm Period. (That's why it was called "Greenland", after all.) But the warming is expected to raise the amount of snow dumped on Antarctica to more than compensate, resulting in a net LOWERING of the sea level from the changing of the ice balance.
Which doesn't mean that global warming wouldn't raise the oceans. The expansion from the rise in ocean water temperature may get slightly ahead of the sequestration of water in the south polar cap. But you're talking a foot or two, not the hundreds of feet you'd get from melting the south cap.
All that assuming the next round of modeling and research doesn't change the paradigm, of course.
IANAC (I Am Not A Climatologist) Your sea level may vary. B-)
Actually, while the Middle English root of disgruntle was negative, Meriam-Webster's gives the positive meaning that a hacker would sensibly expect. Evidently, the back-construction dates back to 1926 and now predominates. "Curiouser and curiouser."
Fortunately the "gruntle" formulation is sufficiently out-of-use that saying it still causes the mind-pop that makes the conversational hack work. B-)
There's actually a measureable pulse of brain activity that results from things like this - or from conversational non-sequiters - that occurs a particular number of miliseconds after the out-of-place word. It's named for the number of miliseconds (which I forget at the moment).
It's handy to do this in conflict situations, too, since it tends to paralyze a listener who isn't expecting it. (Very handy if he has a gun pointed at you. B-) )
"I'll have a sundae: chocolate and vanilla ice cream topped with hot giraffes."
Also: The guy who's comes up with the most answers (often the one with the most correct solutions) will be the one who issues the most midcourse corrections. That means he will make the most statements that conflict with his colleagues' previous statements and ideas and will end up looking the most "argumentative".
Why is the default and nearly universal choice to work late as opposed to early?
In addition to the points already mentioned:
Metabolism:
- There are "morning people" and "afternoon/night people" and the latter are more common.
- Changing to a later wake time is easier for most people than changing to earlier.
Time-stretching:
Staying on task beyond "quitting time" into "uninterrupted by colleagues time" is tempting - especially when the task is one that requires keeping a lot of mental state, such as debugging an issue in a complicated system or a program. Continuing it once started is MUCH easier than putting it down and picking it up the next day, since the latter involves "reloading" the mental "task state" - bringing all the information back into short-term memory. For many people this is usually more of a disadvantage than "sleeping on the problem" is an advantage.
IT workers, especially, tend to be solving a lot of short-term problems that were assigned to them during the day, which plays into that "keep state loaded" issue. Further, putting some hot-button problem off to the next day so they can leave early is seen as "shirking" - displaying another of TFA's "warning signs" as well as leaving a lot of co-workers with unsolved problems chewing their fingernails for the rest of the day.
"gruntled" is actually a bad thing [...] Now you know, and knowing is half the battle!
(Like "flammable"/"inflammable" versus "nonflammable".)
Thanks. But I'm quite aware it was not the proper usage. (That's why it was in quotes.)
I was using a form of hacker slang for humorous emphasis: Deliberately over-applying a generalized rule to a word which is an exception to it. The conflict makes the unusual construction stand out and focuses the reader/listener's mind on the intended meaning. Meanwhile it tends to cause an extra pass of parsing, letting the point stay in the mind longer and sink into long-term memory better. (This works best when, as in this case, the conflicting meanings are nearly exact opposites.)
In addition to promoting communication, it tends to be fun for the listener.
A little heavy handed perhaps?... this guy sounds like a power tripping fuckwit. Tell a subset of your workers they the greatest risk to the security of the company then monitor them to see which ones react badly?
No Shinola, Sherlock!
"Anybody who disagrees with me is a threat to the company who should immediately be fired."
Even a PHB should be able to recognize THAT one.
But watch the ones who don't see through it start hamstringing their IT departments, firing their best IT people and executive-suite sanity-checkers, and then think the former employees sabotaged things when their IT infrastructure starts to rot without the "late-arriving disgruntled, argumentative, paranoids" around to maintain it.
Fortunately it's to SOME extent self-correcting, as the companies who fall for this fad lose ground to competitors who don't. But meanwhile a lot of good IT people are going to get hurt.
Let's see... the study shows that people who are fired generally are considered by their employers to have performed poorly...
This is groundbreaking!
And while we're at it: How many employees who do NOT sabotage corporate systems "are disgruntled", "are paranoid", "generally show up late", and/or "argue with colleagues"?
Last time I looked:
- A large fraction of the best IT people often work late, for any or all of several reasons: They prefer it, they need to work when load is light to minimize impact on business processes, fixing what the users broke during the day skews the time of their peak workload to later than that of the mainstream users, etc.
They often work more than a normal workday - but they'd have to work two shifts every day and only take time out for sleep, in order to come in bright and early to impress the suits who read this "study". But any sane IT professional will take advantage of flex time and come in late instead.
Programmers and other IT professionals coming in late has been a stereotype since computers used vacuum tubes. (I know because I was there and was one of many who created it. B-) )
- "Argue with colleagues"? Maybe yes-maning works in the executive suite. But when a crew of experts is chasing down a problem there will be a slew of hypotheses tried and discarded, with different workers coming up with different hypotheses and evidence to falsify them. To an outsider this looks like an argument, when it's actually progress. Experts will also often have differing opinions and will discuss them - ditto.
(I recall one company where upper-level executives quietly added themselves to an engineering internal mailing list. There we discussed the latest problems - often heatedly - until they were solved. When one was solved the traffic on THAT problem stopped cold and another would take its place. To the suits it looked like a disaster, when in fact the project was on time, within budget, exceeding targets, and still looked like it would have been a quantum leap when delivered - if the company hadn't suddenly shut it down...)
- "disgruntled"? With the continuing budget shortfalls, IT resource expansion always lagging company growth, lusers opening virus email,... I have yet to meet a "gruntled" IT professional.
- "paranoid"? (I presume we're talking the folk etymology, not clinical paranoia.) IT, like other forms of engineering, is an exercise in staying at least one step ahead of Murphy's Law. If an IT professional isn't "paranoid" he's not doing his job.
Watch the suits who saw this start canning their best IT people - zero-notice style. (That's where the employee arrives at work to find his cardkey doesn't work his passwords are rescinded, and he is escorted to HR where he is handed two weeks pay in lieu of notice, a box containing anything from his desk that the company didn't think was theirs, and a threatening document in lawyerese, and then kicked out of the building.)
And of course the fired employees will be blamed when the network starts to go to hell when the remaining people can't apply duct tape and chewing gum fast enough or the next rash of malware gets past the firewall.
= = = =
This reminds me of the "profiles" of school-age mass-murderers: They're always described as loners and introverts who don't get along with others in their school. In other words, just like all the nerds who get pounded on by the jocks and snubbed by the cheerleaders and queen-bees and react by withdrawing from contact with the "beautiful people" cliques. And every time one of these "studies" come out the administrators (generally former "beautiful people" themselves) dump on the nerds and side with the jocks that much more...
why does it seem like every week the riaa has some new, bizarre claim about the cost of music, or some completely inane justification for them to charge us all more money for our cds?
Because the more they can claim a CD SHOULD sell for (if not for those "darned pirates"), the more they can claim when lobbying congress or asking for damages in court.
This has nothing to do with their future pricing strategy and everything to do with political spin.
If you buy _more_ music, the revenue stream gets diluted. The cost to produce per unit sold becomes a larger part of the total revenue of each unit sold, and they get less profit.
Per Unit.
The question remains: With a lower price point would they sell enough additional units that the increased revenue would more than compensate for the decreased profit per unit.
Demand is still elastic: High prices mean some people who otherwise would have bought do not buy. Perhaps they borrow. Perhaps they borrow and copy. Perhaps they do without. In all three cases the xxAA gets nothing.
There is some price point where the profit is maximized: Lower and you cut your profit per unit more than increased units will compensate for, higher and you cut your sales more than the increased profit per unit will compensate for.
The RIAA and MPAA members seem to have the price point set too high and would no doubt do much better by lowering the price and selling more units. Instead they have chosen to keep it high, and rely on using their trade associations to attempt conversion of SOME of the borrowers to buyers with DRM and some of the copiers to customers with anti-piracy legislation and legal action. The ones that convert to "do without" are meaningless to them - even though a better pricing strategy COULD have turned them into buyers. (But it's hardly surprising that xxAA act that way, since the organizations were explicitly set up to handle the members' copyright-violation policing and diffuse royalty collection, while pricing strategy is the function of the individual members.)
(Interestingly, there may be more than one "hump" in the price curve. This industry got its start with people paying a nickel to play a song on a jukebox - keeping nothing but the experience. (They still do it - at higher prices per play - though part of the value is having the song playing in the place where the jukebox is.) With low enough prices people might very well buy a song over and over - even if they could capture a copy - just because it's more convenient.)
Is that what you do when you need money and so you put Google ads on your web page?
B-)
Hic, haek, hoc, heck... I really ought to decline to take the bait - and switch topics.
(Having learned spelling by phonics half a century or more ago I tend to mistype phonically when typing rapidly. Even the nice red-underline of dictionary-mismatches that Firefox now gives me won't catch homonyms.)
Another time Network Solutions distributed a corrupt update to the root servers. For several hours any name lookup that didn't get resolved from a nameserver's cache and had to hit the root servers wouldn't work.
Last major blackout in the eastern US took down a bunch of the North American backbone (and much of the bandwidth among other countries due to loss of routes through) when too many routers ran their UPSes down.
Much of Asia was recently nearly dead due to undersea cable cuts.
Yes the whole net didn't go down in any of these cases. (For instance: When the root servers were corrupted you could still route any packet for which you had the IP number - and could still translate a name if it was in a cache between you and the root.) But there were still large chunks of the world population that either lost all connectivity simultaneously or lost effective use of the network ditto.
Nah, someone just sent some spam. All those lookups, since everyone is on the list about a hundred times.
Sounds to me like some malware author was trying to write a 'bot that would skip the ISPs' nameservers and do his name lookups starting with the root servers - with no cacheing. So once it got cloned-out into a net and got started, every name lookup for every piece of mail (or whatever) started fresh with a request to one of the subset of root servers the bots knew about.
Result: Hammering on a small number of the root servers.
Reason for stopping it: Operator found out that he had a problem that the net operators couldn't ignore and would lead to a bigger possie of white-hats after him than was assembled to deal with the Morris worm. So he shut the botnet down before they hunted him down.
Slashdot Mirror
But it does answer a question once asked by a headline, when another planetary ring system had been tentatively identified:
"Is there a Ring of Debris around Uranus?"
First of all, they will dissipate almsot instantly due to Hawking radiation. Second of all, they are so tiny that they will rarely (if ever) get close enough to swallow something else.
Third of all: The kind of (and energy of) collision in question occurs with non-trivial frequency when cosmic rays hit atoms in the atmosphere. If it created a long-lived black hole that could suck down a planet in a geologically short time we would have been down the drain LONG ago.
Good thing Intel put in those nice debugging registers that let you dump the contents of SSE registers at arbitrary intervals (e.g. after every SSE operation by the debugged process).
Also: Having the keys only in the registers shrinks the search space to microscopic proportions, while expanding the time window of vulnerability (along with labeling it - as the code has to work around the "missing" registers for everything else it's doing.)
Trains put buggy makers out of work, did the governments do anything?
Yes, they did: Laws like: "When two trains approach each other at a track crossing, each must stop until the other is clear." (Not an error: A deliberate attempt to make it impossible to run the railroad legally.)
Similarly (when automobiles were putting buggy makers out of work): Laws like the one requiring a man with a red warning flag to precede the auto.
Of course they didn't work. B-)
Things like DMCA are the same thing revisited.
You can get most of the same effect as the (un)"fair tax" with less downsides (including avoiding the double-tax effect of switching):
- Stick with an income tax but make it DEAD flat. Collect the full amount as withholding at paycheck time. Everybody pays the same percentage, so there's no need to track I.D.
- Do the flat "rebate/dole" as a separate (though related) item: One to a customer, regardless of income. Registration is voluntary, as is picking up the payment. Anybody who wishes to trade in the money for anonymity can simply refuse to sign up or to collect his check that year.
This would also eliminate much of the financial incentive for illegal immigration / "undocumented workers" and their cost advantage over citizens and legals under the current "look the other way" system (which amounts to a subsidy to business paid for by the documented/citizen workers.)
- They'd be paying their taxes regardless of whether the rest of the money was spent locally or sent back to the old country.
- They couldn't get the "rebate" unless they went through the normal immigration channels.
- Decriminalizing their working would eliminate an employer's ability to impose unconscionable (but cheaper) working conditions and fire or arrange the deportation of any who complain.
- With the "rebate" replacing welfare most "services" and "programs" (and their costly bureaucracies) could be eliminated. "Undocumented" dependents would, of course, be ineligible, eliminating the major income "redistribution" from legal workers to the families of illegals.
Well, you can do that today by inventing extra children for more deductions, and that's just one of the countless ways to cheat on income taxes. And I don't see why we'd need a national ID other than the existing SSN.
... And of course lifelong updates and tracking (to "make sure the dead go off the roles rather than a crook appropriating their dole".)
The point is not whether you'd need any additional ID number.
With the current SSN, while it's not legal to register more than once, there's little incentive to do so, because benefits are largely proportional to pay-in. Somebody who switches identities loses his accumulation in return for anonymity. (Yes there are ways to scam it, but they're complicated and tend to leave other tracks if attempted.) So there isn't a big need to impose SSN as a "Your PAPERS!" national ID system with massive and intrusive enforcement.
With something like the "Fair Tax" proposal having a second ID number automatically means having a second payout of the "rebate" - which is a major chunk of cash. Criminals jump on it right away, putting a major drain on the system. So the government jumps on investigation and enforcement (with the approval and encouragement of much of the taxpaying base, which sees it as a ripoff of themselves).
EVERYBODY gets identified and all the IDs cross-checked. Fingerprints, retina and iris patterns, life history investigation, databases,
Big Brother, big time!
I am quite skeptical of the claim that heavy water slows down a plant's metabolism. It is far more likely that sufficient heavy water to have a real effect on a plant would simply kill it outright.
Back when my wife was working her way through college, one of her summer jobs was working in just such a plant gene bank, in Corvallis Oregon.
It's my understanding that archeologists have sprouted and grown millet seeds found in Egyptian tombs.
According to the Wikipedia article cited above that was an old hoax - but there have been more reliable reports of some seeds over a thousand years old sprouting.
And while we're at it, let's also overhaul the tax system [linking to the "fair tax" {a national sales tax proposal} wikipedia page].
Federal sales taxes have a number of problems.
The biggest, IMHO, is that switching to them ends up taxing people's savings - especially retirement savings - twice. It was taxed once, at various rates, while it was was being squirreled away. Then it gets taxed again, at confiscatory rates, when it is spent.
Right now is especially nasty, since you've got the entire baby boom just reaching retirement age. They've already been massively soaked by the Social Security pyramid scheme to give bread and circuses to previous generations - amid constant predictions that it would collapse when THEY retired. So they had to build their own retirement nest-eggs on top of it, while paying the ever-climbing interest on the national debt (which first became intractable when their parents ran the Vietnam War on credit, back when the bulk of the boomers were opposing it). Now, as they're about to retire and have to live on what little they were able to save: And people talk about "replacing" the income tax (which they already paid on much of that money) with a similar percentage of sales tax.
That's one big voting block that will oppose such a measure until they die - by which time additional generations will be in a similar situation.
Next: Like all taxes, once imposed it will never go away and will always go up. Sales taxes, being largely hidden, make it much easier for the government to jack the rates. (See the "value added tax" debacle on the other side of the Atlantic pond for details.)
And: Sales taxes zap the lower income earners harder than the upper (since the lower-income people are working hand-to-mouth and need to spend pretty much all of it, while the upper can avoid spending much of it - investing it to make more, moving it to places and situations where the tax can be avoided before spending it, etc.). This scheme attempts to avoid the effect by "rebating" a certain amount of tax to each individual - approximating a flat-tax plus dole scheme. What a massive opportunity for cheating (by creating multiple fake identities to get multiple "rebates".) What a massive excuse for the government to impose a national ID / registration / citizen tracking system.
I could go on...
Guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people.
Knives don't kill people. People with knives kill people.
Clubs don't kill people. People with clubs kill people.
Fists don't kill people. People with fists kill people.
Poisons don't kill people. People with poisons kill people.
Cars don't kill people. People with cars kill people.
Cans of gasoline don't kill people. People with cans of gasoline kill people.
If you try to disarm people, where do you stop?
Why do I object? Because guns (or "people with guns") also protect people (including the person with the gun). They do this in several ways, including by opposing unprovoked attacks. Apparently, in that case alone, they prevent more death and injury than they cause, by a factor of several.
The quoted formulation leads to the false belief that killing can be reduced by banning guns (when in fact such attempts apparently greatly increase it "in the wild").
Dropping it into a discussion of another subject, if the poster is not called on it, propagates the dangerous meme.
The extension I posted above is intended to
Yes, my posting is off-topic. So is the parent. If I had mod points at this time I'd have just modded the parent down as off-topic. So instead I'm putting my own karma on the line to oppose the propagation of a meme that has killed countless people and continues to do so to this day.
I request any moderator that choses to mod THIS post down to do the same to the parent. I also request that any moderator who finds the parent posting has less off-topic down-mods than this one to add another down-mod to just the parent. To do otherwise is to take sides in the political debate injected into a different topic's discussion by the parent poster.
so it was named to fool people into thinking it was Green
And people thought that he was lying, instead of emphisizing the good parts.
Until recently.
You see the glacers have been receeding and over the last few years they've been finding the remains of the villages which had been underneath them.
Some seeds can go over 1,000 years and still germinate. ...
Seeds are tough.
Some are, some, aren't.
As you'll note from the article, some seeds (such as those of cocoa and rubber) are "recalcitrant" and can't be banked at all. Many others can be banked for a few years but need to be sprouted and new seeds grown from time to time.
Yes, the seeds of some plants can go for centuries. But that's outliers, not something you can count on for seeds of arbitrary crops.
How long will a post-apocalyptic population last on seeds that are buried in a mountain on a remote island? Provided they can get there, how many big macs can they make from those seeds?
And they might as well make them into bread, because they are unlikely to sprout.
Seeds stay fertile only for a limited time. You can stretch that somewhat by keeping them frozen - provided that the particular seeds can survive freezing, of course. But short of cryonic preservation (after perfusing them with cryoprotectants) you're not going to get them to last more than a few years.
That's why REAL plant gene banks work by growing the plants with heavy water. This drastically slows their metabolism (along with that of any bugs that might attack them), resulting in these tiny bonsai-like specimens that live very slowly - and thus very long - and eventually make seeds you can use to continue the cycle. Grow their seeds in normal water and you're back to normal plants - or gradually switch the plants over to normal water and they may revert to normal growth patterns.
And if all the ice melts, the seas rise
The ice on Antarctica and Greenland, along with a few glaciers elsewhere, are the only significant contributors to sea level from ice melting. (The rest of the north polar ice is floating.)
The average and year-round snow lines lower with increasing latitude. Once the first reaches ground level you switch to permafrost, the second and you switch to polar ice caps. Global warming will move those boundary poleward only slightly. It would take a HELL of a lot of global warming to move it far enough to start thawing the Antarctic cap, and even afterward you're talking a thousand years or more to melt it off the continent. (Fossil fuels run out well before that.) Meanwhile, once it snows there the only way for the snow to leave is as a glacier crawling (at "glacial speed") to the ocean. If it weren't for glaciers the water would all end up on the cap as ice and the seas would become salt flats. B-)
Greenland might melt off a significant amount of ice with the projected warming - as it did during the Medieval Warm Period. (That's why it was called "Greenland", after all.) But the warming is expected to raise the amount of snow dumped on Antarctica to more than compensate, resulting in a net LOWERING of the sea level from the changing of the ice balance.
Which doesn't mean that global warming wouldn't raise the oceans. The expansion from the rise in ocean water temperature may get slightly ahead of the sequestration of water in the south polar cap. But you're talking a foot or two, not the hundreds of feet you'd get from melting the south cap.
All that assuming the next round of modeling and research doesn't change the paradigm, of course.
IANAC (I Am Not A Climatologist) Your sea level may vary. B-)
Actually, while the Middle English root of disgruntle was negative, Meriam-Webster's gives the positive meaning that a hacker would sensibly expect. Evidently, the back-construction dates back to 1926 and now predominates. "Curiouser and curiouser."
Fortunately the "gruntle" formulation is sufficiently out-of-use that saying it still causes the mind-pop that makes the conversational hack work. B-)
There's actually a measureable pulse of brain activity that results from things like this - or from conversational non-sequiters - that occurs a particular number of miliseconds after the out-of-place word. It's named for the number of miliseconds (which I forget at the moment).
It's handy to do this in conflict situations, too, since it tends to paralyze a listener who isn't expecting it. (Very handy if he has a gun pointed at you. B-) )
"I'll have a sundae: chocolate and vanilla ice cream topped with hot giraffes."
See?
Thanks.
Also: The guy who's comes up with the most answers (often the one with the most correct solutions) will be the one who issues the most midcourse corrections. That means he will make the most statements that conflict with his colleagues' previous statements and ideas and will end up looking the most "argumentative".
Oops!
Why is the default and nearly universal choice to work late as opposed to early?
In addition to the points already mentioned:
Metabolism:
- There are "morning people" and "afternoon/night people" and the latter are more common.
- Changing to a later wake time is easier for most people than changing to earlier.
Time-stretching:
Staying on task beyond "quitting time" into "uninterrupted by colleagues time" is tempting - especially when the task is one that requires keeping a lot of mental state, such as debugging an issue in a complicated system or a program. Continuing it once started is MUCH easier than putting it down and picking it up the next day, since the latter involves "reloading" the mental "task state" - bringing all the information back into short-term memory. For many people this is usually more of a disadvantage than "sleeping on the problem" is an advantage.
IT workers, especially, tend to be solving a lot of short-term problems that were assigned to them during the day, which plays into that "keep state loaded" issue. Further, putting some hot-button problem off to the next day so they can leave early is seen as "shirking" - displaying another of TFA's "warning signs" as well as leaving a lot of co-workers with unsolved problems chewing their fingernails for the rest of the day.
I have yet to meet a "gruntled" IT professional.
"gruntled" is actually a bad thing [...] Now you know, and knowing is half the battle!
(Like "flammable"/"inflammable" versus "nonflammable".)
Thanks. But I'm quite aware it was not the proper usage. (That's why it was in quotes.)
I was using a form of hacker slang for humorous emphasis: Deliberately over-applying a generalized rule to a word which is an exception to it. The conflict makes the unusual construction stand out and focuses the reader/listener's mind on the intended meaning. Meanwhile it tends to cause an extra pass of parsing, letting the point stay in the mind longer and sink into long-term memory better. (This works best when, as in this case, the conflicting meanings are nearly exact opposites.)
In addition to promoting communication, it tends to be fun for the listener.
A little heavy handed perhaps? ... this guy sounds like a power tripping fuckwit. Tell a subset of your workers they the greatest risk to the security of the company then monitor them to see which ones react badly?
No Shinola, Sherlock!
"Anybody who disagrees with me is a threat to the company who should immediately be fired."
Even a PHB should be able to recognize THAT one.
But watch the ones who don't see through it start hamstringing their IT departments, firing their best IT people and executive-suite sanity-checkers, and then think the former employees sabotaged things when their IT infrastructure starts to rot without the "late-arriving disgruntled, argumentative, paranoids" around to maintain it.
Fortunately it's to SOME extent self-correcting, as the companies who fall for this fad lose ground to competitors who don't. But meanwhile a lot of good IT people are going to get hurt.
Let's see... the study shows that people who are fired generally are considered by their employers to have performed poorly...
... I have yet to meet a "gruntled" IT professional.
This is groundbreaking!
And while we're at it: How many employees who do NOT sabotage corporate systems "are disgruntled", "are paranoid", "generally show up late", and/or "argue with colleagues"?
Last time I looked:
- A large fraction of the best IT people often work late, for any or all of several reasons: They prefer it, they need to work when load is light to minimize impact on business processes, fixing what the users broke during the day skews the time of their peak workload to later than that of the mainstream users, etc.
They often work more than a normal workday - but they'd have to work two shifts every day and only take time out for sleep, in order to come in bright and early to impress the suits who read this "study". But any sane IT professional will take advantage of flex time and come in late instead.
Programmers and other IT professionals coming in late has been a stereotype since computers used vacuum tubes. (I know because I was there and was one of many who created it. B-) )
- "Argue with colleagues"? Maybe yes-maning works in the executive suite. But when a crew of experts is chasing down a problem there will be a slew of hypotheses tried and discarded, with different workers coming up with different hypotheses and evidence to falsify them. To an outsider this looks like an argument, when it's actually progress. Experts will also often have differing opinions and will discuss them - ditto.
(I recall one company where upper-level executives quietly added themselves to an engineering internal mailing list. There we discussed the latest problems - often heatedly - until they were solved. When one was solved the traffic on THAT problem stopped cold and another would take its place. To the suits it looked like a disaster, when in fact the project was on time, within budget, exceeding targets, and still looked like it would have been a quantum leap when delivered - if the company hadn't suddenly shut it down...)
- "disgruntled"? With the continuing budget shortfalls, IT resource expansion always lagging company growth, lusers opening virus email,
- "paranoid"? (I presume we're talking the folk etymology, not clinical paranoia.) IT, like other forms of engineering, is an exercise in staying at least one step ahead of Murphy's Law. If an IT professional isn't "paranoid" he's not doing his job.
Watch the suits who saw this start canning their best IT people - zero-notice style. (That's where the employee arrives at work to find his cardkey doesn't work his passwords are rescinded, and he is escorted to HR where he is handed two weeks pay in lieu of notice, a box containing anything from his desk that the company didn't think was theirs, and a threatening document in lawyerese, and then kicked out of the building.)
And of course the fired employees will be blamed when the network starts to go to hell when the remaining people can't apply duct tape and chewing gum fast enough or the next rash of malware gets past the firewall.
= = = =
This reminds me of the "profiles" of school-age mass-murderers: They're always described as loners and introverts who don't get along with others in their school. In other words, just like all the nerds who get pounded on by the jocks and snubbed by the cheerleaders and queen-bees and react by withdrawing from contact with the "beautiful people" cliques. And every time one of these "studies" come out the administrators (generally former "beautiful people" themselves) dump on the nerds and side with the jocks that much more...
why does it seem like every week the riaa has some new, bizarre claim about the cost of music, or some completely inane justification for them to charge us all more money for our cds?
Because the more they can claim a CD SHOULD sell for (if not for those "darned pirates"), the more they can claim when lobbying congress or asking for damages in court.
This has nothing to do with their future pricing strategy and everything to do with political spin.
If you buy _more_ music, the revenue stream gets diluted. The cost to produce per unit sold becomes a larger part of the total revenue of each unit sold, and they get less profit.
Per Unit.
The question remains: With a lower price point would they sell enough additional units that the increased revenue would more than compensate for the decreased profit per unit.
Demand is still elastic: High prices mean some people who otherwise would have bought do not buy. Perhaps they borrow. Perhaps they borrow and copy. Perhaps they do without. In all three cases the xxAA gets nothing.
There is some price point where the profit is maximized: Lower and you cut your profit per unit more than increased units will compensate for, higher and you cut your sales more than the increased profit per unit will compensate for.
The RIAA and MPAA members seem to have the price point set too high and would no doubt do much better by lowering the price and selling more units. Instead they have chosen to keep it high, and rely on using their trade associations to attempt conversion of SOME of the borrowers to buyers with DRM and some of the copiers to customers with anti-piracy legislation and legal action. The ones that convert to "do without" are meaningless to them - even though a better pricing strategy COULD have turned them into buyers. (But it's hardly surprising that xxAA act that way, since the organizations were explicitly set up to handle the members' copyright-violation policing and diffuse royalty collection, while pricing strategy is the function of the individual members.)
(Interestingly, there may be more than one "hump" in the price curve. This industry got its start with people paying a nickel to play a song on a jukebox - keeping nothing but the experience. (They still do it - at higher prices per play - though part of the value is having the song playing in the place where the jukebox is.) With low enough prices people might very well buy a song over and over - even if they could capture a copy - just because it's more convenient.)
"ad hock"?
Is that what you do when you need money and so you put Google ads on your web page?
B-)
Hic, haek, hoc, heck... I really ought to decline to take the bait - and switch topics.
(Having learned spelling by phonics half a century or more ago I tend to mistype phonically when typing rapidly. Even the nice red-underline of dictionary-mismatches that Firefox now gives me won't catch homonyms.)
Another time Network Solutions distributed a corrupt update to the root servers. For several hours any name lookup that didn't get resolved from a nameserver's cache and had to hit the root servers wouldn't work.
Last major blackout in the eastern US took down a bunch of the North American backbone (and much of the bandwidth among other countries due to loss of routes through) when too many routers ran their UPSes down.
Much of Asia was recently nearly dead due to undersea cable cuts.
Yes the whole net didn't go down in any of these cases. (For instance: When the root servers were corrupted you could still route any packet for which you had the IP number - and could still translate a name if it was in a cache between you and the root.) But there were still large chunks of the world population that either lost all connectivity simultaneously or lost effective use of the network ditto.
Some new botnet flexing its muscle perhaps?
Nah, someone just sent some spam. All those lookups, since everyone is on the list about a hundred times.
Sounds to me like some malware author was trying to write a 'bot that would skip the ISPs' nameservers and do his name lookups starting with the root servers - with no cacheing. So once it got cloned-out into a net and got started, every name lookup for every piece of mail (or whatever) started fresh with a request to one of the subset of root servers the bots knew about.
Result: Hammering on a small number of the root servers.
Reason for stopping it: Operator found out that he had a problem that the net operators couldn't ignore and would lead to a bigger possie of white-hats after him than was assembled to deal with the Morris worm. So he shut the botnet down before they hunted him down.