Other posters have mentioned that automotive systems switch these currents daily, so although it's not an ideal solution, it's not that big a deal.
A better way to cope with these sorts of electrical loads is to use a higher voltage. You don't need to be an electrical engineer to see that higher voltage = lower current for a given power. As a bonus, the manufacturer can then use thinner cable (read: lighter and cheaper) for high-power electrical systems - starter, demister, catconverter heater etc.
This is why an agreement has been in place for a few years for the automotive industry to gradually phase-in 42volt electrical systems to replace the current 12volt standard. (http://www.autospeed.com/cms/article.html?&A=0319 )
It remains to be seen if this will be adopted, but how many cars with 6v electrics do we see nowadays?
The funny part is that Americans seem to pronounce words exactly how they're spelled, e.g buoy, Gloucester... Or they change the spelling to suit their own pronunciation - sulfur, ax, etc
The first time an American ( a jeweller as it happened) said "sodder" to me I though it was some new way of joining metals.
Perhaps, but I'm pretty sure the most harmful UV is about ~260nm, as this corresponds to the diameter of DNA. A shorter wavelength may not actually be as harmful.
Besides, I don't see how any spectrum of UV can jump out of the drive's case to give you skin cancer...
I think the bluray spec actually describes cartridges around their media too, although I understand a few firms are trying to make things cheaper by discarding the cartridge. I guess this also stops the masses feeling threatened because cartridges look too '80s.
A step backwards in my opinion. Rember how much more reliable (relatively!) 3.5" disks were than their 5.25" predecessors? despite having a higher data density etc? This is in part due to their nifty housing which is more rigid and has that sliding flap to keep the dust out.
His rights have not been interfered with, as far as my layman's knowledge of US law tells me. If people were coming to his residence or place of business to call him a cocksmoking asshole, then that would be an infringement. But a public forum? I can't see how that form of free speech could be interpreted as infringing his rights.
From what the article says, what was said to Steven is obviously rude, but what else can be done about it?
That's just the trouble. If one is a lawyer working for oneself (read: free) then one also has the option of wasting everybody's time with shit like this. Anybody else would have no alternative but to walk away or at worst, stop using that message board, big deal. But shysters like this see an opportunity to rort a few bucks or some free publicity out of some perceived slur.
Also, the Yahoo article states that he tried to subpoena the details of the people who called him names. Do you think he just wanted to ask them politely to apologise? Did he shit. It seems to me he has spotted an opportunity to make a few bucks suing some poor bastard expressing an opinion, and now he's really grumpy because Yahoo won't give him a list of those people, so he's decided to sue Yahoo.
In related material, I for one find all the "asshole" comments in this/. thread both funny and ontopic. I've had a good chuckle reading this thread and I imagine that the funnies will have multiplied exponentially by the time I've finished this comment. However, I would say the the most relevant place to put these comment would be to click on the link to the Yahoo story. They have a message board following the story which seems a bit of a laugh too. There are even posts by "stephengalton" Do you think it's really the "overly robust geezer... shyster" himself, or has somebody clever hacked his screen name?
All the above is my own opinion and not presented as fact.
So is this: I think that the "stephengalton" featured in the article and related threads is a vindictive, petty-minded, overly sensitive maladjusted twat. So there.
Good work valkraider! You have shown how many people RTFA. I mean, here we are at the bottom of the thread before somebody has realised: "cool! a hacker chick! Is she hot?"
Readers, you should be ashamed of yourselves. Here's a girl who likes computers, has questionable morals, and by all accounts is none too bright. Perhaps we should stop saying "yeah, me too! I want to hurt that Sasser guy, just like the other 50 people to have said that" and instead go out and try to find this dream woman...
Good luck finding the photo valkraider, that's probably sufficient for most of us.
Disclaimer: I just failed immunology, but I think I can point you in the right direction.
The protein that causes the scary, well-known vCJD in humans (as opposed to any other prion infections which can have different hosts) is found only in the nervous tissues of cattle. This is passed on to other cattle when cow carcasses are ground down and fed to other cattle. It used to be that any part of the cow not sold to humans was pulped, dried, and fed to other cattle. In one way it's an elegant way to reduce waste and add cheap protein to cattle-feed, but as a previous poster pointed out it introduces an unnatural loop into the food chain which, Gaia theories aside, tends to be a Bad Thing.
As a human eating cow products, your main fear is brain and nerve tissue in your beef. Given the mechanisation of beef production, there is probably a significant risk of contamination, particularly in cheap ground beef/mince/hamburger.
Note that prions are resistant to high temperatures, so unlike bacterial infections, thorough cooking will not lessen the risk of infection.
As far as other cow-derived products go, unless you are very messy at milking cows, this should be OK.
Rennet used to manufacture cheese etc shouldn't be bad either, as it is just a protein from the gut and therefore shouldn't have come in contact with nervous tissue. If you are worried, there's cheese available which uses rennet from other sources.
Again, high temperatures as used in pasteurisation have neglligible impact on prions, but I would suggest that prions are not a good reason to annoy your friends and ruin restaurant outings by becoming Vegan just yet;-)
I think you were on to something there. Talking on the phone _is_ dangerous, because it's distracting. So is talking to someone in the back seat of the car, especially if you are one of those people who has to make eye contact while speaking.
The only obvious difference between these activites is that one of them involves taking a hand off the wheel. Shit, so does driving a manual transmission (stick). So does drinking a can of Coke. Oh dear, car manufacturers actually encourage this dangerous practice by putting cupholders in their new vehicles! And Ashtrays! Now they are encouraging the danerous practice of smoking a cigarette with your other hand!
So, (as the above stated) I can drink a Coke, smoke a cigarette, eat a hamburger, all whilst trying to check my mirror, use the indicator, and change lanes, but I can't talk on the phone. This is the problem with such specific laws. All they need is the previous law against driving like a dazed dumbarse, and some intelligence in enforcing it.
Besides, I know of many people who, far from avoiding phone use because of the new laws, just send texts instead, because it's "harder for the police to see"
I've been browsing at -1 (bored at university) but still can't find the answer to that exact question. So sorry if this is redundant, but just how does SETI distinguish between genuine ET signals and our own TV etc bouncing off, like Pluto or something? I mean, If you are looking for a nice, stable carrier among the random noise, surely the easiest to hear will be one of our own from a few years ago, that's just been reflected off some big dead rock ou there
But does this gene mean that you can't taste your piss, or that it doesn't taste? What's called for here is a double blind test. I wonder if anybody wants to volunteer to perform the test.
If the latter is the case, I can't help but to propose the following:
1. Discover that your piss is flavourless
2. Join the Army and get sent as cannonfodder in the desert
3. Sell your piss to anybody who doesn't want their food to taste like piss (I for one would pay a handsome portion of my crappy army wage)
4. ???
5. Profit
I suppose I meant to say "any organisation... should have an obligation"
I guess I was being a bit offtopic, but what I was trying to say is that a good way to ensure that CCTV monitoring of your activities is not being abused, is to be able to view these feeds at any time, in real time. It would be nifty if one could also view a history of who else has viewed this data.
Of course this would cost the CCTV providers a fortune, so it's easier to tell the curious public that of course they may view the footage... if they fill out the tedious paperwork, wait 40 days... etc. Anybody remember in Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, where the plans for the Earth bypass were available for public viewing... in a basement... in a disused lavatory... behind a sign marked "beware of the leopard"
If the university uses CCTV to monitor the activities of people on its grounds, then those people _should_ have access to the camera feeds. The students (and staff etc) should have to right to check what the security staff are getting their voyeuristic jollies from at any time. Any organisation that performs this wide-scale CCTV surveillance has an obligation to provide access to anybody who has legitimate business on the premises who wants to see what is being filmed.
It does seem, though, that this security breach allowed unauthorised _moving_ of the the cameras, which obviously should be restricted to avoid abuse.
IIRC, the origin of the Guinness book of records was to settle the debates that one gets into after a few pints at the pub, eg. "I tells ya, a greyhound can outrun a racehorse!" etc. That's why the book was originally published by the brewer GUINNESS and filled with "faster, bigger" type facts. These days they have all kinds of scrutineering to verify any world records published, but I still don't think it's quite ready to rank up there as a reputable scientific journal yet.
Also because of the geographic origins of the publication (Guinness = Ireland I assume;-) there might be some UK-centric bias. I'm not accusing Guinness of any underhanded practices here, merely that they are likely to receive many more submissions for inclusion from their side of the Atlantic, and that these submissions would be simpler to verify.
I for one am just saddenned that they have discontinued so many of the "gluttony" records in recent editions, for fear they would be sued if some idiot ate 50kg of canned prunes and crapped himself inside out.
I haven't looked at a Guinness Book of Records recently, so some of this may no longer be current.
Hey people, a big "hats off" to GNS. they've been serving zillions of images from a previously unknown webcam to zillions of nerds worldwide, and their server HASN'T been slashdotted yet. Well done GNS, we've slashdotted much bigger organisations than yours in the past. (no I don't work for GNS, but credit where credit's due)
The only thing that worries me is the "joke" emails we'll all be getting by the truckload in a coupla days, when the rest of the world notice and perpetuate what will be an old joke by then...
There's a real estate agent on the South Coast of NSW (Australia) named Dick Payne. If you sell your house thru his company, they put a big sign on your lawn with his name on it. Makes you wonder if they manage to sell _any_ properties.
Cruel bugger called his first born son Richard as well.
Hey this is SlashDot and they do have a website (www.viz.co.uk) It's funny, rude comics without being as in-yer-face as spacemoose www.drunkanddisorderly.net/spacemoose/archive.htm.
Takes a few reads to get the language and phonetic/satirical spelling of the accents though.
Exactly. Even 1000 years ago, if you survived childhood you would have pretty much the same chance of living to 75+ as any 20-year-old today. More even, since there were less carcinogens in the atmosphere, food etc, which can mess you up in old age.
So why does everyone _still_ use "average life expectancy" as if it actually means something. We all know how averages are created, kiddies, remember a baby dying at age = 1day is going to have a much bigger effect on the "average" than some old guy living one more year because he didn't get pneumonia.
The statistic that the average lifespan of humans has doubled in the last 300 years is thrown around all the time. People tend to imply that 300 years ago everybody must have died at 40. This is obviously nonsense. The statistic used to calculate life expectancy is actually "life expectancy at birth". So the real influence is not healthy adults living a few years longer. Remember your 3rd-grade arithmetic? If a baby breathes for a coupla minutes, then dies,(ie age = 0) it will affect the average more than someone who lives to say, 80 instead of 75. The reason life expectancy has doubled in the last 300 years is because fewer people die young of poor neonatal care, childhood diseases, malnutrition etc, not because science has done anything major for old people. This is still a Good Thing, but kind of different to the geriatric revolution it is so often painted as.
Dear drug runners:
I can build a much cooler sub for you for HALF the price. As a bonus, I will paint it a colour that is not quite so glaringly obvious to the DEA.
Instead of aguing over who to vote for, how about a few more Americans get off their arse and actually VOTE? In Australia voting is compulsory, and while we may not be able to get the best guy in all the time, we can at least keep the worst guy out. The "silent majority" actually have a voice here....
Why does everybody in The US call the IMPERIAL system the ENGLISH system?? Last time I checked even the English were using the metric system these days.
Point 2: the american system was never the same as the english, just look at the different definitions of the Gallon
Point 3: The americans had the sense to use decimal currency when Britain was still fumbling with farthings, shillings etc. What happened to that sensible start?
Point ?: Metric system is based on factors of 10. I have 10 fingers, 10 toes. This would seem at the first look to be a "natural" order of things. Unfortunately that theory is torpedoed by the presence of my 12 inch dick. I propose that the foot be renamed...
Slashdot Mirror
Other posters have mentioned that automotive systems switch these currents daily, so although it's not an ideal solution, it's not that big a deal.
9 )
A better way to cope with these sorts of electrical loads is to use a higher voltage. You don't need to be an electrical engineer to see that higher voltage = lower current for a given power. As a bonus, the manufacturer can then use thinner cable (read: lighter and cheaper) for high-power electrical systems - starter, demister, catconverter heater etc.
This is why an agreement has been in place for a few years for the automotive industry to gradually phase-in 42volt electrical systems to replace the current 12volt standard. (http://www.autospeed.com/cms/article.html?&A=031
It remains to be seen if this will be adopted, but how many cars with 6v electrics do we see nowadays?
The funny part is that Americans seem to pronounce words exactly how they're spelled, e.g buoy, Gloucester... Or they change the spelling to suit their own pronunciation - sulfur, ax, etc
The first time an American ( a jeweller as it happened) said "sodder" to me I though it was some new way of joining metals.
Of course your 19" CRT isn't going anywhere, it's too f#cking heavy.
You must be new here. Why do you think everybody else here is wearing these stylish tinfoil hats?
Perhaps, but I'm pretty sure the most harmful UV is about ~260nm, as this corresponds to the diameter of DNA. A shorter wavelength may not actually be as harmful.
Besides, I don't see how any spectrum of UV can jump out of the drive's case to give you skin cancer...
I think the bluray spec actually describes cartridges around their media too, although I understand a few firms are trying to make things cheaper by discarding the cartridge. I guess this also stops the masses feeling threatened because cartridges look too '80s.
A step backwards in my opinion. Rember how much more reliable (relatively!) 3.5" disks were than their 5.25" predecessors? despite having a higher data density etc? This is in part due to their nifty housing which is more rigid and has that sliding flap to keep the dust out.
His rights have not been interfered with, as far as my layman's knowledge of US law tells me. If people were coming to his residence or place of business to call him a cocksmoking asshole, then that would be an infringement. But a public forum? I can't see how that form of free speech could be interpreted as infringing his rights.
That's just the trouble. If one is a lawyer working for oneself (read: free) then one also has the option of wasting everybody's time with shit like this. Anybody else would have no alternative but to walk away or at worst, stop using that message board, big deal. But shysters like this see an opportunity to rort a few bucks or some free publicity out of some perceived slur. /. thread both funny and ontopic. I've had a good chuckle reading this thread and I imagine that the funnies will have multiplied exponentially by the time I've finished this comment. However, I would say the the most relevant place to put these comment would be to click on the link to the Yahoo story. They have a message board following the story which seems a bit of a laugh too. There are even posts by "stephengalton" Do you think it's really the "overly robust geezer... shyster" himself, or has somebody clever hacked his screen name?
Also, the Yahoo article states that he tried to subpoena the details of the people who called him names. Do you think he just wanted to ask them politely to apologise? Did he shit. It seems to me he has spotted an opportunity to make a few bucks suing some poor bastard expressing an opinion, and now he's really grumpy because Yahoo won't give him a list of those people, so he's decided to sue Yahoo.
In related material, I for one find all the "asshole" comments in this
All the above is my own opinion and not presented as fact.
So is this: I think that the "stephengalton" featured in the article and related threads is a vindictive, petty-minded, overly sensitive maladjusted twat. So there.
Good work valkraider! You have shown how many people RTFA. I mean, here we are at the bottom of the thread before somebody has realised: "cool! a hacker chick! Is she hot?"
Readers, you should be ashamed of yourselves. Here's a girl who likes computers, has questionable morals, and by all accounts is none too bright. Perhaps we should stop saying "yeah, me too! I want to hurt that Sasser guy, just like the other 50 people to have said that" and instead go out and try to find this dream woman...
Good luck finding the photo valkraider, that's probably sufficient for most of us.
Disclaimer: I just failed immunology, but I think I can point you in the right direction.
;-)
The protein that causes the scary, well-known vCJD in humans (as opposed to any other prion infections which can have different hosts) is found only in the nervous tissues of cattle. This is passed on to other cattle when cow carcasses are ground down and fed to other cattle. It used to be that any part of the cow not sold to humans was pulped, dried, and fed to other cattle. In one way it's an elegant way to reduce waste and add cheap protein to cattle-feed, but as a previous poster pointed out it introduces an unnatural loop into the food chain which, Gaia theories aside, tends to be a Bad Thing.
As a human eating cow products, your main fear is brain and nerve tissue in your beef. Given the mechanisation of beef production, there is probably a significant risk of contamination, particularly in cheap ground beef/mince/hamburger.
Note that prions are resistant to high temperatures, so unlike bacterial infections, thorough cooking will not lessen the risk of infection.
As far as other cow-derived products go, unless you are very messy at milking cows, this should be OK.
Rennet used to manufacture cheese etc shouldn't be bad either, as it is just a protein from the gut and therefore shouldn't have come in contact with nervous tissue. If you are worried, there's cheese available which uses rennet from other sources.
Again, high temperatures as used in pasteurisation have neglligible impact on prions, but I would suggest that prions are not a good reason to annoy your friends and ruin restaurant outings by becoming Vegan just yet
The only obvious difference between these activites is that one of them involves taking a hand off the wheel. Shit, so does driving a manual transmission (stick). So does drinking a can of Coke. Oh dear, car manufacturers actually encourage this dangerous practice by putting cupholders in their new vehicles! And Ashtrays! Now they are encouraging the danerous practice of smoking a cigarette with your other hand!
So, (as the above stated) I can drink a Coke, smoke a cigarette, eat a hamburger, all whilst trying to check my mirror, use the indicator, and change lanes, but I can't talk on the phone. This is the problem with such specific laws. All they need is the previous law against driving like a dazed dumbarse, and some intelligence in enforcing it.
Besides, I know of many people who, far from avoiding phone use because of the new laws, just send texts instead, because it's "harder for the police to see"
Dumb laws can also just encourage dumb behaviour.
I've been browsing at -1 (bored at university) but still can't find the answer to that exact question. So sorry if this is redundant, but just how does SETI distinguish between genuine ET signals and our own TV etc bouncing off, like Pluto or something? I mean, If you are looking for a nice, stable carrier among the random noise, surely the easiest to hear will be one of our own from a few years ago, that's just been reflected off some big dead rock ou there
If the latter is the case, I can't help but to propose the following:
1. Discover that your piss is flavourless
2. Join the Army and get sent as cannonfodder in the desert
3. Sell your piss to anybody who doesn't want their food to taste like piss (I for one would pay a handsome portion of my crappy army wage)
4. ???
5. Profit
I suppose I meant to say "any organisation ... should have an obligation"
I guess I was being a bit offtopic, but what I was trying to say is that a good way to ensure that CCTV monitoring of your activities is not being abused, is to be able to view these feeds at any time, in real time. It would be nifty if one could also view a history of who else has viewed this data.
Of course this would cost the CCTV providers a fortune, so it's easier to tell the curious public that of course they may view the footage... if they fill out the tedious paperwork, wait 40 days... etc. Anybody remember in Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, where the plans for the Earth bypass were available for public viewing... in a basement... in a disused lavatory... behind a sign marked "beware of the leopard"
(feel free to correct my inaccurate quote!)
If the university uses CCTV to monitor the activities of people on its grounds, then those people _should_ have access to the camera feeds. The students (and staff etc) should have to right to check what the security staff are getting their voyeuristic jollies from at any time. Any organisation that performs this wide-scale CCTV surveillance has an obligation to provide access to anybody who has legitimate business on the premises who wants to see what is being filmed.
It does seem, though, that this security breach allowed unauthorised _moving_ of the the cameras, which obviously should be restricted to avoid abuse.
IIRC, the origin of the Guinness book of records was to settle the debates that one gets into after a few pints at the pub, eg. "I tells ya, a greyhound can outrun a racehorse!" etc. That's why the book was originally published by the brewer GUINNESS and filled with "faster, bigger" type facts. These days they have all kinds of scrutineering to verify any world records published, but I still don't think it's quite ready to rank up there as a reputable scientific journal yet.
Also because of the geographic origins of the publication (Guinness = Ireland I assume;-) there might be some UK-centric bias. I'm not accusing Guinness of any underhanded practices here, merely that they are likely to receive many more submissions for inclusion from their side of the Atlantic, and that these submissions would be simpler to verify.
I for one am just saddenned that they have discontinued so many of the "gluttony" records in recent editions, for fear they would be sued if some idiot ate 50kg of canned prunes and crapped himself inside out.
I haven't looked at a Guinness Book of Records recently, so some of this may no longer be current.
Hey people, a big "hats off" to GNS. they've been serving zillions of images from a previously unknown webcam to zillions of nerds worldwide, and their server HASN'T been slashdotted yet. Well done GNS, we've slashdotted much bigger organisations than yours in the past. (no I don't work for GNS, but credit where credit's due) The only thing that worries me is the "joke" emails we'll all be getting by the truckload in a coupla days, when the rest of the world notice and perpetuate what will be an old joke by then...
There's a real estate agent on the South Coast of NSW (Australia) named Dick Payne. If you sell your house thru his company, they put a big sign on your lawn with his name on it. Makes you wonder if they manage to sell _any_ properties. Cruel bugger called his first born son Richard as well.
Hey this is SlashDot and they do have a website (www.viz.co.uk) It's funny, rude comics without being as in-yer-face as spacemoose www.drunkanddisorderly.net/spacemoose/archive.htm.
Takes a few reads to get the language and phonetic/satirical spelling of the accents though.
Exactly. Even 1000 years ago, if you survived childhood you would have pretty much the same chance of living to 75+ as any 20-year-old today. More even, since there were less carcinogens in the atmosphere, food etc, which can mess you up in old age.
So why does everyone _still_ use "average life expectancy" as if it actually means something. We all know how averages are created, kiddies, remember a baby dying at age = 1day is going to have a much bigger effect on the "average" than some old guy living one more year because he didn't get pneumonia.
The statistic that the average lifespan of humans has doubled in the last 300 years is thrown around all the time. People tend to imply that 300 years ago everybody must have died at 40. This is obviously nonsense. The statistic used to calculate life expectancy is actually "life expectancy at birth". So the real influence is not healthy adults living a few years longer. Remember your 3rd-grade arithmetic? If a baby breathes for a coupla minutes, then dies,(ie age = 0) it will affect the average more than someone who lives to say, 80 instead of 75. The reason life expectancy has doubled in the last 300 years is because fewer people die young of poor neonatal care, childhood diseases, malnutrition etc, not because science has done anything major for old people. This is still a Good Thing, but kind of different to the geriatric revolution it is so often painted as.
Dear drug runners: I can build a much cooler sub for you for HALF the price. As a bonus, I will paint it a colour that is not quite so glaringly obvious to the DEA.
Instead of aguing over who to vote for, how about a few more Americans get off their arse and actually VOTE? In Australia voting is compulsory, and while we may not be able to get the best guy in all the time, we can at least keep the worst guy out. The "silent majority" actually have a voice here....
Why does everybody in The US call the IMPERIAL system the ENGLISH system?? Last time I checked even the English were using the metric system these days. Point 2: the american system was never the same as the english, just look at the different definitions of the Gallon Point 3: The americans had the sense to use decimal currency when Britain was still fumbling with farthings, shillings etc. What happened to that sensible start? Point ?: Metric system is based on factors of 10. I have 10 fingers, 10 toes. This would seem at the first look to be a "natural" order of things. Unfortunately that theory is torpedoed by the presence of my 12 inch dick. I propose that the foot be renamed ...