A fireman that rescued me (barely sensible) after an electronic device exploded, said that BeO was probably the culprit. I had been in the room when the device(s) exploded and was the first one to ring for help.
About 15 minutes later (I hadn't been feeling too good), I collapsed and was taken to hospital.
The principle behind this is astonishingly simple. I'm surprised it took this long for someone to think of the technological application.
Deaf people (at least the few I know) have been taught to feel their throat to learn how to speak. (ie how making certain sounds "feels" rather than sounds)
A case in point, one of my friends (deaf) was the first to notice a fire, as we were meant to (SOPs), she yelled "Fire, Fire, Fire" to alert everyone to the fire - she put her hand to her throat to ensure that she was indeed shouting.
As a sysadmin of a college network, "just a crash" *really* helped me.
I replaced all firewalls with OpenBSD filtering bridges. One rather persistent script kiddie (unfortuneately a legitimite $luser on the network) decided to send a few malformed packets here, there and everywhere. One of these crashed the filtering bridge at the edge of that particular subnet.
Immediately no packets enter or leave that subnet and I get about 40 phone calls "the internet is broken / my session crashed..." and go and deal with it.
Just a crash, saved several boxes. By contrast, accessible linux machines, privelege escalation - root exploit. All over.
Now if only the average windows box would *only* bluescreen in response to being cracked/ infection with the latest...rather than sending mal packets everywhere. Then infection would be self limiting and the world would be a better place.
Without thinking too much about it, we paraphrase all the time. Trying to give a sentence to a computer to reword, is a complicated task.
At Cornell, University, researchers decided to avail themselves of two different sources of the same news and use computational biology methods to make it possible for computers to automatically paraphrase input sentences. Their first step was to compare the two different sources of the same news.
Eventually, it is hoped that this research will have benefits in computer processing of natural-language queries, translation engines, and in assisting people with certain types of reading disabilities.
The project began when two ideas came together, said one of the Cornell researchers, Regina Barzilay. Regina Barzilay is an assistant professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The vast amount of duplicated content online is a valuable resource for computer systems learning to paraphrase. A number of reporters report the same news but using different wording. The redundant sources of news are able to assist in learning the different ways one piece of information can be paraphrased, as the same basic facts are reported in each. So with these multiple sources, you can sort out the noise and get the facts and then work out different ways of stating those facts.
Even with similar styles of writing, paraphrasing of sentences is more than just working out ans substituting synonyms. The researchers' provide a couple of common business phrases to illustrate this:
After the latest Fed rate cut, stocks rose across the board. Winners strongly outpaced losers after Greenspan cut interest rates again.
The next step, was to use computational biology techniques to determine how much in common two sentences had and how closely they were related. The technique used was similar to when biologista are looking to see how close two sets of genes are that may have started from the same seed but then evolved. They are different but have a degree of similarity.
They important thing was to compare news sources that were written differently but covered the same event. This generated a whole set of word patterns that were kind of the same. This was exactly the core data needed to inform a computer paraphrasing technique.
The Reuters and AFP news sources were used to test the system. News was selected from English articles produced between September 2000 and August 2002.
The system developed by the researchers performs two groupings; firstly comparing articles from the same source:
Word-based clustering methods were used to identify sets of text that had a high degree of overlapping words. This method identified articles that reported distinct acts of violence occuring in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Computational biology techniques were then used on these sets of articles to generate lattices or sentence templates for the computer to use. Each lattice contains a number of sets of words that occur in parallel and empty slots where arguments, such as locations, number of fatalities, times and dates can be inserted.
The challenge was to sort out which lattices were indeed due to different events and which were due to writing variability.
The researchers were thus able to identify common templates used by journalists to describe similar events. Ie. journalists who take the same article and change or take out a word, add a detail, reverse the sentence and so on are hereby busted.
One of the templates, or lattices, read: Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up in NAME on DATE killing NUMBER (other) people and injuring/maiming NUMBER. In addition to the injuring/maiming variable, there are several variables within the name argument: settlement of, coastal resort of, center of, southern city, or garden cafe.
43 AFP and 32 Reuters templates were thus discovered by the system. The researchers then cross-compared these lattices.
In Australia, university students are required to join the student union on enrolment in any course at a tertiary institution. The union can thus choose to take action on behalf of the students in exactly the same way as any other workers union.
So even though students are not paid to attend university, their union has legally the same weight as all other trade unions.
In my city the local representatives have been active organising various protests against proposed government regulation changes (effectively govt. wants to reduce spending on education and force universities to obtain funding through research avenues AND raise student fees - in Australia we have a deferred payment scheme called HECS that partially offsets tuition fees).
Some of the recent protests have been a day strike, culminating in a lunchtime rally, storming the state Parliament house. How effective? Who knows but the proposed reform bill has been stymied.
As they imply they will show a new photo each day until Christmas (Advent Calendar of photos), I hope they will produce some false colour images from the OMEGA and SPICAM instruments. THe first two both look like images from the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC), which do look cool but I would like to see some of the atmospheric and mineralogic data as maps.
> And what's this about "no freezer"? What exactly is outer space, if not cold? No airlocks aboard the ISS?
An obvious flaw with this argument is that if indeed the inside of the ISS is at 0 degC, then why don't the astro/cosmo nauts freeze as well as their food?
Or does their food orbit separately, and they go on a spacewalk each mealtime?
Another poster was correct in pointing out that sugars have multiple chiral centres. Glucose has four, which means that there are 2^4 = 16 stereoisomers of glucose. Prof. Fischer won the Nobel prize in 1902 for determining the correct isomer. In doing this work he invented a way of drawing these monosaccharides as a linear chain (all sugars do spend some time linear and some cyclic - it is an equilibrium) and the stereochemistry of the carbon atom furthest away from the aldehyde group determines the D or L designation.
So the ascii art above represents d-glucose because the OH group with an asterisk points to the right.
The idea is of using the opposing sugar works in theory becase we don't have the enzymes to digest them (no energy value) but we are able to recognise them (taste sweet).
Esau sawed wood. Easu wood would saw wood. Oh the wood Wood would saw. One day Esau Wood saw a saw saw wood as no other wood-saw would saw wood. In fact if all the wood-saws wood ever saw wood would saw wood, Wood never saw a wood saw saw wood as the wood-saw Wood saw would saw wood. And I never saw a wood-saw saw wood as the wood-saw Wood saw would saw wood until I saw Easu Wood saw wood with the wood-saw Wood saw would saw wood.:-)
I had some firmware driver issues with hardware I'd purchased. I only twigged to what was going on when the retail people let me set up my hardware next to their display model - theirs worked, mine didn't - theirs was twelve months older than mine. Got some mates together, worked out exactly which drivers did and didn't work, then rang the given number and asked for a firmware upgrade (or preferably downgrade). First we went through what kind of carpet I had, then she thought that "about two feet" off the ground was a bit high (measure the height of your desk). I got a little insistent that it was a software problem on their side - she asked if I ment games. I explained that there was software sort of pre-programmed into the chip that told it what it was and how it should detect it's environment and react accordingly (well it does...). She put me on hold for a while, then came back and told me that none of the other girls had ever heard of what I was on about and so she couldn't help me. Ugh..I'm still stuck with defective hardware....
An appropriate place to mention the "official" definition of disconfection - the practive of blowing on candy that has been dropped on the floor to remove the germs.
The interaction of metal nanocrystals is a burgeoning field of science.
The presence of ligands (things like water, carbon monoxide, dinitrogen) can and does change the structure of metal clusters.
In these interactions both the geometric structure (the physical shape of the thing - what we see being altered here) and the electronic structure are important.
If for example the sum of the bond strength between a metal atom and say the hydrogen of water, and another metal atom with the ohter hydrogen of water is stronger than the bond between the two metal atoms, then the water molecule can push the two metal atoms apart and form a bridge between them. The degree of change can be measured by spectrosopies such as UV/vis, IR, Raman etc. that allow characterisation of types & strength of bonds and forces.
Finding examples of this behaviour and learning how it can be directed by say changing the geometry of the metal cluster and by changing the ligand or the metal composition has applications in materials science, fabrication (using "dumb" molecules to direct the formation of certain crystal structures may be cheaper than forcing high pressures and so on).
The aymara people have used trivalent logic for thousands of years. It allows precise definition of "maybe" or "possibly"
There is a great writeup of these people and their logic at:
http://www.aymara.org/biblio/igr/igr3.html
The article mentions that it is very difficult to impossible to express the logic of one culture in the language of another. Thus to understand better the inferences in Aymara logic, we have to resort to mathematics, which is sufficiently general to be understandable and translatable.
This business model seems very much like the way we as consumers should be heading.
I am reminded of the failed business plan when faw machines were first commercial (before they were common) FedEx offered a service called ZapMail, whereby they offered 2 hour delivery of documents rather than 1 day. They did this by faxing the documents around FedEx offices. Of course people realised that for a small initial investment (buy a fax machine) they could do they same thing themselves, cheaper.
This seems a small venture at the moment and may be ulitmately unsuccessful due to the limitiation of only being able to call other SIPphones, but it is a step in the right direction and may pave the way for other businesses to operate using a similar model.
I see uses for not only businesses but for travellers and ex-patriots. It is increasingly easy and cheap too access broadband internet while costs of international phone calls are still high.
I agree with the sentiment. I think the largest obstacle to widespead use of linux by Mr and Mrs Average is they don't know anything different. I used to work in a college as the sysadmin. The people that hung around me (yes some did!) eventually got around to trying linux. No-one else, including many CS students for which I ran tutorials (though anyone could come to these tutorials of course) didn't care, loved their 40G monolithic WinXP partition and so on.
Another obstacle is that Mr and Mrs Average aren't hackers. They may be able to get used to apt-get or rpm rather than clicking on an icon to install a program but they probably have hassles as to why supermount is often a bad idea (what is write-ahead caching anyway?).
People realise that they don't have to buy expensive office suites and other applications - that is what cd burners are for. What they don't realise is that they don't have to pirate them either.
I think that providing GPL software for the windows platform (as much as we may shudder) is a good first step. Mr and Mrs Average get to keep their current OS but get to explore and add functionality for free. They may or may not then make the jump to linux.
This may help solve the problem that thermal compound applied badly is worse (in terms of temperature) than none at all.
In a thermal compound we are seeking somethng that: (1) will conduct heat to the heatsink better than air (2) will remain inert under extended high temperature exposure (3) is non toxic (nice seeing as we have to deal with the stuff)
It is difficult for a material to conduct heat better than air if (large or many) air bubbles are present between the two surfaces, trapped by the compound itself.
So we all know how silicone performs, it meets 2 and 3 but there are some issues with 1, mainly because of the air bubble issue.
Carbon black, polyehtylene glycol and ethyl cellulose are both non-hazardous and ethyl cellulose is only mildly hazardous (Material Safety Data Sheets www.merck.co.th, criterion 3 met) Particulate size is small (should lick the air bubble problem). Spreadability should be a-ok (ethyl cellulose is a molding compound. No polymerisation or other chemical reaction should occur (stable mixture, criterion 2 met). Carbon is a brilliant conductor in this form ( criterion 1 met)
You and some colleagues are working on a document. The largest part of this document is stored on your company's file server. Someone with malicious intent cracks the server and the last weeks work (assuming regular backups here!) is lost.
I think we all agree that this is a real loss. The loss can be quantified in the $time spent by you and your colleages x $wage working on the document plus any loss intrinsic to the data. If the data is stolen rarther than destroyed then damages associated with rival company having internal data etc need factoring in.
But at the end of the day, you do whatever you can (restore from backup, restart work from what you have, possibly seek redress for stolen data, secure systems better in future).
So if the analogy is valid (you and friends have spent hours working on a game), you accept a loss, do whatever you can and then get on with it.
A second way to look at the legal situation here is to use an anthropological viewpoint. What are the native laws in the society (in this case the online one), it may be quite acceptable to steal (thief as an occupation comes to mind, danm those succubi). It is nearly always wrong to attempt to apply 'our' laws to another society - look historically at all the attempts to enforce new laws and ways of life on indigenous populations.
I guess in summary, look at online RPGs as their own little microcosmic world and accept their minimal effect on our real world.
It can be awkward as an employee, but particularly as a volunteer - where you don't have the rights of an employee. The boss is completely non-technical but wants things done exactly his way despite your protests that it wont work, is insecure, doesn't meet their needs etc.
Using the same blind logic, the boss locks the only people that know the system out of the system (change all root passwds, change locks on doors etc) and then 'make do' with a poorer quality system that they pay more for. Normally in these cases with small schools, there simply isn't the budget to employ a sysadmin and deploy nice (read expensive) network topologies and so people volunteer.
If the camera fitted was an infrared camera, this would be great to help find lost hikers/ skiiers.
This could also be adapted for something like rogaining - every team carries some form of tag. Helicopter flies around competition area giving real-time tracking of competitors and also some cool video.
The ruling seems to indicate that not only are modchips illegal, but software solutions that allow playing of ah.. unauthorised discs are also illegal.
In Australia it is illegal for vendors to 'lock' products with products from third parties. This ruling seems to side with the manufacturers without addressing any of their failings. There is possibly wrongdoing on both sides here (ie offering a product for sale that does not comply with these 'third party lock in' laws)
With respect to the 'could reasonably know that a device would be used for copyright infringement' or 'that commercial viability of non-infringing uses for such device would be minimal' there are a couple of cases in point: The playing of legally purchased games from overseas. The use of backup copies of legally purchased material.
One way a number of companies remove the need to allow backup copies is to offer exchange at no or minimal cost of damaged media. I have not seen any examples of game manufacturers offering this service.
There are two things that are of help here. Firstly is the size of the tubes, when you are in the nano- or pico- regimes, there are a lot more surface features (corners, edges) per atom than there are in the bulk metal. As most reactions (catalytic or non catalytic) occur on surface features, having as many small particles as possible makes sense. The other factor that is a help here is that the oxide is used. Introducing impurities into metal (consider the oxygen an impurity) does two things, changes the electron affinity of the metal so it can bind ligands better (or worse - also useful) and introduces point 'defects' - places where the crystal lattice is interrupted. These 'defect' sites actually provide reaction points for in this case, hydrogen. Nice piece of chemistry!
Think Indians are dumb to use technology that's so prone to fraud?
What makes you think electronic voting machines are not prone to fraud, faked votes, incorrect counting etc etc?
They propose to make having voting cards mandatory even if all voters do not get the cards. This could be a cause for concern if there are hassles getting the cards. I would like to know the reason only 65% of voters have a card. Is there any way to get a card on the day or is there a cutoff?
Voting is voluntary in India (source: Subas Pani, Deputy Election Commissioner, Election Commission of India, subaspani(a)eci.gov.in) so I guess it doesn't matter much.
They have only 1500 voters at each polling station so vote rigging is kind of limited in effect (there are always ways and means I realise).
What would be good is is a collection of poems generated by this method could actually get published without anyone knowing their origin until afterward. A lecturer got away with publishing a random garbage paper in a journal - the link below is from a social scientist but I remember some physicists doing the same thing - some paper about string theory, they put in a bunch of meaningless equations and it was published in a peer-reviewed journal!
Slashdot Mirror
A fireman that rescued me (barely sensible) after an electronic device exploded, said that BeO was probably the culprit. I had been in the room when the device(s) exploded and was the first one to ring for help.
h tml
About 15 minutes later (I hadn't been feeling too good), I collapsed and was taken to hospital.
BeO is highly toxic by ingestion and inhalation (Material Safety Data Sheet: http://physchem.ox.ac.uk/MSDS/BE/beryllium_oxide.
).
Apparently it is one of the more common toxic substances emitted in smoke/fumes. Particularly in domestic / non-chemical-factory settings.
The principle behind this is astonishingly simple. I'm surprised it took this long for someone to think of the technological application.
Deaf people (at least the few I know) have been taught to feel their throat to learn how to speak. (ie how making certain sounds "feels" rather than sounds)
A case in point, one of my friends (deaf) was the first to notice a fire, as we were meant to (SOPs), she yelled "Fire, Fire, Fire" to alert everyone to the fire - she put her hand to her throat to ensure that she was indeed shouting.
Seems like common sense to me
May you be guided and kept safe on your travels. You take the dreams of mankind and the hope of science with you. Good luck.
As a sysadmin of a college network, "just a crash" *really* helped me.
I replaced all firewalls with OpenBSD filtering bridges. One rather persistent script kiddie (unfortuneately a legitimite $luser on the network) decided to send a few malformed packets here, there and everywhere. One of these crashed the filtering bridge at the edge of that particular subnet.
Immediately no packets enter or leave that subnet and I get about 40 phone calls "the internet is broken / my session crashed..." and go and deal with it.
Just a crash, saved several boxes. By contrast, accessible linux machines, privelege escalation - root exploit. All over.
Now if only the average windows box would *only* bluescreen in response to being cracked/ infection with the latest...rather than sending mal packets everywhere. Then infection would be self limiting and the world would be a better place.
Without thinking too much about it, we paraphrase all the time. Trying to give a sentence to a computer to reword, is a complicated task.
At Cornell, University, researchers decided to avail themselves of two different sources of the same news and use computational biology methods to make it possible for computers to automatically paraphrase input sentences. Their first step was to compare the two different sources of the same news.
Eventually, it is hoped that this research will have benefits in computer processing of natural-language queries, translation engines, and in assisting people with certain types of reading disabilities.
The project began when two ideas came together, said one of the Cornell researchers, Regina Barzilay. Regina Barzilay is an assistant professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The vast amount of duplicated content online is a valuable resource for computer systems learning to paraphrase. A number of reporters report the same news but using different wording. The redundant sources of news are able to assist in learning the different ways one piece of information can be paraphrased, as the same basic facts are reported in each. So with these multiple sources, you can sort out the noise and get the facts and then work out different ways of stating those facts.
Even with similar styles of writing, paraphrasing of sentences is more than just working out ans substituting synonyms. The researchers' provide a couple of common business phrases to illustrate this:
After the latest Fed rate cut, stocks rose across the board.
Winners strongly outpaced losers after Greenspan cut interest rates again.
The next step, was to use computational biology techniques to determine how much in common two sentences had and how closely they were related. The technique used was similar to when biologista are looking to see how close two sets of genes are that may have started from the same seed but then evolved. They are different but have a degree of similarity.
They important thing was to compare news sources that were written differently but covered the same event. This generated a whole set of word patterns that were kind of the same. This was exactly the core data needed to inform a computer paraphrasing technique.
The Reuters and AFP news sources were used to test the system. News was selected from English articles produced between September 2000 and August 2002.
The system developed by the researchers performs two groupings; firstly comparing articles from the same source:
Word-based clustering methods were used to identify sets of text that had a high degree of overlapping words. This method identified articles that reported distinct acts of violence occuring in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Computational biology techniques were then used on these sets of articles to generate lattices or sentence templates for the computer to use. Each lattice contains a number of sets of words that occur in parallel and empty slots where arguments, such as locations, number of fatalities, times and dates can be inserted.
The challenge was to sort out which lattices were indeed due to different events and which were due to writing variability.
The researchers were thus able to identify common templates used by journalists to describe similar events. Ie. journalists who take the same article and change or take out a word, add a detail, reverse the sentence and so on are hereby busted.
One of the templates, or lattices, read: Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up in NAME on DATE killing NUMBER (other) people and injuring/maiming NUMBER. In addition to the injuring/maiming variable, there are several variables within the name argument: settlement of, coastal resort of, center of, southern city, or garden cafe.
43 AFP and 32 Reuters templates were thus discovered by the system. The researchers then cross-compared these lattices.
They compared the
In Australia, university students are required to join the student union on enrolment in any course at a tertiary institution. The union can thus choose to take action on behalf of the students in exactly the same way as any other workers union.
So even though students are not paid to attend university, their union has legally the same weight as all other trade unions.
In my city the local representatives have been active organising various protests against proposed government regulation changes (effectively govt. wants to reduce spending on education and force universities to obtain funding through research avenues AND raise student fees - in Australia we have a deferred payment scheme called HECS that partially offsets tuition fees).
Some of the recent protests have been a day strike, culminating in a lunchtime rally, storming the state Parliament house. How effective? Who knows but the proposed reform bill has been stymied.
As they imply they will show a new photo each day until Christmas (Advent Calendar of photos), I hope they will produce some false colour images from the OMEGA and SPICAM instruments.
THe first two both look like images from the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC), which do look cool but I would like to see some of the atmospheric and mineralogic data as maps.
> And what's this about "no freezer"? What exactly is outer space, if not cold? No airlocks aboard the ISS?
An obvious flaw with this argument is that if indeed the inside of the ISS is at 0 degC, then why don't the astro/cosmo nauts freeze as well as their food?
Or does their food orbit separately, and they go on a spacewalk each mealtime?
Another poster was correct in pointing out that sugars have multiple chiral centres. Glucose has four, which means that there are 2^4 = 16 stereoisomers of glucose.
Prof. Fischer won the Nobel prize in 1902 for determining the correct isomer. In doing this work he invented a way of drawing these monosaccharides as a linear chain (all sugars do spend some time linear and some cyclic - it is an equilibrium) and the stereochemistry of the carbon atom furthest away from the aldehyde group determines the D or L designation.
H-C=O
|
H-C-OH
|
HO-C-H
|
H-C-OH
|
H-C-OH*
|
CH2-OH
So the ascii art above represents d-glucose because the OH group with an asterisk points to the right.
The idea is of using the opposing sugar works in theory becase we don't have the enzymes to digest them (no energy value) but we are able to recognise them (taste sweet).
Esau sawed wood. Easu wood would saw wood. Oh the wood Wood would saw. One day Esau Wood saw a saw saw wood as no other wood-saw would saw wood. In fact if all the wood-saws wood ever saw wood would saw wood, Wood never saw a wood saw saw wood as the wood-saw Wood saw would saw wood. And I never saw a wood-saw saw wood as the wood-saw Wood saw would saw wood until I saw Easu Wood saw wood with the wood-saw Wood saw would saw wood. :-)
I had some firmware driver issues with hardware I'd purchased. I only twigged to what was going on when the retail people let me set up my hardware next to their display model - theirs worked, mine didn't - theirs was twelve months older than mine.
Got some mates together, worked out exactly which drivers did and didn't work, then rang the given number and asked for a firmware upgrade (or preferably downgrade).
First we went through what kind of carpet I had, then she thought that "about two feet" off the ground was a bit high (measure the height of your desk). I got a little insistent that it was a software problem on their side - she asked if I ment games. I explained that there was software sort of pre-programmed into the chip that told it what it was and how it should detect it's environment and react accordingly (well it does...). She put me on hold for a while, then came back and told me that none of the other girls had ever heard of what I was on about and so she couldn't help me.
Ugh..I'm still stuck with defective hardware....
An appropriate place to mention the "official" definition of disconfection - the practive of blowing on candy that has been dropped on the floor to remove the germs.
The interaction of metal nanocrystals is a burgeoning field of science.
The presence of ligands (things like water, carbon monoxide, dinitrogen) can and does change the structure of metal clusters.
In these interactions both the geometric structure (the physical shape of the thing - what we see being altered here) and the electronic structure are important.
If for example the sum of the bond strength between a metal atom and say the hydrogen of water, and another metal atom with the ohter hydrogen of water is stronger than the bond between the two metal atoms, then the water molecule can push the two metal atoms apart and form a bridge between them.
The degree of change can be measured by spectrosopies such as UV/vis, IR, Raman etc. that allow characterisation of types & strength of bonds and forces.
Finding examples of this behaviour and learning how it can be directed by say changing the geometry of the metal cluster and by changing the ligand or the metal composition has applications in materials science, fabrication (using "dumb" molecules to direct the formation of certain crystal structures may be cheaper than forcing high pressures and so on).
Very exciting science!
The aymara people have used trivalent logic for thousands of years. It allows precise definition of "maybe" or "possibly"
There is a great writeup of these people and their logic at:
http://www.aymara.org/biblio/igr/igr3.html
The article mentions that it is very difficult to impossible to express the logic of one culture in the language of another. Thus to understand better the inferences in Aymara logic, we have to resort to mathematics, which is sufficiently general to be understandable and translatable.
This business model seems very much like the way we as consumers should be heading.
I am reminded of the failed business plan when faw machines were first commercial (before they were common) FedEx offered a service called ZapMail, whereby they offered 2 hour delivery of documents rather than 1 day. They did this by faxing the documents around FedEx offices.
Of course people realised that for a small initial investment (buy a fax machine) they could do they same thing themselves, cheaper.
This seems a small venture at the moment and may be ulitmately unsuccessful due to the limitiation of only being able to call other SIPphones, but it is a step in the right direction and may pave the way for other businesses to operate using a similar model.
I see uses for not only businesses but for travellers and ex-patriots. It is increasingly easy and cheap too access broadband internet while costs of international phone calls are still high.
I agree with the sentiment. I think the largest obstacle to widespead use of linux by Mr and Mrs Average is they don't know anything different.
I used to work in a college as the sysadmin. The people that hung around me (yes some did!) eventually got around to trying linux. No-one else, including many CS students for which I ran tutorials (though anyone could come to these tutorials of course) didn't care, loved their 40G monolithic WinXP partition and so on.
Another obstacle is that Mr and Mrs Average aren't hackers. They may be able to get used to apt-get or rpm rather than clicking on an icon to install a program but they probably have hassles as to why supermount is often a bad idea (what is write-ahead caching anyway?).
People realise that they don't have to buy expensive office suites and other applications - that is what cd burners are for. What they don't realise is that they don't have to pirate them either.
I think that providing GPL software for the windows platform (as much as we may shudder) is a good first step. Mr and Mrs Average get to keep their current OS but get to explore and add functionality for free. They may or may not then make the jump to linux.
This may help solve the problem that thermal compound applied badly is worse (in terms of temperature) than none at all.
In a thermal compound we are seeking somethng that:
(1) will conduct heat to the heatsink better than air
(2) will remain inert under extended high temperature exposure
(3) is non toxic (nice seeing as we have to deal with the stuff)
It is difficult for a material to conduct heat better than air if (large or many) air bubbles are present between the two surfaces, trapped by the compound itself.
So we all know how silicone performs, it meets 2 and 3 but there are some issues with 1, mainly because of the air bubble issue.
Carbon black, polyehtylene glycol and ethyl cellulose are both non-hazardous and ethyl cellulose is only mildly hazardous (Material Safety Data Sheets www.merck.co.th, criterion 3 met)
Particulate size is small (should lick the air bubble problem).
Spreadability should be a-ok (ethyl cellulose is a molding compound.
No polymerisation or other chemical reaction should occur (stable mixture, criterion 2 met).
Carbon is a brilliant conductor in this form ( criterion 1 met)
I think it'll work
You and some colleagues are working on a document. The largest part of this document is stored on your company's file server. Someone with malicious intent cracks the server and the last weeks work (assuming regular backups here!) is lost.
I think we all agree that this is a real loss. The loss can be quantified in the $time spent by you and your colleages x $wage working on the document plus any loss intrinsic to the data. If the data is stolen rarther than destroyed then damages associated with rival company having internal data etc need factoring in.
But at the end of the day, you do whatever you can (restore from backup, restart work from what you have, possibly seek redress for stolen data, secure systems better in future).
So if the analogy is valid (you and friends have spent hours working on a game), you accept a loss, do whatever you can and then get on with it.
A second way to look at the legal situation here is to use an anthropological viewpoint. What are the native laws in the society (in this case the online one), it may be quite acceptable to steal (thief as an occupation comes to mind, danm those succubi).
It is nearly always wrong to attempt to apply 'our' laws to another society - look historically at all the attempts to enforce new laws and ways of life on indigenous populations.
I guess in summary, look at online RPGs as their own little microcosmic world and accept their minimal effect on our real world.
It can be awkward as an employee, but particularly as a volunteer - where you don't have the rights of an employee. The boss is completely non-technical but wants things done exactly his way despite your protests that it wont work, is insecure, doesn't meet their needs etc.
Using the same blind logic, the boss locks the only people that know the system out of the system (change all root passwds, change locks on doors etc) and then 'make do' with a poorer quality system that they pay more for. Normally in these cases with small schools, there simply isn't the budget to employ a sysadmin and deploy nice (read expensive) network topologies and so people volunteer.
A sad case of biting the mouth that feeds..
If the camera fitted was an infrared camera, this would be great to help find lost hikers/ skiiers.
This could also be adapted for something like rogaining - every team carries some form of tag. Helicopter flies around competition area giving real-time tracking of competitors and also some cool video.
The ruling seems to indicate that not only are modchips illegal, but software solutions that allow playing of ah.. unauthorised discs are also illegal.
In Australia it is illegal for vendors to 'lock' products with products from third parties.
This ruling seems to side with the manufacturers without addressing any of their failings. There is possibly wrongdoing on both sides here (ie offering a product for sale that does not comply with these 'third party lock in' laws)
With respect to the 'could reasonably know that a device would be used for copyright infringement' or 'that commercial viability of non-infringing uses for such device would be minimal' there are a couple of cases in point:
The playing of legally purchased games from overseas.
The use of backup copies of legally purchased material.
One way a number of companies remove the need to allow backup copies is to offer exchange at no or minimal cost of damaged media. I have not seen any examples of game manufacturers offering this service.
There are two things that are of help here. Firstly is the size of the tubes, when you are in the nano- or pico- regimes, there are a lot more surface features (corners, edges) per atom than there are in the bulk metal. As most reactions (catalytic or non catalytic) occur on surface features, having as many small particles as possible makes sense.
The other factor that is a help here is that the oxide is used. Introducing impurities into metal (consider the oxygen an impurity) does two things, changes the electron affinity of the metal so it can bind ligands better (or worse - also useful) and introduces point 'defects' - places where the crystal lattice is interrupted. These 'defect' sites actually provide reaction points for in this case, hydrogen.
Nice piece of chemistry!
Think Indians are dumb to use technology that's so prone to fraud? What makes you think electronic voting machines are not prone to fraud, faked votes, incorrect counting etc etc?
They propose to make having voting cards mandatory even if all voters do not get the cards. This could be a cause for concern if there are hassles getting the cards. I would like to know the reason only 65% of voters have a card. Is there any way to get a card on the day or is there a cutoff?
Voting is voluntary in India (source: Subas Pani, Deputy Election Commissioner, Election Commission of India, subaspani(a)eci.gov.in) so I guess it doesn't matter much.
They have only 1500 voters at each polling station so vote rigging is kind of limited in effect (there are always ways and means I realise).
I'm interested to see how this goes for them.
What would be good is is a collection of poems generated by this method could actually get published without anyone knowing their origin until afterward.
A lecturer got away with publishing a random garbage paper in a journal - the link below is from a social scientist but I remember some physicists doing the same thing - some paper about string theory, they put in a bunch of meaningless equations and it was published in a peer-reviewed journal!
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/