There has never been a land connection to Australia since the continent broke off from Africa shortly after the KT Event, which is why all the mammals were marsupials. The closest islands in the South Asian Archipelago (which themselves have never been reachable by land) could barely see mountain peaks in Australia on a clear day. The only way the Aborigines could have arrived was by boat or raft.
BTW, dingos arrived only about 4000-6000 years ago, the original immigrants appear to have arrived well before dogs and humans began living together.
The last that I read there were at least three major influxes of immigration prior to the arrival of the European barbarians, and almost certainly multiple minor ones. That the Spaniards found people with red hair in South America and black skin in Central America when they arrived would seem to confirm the latter. Some minor influxes from Europe seem inevitable, particularly prior to the Viking domination of the North Atlantic, and Thor Heyerdahl showed that one-way trips from Africa were possible and in fact likely for any raft caught in the North Atlantic Gyre.
Considering that the Aborigines have been in Australia for as much as 60,000 years the antiquity of the progenitor population suggests a very early migration to North America as well. The extremely low population density and the fact that the coastline of the time (the most likely populated area) is now submerged make recovery of any artifacts unlikely, unfortunately.
My dad had one of the first Lowrance GPS receivers on the consumer market. About the size and weight of a brick, he used it until he passed away. It did exactly what he needed it to do and could survive laying in the bottom of the boat during a rainstorm, so he never saw the need to replace it.
There's a small saw mill somewhere in southern Washington that still uses cards. Apparently it was one of the first automated saw mills and still works.
I had a coworker who had to integrate a pneumatic fire alarm into the access control system. Apparently there are air-tight lead tubes throughout the building dating to the 1930s. If the tubes heat up too much the air expands and triggers a switch, which he wired to an input so that it could be adequately monitored.
Since I can ride the bus now for my commute I have half an hour every morning and evening with nothing in particular to do. I've taken to writing letters to my grandfather, who is in a nursing home in Michigan. Apparently he shows them off to the other residents. I also write on occasion to my 10 year-old niece in Louisiana, they'll probably be the only dead-tree letters she ever gets. She writes back the cutest letters, full of drawings and with jokes on the back of the pages.
I actually think that the 38400 limit is interior to the Cisco hardware, because I've built my own cables and still couldn't communicate any faster than that.
Analog PTZ cameras use RS-485 for control commands. RS-232 is limited to about 50 feet, but RS-485 can be 4000 feet away, and I've seen cameras work fairly reliably a mile away from the matrix. Access control hardware also generally uses RS-485 to communicate between panels, and they can daisy chain. There is a refinery north of here with a 5 mile long fence with card reader controlled gates every 3000+ feet, all on a single serial chain.
You can use a switch with NetBEUI, in fact you can cascade switches, you just can't route anything. In 2005 I was supporting a restaurant point of sale system that used NetBEUI to communicate with the terminals. Obviously not scalable, but restaurants generally don't have more than a few terminals (maybe a couple dozen for somewhere like the Hard Rock Cafe).
I helped move a couple of those beasts and a PDP-8 when a local beverage distributor moved its headquarters a few years ago. The IT guy said that the PDP-8 was his test environment, it sounded like a jumbo jet when he fired the thing up but settled down to a dull rumble after a few minutes. He said that moving them was the first time they had been fully powered down in a decade.
There was a local investment firm that had an AMAG access control system running on a Win98 box that hadn't been powered down since 2008 because they didn't think it would come back up. No way to get data off as it had no network connection, no USB ports, the floppy drive was dead and the CD drive was read-only. It finally failed last year and they had to rebuild the whole environment from scratch, to the tune of $30,000.
When I used to contract at a local utility I was suplussing old equipment and offered to dispose of the pile of Compaq 396 laptops in the radio room. The staff almost had a heart attack, because they had installed a new half-million dollar radio tower with a cutting edge control system in the '90s. Then the manufacturer was sold, the product was discontinued and there was no support for it any more. The tower controller software would only run on a 386 running DOS 3, nothing higher.
Security equipment can stay in place for exceedingly long periods. Replaced a system in Spokane three years ago that had been discontinued by GE in 1998, it still worked but they couldn't get parts to expand it any more. I know of a hospital where some of the access control boards haven't been rebooted in over a decade. I've worked with PTZ cameras that were 15 years old, which they just took down and rebuilt every four years.
Really there was nothing that could stop the soviets from expanding except the US.
Stopped reading there, because it's so absurd. The thing that stopped the Soviets from expanding was, of all things, THE SOVIETS. They had enough trouble holding onto a restive Eastern Europe, very, very few people in the Kremlin had the slightest illusion that they were going to be expanding much beyond that (they never even made a serious attempt at controlling the Dardanelles to protect their underbelly). The only place that fantasy was prevalent was in the Pentagon, where the generals projected their own power lust on their Soviet counterparts. After the collapse of the Soviet Union the Pentagon was perturbed that they couldn't find any plans to administer Western Europe, preferring to believe that they were hidden rather than that they never existed.
No protecting South Korea? No protecting Israel? No protecting Europe? No protecting Eastern Europe? No defense agreements in South America to defend country X if attacked by country Y?
You've got some good suggestions there. If South Korea's oligarchs actually had to fund a military adequate to go up against the North they might actually be able to come up with a functional peace. Who are we protecting Europe from by the way? Morocco? Finland? Germany? As far as the Organization of American States mutual defense treaty, the only violators in the last 50 years have been 1) The United States (at least 6 times) 2) Ecuador (attacked Peru and immediately lost), 3) minor Argentina/Chile disputes (twice).
maybe you'd like them to not have the latest high tech stuff so when we go to war more of our people die
Yep. Get rid of the Joint Strike Fighter, first. Pretty much all of Lockheed's Skunk Works projects at this point. Most of the alphabet soup of intel agencies. The entirely illegal bio-weapons and chemical weapons programs. Ninety percent of the nukes, including **all** of the tactical ones. The Osprey and the Paladin. The very illegal domestic propaganda operations. The free weapons and ammunition to Israel, Saudi Arabia and the dictatorships of Haiti, Honduras and half of Africa, and the troops guarding pipelines and facilities for multinational corporations. All Blackwater and other mercenary contracts. Remove the mercenary scum guarding the embassies and consulates and put the Marines back there (I think that's still a Pentagon contract). Get rid of the expensive KBR no-bid contracts and the other leeches supplying services that the military can do better for themselves.
That's a small start, but mostly yes, we **DO** need more of our people dying if we go to war, because that's the only way that people will ever be convinced that war is a bad thing.
Two or three years ago a 30-something year old friend of my wife was all ready to give her bank account info to a Nigerian prince. Hotmail's filter finally failed her that one time, and she'd never seen that particular scam before. Novelty can be powerful, especially when combined with greed.
Keep in mind that in the time period she was raised 'trust' was the default in social interactions. My grandfather ended up financing the stocking of a minimarket and never got a penny back in the 1950s. It wasn't until after that experience that he distrusted people asking for money. If she never got ripped off before her scam-o-meter never got recalibrated. Some of these guys are really good too, and remember how many professional investors get taken each year.
Wow, so much stupid in only two sentences. I'm impressed. Hundreds of billions??? And seventeen of the hottest years on record occurred during your two decades.
No, the latter changes how the energy is retained in the atmosphere and then passed to the hydrosphere. CO2 content has little to do with how turbulent the atmosphere is or how energy is distributed, it's a relatively minor component of the air. It's only important for it's heat retention properties, at least in this context.
There's been a huge influx of ACs the last two years, to the point where they dominate most of the threads. Since they're not smart enough to figure out how to create a user account you can guess what sort of contribution they make to the discussions.
Mostly the site started going downhill when Cowboy Neal left, and now that Dice is the corporate overlord they started making random changes to the site, auto-playing videos, injecting ads willy-nilly, etc. You missed the clusterfuck of SlashDot Beta, which Dice tried to foist off on everyone without asking for input, which drove even more people away. To be truthful I'm not really sure why I come back most days.
Stupid AC. Amazon Web Services and Windows Live are opening data centers as fast as they can pour concrete (literally). The security infrastructure that I help oversee at a major cloud provider has tripled in two years.
Add to that two or three dozen guard staff, facilities personnel, a few shipping/receiving people, and lots of contractors to maintain and expand the cable plant, security system, power system, cooling system, UPS, etc. Still fewer people than a WalMart, but good, interesting jobs that are worth having.
Not so much the cost of the sensor/programming/configuration, but the reliability of it would be an issue. Assembly lines have to function within very tight schedules from beginning to end of the line, there isn't a lot of room for pauses. Every false alarm (and there would be a lot) would shut down the device, causing a backup and very likely shutting down the line until it is reset. It makes a lot more sense to just have exclusion zones clearly marked and keep people the hell out of them. That simple low-tech solution has worked for 150 years, there really isn't any reason to yet to spend a lot of resources on solutions that won't work as well and will cause new and unpredictable problems.
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There has never been a land connection to Australia since the continent broke off from Africa shortly after the KT Event, which is why all the mammals were marsupials. The closest islands in the South Asian Archipelago (which themselves have never been reachable by land) could barely see mountain peaks in Australia on a clear day. The only way the Aborigines could have arrived was by boat or raft.
BTW, dingos arrived only about 4000-6000 years ago, the original immigrants appear to have arrived well before dogs and humans began living together.
The last that I read there were at least three major influxes of immigration prior to the arrival of the European barbarians, and almost certainly multiple minor ones. That the Spaniards found people with red hair in South America and black skin in Central America when they arrived would seem to confirm the latter. Some minor influxes from Europe seem inevitable, particularly prior to the Viking domination of the North Atlantic, and Thor Heyerdahl showed that one-way trips from Africa were possible and in fact likely for any raft caught in the North Atlantic Gyre.
Considering that the Aborigines have been in Australia for as much as 60,000 years the antiquity of the progenitor population suggests a very early migration to North America as well. The extremely low population density and the fact that the coastline of the time (the most likely populated area) is now submerged make recovery of any artifacts unlikely, unfortunately.
My dad had one of the first Lowrance GPS receivers on the consumer market. About the size and weight of a brick, he used it until he passed away. It did exactly what he needed it to do and could survive laying in the bottom of the boat during a rainstorm, so he never saw the need to replace it.
I wonder what he would have thought of Unicode?
Probably about the same thing that SlashDot thinks of it . . .
There's a small saw mill somewhere in southern Washington that still uses cards. Apparently it was one of the first automated saw mills and still works.
I had a coworker who had to integrate a pneumatic fire alarm into the access control system. Apparently there are air-tight lead tubes throughout the building dating to the 1930s. If the tubes heat up too much the air expands and triggers a switch, which he wired to an input so that it could be adequately monitored.
Analog security cameras use either NTSC or PAL formats, but the newer IP cameras just feed directly from the CCD to the encoder.
I have no earthly idea what he does with it
Heats his office.
In medical clinics it's still not uncommon for the receptionists to be using Win 95/98. Doctors are possibly the only people cheaper than lawyers.
Since I can ride the bus now for my commute I have half an hour every morning and evening with nothing in particular to do. I've taken to writing letters to my grandfather, who is in a nursing home in Michigan. Apparently he shows them off to the other residents. I also write on occasion to my 10 year-old niece in Louisiana, they'll probably be the only dead-tree letters she ever gets. She writes back the cutest letters, full of drawings and with jokes on the back of the pages.
I actually think that the 38400 limit is interior to the Cisco hardware, because I've built my own cables and still couldn't communicate any faster than that.
Analog PTZ cameras use RS-485 for control commands. RS-232 is limited to about 50 feet, but RS-485 can be 4000 feet away, and I've seen cameras work fairly reliably a mile away from the matrix. Access control hardware also generally uses RS-485 to communicate between panels, and they can daisy chain. There is a refinery north of here with a 5 mile long fence with card reader controlled gates every 3000+ feet, all on a single serial chain.
You can use a switch with NetBEUI, in fact you can cascade switches, you just can't route anything. In 2005 I was supporting a restaurant point of sale system that used NetBEUI to communicate with the terminals. Obviously not scalable, but restaurants generally don't have more than a few terminals (maybe a couple dozen for somewhere like the Hard Rock Cafe).
I helped move a couple of those beasts and a PDP-8 when a local beverage distributor moved its headquarters a few years ago. The IT guy said that the PDP-8 was his test environment, it sounded like a jumbo jet when he fired the thing up but settled down to a dull rumble after a few minutes. He said that moving them was the first time they had been fully powered down in a decade.
There was a local investment firm that had an AMAG access control system running on a Win98 box that hadn't been powered down since 2008 because they didn't think it would come back up. No way to get data off as it had no network connection, no USB ports, the floppy drive was dead and the CD drive was read-only. It finally failed last year and they had to rebuild the whole environment from scratch, to the tune of $30,000.
When I used to contract at a local utility I was suplussing old equipment and offered to dispose of the pile of Compaq 396 laptops in the radio room. The staff almost had a heart attack, because they had installed a new half-million dollar radio tower with a cutting edge control system in the '90s. Then the manufacturer was sold, the product was discontinued and there was no support for it any more. The tower controller software would only run on a 386 running DOS 3, nothing higher.
Security equipment can stay in place for exceedingly long periods. Replaced a system in Spokane three years ago that had been discontinued by GE in 1998, it still worked but they couldn't get parts to expand it any more. I know of a hospital where some of the access control boards haven't been rebooted in over a decade. I've worked with PTZ cameras that were 15 years old, which they just took down and rebuilt every four years.
Really there was nothing that could stop the soviets from expanding except the US.
Stopped reading there, because it's so absurd. The thing that stopped the Soviets from expanding was, of all things, THE SOVIETS. They had enough trouble holding onto a restive Eastern Europe, very, very few people in the Kremlin had the slightest illusion that they were going to be expanding much beyond that (they never even made a serious attempt at controlling the Dardanelles to protect their underbelly). The only place that fantasy was prevalent was in the Pentagon, where the generals projected their own power lust on their Soviet counterparts. After the collapse of the Soviet Union the Pentagon was perturbed that they couldn't find any plans to administer Western Europe, preferring to believe that they were hidden rather than that they never existed.
No protecting South Korea? No protecting Israel? No protecting Europe? No protecting Eastern Europe? No defense agreements in South America to defend country X if attacked by country Y?
You've got some good suggestions there. If South Korea's oligarchs actually had to fund a military adequate to go up against the North they might actually be able to come up with a functional peace. Who are we protecting Europe from by the way? Morocco? Finland? Germany? As far as the Organization of American States mutual defense treaty, the only violators in the last 50 years have been 1) The United States (at least 6 times) 2) Ecuador (attacked Peru and immediately lost), 3) minor Argentina/Chile disputes (twice).
maybe you'd like them to not have the latest high tech stuff so when we go to war more of our people die
Yep. Get rid of the Joint Strike Fighter, first. Pretty much all of Lockheed's Skunk Works projects at this point. Most of the alphabet soup of intel agencies. The entirely illegal bio-weapons and chemical weapons programs. Ninety percent of the nukes, including **all** of the tactical ones. The Osprey and the Paladin. The very illegal domestic propaganda operations. The free weapons and ammunition to Israel, Saudi Arabia and the dictatorships of Haiti, Honduras and half of Africa, and the troops guarding pipelines and facilities for multinational corporations. All Blackwater and other mercenary contracts. Remove the mercenary scum guarding the embassies and consulates and put the Marines back there (I think that's still a Pentagon contract). Get rid of the expensive KBR no-bid contracts and the other leeches supplying services that the military can do better for themselves.
That's a small start, but mostly yes, we **DO** need more of our people dying if we go to war, because that's the only way that people will ever be convinced that war is a bad thing.
Two or three years ago a 30-something year old friend of my wife was all ready to give her bank account info to a Nigerian prince. Hotmail's filter finally failed her that one time, and she'd never seen that particular scam before. Novelty can be powerful, especially when combined with greed.
Keep in mind that in the time period she was raised 'trust' was the default in social interactions. My grandfather ended up financing the stocking of a minimarket and never got a penny back in the 1950s. It wasn't until after that experience that he distrusted people asking for money. If she never got ripped off before her scam-o-meter never got recalibrated. Some of these guys are really good too, and remember how many professional investors get taken each year.
Wow, so much stupid in only two sentences. I'm impressed. Hundreds of billions??? And seventeen of the hottest years on record occurred during your two decades.
No, the latter changes how the energy is retained in the atmosphere and then passed to the hydrosphere. CO2 content has little to do with how turbulent the atmosphere is or how energy is distributed, it's a relatively minor component of the air. It's only important for it's heat retention properties, at least in this context.
There's been a huge influx of ACs the last two years, to the point where they dominate most of the threads. Since they're not smart enough to figure out how to create a user account you can guess what sort of contribution they make to the discussions.
Mostly the site started going downhill when Cowboy Neal left, and now that Dice is the corporate overlord they started making random changes to the site, auto-playing videos, injecting ads willy-nilly, etc. You missed the clusterfuck of SlashDot Beta, which Dice tried to foist off on everyone without asking for input, which drove even more people away. To be truthful I'm not really sure why I come back most days.
Stupid AC. Amazon Web Services and Windows Live are opening data centers as fast as they can pour concrete (literally). The security infrastructure that I help oversee at a major cloud provider has tripled in two years.
Add to that two or three dozen guard staff, facilities personnel, a few shipping/receiving people, and lots of contractors to maintain and expand the cable plant, security system, power system, cooling system, UPS, etc. Still fewer people than a WalMart, but good, interesting jobs that are worth having.
Celestial mechanics? Newton's laws of motion and universal gravitation? Those would be good places to start.
Only if Adam Sandler dies horribly in the first few minutes of the film.
Not so much the cost of the sensor/programming/configuration, but the reliability of it would be an issue. Assembly lines have to function within very tight schedules from beginning to end of the line, there isn't a lot of room for pauses. Every false alarm (and there would be a lot) would shut down the device, causing a backup and very likely shutting down the line until it is reset. It makes a lot more sense to just have exclusion zones clearly marked and keep people the hell out of them. That simple low-tech solution has worked for 150 years, there really isn't any reason to yet to spend a lot of resources on solutions that won't work as well and will cause new and unpredictable problems.