Just as long as you don't vote for the same dummy again. Of course, technically you did not actually vote for him, not by a majority at least. I hope this year's election will be better, with Dubya gone by a decisive majority vote, we may find it easier in the UK to get rid of Tony. B Liar and his vile regime.
And fixed font sizes, bad colour combinations etc, all of which cause eyestrain to those of us who run our monitors at higher than 800*600.
Of course, we can always use Mozilla, Firefox, or another decent browser at home, which will allow the text to be made legible, but at work many of us have to use Incompetent Exploder, which says a lot about our IT staff.
I seem to remember that when the sun is overhead in a clear sky the power density is about 1400 watts per square metre, which makes the efficiency about 3%, which is not bad for large-area, inexpensive, transparent cells, but nowhere near the 20% or more of a good conventional cell (your Sharps are getting about 16% which is OK, some will be lost in the control circuits, blocking diode, etc, if they are wired for battery charging). But remember, this is transparent to it has only the light it absorbs to work with, not the light it transmits.
Even so, a great way of absorbing some spurious solar energy instead of dumping it as heat, or reflecting it to annoy someone else, as the adhesive plastic films do.
The challenge will be to orient buildings properly for maximum energy, some interesting, and possibly movable, architectural features might result!
Ah yes the Phillipines...... That explains many of your problems. Such countries tend to grab what they can of, in this case, US technology, without checking that they have got all the details right, or put all the necessary regulations in place. Funnily enough, Singapore, which adimttedly has a lot more wealth, does it better. I think the standards vary but the hotels I have been in had UK style 13 amp sockets, which implies fused plugs. Being a nosy person, I did check them for the correct BS1363 mark, which was correct. But I don't know how good or bad the bits that I could not see may have been!
But Pakistan, and other ex-British colonies, are still using the 15 amp eound-pin plugs we banned around 1954 for new installations. No fuse, and likely no fuse anywhere because in the less well-developed parts (i.e. most), many houses have an illegal connection to the public supply. The prospective fault current could be many thousands of amps if they are near the sub-station. Should cause lots of fires.
I do wonder if the reason some parts of the far east have become economically successful is because they have handled basic things like electricty supply properly, whereas others have not. And yet Japan has a mixture of both voltage and frequency, and if I remember correctly they are one of the places with an odball 3-phase system in some parts with one phase grounded and a very non-standard voltage. I used to have a chart of all this, can't find it now but I expect it is all on the net somewhere.
In one part of Holland I once measured about 140V from one pin of the socket to ground, and 130V from the other, but only just over 200V between pins, so obviously they had some stange phasing problems or the neutral had become ungrounded, or my measurement ground, a copper water pipe, may have been live. Quite dangerous for those from elsewhere in Europe who plug in with an adaptor, their equipment and extension leads etc may be single-pole fused and this "seemed" to be a double-pole system. But again, the ground may have been the thing that was wrong........ And I was trying to keep musicians with guitar amplifiers and keyboards and PA systems safe, not easy at the best of times.
Large parts of Europe use reversible plugs (not a good idea) and some have grounds that only make contact after the live pins, very bad indeed. This seems to have happened because each country had their own standards and some idiot found that by compromising the tolerances a little bit here and there, most countries plugs would just about go into another's sockets, so they improvised a horrid plug with side contacts for grounding in some places and a female ground contact for others. What they forgot is that it will fit into absolutely any ungrounded socket, so you can have potentially lethal equipment such as washing machines (lots of water, many possible leakage mechanisms in the motor windings and other places) plugged in and running in a kitchen, within touch distance of grounded plumbing. Not nice.
In the UK we have standards for inspection and test before a new installation will be connected, but these in many instances are not mandatory, although fairly well enforced. But, after that, there is no check on what people do, and as in other areas, I have seen some real horrors in domestic installations. But I guess most installations are OK as there are not many electrical accidents. I do my own wiring, which is legal here, and I take a lot of trouble to make it safe. A little over-engineering such as separate circuit breakers for the computer room has other benefits as well. I may have spent a little bit more on materials than most people, but at least the labour was "free".
Good luck with the house in the Phillipines. The weather tends to be very nice, at least it was when I was there, but only passing through, sadly.
Maybe so in court, but to say so in public is probably quite different. IANAL also, but I thing SCOundrel are heading for even biger trouble unless they have absolutely solid proof of this.
But what ought to be under investigation is who is buying SCO stock, and whether it is being illegally manipulated.
Fair comment, I mis-read or misunderstood I think. But I might mention that a fair part of the world nominally works to European or British standards but does not enforce them properly, or keep them up to date. Others work to US standards, some have their own, or none! Also, a lot of equipment coming into the UK from the far east is seriously deficient. The importer is technically liable AFAIK (IANAL), but often the importers are small businesses with negligible assets, so getting anything out of them in the event of an accident or equipment damage would be impossible. This sort of stuff also flouts EMC laws of course.
As to Epsom, I have heard of this with a number of brands of equipment. I thought someone mentioned Apple. I could name a few more, in many cases it was cheap external power adaptors which were to blame, not the main equipment.
For your information, the surface gap on the power supply PCB (or anything else where mains and low voltage is present) generally needs to be 7mm approximately (exact figure depends on dust-proofing the box etc), I have seen it as small as 2mm, and mains voltage wires inside, as well as outside, need an overall sheath, which I have seen, but it was PVC, was up against a hot resistor on the low voltage side, and...... BANG! That one came from a well-known Japanese manufacturer of audio equipment.
The cost of doing it right is generally negligible, sadly the managers and accountants do not always agree, or do proper safety checks at the design stage.
I usually work in hardware design by the way, often on safety-critical systems, so I see a whole spectrum from trash software down to sheer negligence by hardware people. And, if I am doing safety analysis, I often find things which are ridiculously over-engineered, but fall short on some little detail. I expect your Epsom printer's power supply was engineered to last for about 100 years (it is quite difficult not to, unless you stress components too close to their ratings), but someone skimped on one detail, such as checking, at a guess, the EMC capacitor values. Such is life.
Yes you are quite correct, and thanks for the clarification. My memory is clearly becoming a bit volatile these days, I did know once upon a time it was the shell: issue. Nevertheless the very small fix from Mozilla cured the problem. I think M$ ought to pay them!
But yes, some bugs hang around for a loooooooooong time, but AFAIK some bugs dating from Windoze 95, or before, and still present, possibly in a slightly different form, have not been fixed yet. I was reminded of one yesterday, when Xtra Pathetic locked up because I had taken the CD out of the drive, not realising that some obscure window was still wanting to access files. That sort of problem was fixed in Linux ages ago, drives are locked (where possible) to ensure you unmount properly. But even there, some things are not getting fixed.....
Two things the software "industry" (including extremes such as the Criminal Monopoly, FOSS etc) have never been particularly good at are good quality, accurate documentation, and also prompt fixing of bugs which are not actually annoying the developers. I don't see any sign that it will change any time soon, people prefer to work on the most interesting bits..... There is much less excuse for large companies of course, they can afford to pay staff, set up QA systems and so on, yet it still does not get done, except in a few places such as IBM, Sun, Oracle..... Having said that, a few bits of FOSS documentation are first class, and high priority things which interest top developers do get fixed promptly, especially where security is concerned. But the stuff in the middle, which is neither free nor horrendously expensive (but still over-priced for what it is) is the worst of the lot.
Strangely, in the UK we once had Acorn Computers, who with one of their earlier products, the BBC Micro, managed to produce very good (but not quite perfect) documentation, and very good software with the few remaining bugs fully documented, and fixed when the next ROM was issued. Way ahead of M$ Basic of that era, and ran fater on the 2MHz 6502 than Bill's bloat did on a 6MHz PC-AT with floating point coprocessor. They repeated that feat with the next series of RISC machines, with early ARM processors, and so did the third-party software suppliers. For a very much smaller market than M$, decent word processors, drawing packages (such as the forerunner of the super-fast Xara for the PC) etc were all less than a quarter of the price of similar but buggier packages for the PC from, you know who. I never did understand how minority market software could be cheaper, less buggy, and in some cases more user-friendly than mass-market software, except to observe that Bill was not involved. Enough said about his negative contributions to computing and the world economy, I think.
Yes, commissioners are appointed, and Tony B. Liar has just appointed a particularly vile, disgraceful and corrupt specimen, Peter Mandellson, with no regard whatsoever to his proven track record of corruption, which ensures that he had no future whatsoever in any democratically elected government. But, B. Liar owed him a few (in fact a lot) of favours.
The diameter of coverage would be very poor. A directional antenna only covers one direction!
At least approximately so, of course.
The only way you can boost the range of a radio system (assuming the receiver to be limited by thermal noise rather than things which can be fixed) is to boost either the transmitter power, or the antenna gain at one or both ends of the link. That you do by making them directional.
Now this is an excellent achievement, and has obvious and immedate application for those who live in sparsely populated regions, but in many countries the authorities regulate the transmitter power in terms of field strength, which in this case would be quite high, rather than actual total power, which obviously was low, so we might not be allowed to try this.
I think it is time for some serious efforts at standardisation, and legislation, worldwide so techniques like this can be used, after all lots of people who live in the countryside rather than urban areas could benefit. Even in the UK, using things like this between individual villages would be viable, rather than running cables, but it would probably not be legal.
But, as is usually the case, note that this was a small group of fairly inexperienced individuals, not a mega-monopoly, who did something truly innovative..... Monopolies such as the one in Redmond have the capability to bulldoze their way through laws and regulations, but they can't achieve any technical innovation, but sadly private individuals stand negligible chance of influencing regulatory bodies worldwide.
But if these things do spring up everywhere, they will need to be coordinated to avoid mutual interference, which could likely be planned at local rather than national level. Confining the transmissions to a narrow beam helps enormously of course.
Clearly this was workable at a safe, harmless and economic power level, which makes it all the more interesting.
I can see a new (but probably not very large) industry springing up, making suitable inexpensive dishes and other bits.
Yes and no, yes because with sufficient eyes, all bugs are indeed shallow, and no because probably not so many eyes bother to look at the Mozilla source, as the Linux kernel, for example. This encourages more eyes to look.
Find two bugs and you will have $401 to spend on whatever you want, even after the Darl Tax. But if you do decide to pay the SCOundrel anything, you are a bigger moron than Dubya.
Yes, I would agree with that. Did you notice how quickly the last Mozilla hole was fixed, and how small, in fact tiny (1kb), the download was to fix it?
I have used Mozilla, and before it, Netscape for almost all browsing for a long time now, and simply do not get the problems that IE users get.
Surely an annual CT is likely to cause cancer? If you want an annual scan, best make it an MRI, about as unhealthy as a few minutes use of a mobile phone. But the CT scan uses X-rays.......
My kidney cancer may, or may not, have been related to a vastly excessive number of X-rays about 8 years previously, looking for a stone in the other kidney, which was duly dealt with. But why they had to keep X-raying both, when the stone was clearly in one, beats me. And, one hospital lost all the X-rays taken in another.....
The best set of pictures I have are all MRI scans, but for no good reason the equipment is under-utilised so a scan costs far too much. The running costs of the machine are fairly fixed, it should be in constant use, with X-rays only used when absolutely necessary, IMHO.
Incorrect. A few European countries are notoriously lax about electrical safety, but others, and the UK is one of many, are much more thorough than just about anywhere else in the world. It shows in our accident rate, which in industry is not very high nowadays, but people can, and sadly do, anything they like in their own homes, sometimes with tragic results. The curious thing is that with twice the voltage, the fatality rate per capita is much less than in the US. It is alleged that the human body is less tolerant of 60Hz than 50Hz, but there must also be other factors involved.
In Europe it is normal for double insulated equipment to not have provision for grounding. Double insulated is generally taken to mean that there is primary insulation, (rated to typically 3750 volts to allow for spikes and transients, this high figure is very necessary!) and secondard insulation of equal capability, which will do the job if the primary insulation fails. In some circumstances it is not permissible, even at that.....
The problem with power adaptors which give electric shocks (and yes, it is highly improper, and potentially dangerous) is that they designers have fitted capacitors between the live conductors and the casing, or signal ground, or whatever, in order to meet EMC regulations, and these are causing the equipment chassis etc to float at half the mains voltage (assuming one side is grounded). There are strict limits on the size of capacitor which is allowed in most countries to limit the current, and it sounds as if this has been greatly exceeded in this particular item of equipment. There are also extremely strict regulations relating to the construction and test of these capacitors, because a failure there will utterly negate any attempts at making the thing safe, for obvious reasons.
If substantial voltages are finding their way onto what is effectively the equipment signal reference, they are also present on signal pins, and damage of the affected equipment, or whatever you are plugging it in to, is extremely likely, if the pins on the connector mate in the wrong order.
Equipment like this should not be on sale, it is potentially highly destructive to other expensive equipment, even if the current is non-lethal, and shows extreme incompetence and ignorance on the part of the designer. It would not have been allowed in any company in which I have worked as a design engineer, and in most cases someone who allowed such a product to leave the company premises would be subject to instant dismissal. But clearly there are cowboy companies around who do not care about the integrity of their products or the potential legal liability.
No, the blame should be placed fairly and squarely on the Criminal Monopoly who continue to damage the world with their vile, bug-ridden and hopelessly insecure products.
Unfortunately the idiots at the DOJ went after side issues like the damage to Netscape and missed the point completely that the abysmally poor software, which results directly from Sir Bill's total incompetence, causes serious damage to everyone who uses it. The DOJ took the scumbag monopolists to court with a half-baked case, in fact they could not even properly demonstrate how the trash OS could have Incompetent Exploder and Lookout removed simply by using Ieradicator, instead they got some so-called expert to try to do it the hard way.
Come to think of it, was not Boeis the chief schyster for the DOJ, and is he not now leading the SCOundrel's cases against virtually teh whole world? With performance like that, the SCOundrel can expect to win precisely nothing, even if tehy have a case, which they don't.
....., none of which is due to Bill Gates. We might be able to increase that to 0.00000001% if the alleged security measures in Latehorn actually do anything at all.
Yes, excellent point, and maybe the various cities and organisations within Europe that have adopted, or are thinking about adopting, Linux or any other open source software should get together on this and jointly lobby the EU politicians.
The continuing protests against the possible introduction of software patents need coordinating by experts in the field of politics, which most of the interested parties, at least on the developers side, are not.
They also need to be shown that the USPTO is a failed organisation, quite probably due to underfunding and mismanagement at the top, not one to copy. If they handle it right, the US will have to sort themselves out, to everyone's benefit except the Criminal Monopoly and close associates.
A lot of excellent ideas have been advocated here, but it is important to remember that many people dual-boot, perhaps with one or other of the BSDs, or other free and not so free OSs, so whatever is done should be as universal as possible. Right now I have to use ext2 for my common area because FreeBSD will not handle ext3 or reiser, while Linux will not handle the latest UFS2.
With the interest in an open bios it ought to be possible to handle file systems at that level. I am sick of having to restore certain broken OSs before I can read my backups, this also sometimes happens with Linux or any other OS, so there should be a basic capability at BIOS level to dump and restore, as well as boot management, file system repair, partition resizing etc.
A bit of joined-up thinking across a number of projects could easily result in a final product that would far surpass anything that could conceivably be created in Redmond.
Why not neptunium? But you are correct about the others, if they get that far in the body, instead of lodging in the lungs, where they are equally lethal.
But some lighter elements (polonium, radium......) are equally lethal, and what about thorium, which for instace is used in the tungsten electrodes used for TIG welding? It has a long half-life IIRC, but as the tungsten is slowly consumed, a small quantity of thorium must be liberated as vapour, which will become oxide quite quickly, and then where will it go? Into the unfortunate welder's lungs, I suspect.
I did a search for info on this about a year ago, and drew a complete blank. Someone here may know.
Actually you can get a "fizzle", which will widely disperse the material due to violent boiling, even if it started out as a solid, and will also generate a lethal flux of neutrons and other radiation for maybe tens of milliseconds. If it is liquid, it may boil for a lot longer if it is only marginally critical, that might be even worse.
All criticality accidents are potential large-scale disasters although in general there will not be a large explosion,but instead an immediate release of radiation, nad a wide dispersal of small particles which mught be inhaled. But the critical mass in the most favourable configuration is about 3kg, much more if it is in solution, so the problem can simply be avoided by handling it in limited quantities.
The techniques for doing this must surely be well understood by now.
Sorry, I don't have exact numbers, but in comparison to typical railway rolling stock an empty 23 metre vehicle (about the longest viable due to track curvature) will weigh about 20 tons, quite probably more, but 23 metres will hold only about 4 cars, weighng 1 to 2 tons each, approximately, That is the root cause of the problem.
BTW I think they would need to be electric rather than diesel to bring the best environmental benefit, that hardly changes the weight, if anything it reduces slightly if AC is used, and a bit more if DC is used, but we are still not talking about enough. It does however result in a major reduction in maintenance costs, which does matter, and if the fixed equipment is there already for existing trains, the capital cost is also reduced.
I imagine there are web sites with exact figures for various types of train, there certainly are monthly magazines where these issues are expounded at great length.
You could build a lightweight vehicle using aircraft technology, but the fatigue stresses resulting from rail irregularities etc would wreck it very quickly, and the first time it was shunted less than carefully, it would end up looking like a concertina. The other problem is that composites have been tried for rail vehicle structures, but are positively dangerous because the major resonance invariably lands in a dangerous frequency region. Rail vehicles require to be very rigid vertically, it might not seem to matter if they sag in the middle, but it would actually lead to derailment. That is explained in various engineering textbooks IIRC,I probably read it in Macinery's Handbook or Kempe's, which are availabe in the UK.
But I accept that there may be a way forward, it might not necessarily resemble anything that has been tried so far. It could be for example that a very short, rigid flat wagon carrying one car would work very well, if the problems of a short wheelbase vehicle can be overcome. My thinking is that for equivalent vertical stiffness you need a much less deep beam, and the resonant frequency will go way up, but a short vehicle would need to be articulated. I have vague recollection of a Spanish "Talgo" train of very short articulated vehicles (it was for passengers) and one axle only per vehicle, if you can make that work the weight must go down a long way. The Talgo train would have been around 1960, later ones may be very different.
But if you can get the weight right down, say 4 tons train weight per car carried, it would surely be viable from energy considerations. But there is still the cost.....
Yes, I would scrupulously avoid dodgy health supplements. I am not an expert, but it seems from masses of stuff I have read over the years that a trace of selenium is absolutely essential, and only in areas where there is very low selenium in the soil, and so in vegetables, should we consider supplementing the natural intake. But with none, we can become very ill, as I am sure Mr. Google will be pleased to confirm.
If you search around, you will most likely find that a fair proportion of health additives are exactly the opposite, it is an industry which can make money by misrepresenting the truth, like many others. Best to search out info on everything you eat for yourself, and not believe anyone with a vested interest.
But it may be that a normal intake of Centrum is safe. I know that when selenium was used for rectifiers (before silicon or even germanium, about the same time as copper oxide), they would go up in smoke with monotonous regularity, and some people became very seriously ill from inhaling the fumes. They were used in some early valve/tube (depending on which side of teh Atlantic you are on) TV sets, and also battery chargers, usually a stack of square fins with a bolt through the middle, and solder tags on some of the extremities. Or, there was the compact version in a flat aluminium case about the size of a modern bridge rectifier, say an inch square by quarter thick, with tags protruding from the sides, these absolutely had to be bolted tightly to the chassis. Copper oxide rectifiers were vaguely similar, and equally unreliable, only the resulting fumes were realtively harmless.
Now I am not quite showing my age here, because when I was very young, I used to collect old, discarded TV sets as a source of components, at that time they mainly used a valve rectifier for the HT, with silicon just being introduced. The silly selenium era had gone.
Yes, I remember Multimate, and as it was latterly being run in a DOS box under Billdoze 3.1, I managed to change the icon to Multihate! Before that was Worststar..... (One imbecilic manager with severeeparanoid megalomaniac tendencies (no, I have never worked for Microsoft!) insisted that we use it as a programming editor. Ouch! And, likening them to EMACS is a pretty fair comparison! Maybe I should not say too much about Edlin, in case someone, somewhere actually liked it. The sad thing is that, like all Monopoly products, better, less bloated things were available, even then. The text editor on any basic Z80 or 6502 based computer of the preceding several years was way ahead.
You are of course right, some people will learn about their environment if there is some reason to do so, but most Windoze packages are the ultimate form of dumbing-down, because while they work, they avoid the need for people to think. Some MAC users are even worse, I know graphics artists who know less than nothing about their computers, not even being able to name the software packages they are using, they only know it as a MAC. One even considers himself a computer expert. Now this is no place to start the MAC vs PC debate, because many PC users are quite similar, and in any case this is not the fault of the particular computer architecture. I am sure I would be very happy with a MAC, as long as it ran OS-X of course.
There does need to be a major breakthrough in input devices or methods, keep thinking about it! We shall expect to read all about your invention on Slashdot one day. Just remember that individual people like you and I turn out far more inventions than mighty corporations, including the Monopoly, so you have at least as much chance as anyone, because you have already thought about it. And good luck.
Yes, another valid part of a complex picture, and it explains why the UK railways appear to be safe again, despite still being privatised. The key thing is that the line of accountability bypasses the accountants! (and politicians etc) The enforcement agency needs to have sharp teeth.
As to Chernobyl, I think the pressure under a vile regime such as communism can have much the same effect as having a huge financial pressure, it can make people cut corners.
The difficulty with privately owned things is that there is far too much contract law etc between the various parties so they pass the buck (at least it was so for the UK railways). With aircraft we do somewhat better, the regulatory agency (CAA) is highly respected, because they do a good job, but they are still subject to the accident investigators (AAIB) who are strictly independent. But the CAA does not have the manpower they deserve, and as I often work in avionics design, I know of companies, who I would not work for (I have seen the facts at first hand), who will produce something marginal or plainly inadequate, and manage to get it approved for flight. This is often due to incompetence up front, in incorrectly estimating what needs to be done, or believing that when a specification says that something is mandatory, that it can be negotiated away at the end of the project. Others, who seemingly do not make so much profit, take the correct approach from day 1, and don't need to be devious or plainly dishonest.
So I don't think you can ever have too much regulation where safety is concerned. You don't need stupid rules, but rather competent people with authority, and they have to have the final say, in any dispute where the acciuntants want to cut corners.
In the ideal world the safety assessors would have all the power you and I would both like, and there would be no cowboys anywhere in the chain of command, but as we know, it is not always so. I know of managers who simply should be barred for life from working in any safety-critical industry, but who can do it? By the same reasoning there are people who should be barred for life from ever driving a car, I see one or two of those on the road every day, but where is the enforcement agency? Too over-committed with other work, probably.
These things are never simple, and there is never the perfect solution, except to do nothing and revert back to the stone age. But really punitive fines for violations, so there is every economic incentive to do the right thing, would be one approach, just the same as imposing really big fines on a Criminal Monopoly might make them behave....... Just don't let Sir Bill anywhere near a nuclear reactor!
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Just as long as you don't vote for the same dummy again. Of course, technically you did not actually vote for him, not by a majority at least. I hope this year's election will be better, with Dubya gone by a decisive majority vote, we may find it easier in the UK to get rid of Tony. B Liar and his vile regime.
Of course, we can always use Mozilla, Firefox, or another decent browser at home, which will allow the text to be made legible, but at work many of us have to use Incompetent Exploder, which says a lot about our IT staff.
Even so, a great way of absorbing some spurious solar energy instead of dumping it as heat, or reflecting it to annoy someone else, as the adhesive plastic films do.
The challenge will be to orient buildings properly for maximum energy, some interesting, and possibly movable, architectural features might result!
But Pakistan, and other ex-British colonies, are still using the 15 amp eound-pin plugs we banned around 1954 for new installations. No fuse, and likely no fuse anywhere because in the less well-developed parts (i.e. most), many houses have an illegal connection to the public supply. The prospective fault current could be many thousands of amps if they are near the sub-station. Should cause lots of fires.
I do wonder if the reason some parts of the far east have become economically successful is because they have handled basic things like electricty supply properly, whereas others have not. And yet Japan has a mixture of both voltage and frequency, and if I remember correctly they are one of the places with an odball 3-phase system in some parts with one phase grounded and a very non-standard voltage. I used to have a chart of all this, can't find it now but I expect it is all on the net somewhere.
In one part of Holland I once measured about 140V from one pin of the socket to ground, and 130V from the other, but only just over 200V between pins, so obviously they had some stange phasing problems or the neutral had become ungrounded, or my measurement ground, a copper water pipe, may have been live. Quite dangerous for those from elsewhere in Europe who plug in with an adaptor, their equipment and extension leads etc may be single-pole fused and this "seemed" to be a double-pole system. But again, the ground may have been the thing that was wrong........ And I was trying to keep musicians with guitar amplifiers and keyboards and PA systems safe, not easy at the best of times.
Large parts of Europe use reversible plugs (not a good idea) and some have grounds that only make contact after the live pins, very bad indeed. This seems to have happened because each country had their own standards and some idiot found that by compromising the tolerances a little bit here and there, most countries plugs would just about go into another's sockets, so they improvised a horrid plug with side contacts for grounding in some places and a female ground contact for others. What they forgot is that it will fit into absolutely any ungrounded socket, so you can have potentially lethal equipment such as washing machines (lots of water, many possible leakage mechanisms in the motor windings and other places) plugged in and running in a kitchen, within touch distance of grounded plumbing. Not nice.
In the UK we have standards for inspection and test before a new installation will be connected, but these in many instances are not mandatory, although fairly well enforced. But, after that, there is no check on what people do, and as in other areas, I have seen some real horrors in domestic installations. But I guess most installations are OK as there are not many electrical accidents. I do my own wiring, which is legal here, and I take a lot of trouble to make it safe. A little over-engineering such as separate circuit breakers for the computer room has other benefits as well. I may have spent a little bit more on materials than most people, but at least the labour was "free".
Good luck with the house in the Phillipines. The weather tends to be very nice, at least it was when I was there, but only passing through, sadly.
But what ought to be under investigation is who is buying SCO stock, and whether it is being illegally manipulated.
As to Epsom, I have heard of this with a number of brands of equipment. I thought someone mentioned Apple. I could name a few more, in many cases it was cheap external power adaptors which were to blame, not the main equipment.
For your information, the surface gap on the power supply PCB (or anything else where mains and low voltage is present) generally needs to be 7mm approximately (exact figure depends on dust-proofing the box etc), I have seen it as small as 2mm, and mains voltage wires inside, as well as outside, need an overall sheath, which I have seen, but it was PVC, was up against a hot resistor on the low voltage side, and...... BANG! That one came from a well-known Japanese manufacturer of audio equipment.
The cost of doing it right is generally negligible, sadly the managers and accountants do not always agree, or do proper safety checks at the design stage.
I usually work in hardware design by the way, often on safety-critical systems, so I see a whole spectrum from trash software down to sheer negligence by hardware people. And, if I am doing safety analysis, I often find things which are ridiculously over-engineered, but fall short on some little detail. I expect your Epsom printer's power supply was engineered to last for about 100 years (it is quite difficult not to, unless you stress components too close to their ratings), but someone skimped on one detail, such as checking, at a guess, the EMC capacitor values. Such is life.
But yes, some bugs hang around for a loooooooooong time, but AFAIK some bugs dating from Windoze 95, or before, and still present, possibly in a slightly different form, have not been fixed yet. I was reminded of one yesterday, when Xtra Pathetic locked up because I had taken the CD out of the drive, not realising that some obscure window was still wanting to access files. That sort of problem was fixed in Linux ages ago, drives are locked (where possible) to ensure you unmount properly. But even there, some things are not getting fixed.....
Two things the software "industry" (including extremes such as the Criminal Monopoly, FOSS etc) have never been particularly good at are good quality, accurate documentation, and also prompt fixing of bugs which are not actually annoying the developers. I don't see any sign that it will change any time soon, people prefer to work on the most interesting bits..... There is much less excuse for large companies of course, they can afford to pay staff, set up QA systems and so on, yet it still does not get done, except in a few places such as IBM, Sun, Oracle..... Having said that, a few bits of FOSS documentation are first class, and high priority things which interest top developers do get fixed promptly, especially where security is concerned. But the stuff in the middle, which is neither free nor horrendously expensive (but still over-priced for what it is) is the worst of the lot.
Strangely, in the UK we once had Acorn Computers, who with one of their earlier products, the BBC Micro, managed to produce very good (but not quite perfect) documentation, and very good software with the few remaining bugs fully documented, and fixed when the next ROM was issued. Way ahead of M$ Basic of that era, and ran fater on the 2MHz 6502 than Bill's bloat did on a 6MHz PC-AT with floating point coprocessor. They repeated that feat with the next series of RISC machines, with early ARM processors, and so did the third-party software suppliers. For a very much smaller market than M$, decent word processors, drawing packages (such as the forerunner of the super-fast Xara for the PC) etc were all less than a quarter of the price of similar but buggier packages for the PC from, you know who. I never did understand how minority market software could be cheaper, less buggy, and in some cases more user-friendly than mass-market software, except to observe that Bill was not involved. Enough said about his negative contributions to computing and the world economy, I think.
Yes, commissioners are appointed, and Tony B. Liar has just appointed a particularly vile, disgraceful and corrupt specimen, Peter Mandellson, with no regard whatsoever to his proven track record of corruption, which ensures that he had no future whatsoever in any democratically elected government. But, B. Liar owed him a few (in fact a lot) of favours.
At least approximately so, of course.
The only way you can boost the range of a radio system (assuming the receiver to be limited by thermal noise rather than things which can be fixed) is to boost either the transmitter power, or the antenna gain at one or both ends of the link. That you do by making them directional.
Now this is an excellent achievement, and has obvious and immedate application for those who live in sparsely populated regions, but in many countries the authorities regulate the transmitter power in terms of field strength, which in this case would be quite high, rather than actual total power, which obviously was low, so we might not be allowed to try this.
I think it is time for some serious efforts at standardisation, and legislation, worldwide so techniques like this can be used, after all lots of people who live in the countryside rather than urban areas could benefit. Even in the UK, using things like this between individual villages would be viable, rather than running cables, but it would probably not be legal.
But, as is usually the case, note that this was a small group of fairly inexperienced individuals, not a mega-monopoly, who did something truly innovative..... Monopolies such as the one in Redmond have the capability to bulldoze their way through laws and regulations, but they can't achieve any technical innovation, but sadly private individuals stand negligible chance of influencing regulatory bodies worldwide.
But if these things do spring up everywhere, they will need to be coordinated to avoid mutual interference, which could likely be planned at local rather than national level. Confining the transmissions to a narrow beam helps enormously of course.
Clearly this was workable at a safe, harmless and economic power level, which makes it all the more interesting.
I can see a new (but probably not very large) industry springing up, making suitable inexpensive dishes and other bits.
Yes and no, yes because with sufficient eyes, all bugs are indeed shallow, and no because probably not so many eyes bother to look at the Mozilla source, as the Linux kernel, for example. This encourages more eyes to look.
Find two bugs and you will have $401 to spend on whatever you want, even after the Darl Tax. But if you do decide to pay the SCOundrel anything, you are a bigger moron than Dubya.
I have used Mozilla, and before it, Netscape for almost all browsing for a long time now, and simply do not get the problems that IE users get.
My kidney cancer may, or may not, have been related to a vastly excessive number of X-rays about 8 years previously, looking for a stone in the other kidney, which was duly dealt with. But why they had to keep X-raying both, when the stone was clearly in one, beats me. And, one hospital lost all the X-rays taken in another.....
The best set of pictures I have are all MRI scans, but for no good reason the equipment is under-utilised so a scan costs far too much. The running costs of the machine are fairly fixed, it should be in constant use, with X-rays only used when absolutely necessary, IMHO.
Yes. Having had cancer myself, of the kidney, I can confirm that it is not a nice experience.
In Europe it is normal for double insulated equipment to not have provision for grounding. Double insulated is generally taken to mean that there is primary insulation, (rated to typically 3750 volts to allow for spikes and transients, this high figure is very necessary!) and secondard insulation of equal capability, which will do the job if the primary insulation fails. In some circumstances it is not permissible, even at that.....
The problem with power adaptors which give electric shocks (and yes, it is highly improper, and potentially dangerous) is that they designers have fitted capacitors between the live conductors and the casing, or signal ground, or whatever, in order to meet EMC regulations, and these are causing the equipment chassis etc to float at half the mains voltage (assuming one side is grounded). There are strict limits on the size of capacitor which is allowed in most countries to limit the current, and it sounds as if this has been greatly exceeded in this particular item of equipment. There are also extremely strict regulations relating to the construction and test of these capacitors, because a failure there will utterly negate any attempts at making the thing safe, for obvious reasons.
If substantial voltages are finding their way onto what is effectively the equipment signal reference, they are also present on signal pins, and damage of the affected equipment, or whatever you are plugging it in to, is extremely likely, if the pins on the connector mate in the wrong order.
Equipment like this should not be on sale, it is potentially highly destructive to other expensive equipment, even if the current is non-lethal, and shows extreme incompetence and ignorance on the part of the designer. It would not have been allowed in any company in which I have worked as a design engineer, and in most cases someone who allowed such a product to leave the company premises would be subject to instant dismissal. But clearly there are cowboy companies around who do not care about the integrity of their products or the potential legal liability.
Unfortunately the idiots at the DOJ went after side issues like the damage to Netscape and missed the point completely that the abysmally poor software, which results directly from Sir Bill's total incompetence, causes serious damage to everyone who uses it. The DOJ took the scumbag monopolists to court with a half-baked case, in fact they could not even properly demonstrate how the trash OS could have Incompetent Exploder and Lookout removed simply by using Ieradicator, instead they got some so-called expert to try to do it the hard way.
Come to think of it, was not Boeis the chief schyster for the DOJ, and is he not now leading the SCOundrel's cases against virtually teh whole world? With performance like that, the SCOundrel can expect to win precisely nothing, even if tehy have a case, which they don't.
....., none of which is due to Bill Gates. We might be able to increase that to 0.00000001% if the alleged security measures in Latehorn actually do anything at all.
The continuing protests against the possible introduction of software patents need coordinating by experts in the field of politics, which most of the interested parties, at least on the developers side, are not.
They also need to be shown that the USPTO is a failed organisation, quite probably due to underfunding and mismanagement at the top, not one to copy. If they handle it right, the US will have to sort themselves out, to everyone's benefit except the Criminal Monopoly and close associates.
With the interest in an open bios it ought to be possible to handle file systems at that level. I am sick of having to restore certain broken OSs before I can read my backups, this also sometimes happens with Linux or any other OS, so there should be a basic capability at BIOS level to dump and restore, as well as boot management, file system repair, partition resizing etc.
A bit of joined-up thinking across a number of projects could easily result in a final product that would far surpass anything that could conceivably be created in Redmond.
But some lighter elements (polonium, radium......) are equally lethal, and what about thorium, which for instace is used in the tungsten electrodes used for TIG welding? It has a long half-life IIRC, but as the tungsten is slowly consumed, a small quantity of thorium must be liberated as vapour, which will become oxide quite quickly, and then where will it go? Into the unfortunate welder's lungs, I suspect.
I did a search for info on this about a year ago, and drew a complete blank. Someone here may know.
All criticality accidents are potential large-scale disasters although in general there will not be a large explosion,but instead an immediate release of radiation, nad a wide dispersal of small particles which mught be inhaled. But the critical mass in the most favourable configuration is about 3kg, much more if it is in solution, so the problem can simply be avoided by handling it in limited quantities.
The techniques for doing this must surely be well understood by now.
BTW I think they would need to be electric rather than diesel to bring the best environmental benefit, that hardly changes the weight, if anything it reduces slightly if AC is used, and a bit more if DC is used, but we are still not talking about enough. It does however result in a major reduction in maintenance costs, which does matter, and if the fixed equipment is there already for existing trains, the capital cost is also reduced.
I imagine there are web sites with exact figures for various types of train, there certainly are monthly magazines where these issues are expounded at great length.
You could build a lightweight vehicle using aircraft technology, but the fatigue stresses resulting from rail irregularities etc would wreck it very quickly, and the first time it was shunted less than carefully, it would end up looking like a concertina. The other problem is that composites have been tried for rail vehicle structures, but are positively dangerous because the major resonance invariably lands in a dangerous frequency region. Rail vehicles require to be very rigid vertically, it might not seem to matter if they sag in the middle, but it would actually lead to derailment. That is explained in various engineering textbooks IIRC,I probably read it in Macinery's Handbook or Kempe's, which are availabe in the UK.
But I accept that there may be a way forward, it might not necessarily resemble anything that has been tried so far. It could be for example that a very short, rigid flat wagon carrying one car would work very well, if the problems of a short wheelbase vehicle can be overcome. My thinking is that for equivalent vertical stiffness you need a much less deep beam, and the resonant frequency will go way up, but a short vehicle would need to be articulated. I have vague recollection of a Spanish "Talgo" train of very short articulated vehicles (it was for passengers) and one axle only per vehicle, if you can make that work the weight must go down a long way. The Talgo train would have been around 1960, later ones may be very different.
But if you can get the weight right down, say 4 tons train weight per car carried, it would surely be viable from energy considerations. But there is still the cost.....
If you search around, you will most likely find that a fair proportion of health additives are exactly the opposite, it is an industry which can make money by misrepresenting the truth, like many others. Best to search out info on everything you eat for yourself, and not believe anyone with a vested interest.
But it may be that a normal intake of Centrum is safe. I know that when selenium was used for rectifiers (before silicon or even germanium, about the same time as copper oxide), they would go up in smoke with monotonous regularity, and some people became very seriously ill from inhaling the fumes. They were used in some early valve/tube (depending on which side of teh Atlantic you are on) TV sets, and also battery chargers, usually a stack of square fins with a bolt through the middle, and solder tags on some of the extremities. Or, there was the compact version in a flat aluminium case about the size of a modern bridge rectifier, say an inch square by quarter thick, with tags protruding from the sides, these absolutely had to be bolted tightly to the chassis. Copper oxide rectifiers were vaguely similar, and equally unreliable, only the resulting fumes were realtively harmless.
Now I am not quite showing my age here, because when I was very young, I used to collect old, discarded TV sets as a source of components, at that time they mainly used a valve rectifier for the HT, with silicon just being introduced. The silly selenium era had gone.
You are of course right, some people will learn about their environment if there is some reason to do so, but most Windoze packages are the ultimate form of dumbing-down, because while they work, they avoid the need for people to think. Some MAC users are even worse, I know graphics artists who know less than nothing about their computers, not even being able to name the software packages they are using, they only know it as a MAC. One even considers himself a computer expert. Now this is no place to start the MAC vs PC debate, because many PC users are quite similar, and in any case this is not the fault of the particular computer architecture. I am sure I would be very happy with a MAC, as long as it ran OS-X of course.
There does need to be a major breakthrough in input devices or methods, keep thinking about it! We shall expect to read all about your invention on Slashdot one day. Just remember that individual people like you and I turn out far more inventions than mighty corporations, including the Monopoly, so you have at least as much chance as anyone, because you have already thought about it. And good luck.
As to Chernobyl, I think the pressure under a vile regime such as communism can have much the same effect as having a huge financial pressure, it can make people cut corners.
The difficulty with privately owned things is that there is far too much contract law etc between the various parties so they pass the buck (at least it was so for the UK railways). With aircraft we do somewhat better, the regulatory agency (CAA) is highly respected, because they do a good job, but they are still subject to the accident investigators (AAIB) who are strictly independent. But the CAA does not have the manpower they deserve, and as I often work in avionics design, I know of companies, who I would not work for (I have seen the facts at first hand), who will produce something marginal or plainly inadequate, and manage to get it approved for flight. This is often due to incompetence up front, in incorrectly estimating what needs to be done, or believing that when a specification says that something is mandatory, that it can be negotiated away at the end of the project. Others, who seemingly do not make so much profit, take the correct approach from day 1, and don't need to be devious or plainly dishonest.
So I don't think you can ever have too much regulation where safety is concerned. You don't need stupid rules, but rather competent people with authority, and they have to have the final say, in any dispute where the acciuntants want to cut corners.
In the ideal world the safety assessors would have all the power you and I would both like, and there would be no cowboys anywhere in the chain of command, but as we know, it is not always so. I know of managers who simply should be barred for life from working in any safety-critical industry, but who can do it? By the same reasoning there are people who should be barred for life from ever driving a car, I see one or two of those on the road every day, but where is the enforcement agency? Too over-committed with other work, probably.
These things are never simple, and there is never the perfect solution, except to do nothing and revert back to the stone age. But really punitive fines for violations, so there is every economic incentive to do the right thing, would be one approach, just the same as imposing really big fines on a Criminal Monopoly might make them behave....... Just don't let Sir Bill anywhere near a nuclear reactor!