There are a number of anecdotal comments already about Windows/Linux media centers on planes, and how "robust" they are. Many of these failures are hardware failures - specifically, "Single-Event Upsets" (SEU), which are bit-flips in hardware memory that occur regardless of software choice. As feature sizes on modern RAM and CPUs shrink, their susceptibility to neutron radiation increases, to the point (which was about a decade ago) that operators at aircraft altitudes should expect some type of memory failure (CPU register, program/data cache, RAM, etc.) every 2-3 hours on equipment which has not been rad-hardened (expensive/heavy) or designed to withstand these effects (expensive). EDAC can help to prevent some of these errors, but not all of them, since software alone can not guarantee detection of SEUs. In-flight entertainment centers are probably not the first place the airline decides to spend all of their money - these systems are probably as SEU-tolerant as any run-of-the-mill desktop.
My favorite tequila is "Oso Negro", which is made in Mason jars. There's a stick-on label with a Magic-Marker picture of a black bear on it. And by "favorite", I mean "quickest road to the Tequila Experience".
I was considering that the alcohol doesn't kill all of the bacteria, and they are only covered in it momentarily (and probably not fully). I do not die from it with a limited exposure, so it is possible for the bacteria to live through limited exposure.
Fair enough - a shorter exposure window will definitely enhance the bacteria's survival rate. There are bacteria which are much more resistant to alcohol than others, and continued exposure to small amounts of alcohol could potentially lead to alcohol-resistant strains of bacteria. The death rate of the bacteria is mostly a matter of exposure time and acidic strength.
So, how long does bacteria have to exists in an autoclave to die?
This is called Thermal Death Time - it will be different for different types of bacteria, and it gives you a good measure of how many bacteria are likely to be alive during different exposure windows.
It's been a pleasure talking to you. Have a continued pleasant Slashdot experience!
I don't follow this. Please explain how this stops evolution.
An environment which can not support any form of life is not a breeding ground for new or adapting species. Acids (which alcohol is) break down the types of carbon bonds that form living cells. A strong acid bath is one of many environments in which life can simply not exist.
So, you are suggesting that the current 120C microbes didn't evolve this ability?
No, I'm not - an autoclave is a different environment than the thermal vents of an undersea volcano. For one thing, an autoclave does not possess the static characteristics needed to constitute an environmental shift that the bacteria can adapt to (it is not hot long enough, there is no ample food supply, etc.). Strain 120C can only survive because the temperature of the water near the thermal vent is cool enough for them to survive. If the temperature increases beyond 140C, then the latent energy begins prying their constituent atoms out of their bonds. Life does not evolve through that - it simply ends.
We used to play a game at my college radio station where we tried to manually bleep out all the swear words in "Aenema" (by Tool) in real time. The important word in that sentence is "college" - our local metal station has a pre-bleeped version they play which is surprisingly okay.
Alcohol works primarily because of organic chemistry, not something specific to certain strains of bacteria. If we keep using autoclaves to sterilize instruments, we are not going to evolve organisms that can survive fifteen minutes in 120C water (the microbes that can do this already live in such environments).
I realize that you are constructing an exception to the GP's statement, but why would we want to alter the test so that somebody who slams 3 beers in five minutes and immediately gets back into their car should be given the benefit of the doubt?
You might want to add function calls where it corrects that reading for ambient measurement factors (temperature, humidity, etc.) and inherent measurement errors (calibration coefficients for the sensors). Also, you probably want to seed that rand() with current time, or heart rate, or phase of the moon.
There's a gun club in my home town that uses it to "polish chrome" (wink wink, nudge nudge). That was the day I discovered (and could never un-discover) that you can buy K-Y Jelly (TM) in 5 gallon drums.
Of course BMI, like any objective data, must be considered within the clinical picture at hand rather than used as a standalone datum for decision making in a vacuum.
Which is exactly why would this is a bad metric for insurance decisions, since the patients are penalized for each individual test they fail. BMI is, at best, the initial screening to do more tests - that makes it a bad total metric for healthy weight.
As they say in the trade - "Quick, Cheap, Good - Pick Any Two"
Very cute, but that isn't evolution - it's eugenics. If the "undesirables" were prevented from reproducing (because their offspring were ill-suited to cope with their environment), it would be evolution. Also, the Morlocks ate all of the Eloi - even the hot ones.
The Amish most definitely believe in a centralized power - they call Him "God".
Sometimes, in the experience of community, coercion becomes unavoidable. Even the Amish shun those who are able to work to support themselves and do not; those who hold heretical beliefs; those who have brought shame to their families by breaking a taboo or code of silence. If it is unavoidable, then where do you draw the line as to what is morally (or ethically) objectionable about coercion? If another community wants your land, and are bent on the "coercion" of your people at the end of a gun, does it become acceptable then? What's wrong with imprisoning/punishing those who wish to destroy (or never acknowledge their indebtedness to) their communities?
The only two normal operation scenarios you need a pilot for are take-off and landing. These are really not capable of being automated unless you have a secondary position/attitude source (like military-grade GPS signals).
As for the second bit, Windows CE is the only Microsoft OS that has any hope of making DO-178B Level A anytime soon;-)
Determining ionospheric interference is still the biggest error source for most of civilian GPS. Until the L5 band becomes available (which would serve the same function as the L2 P-code band for military GPS), we are as good as we're going to get for now without supplementing the nav with inertial sources (which are only useful if they're on an aircraft).
Differential GPS is the use of several GPS receivers (and possibly inertial sensors) at multiple locations on a vehicle in order to determine the vehicle's velocities, attitudes (pitch, roll, yaw), and position (latitude, longitude, and altitude). Since the most useful things a GPS user can measure using GPS are "GPS time" and the distance from the receiver to the satellite. Getting the signal from a single satellite will tell you the range "r" that you are from that one satellite - in the naive sense, all of the possible positions the receiver could be are described as a sphere with radius "r" centered on the satellite; if you know that you are not above the satellite (an important assumption in space navigation), then it's a hemisphere. Each additional satellite's range narrows down your possible position to the set of the points of intersection of all the possible ranges. Examining the changes in these distances over time will help you zero in on your true position. But knowing your position, and even your velocity, is not enough to determine if you are, say, upside-down. This is where differential GPS comes into play, since receivers at multiple locations with fixed distances between each other can determine this.
The scheme that the Coast Guard has developed is a "pseudo-lite" (false satellite) system. It is basically another satellite that a user can use to fix their position, or potentially perform differential GPS with respect to a naval vessel or airplane.
To nitpick, the Mariner 1 incident is a confluence of hardware/system/software errors, and the Mars Climate Orbiter is a Lockheed Martin software error/NASA integration error. If, in the fifty years of NASA's existence, these are the only field-reportable software errors you can name off the top of your head, its seems disingenuous to accuse NASA's software engineers of "repeated incompetence".
It depends whether you work hardware, software, or systems procurement. We have some customers who seem to believe it means "Custom(ized) Off The Shelf", like that makes any genuine sense.
Relative to IT, HR is really only concerned about one thing - minimizing the risk of lawsuits against the company for any reason they can imagine (hiring, firing, and compensating employees tends to lead to lawsuits, for a variety of reasons). Since HR employees are not the legal department, they spend their time covering their own ass and the ass of the company as a whole relative to issues that may or may not be genuine.
And out of all of those options, if you actually know what you want, you may be able to pick the one which asymptotically approaches the satisfaction of your requirements. Software evolves through competition in dynamic environments - if the world never changed, and everything wanted exactly the same thing every day, we could all just do it once and go home. If every software program you find can satisfy your needs (free or not), you don't know what you really want.
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There are a number of anecdotal comments already about Windows/Linux media centers on planes, and how "robust" they are. Many of these failures are hardware failures - specifically, "Single-Event Upsets" (SEU), which are bit-flips in hardware memory that occur regardless of software choice. As feature sizes on modern RAM and CPUs shrink, their susceptibility to neutron radiation increases, to the point (which was about a decade ago) that operators at aircraft altitudes should expect some type of memory failure (CPU register, program/data cache, RAM, etc.) every 2-3 hours on equipment which has not been rad-hardened (expensive/heavy) or designed to withstand these effects (expensive). EDAC can help to prevent some of these errors, but not all of them, since software alone can not guarantee detection of SEUs. In-flight entertainment centers are probably not the first place the airline decides to spend all of their money - these systems are probably as SEU-tolerant as any run-of-the-mill desktop.
Thank you! Funniest thing I've read today!
My favorite tequila is "Oso Negro", which is made in Mason jars. There's a stick-on label with a Magic-Marker picture of a black bear on it. And by "favorite", I mean "quickest road to the Tequila Experience".
Fair enough - a shorter exposure window will definitely enhance the bacteria's survival rate. There are bacteria which are much more resistant to alcohol than others, and continued exposure to small amounts of alcohol could potentially lead to alcohol-resistant strains of bacteria. The death rate of the bacteria is mostly a matter of exposure time and acidic strength.
So, how long does bacteria have to exists in an autoclave to die?This is called Thermal Death Time - it will be different for different types of bacteria, and it gives you a good measure of how many bacteria are likely to be alive during different exposure windows.
It's been a pleasure talking to you. Have a continued pleasant Slashdot experience!
An environment which can not support any form of life is not a breeding ground for new or adapting species. Acids (which alcohol is) break down the types of carbon bonds that form living cells. A strong acid bath is one of many environments in which life can simply not exist. So, you are suggesting that the current 120C microbes didn't evolve this ability?
No, I'm not - an autoclave is a different environment than the thermal vents of an undersea volcano. For one thing, an autoclave does not possess the static characteristics needed to constitute an environmental shift that the bacteria can adapt to (it is not hot long enough, there is no ample food supply, etc.). Strain 120C can only survive because the temperature of the water near the thermal vent is cool enough for them to survive. If the temperature increases beyond 140C, then the latent energy begins prying their constituent atoms out of their bonds. Life does not evolve through that - it simply ends.
We used to play a game at my college radio station where we tried to manually bleep out all the swear words in "Aenema" (by Tool) in real time. The important word in that sentence is "college" - our local metal station has a pre-bleeped version they play which is surprisingly okay.
Indeed! Imagine what would happen if he PVR-ed a football game with only implied oral consent of the NFL, and not express written consent?
Alcohol works primarily because of organic chemistry, not something specific to certain strains of bacteria. If we keep using autoclaves to sterilize instruments, we are not going to evolve organisms that can survive fifteen minutes in 120C water (the microbes that can do this already live in such environments).
If we didn't have to use a wish after reducing it to -200 HP to kill it, no way was that website CR40. This is some serious Monty Haul crap.
I realize that you are constructing an exception to the GP's statement, but why would we want to alter the test so that somebody who slams 3 beers in five minutes and immediately gets back into their car should be given the benefit of the doubt?
You might want to add function calls where it corrects that reading for ambient measurement factors (temperature, humidity, etc.) and inherent measurement errors (calibration coefficients for the sensors). Also, you probably want to seed that rand() with current time, or heart rate, or phase of the moon.
There's a gun club in my home town that uses it to "polish chrome" (wink wink, nudge nudge). That was the day I discovered (and could never un-discover) that you can buy K-Y Jelly (TM) in 5 gallon drums.
Which is exactly why would this is a bad metric for insurance decisions, since the patients are penalized for each individual test they fail. BMI is, at best, the initial screening to do more tests - that makes it a bad total metric for healthy weight.
As they say in the trade - "Quick, Cheap, Good - Pick Any Two"
Very cute, but that isn't evolution - it's eugenics. If the "undesirables" were prevented from reproducing (because their offspring were ill-suited to cope with their environment), it would be evolution. Also, the Morlocks ate all of the Eloi - even the hot ones.
And I'm perfectly confident that the invisible hand of the market will keep the planes from colliding with each other mid-air.
The Amish most definitely believe in a centralized power - they call Him "God".
Sometimes, in the experience of community, coercion becomes unavoidable. Even the Amish shun those who are able to work to support themselves and do not; those who hold heretical beliefs; those who have brought shame to their families by breaking a taboo or code of silence. If it is unavoidable, then where do you draw the line as to what is morally (or ethically) objectionable about coercion? If another community wants your land, and are bent on the "coercion" of your people at the end of a gun, does it become acceptable then? What's wrong with imprisoning/punishing those who wish to destroy (or never acknowledge their indebtedness to) their communities?
They lost it due to underestimating how stringent they had made their cabling/power/EMI requirements, as well as how much effort it would take to correct signal strength disconnects between component systems during aircraft integration.
The only two normal operation scenarios you need a pilot for are take-off and landing. These are really not capable of being automated unless you have a secondary position/attitude source (like military-grade GPS signals).
As for the second bit, Windows CE is the only Microsoft OS that has any hope of making DO-178B Level A anytime soon ;-)
Determining ionospheric interference is still the biggest error source for most of civilian GPS. Until the L5 band becomes available (which would serve the same function as the L2 P-code band for military GPS), we are as good as we're going to get for now without supplementing the nav with inertial sources (which are only useful if they're on an aircraft).
Differential GPS is the use of several GPS receivers (and possibly inertial sensors) at multiple locations on a vehicle in order to determine the vehicle's velocities, attitudes (pitch, roll, yaw), and position (latitude, longitude, and altitude). Since the most useful things a GPS user can measure using GPS are "GPS time" and the distance from the receiver to the satellite. Getting the signal from a single satellite will tell you the range "r" that you are from that one satellite - in the naive sense, all of the possible positions the receiver could be are described as a sphere with radius "r" centered on the satellite; if you know that you are not above the satellite (an important assumption in space navigation), then it's a hemisphere. Each additional satellite's range narrows down your possible position to the set of the points of intersection of all the possible ranges. Examining the changes in these distances over time will help you zero in on your true position. But knowing your position, and even your velocity, is not enough to determine if you are, say, upside-down. This is where differential GPS comes into play, since receivers at multiple locations with fixed distances between each other can determine this.
The scheme that the Coast Guard has developed is a "pseudo-lite" (false satellite) system. It is basically another satellite that a user can use to fix their position, or potentially perform differential GPS with respect to a naval vessel or airplane.
To nitpick, the Mariner 1 incident is a confluence of hardware/system/software errors, and the Mars Climate Orbiter is a Lockheed Martin software error/NASA integration error. If, in the fifty years of NASA's existence, these are the only field-reportable software errors you can name off the top of your head, its seems disingenuous to accuse NASA's software engineers of "repeated incompetence".
Name some NASA catastrophes that are the direct result of software error.
It depends whether you work hardware, software, or systems procurement. We have some customers who seem to believe it means "Custom(ized) Off The Shelf", like that makes any genuine sense.
Relative to IT, HR is really only concerned about one thing - minimizing the risk of lawsuits against the company for any reason they can imagine (hiring, firing, and compensating employees tends to lead to lawsuits, for a variety of reasons). Since HR employees are not the legal department, they spend their time covering their own ass and the ass of the company as a whole relative to issues that may or may not be genuine.
And out of all of those options, if you actually know what you want, you may be able to pick the one which asymptotically approaches the satisfaction of your requirements. Software evolves through competition in dynamic environments - if the world never changed, and everything wanted exactly the same thing every day, we could all just do it once and go home. If every software program you find can satisfy your needs (free or not), you don't know what you really want.