You've given yourself away there as a religious fundamentalist, not a thinking human being. And your statement is nonsense. There are plenty of animal species that have been around far longer than we have. There are also species (bonobo chimpanzee) that have evolved relatively peaceful matriarchal societies which would suggest that, in the absence of their biggest predator (us) they would have a long life expectancy.
The fundies demanding special treatment for human beings in these posts have obviously never closely observed another reasonably advanced mammalian species. Our spaniel has a well developed sense of right and wrong and you can easily see the debate ranging in his little mind as he wonders whether he can or should do something he is not allowed to do but wants to. In a small compass he displays much of the typical human behaviour - you can see the roots of religion, society and inquisitiveness.
Unfortunately there is a sequence of ideas here with an evil end. "Mere animals" - "humans who aren't like me so are mere animals" - "it's OK to kill people who aren't like me because they are just animals." You find this thinking wherever you find fundamentalist Semitic religions (mainly Christianity and Islam- this is nothing to do with being Jewish), whereas many Eastern religions are less likely to suffer from this anthroposupremacist error.
I hate to say this (well, actually, I don't, I love to be pedantic like this) but if a real lens can be made to behave like this, then its properties are part of the "natural world". We just haven't experienced it before.
Anybody who has ever done a university course on optics and so has come across phenomena like double refraction, which is truly weird the first time you see it, will know that there are plenty of strange things in optics. But that doesn't make them unnatural.
Taken at face value the term "free market" is an oxymoron, because a market is a place where things are bought and sold and so cannot be free in that sense. "Fair markets" or "Information-neutral markets" would be more correct, but there is no direct connection between information neutral markets and freedom: the term itself is loaded politically. In any case (and someone won a Nobel prize in economics for showing this) free markets are rarely free in reality because the large players always seek to make them asymmetric.
You don't mention the biggest benefit - the ability to use the spent fuel from the slow neutron reactors currently in use, with reprocessing. They are actually part of the solution to the mounds of nuclear waste we already have.
There is only one thing worries me about modern nuclear plants, and that is the access to cooling water. If you plan on using rivers or lakes, you need to be pretty sure that global warming will not dry them up.
Much as I like relatively low overhead technologies like wind, solar, bio-Diesel and bio-ethanol, I have to admit that I'm a convert to the idea of fast neutron sodium-cooled non-breeder plants. They even seem to be relatively terrorist-proof. And they would provide some well paid tech jobs that are not just in moving bits around.
A lot of printers use Power architecture (there's one near me, with a 600MHz processor, right now, and the speed with which it renders a full color A4 PDF is quite impressive.) Power is very good wherever there isn't a load of dead weight to keep supporting, which is why it seems to do so well in the embedded or non-"PC" market. As for Apple's decision - well, I fortunately don't have any shares in Apple. I'm not convinced that they will be able to make the world's best X86 portables, and that is the task they seem to have set themselves. I have an attic full of old Macs, and I now have no reason at all to acquire another one.
China is not a Communist country. It's an oligarchic dictatorship. The fact that said oligarchy calls itself "communist" is about as relevant as Lebanese militias calling themselves "Christian" or the Provisional IRA calling itself "Trotskyite". You can call yourself what you like. But if you want historical parallels for current Chinese government, the Imperial Roman system or the Venetian Serene Republic are probably closer analogies.
I wouldn't get cross about this misnomenclature except that there have been a very few real attempts at Communist government, notably in India, and they shouldn't be dirtied by association. Let's be clear - if the Chinese people eventually overthrow or modernise their government, it will be the end of the process of the rise and collapse of large scale dictatorships in the 20th Century.
I liked the anonymous reference to Velikovsky and the attack on publicly funded science. And the mixed metaphor (try shining a spotlight on a fallacy coming out of someone's mouth). On the basis of a supposed quote from an unidentifiable professor we are supposed to believe that all that research is rubbish? Yes, surely. Because an anecdotal unidentifiable urban legend is just so much more reliable than peer-reviewed scientists who put their reputations on the line when they go public with research based on reproducible experimentation or measurements. Which are falsifiable. Which happens to be a major component of scientific progress.
Disclaimer: I'm English, and definitely NOT British. Brits are those horrible people you see reeling around drunk and throwing up in the street in foreign countries.
After WW2, we very sensibly got rid of almost all the British Empire, except for a few bits of other people's countries (Gibraltar, Northern Ireland). I can't help wondering if the whole thing is some kind of convoluted official joke - sorry, you're not worth a "proper" honour, how would you like to be a Commander of a few dodgy tax havens and a place terrorised by gangsters?
We already have proper honours - the OM for the arts, the Royal Society for scientists, the Royal Academy for artists (tricky ground there though) - and I really do not know why we cannot simply have properly designated recognition for charity workers,business people and designers. Of course, the work of trawling through all those OBEs, CBEs etc. and deciding what recognition they should now be given would need a whole commission of well paid ex civil servants, so you would think they at least would support such a scheme.
Sorry, but all UL certification means is that the thing will not catch fire or get hot in a way that will cause damage in a domestic environment (that's why it's Underwriters' Laboratories for Heaven's sake). Every single example tested could fail open circuit in five minutes and it still could be UL certified because it does not create an INSURANCE risk. UL approval does not mean that additional cooling could not be beneficial. Odd you mention coffee machines because some years ago there was considerable trouble with them catching fire and it took UL a long time to evolve an acceptable testing methodology.
But this leads to an interesting possibility about these add-ons. It's possible that additional cooling could cause a thermal trip or similar overload protection device to fail to operate when it should, perhaps resulting in a fire starting elsewhere in the system. (For instance, a number of systems use PTC devices as simple thermal trips. Blowing additional cold air over a PTC could prevent it tripping). If this resulted in a fire, you might find your add-on cooler had invalidated your household insurance and you were not covered. The situation with changing the CPU cooler is different because the total heat and net airflow in the case should be unchanged.
(and BTW it's Holocaust - which is itself an inappropriate word if you know what it means, and I prefer Shoah.)
If you will kindly leave your expletives behind and learn some history, you will find that yellow badges were introduced at an early stage in the persecutions, when being Jewish affected your employment prospects or status rather than threatened your life. The point I was trying to make was that official discrimination, however unintentioned, leads to more serious discrimination. Anybody who has studied management, or education, knows the importance of not marking out a group as inferior. It's easy enough to do with just a little thought. A company the size of MS should be looking at ways to maximise the contribution of its employment dollars - and that means avoiding having groups perceived as being lower status.
But there was this very large governmental organisation somewhere in Europe once upon a time that put colored badges on people it wanted to treat as inferior. What happened to it? I think it went out of business in the big dot-bomb of '45.
You are correct, but your social skills (even on Slashdot) perhaps leave a little to be desired.
When somebody prefixes a remark with "I think..." implying they are not sure, and suggests that the amount is claim-dependent, prefixing your reply with "Wrong" is bad manners.
I'm making this point because we've been recruiting this year, and one of the questions I always get asked about candidates is "are they safe to talk to clients?"
I am assuming you are in England because you use the vernacular ("£50 quid"), but not a native speaker or you would know the £ sign is redundant (£50 or 50 quid but NOT £50 quid) so you should be aware that phraseology like yours is unlikely to endear you to senior management. In the early phases of my own career I came over like that...then I decided that what goes for your peer group is no good if you want promotion. Just a suggestion.
This is the UK Small Claims Court. I think it currently costs about 80UKP to make a claim, scaling to 10% of the amount claimed. You do not need a lawyer, you can fill in the forms yourself and ask the clerk for advice. The court is fairly informal, run by a kind of junior judge for the most part, who is allowed to employ considerable common sense ("equity"). So it might, possibly, take a day of your time which may be worth it to deal with a very annoying spammer. Oh, and if they decide to ignore your case...summary judgement against them.
What's more, it works. I was involved in a case in which a company sued a friend claiming payment for work they had not, in fact, done. Although we screwed up mildly on the paperwork the judge in the case decided that did not matter and gave judgement in our favor. The other side walked out feeling very upset, but realised the cost of going to a higher court to try again would be much greater than the amount claimed. So they gave up.
You are totally correct. You might have added that one big problem is Word, which has trained loads of semi-literates to believe that loads of formatting and exact spacing somehow make a document better, when in fact all it does is to bloat it with redundant formatting and create a visual mess.
I was talking this morning with a journalist of the old school who really understands layout, and in fact we were discussing the new Guardian format. He was describing how, in effect, the constraints of point by point layout for offset printing, and the need to design physical pages, mean that until people have years of experience with a new format they cannot get the best out of it. He thinks that the new Guardian layout will be really good in a few years...but for now, some content is being sacrificed to the need to fit the page layout blocks of the format.
So why is this precise newspaper layout required? Partly for visual effect, of course, for the minority of people who have the necessary visual skills to appreciate it. But partly to produce something that can be read by the target audience. Because the audience cannot change the face and style to suit their requirements, it is hard to produce a one size fits all. The front page of a paper newspaper has to meet many conflicting requirements and so always is a compromise.
Sometimes, of course, the front page is a thing of beauty where the images and the headlines join up to support the meaning of the stories. But how often does that happen nowadays? I could go on, but you've made the points already.
In (I think) November Scientific American there was an article about how the need for a quantum theory of gravity may be obviated by, in effect, transposing the universe to a different set of coordinates with fewer dimensions.
Now, I am not a physicist and I know nothing about anything, but reading the article made me think of a database. Assume for a moment that what we call an "electron" is actually a row in a table, with its various characteristics modeled by the fields. Although the electron seems to occupy something we call "space" with multiple dimensions, it can in fact be represented by a one-dimensional string of ones and zeroes.
Pursuing this dubious analogy further, we could suggest that our "electron" has several different positions:
The "position" corresponding to the different values of its dimensional fields
The position corresponding to its entry in the table
The position corresponding to its actual position in storage
Positing a 2-dimensional storage for a moment, we can see that "electrons" with very different spatial field values might actually be on adjacent rows of the table or might lie next to one another as actual binary strings on the storage medium. Contrariwise "electrons" with very similar spatial field values might actually be very distant in terms of rows or media.
Thus the concept of physically remote but related electrons could be explained by a variety of means (row adjacency, media adjacency).
Conclusion: The entire universe is actually a database residing on a really big server farm somewhere, and all these strange quantum effects are a natural consequence of interaction between records due to the limitations of the physical media. As to what the server farm is made of or where it resides...that's left as an exercise to the ID proponents. As to what database it is, since it has been in use for at least 15 billion years without a reboot, it's got to be DB2 or Oracle.
I have wrongly assumed that the French term "milliard" is the French equivalent of "billion". I now learn there is a French billion which is 10^12. (Echelle longue). It also appears that Russia is unusual in using the 10^9 billion.
So I apologise for the misleading post, and at least I have learned something new from Slashdot.
A real-world monopolist does not have or need 100% of the market. He needs enough market share to be able to distort the free market in a way that adversely affects competitors. The reason, of course, is that society is not homogeneous and so a high market share plus other technological factors creates local monopolies in one market or section of a market. Even I know this, and I'm not an economist. But then, dictionary editors seem to be even less aware or knowledgeable.
Microsoft is a de facto monopolist in certain markets, including the consumer desktop and many corporates. The monopoly has been handed them on a plate and they have, of course, taken it. In 1988 when I bought my first Mac, there was a bewildering array of word processors. Now there is only one, and Open Office has to copy or die. The browser share of IE is effectively 100% among non-technical users - a de facto monopoly. The market share of Windows among non-technical/specialist consumers is as near 100% as makes no odds.
At the root of this is the simple fact that computers are too difficult for Joe Public and are likely always to be so. Enough people kind of understand how Windows and its apps works that Joe Public can kind of keep things working most of the time. There is simply not the expertise out there to support multiple platforms all with significant market shares. And so long as Microsoft can keep technically competent people busy with release updates, virus checking, feature bloat resulting in user support calls for things they do not really need to do at all...it will continue.
So the answer to your post is that yes, lots of things - lack of knowledge, fear of the unknown, lack of support, existential doubt - stopped many people from buying alternatives and those things are not going away any time soon.
The European Court ruled on appeal that the UK government was wrong to deny legal aid to Morris and Steel because McDonalds then had the power in the case completely shifted in their direction (for those who do not know, in the French slogan "liberté,égalité,fraternité", the "égalité" bit means that the law applies equally to everybody, and this is a principle of European law.)It would be interesting to know if the US constitution could be so interpreted, so that a corporation with effectively limitless access to money and representation could not use this to roll over the rights to a fair trial of somebody without that much money. If not, then then the US would be technically a fascist state, i.e. one in which the Government colluded with unelected corporations. This is where we need some rulings from genuinely conservative judges like the one in the Pennsylvania ID case.
you can use Java to find the fields and replace them directly without needing any temp files. It is easy and fast. Can you do this in PHP? (just curious)
This is an example of a technology which only gives any benefit when it is able to be deployed asymmetrically, but in its practical applications will be so portable and easy to conceal that it will not stay asymmetric for long.
Another obvious example is handguns, but if you say that on Slashdot you get moderated down.
The ideal weapon from the point of view of governments is one that is insanely expensive, hard to deploy, needs lots of training to use, and makes extremely large holes. This ensures that Third World countries can't lay their hands on it without your permission. I have often thought that, if a small rogue state like Israel really did lay their hands on a really simple, cheap and very effective munition, the sensible long term approach for the US and for the world would be to nuke them out of existence before it's too late. Case in point: the Kalashnikov. Too late, that one is already out there.
Seriously, years ago I actually encountered a Geiger counter (don't ask) which used transistors to drive Nixie tubes. In those days there were no high voltage transistors, so it worked around the idea that the Nixies turned off at a certain voltage, therefore the VEBO of the transistors did not need to exceed the difference between the high voltage rail and the Nixie cutoff voltage.
Did you notice the words "Geiger counter" there? Yes. Of course, if the radiation reached a level sufficient to ionise the gas in the tubes, they stayed conducting. So turning a small gamma source on the tubes themselves blew all the output transistors.
than the Internet, and there was some sort of editorial control over what got printed. Now there is still editorial control over what gets printed but it consists of answering the following two questions:
Does it suit people who spend a lot advertising with us? OR Does the author have the ability to influence my career?
Its sad but true. Once upon a time there was a thing called statistics which you could use to determine whether something was significant or not. Now statistics is (are) deprecated. It all started with those two memes of the late 20th century: Perception is everything (so if you don't want to feel this stake through your heart, you won't?) and the accounting one: What is 2 + 2? What do you want it to be?
It was a joke, for Heaven's sake! Read the next sentence. The point is that MS is prepared to lose money on the XBox while Apple has to make a profit on everything.
OK, not a very good joke....but I would have thought obvious enough.
Slashdot Mirror
The fundies demanding special treatment for human beings in these posts have obviously never closely observed another reasonably advanced mammalian species. Our spaniel has a well developed sense of right and wrong and you can easily see the debate ranging in his little mind as he wonders whether he can or should do something he is not allowed to do but wants to. In a small compass he displays much of the typical human behaviour - you can see the roots of religion, society and inquisitiveness.
Unfortunately there is a sequence of ideas here with an evil end. "Mere animals" - "humans who aren't like me so are mere animals" - "it's OK to kill people who aren't like me because they are just animals." You find this thinking wherever you find fundamentalist Semitic religions (mainly Christianity and Islam- this is nothing to do with being Jewish), whereas many Eastern religions are less likely to suffer from this anthroposupremacist error.
Anybody who has ever done a university course on optics and so has come across phenomena like double refraction, which is truly weird the first time you see it, will know that there are plenty of strange things in optics. But that doesn't make them unnatural.
Taken at face value the term "free market" is an oxymoron, because a market is a place where things are bought and sold and so cannot be free in that sense. "Fair markets" or "Information-neutral markets" would be more correct, but there is no direct connection between information neutral markets and freedom: the term itself is loaded politically. In any case (and someone won a Nobel prize in economics for showing this) free markets are rarely free in reality because the large players always seek to make them asymmetric.
There is only one thing worries me about modern nuclear plants, and that is the access to cooling water. If you plan on using rivers or lakes, you need to be pretty sure that global warming will not dry them up.
Much as I like relatively low overhead technologies like wind, solar, bio-Diesel and bio-ethanol, I have to admit that I'm a convert to the idea of fast neutron sodium-cooled non-breeder plants. They even seem to be relatively terrorist-proof. And they would provide some well paid tech jobs that are not just in moving bits around.
A lot of printers use Power architecture (there's one near me, with a 600MHz processor, right now, and the speed with which it renders a full color A4 PDF is quite impressive.) Power is very good wherever there isn't a load of dead weight to keep supporting, which is why it seems to do so well in the embedded or non-"PC" market. As for Apple's decision - well, I fortunately don't have any shares in Apple. I'm not convinced that they will be able to make the world's best X86 portables, and that is the task they seem to have set themselves. I have an attic full of old Macs, and I now have no reason at all to acquire another one.
I wouldn't get cross about this misnomenclature except that there have been a very few real attempts at Communist government, notably in India, and they shouldn't be dirtied by association. Let's be clear - if the Chinese people eventually overthrow or modernise their government, it will be the end of the process of the rise and collapse of large scale dictatorships in the 20th Century.
I liked the anonymous reference to Velikovsky and the attack on publicly funded science. And the mixed metaphor (try shining a spotlight on a fallacy coming out of someone's mouth). On the basis of a supposed quote from an unidentifiable professor we are supposed to believe that all that research is rubbish? Yes, surely. Because an anecdotal unidentifiable urban legend is just so much more reliable than peer-reviewed scientists who put their reputations on the line when they go public with research based on reproducible experimentation or measurements. Which are falsifiable. Which happens to be a major component of scientific progress.
After WW2, we very sensibly got rid of almost all the British Empire, except for a few bits of other people's countries (Gibraltar, Northern Ireland). I can't help wondering if the whole thing is some kind of convoluted official joke - sorry, you're not worth a "proper" honour, how would you like to be a Commander of a few dodgy tax havens and a place terrorised by gangsters?
We already have proper honours - the OM for the arts, the Royal Society for scientists, the Royal Academy for artists (tricky ground there though) - and I really do not know why we cannot simply have properly designated recognition for charity workers,business people and designers. Of course, the work of trawling through all those OBEs, CBEs etc. and deciding what recognition they should now be given would need a whole commission of well paid ex civil servants, so you would think they at least would support such a scheme.
Odd you mention coffee machines because some years ago there was considerable trouble with them catching fire and it took UL a long time to evolve an acceptable testing methodology.
But this leads to an interesting possibility about these add-ons. It's possible that additional cooling could cause a thermal trip or similar overload protection device to fail to operate when it should, perhaps resulting in a fire starting elsewhere in the system. (For instance, a number of systems use PTC devices as simple thermal trips. Blowing additional cold air over a PTC could prevent it tripping). If this resulted in a fire, you might find your add-on cooler had invalidated your household insurance and you were not covered. The situation with changing the CPU cooler is different because the total heat and net airflow in the case should be unchanged.
If you will kindly leave your expletives behind and learn some history, you will find that yellow badges were introduced at an early stage in the persecutions, when being Jewish affected your employment prospects or status rather than threatened your life. The point I was trying to make was that official discrimination, however unintentioned, leads to more serious discrimination. Anybody who has studied management, or education, knows the importance of not marking out a group as inferior. It's easy enough to do with just a little thought. A company the size of MS should be looking at ways to maximise the contribution of its employment dollars - and that means avoiding having groups perceived as being lower status.
But there was this very large governmental organisation somewhere in Europe once upon a time that put colored badges on people it wanted to treat as inferior. What happened to it? I think it went out of business in the big dot-bomb of '45.
When somebody prefixes a remark with "I think..." implying they are not sure, and suggests that the amount is claim-dependent, prefixing your reply with "Wrong" is bad manners.
I'm making this point because we've been recruiting this year, and one of the questions I always get asked about candidates is "are they safe to talk to clients?"
I am assuming you are in England because you use the vernacular ("£50 quid"), but not a native speaker or you would know the £ sign is redundant (£50 or 50 quid but NOT £50 quid) so you should be aware that phraseology like yours is unlikely to endear you to senior management. In the early phases of my own career I came over like that...then I decided that what goes for your peer group is no good if you want promotion. Just a suggestion.
What's more, it works. I was involved in a case in which a company sued a friend claiming payment for work they had not, in fact, done. Although we screwed up mildly on the paperwork the judge in the case decided that did not matter and gave judgement in our favor. The other side walked out feeling very upset, but realised the cost of going to a higher court to try again would be much greater than the amount claimed. So they gave up.
I was talking this morning with a journalist of the old school who really understands layout, and in fact we were discussing the new Guardian format. He was describing how, in effect, the constraints of point by point layout for offset printing, and the need to design physical pages, mean that until people have years of experience with a new format they cannot get the best out of it. He thinks that the new Guardian layout will be really good in a few years...but for now, some content is being sacrificed to the need to fit the page layout blocks of the format.
So why is this precise newspaper layout required? Partly for visual effect, of course, for the minority of people who have the necessary visual skills to appreciate it. But partly to produce something that can be read by the target audience. Because the audience cannot change the face and style to suit their requirements, it is hard to produce a one size fits all. The front page of a paper newspaper has to meet many conflicting requirements and so always is a compromise.
Sometimes, of course, the front page is a thing of beauty where the images and the headlines join up to support the meaning of the stories. But how often does that happen nowadays? I could go on, but you've made the points already.
Now, I am not a physicist and I know nothing about anything, but reading the article made me think of a database. Assume for a moment that what we call an "electron" is actually a row in a table, with its various characteristics modeled by the fields. Although the electron seems to occupy something we call "space" with multiple dimensions, it can in fact be represented by a one-dimensional string of ones and zeroes.
Pursuing this dubious analogy further, we could suggest that our "electron" has several different positions:
- The "position" corresponding to the different values of its dimensional fields
- The position corresponding to its entry in the table
- The position corresponding to its actual position in storage
Positing a 2-dimensional storage for a moment, we can see that "electrons" with very different spatial field values might actually be on adjacent rows of the table or might lie next to one another as actual binary strings on the storage medium. Contrariwise "electrons" with very similar spatial field values might actually be very distant in terms of rows or media.Thus the concept of physically remote but related electrons could be explained by a variety of means (row adjacency, media adjacency).
Conclusion: The entire universe is actually a database residing on a really big server farm somewhere, and all these strange quantum effects are a natural consequence of interaction between records due to the limitations of the physical media. As to what the server farm is made of or where it resides...that's left as an exercise to the ID proponents. As to what database it is, since it has been in use for at least 15 billion years without a reboot, it's got to be DB2 or Oracle.
So I apologise for the misleading post, and at least I have learned something new from Slashdot.
I haven't seen any other kind of billion in use in Europe for many years.
Microsoft is a de facto monopolist in certain markets, including the consumer desktop and many corporates. The monopoly has been handed them on a plate and they have, of course, taken it. In 1988 when I bought my first Mac, there was a bewildering array of word processors. Now there is only one, and Open Office has to copy or die. The browser share of IE is effectively 100% among non-technical users - a de facto monopoly. The market share of Windows among non-technical/specialist consumers is as near 100% as makes no odds.
At the root of this is the simple fact that computers are too difficult for Joe Public and are likely always to be so. Enough people kind of understand how Windows and its apps works that Joe Public can kind of keep things working most of the time. There is simply not the expertise out there to support multiple platforms all with significant market shares. And so long as Microsoft can keep technically competent people busy with release updates, virus checking, feature bloat resulting in user support calls for things they do not really need to do at all...it will continue.
So the answer to your post is that yes, lots of things - lack of knowledge, fear of the unknown, lack of support, existential doubt - stopped many people from buying alternatives and those things are not going away any time soon.
The European Court ruled on appeal that the UK government was wrong to deny legal aid to Morris and Steel because McDonalds then had the power in the case completely shifted in their direction (for those who do not know, in the French slogan "liberté,égalité,fraternité", the "égalité" bit means that the law applies equally to everybody, and this is a principle of European law.)It would be interesting to know if the US constitution could be so interpreted, so that a corporation with effectively limitless access to money and representation could not use this to roll over the rights to a fair trial of somebody without that much money. If not, then then the US would be technically a fascist state, i.e. one in which the Government colluded with unelected corporations. This is where we need some rulings from genuinely conservative judges like the one in the Pennsylvania ID case.
I don't know whether this is reassuring or whether, given the increase in really nasty criminal gangs in this country, to be really really scared.
you can use Java to find the fields and replace them directly without needing any temp files. It is easy and fast. Can you do this in PHP? (just curious)
Another obvious example is handguns, but if you say that on Slashdot you get moderated down.
The ideal weapon from the point of view of governments is one that is insanely expensive, hard to deploy, needs lots of training to use, and makes extremely large holes. This ensures that Third World countries can't lay their hands on it without your permission. I have often thought that, if a small rogue state like Israel really did lay their hands on a really simple, cheap and very effective munition, the sensible long term approach for the US and for the world would be to nuke them out of existence before it's too late. Case in point: the Kalashnikov. Too late, that one is already out there.
Seriously, years ago I actually encountered a Geiger counter (don't ask) which used transistors to drive Nixie tubes. In those days there were no high voltage transistors, so it worked around the idea that the Nixies turned off at a certain voltage, therefore the VEBO of the transistors did not need to exceed the difference between the high voltage rail and the Nixie cutoff voltage.
Did you notice the words "Geiger counter" there? Yes. Of course, if the radiation reached a level sufficient to ionise the gas in the tubes, they stayed conducting. So turning a small gamma source on the tubes themselves blew all the output transistors.
Does it suit people who spend a lot advertising with us? OR
Does the author have the ability to influence my career?
Its sad but true. Once upon a time there was a thing called statistics which you could use to determine whether something was significant or not. Now statistics is (are) deprecated. It all started with those two memes of the late 20th century: Perception is everything (so if you don't want to feel this stake through your heart, you won't?) and the accounting one: What is 2 + 2? What do you want it to be?
OK, not a very good joke....but I would have thought obvious enough.