Re: How did it win? Simple drug-dealer's economics

The first hit is free and you pay for the rest of your life.

Win 3.1 was almost free, as was the version of MS Office that ran on it.

After a majority of businesses had tied themselves into closed file formats ( "addicted") they started raising the price, justifying it with features that most users would have paid to have removed. But, hey, no way out, and no way not to "upgrade" to a more expensive fix.

They were also ruthless with the competition. Drugs dealers kill rivals. So did Microsoft (metaphorically speaking). It blatantly abused its position to put competitors out of business. Sometimes it ended up in court, but win or lose, it knew its competitors were not coming back from the corporate grave.

Re: Trying to hack the experts?

I wonder if we'll get to find out who has the upper hand in this arms race? I'm not convinced that it's possible for even a state to catch a clued-up and paranoid hacker who is merely launching DoS attacks on an internet address from bots. (The real spy-secret kit is doubtless a much harder target, heavily firewalled and hardened or entirely off-net).

Re: Luckily BBS software still exists...

There are a few new things since BBSs first appeared.. There are broadband satellites, for example. Presumably Iranians have friends overseas who can pay for a subscription? So old-style BBSs with small bandwidth requirements could still be connected to the internet in near realtime. Also with a wireless connection to the Iranian net, it would be pretty hard for the authorities to catch someone in the act of operating the router.

The dissenters could even play them at their own game and set up their own open network of ad-hoc peer to peer routers. Sounds like a good use for loads of cheap Rasberry Pi boards. Deploy and forget. Pringles-tube directional antennae to make it hard for the authorities to locate them, if they aren't in the know. With friends in adjacent countries it could even jump the borders. Some time ago I read about battlefield networking using golfball-sized nodes just scattered out of aeroplanes or missiles. A demilitarised version ought to be do-able for £50/node and falling. Maybe something the a news networks should develop, for places like Syria today, and a horribly likely future Iran.

"Interesting times". Is it actually possible to take a whole country off the internet? Ghadaffi tried it in the dying days of his rule, and failed. Now Iran is about to try. I hope they also fail.

Re: Just a heads-up

You forgot to mention that's only a sixth of the galaxy. The other five-sixths is something wierd that we're calling "dark matter" until we can work out how to get a better look at it.

And there are nearly as many galaxies in the (observable) universe as there are stars in this one.

And that lot, including the dark matter, is only about a quarter of the whole. The other three-quarters is somerthing even wierder than dark matter that we're calling "dark energy".

Now, do we have a volunteer to stick his head into the total perspective vortex?

Re: So any explanation offered...

A star dies by imploding, once it's internal nuclear reactions can no longer make enough heat to fight gravity.

If it started as a completely symmetric sphere it would collapse to a singular point, but stars are not completely symmetric. The evidence (fron observations of Betelgeuse) is that stars about to explode get pretty warty! The implosion will therefore go faster from some directions than others, and the faster-moving bits will slam through the centre and out the other side.

Something like that, anyway. Magnetohydrodynamics with nuclear processes being driven by the moving medium depending on its temperature and pressure would make for a VERY tough modelling problem.

Re: I would have thought the simple answer is...

Possible, even probable, grounds for dismissal if they later find out that you lied to them.

I *really* don't have a Facebook account.

Re: Clearly...

Indeed. I wonder if he knows what an F1 hybrid is?

It's my favorite way of upsetting educated racists. To get (say) plants with big red flowers, you selectively breed for such, in several completely separate groups. The trouble is in-breeding. The flowers get bigger and redder, but other recessives make the plants become weak and disease-prone. Then you mix up the groups. The bad recessives are different, and recede. What they all have in common is big and red, and they grow strong and healthy and much bigger and redder than any of their parents.

How does that annoy racists? It's setting the trap. You now get them to agree that in the past, humanity lived in small villages and rarely married outside even a 10-mile radius. (The inbred village idiot was commonplace).

Then you get them to agree that humans with free will direct their own breeding through their choice of partner. What are they choosing for? Strength, beauty. Intelligence? Probably all of those. Universal choices? Also probable. Weak Stupid offspring don't have great chances in the world. (I'll pass on ugly: beauty is in the eye of the beholder).

And once you get them to agree that every village was selecting these traits, offset by inevitable inbreeding, you point out that the industrial revolution increased 10 miles to 100, and that air travel has increased it to span the globe. Interracial marriages are creating human F1 hybrid children. Strong, beautiful, intelligent people.

I can't prove it, but it's far more plausible than the opposite. And racists? the inbred village idiots are still with us. They seek each other out!

Re: they can try

Blocked by a granite wall - are you sure? I've sent ordinary Wireless-G Ethernet 30 metres sideways and down through a reinforced concrete floor. Didn't even need directional antennae. Only got 5Mbps out of it, but it worked. How many Mbps does one need to read a meter?

Re: Rise Of The Socialists

Actually, no. If the abuse of power got that bad, then everyone would do what the criminal classes do already: an insulation-displacement bypass between the streetside of the meter and the house.

It's called theft at present, not protest.

Re: Why be part of a bad health experiment in your own home?

"Do some people become ill around certain common electrical devices? Also undoubtedly true."

Cite proof, please. A double-blind test.

Put a person who claims to be electro-sensitive in a screened room (Faraday cage) with a concealed wireless router, cellphone, whatever. Neither the experimental subject nor the person telling them what to do is allowed to know beforehand whether it is turned on or not. Ask them how they feel BEFORE finding that out. Repeat until a statistically significant body of evidence is gathered.

In a less kind and possibly unethical variant on this experiment, let the subjects know where the router is concealed (say, above a ceiling tile) but don't tell them about the spycam recording their every move and the *other* concealed router permanently turned on. I'd bet 9/10 "electrosensitive" subjects would feel the need to sneak a look at the router (and then report back that they're fine when they see it's turned off, despite the fact that the other one should be making them feel ill.

Re: Can we have

If Robert Hooke hasn't yet featured on a banknote, he should be at or near the front of the queue.

Isaac Newton was a towering scientific genius but a fairly frightful man. He did all he could to bury Hooke's accomplishments, and took the credit for several things that Hooke should rightfully have been credited with.

Newton was also master of the Royal Mint, which is why is woud be such a good thing to honour Hooke with a place on a banknote!

Hawking isn't dead, and the tradition is that this rules him out. People are honoured with memorials after they are no longer alive.

Re: Fire ALL those involved in the design, manufacture, and service of HP printers.

How many of the other makes have you got and do they fare any better? There's not a printer in the world that can survive certain types of (ab)user for long. They do to printers as the BOFH does to managers. I mean, how do you get *coffee grounds* inside a printer? Anyway, it's the cost per page including both consumables and replacement printers that matters.

I'd rate Officejets and Laserjets in the £60 - £300 range highly (about 40 of them, various models). The cheapest ones are bad value (ink too expensive) unless you realy don't ever print more than a few hundred pages. The big expensive ones I just don't have experience with. Unique(?) selling point: they work like a charm with Linux via hplip (open-source but HP-supported).

Re: Lord Of The Rizzzzzz

If you couldn't stand the books you won't like the films. If you absolutely loved the books then the films will inevitably disappoint. But worst movie of all time ... come on, have you really considered all of the above posts and decided RotK was worse than any of them?

Re: The Fermi paradox.

Large moons around gas giants seem common. (Several in our Solar system). Gas giants in the habitable zone seem common (many such exoplanets detected).

Surely the deduction is that ET is more likely to be living on a large moon than a small planet.

Also there's no problem I can think of with life evolving on (or in) a suitably warm gas-giant. It's thought that Earth's original atmosphere was much like Jupiter's is today. It's even possible that some day we'll discover high-pressure-tolerant life under Jupiter's clouds (Jupiter gets warmer the deeper you go). Speculating, I'd agree that it might be hard for such life to attain technology, for lack of anything solid to lay its (presumably non-existent) hands on.

Re: Depressing Drivel

"Kes" was quite good. (Also one of his first, and they don't get better).

Yes, sad.

It was a can-do culture back then. People didn't take "no" for an answer, and the engineers were in charge. Try - fix the failures - try again - repeat until you are pretty sure you have reached the limit of the possible. It normally only happens in war-time. Well, it pretty much was war-time, but mercifully the nukes were never actually loosed.

In peacetime, zombies take over. They have no concept of experimentation and honorable failure. They demand an assurance of complete success in advance. When something works, they take all the credit (and the pay-rises). When something fails, they shoot the messenger (and often the whole engineering team, for good measure). Ultimately they redefine success as successfully causing increasingly untrue or meaningless words to be assembled on sheets of paper, while running any and all actual hardware into the ground. And of course, they are forever breeding more of their own kind, until there are so many zombies that society completely collapses.

For zombies, read bureaucrats, if you don't already think the two synonymous. And in the USSR, "shoot" wasn't always hyperbole.

Vacuum survivability = a few minutes?

I thought human survivability in vacuum was minutes, not "under a second". Anyone know if it's been animal-tested? I'd have thought it must have been.

One would have to exhale as pressure was reduced, and would normally black out from lack of oxygen maybe 15 seconds later. Death from lack of oxygen takes 3-4 minutes. By hyper-ventilating in advance, one might remain conscious for longer.

The other problem is that water at blood temperature will boil in vacuum. However, a body's membranes are quite tough and will maintain the small fraction of an atmosphere needed to prevent this for some time. My guess is that lack of oxygen would be fatal before embolisms.

Explosive decompression presents greater hazards.

Atolls do sink

It was actually Charles Darwin who first worked out how coral atolls form around a volcano which starts sinking back into the earth once it becomes extinct. From its shape, you can deduce that this one is indeed in the last stages of sinking beneath the ocean. Most of what was once a circular reef has already sunk beneath the waves.

How much of what they are seeing is sea-level rsing and how much is rock-level sinking is probably unanswerable. Regardless, the islander's plight is very real!

Unless ...?

Unless, of course, the industry definition of areal density is simply the number of bits stored on a platter divided by (pi times radius squared). It doesn't necessarily make sense to exclude the hole in the middle, since its necessary size may be part of a complex design trade-off. Thinks ... a smaller hole means a narrower spindle which will be less rigid and vibrate more, meaning you have to put the tracks further apart to allow for that. So there's definitely an optimum to be sought.

Re: $35 million but can't afford an iPad?

"Freakonomics"? No, just check out our own industry's major players. "The first hit is free" (90 day free trial software) but after you've used it for a while, you'll be locked in for life. Where do you think they got their business model from?

Re: "Sensitive Personal Data"

You or I may not regard our name, phone numbers and permanent address as sensitive. If you were being pursued by an unbalanced or outright homicidal ex-partner or stalker, you might feel very differently. Especially after s/he had obtained that information by accessing the USA copy of your PNR, and visited you with a gun / knife / bottle of acid.

You might also find that if you were in that situation, it's highly probable that an intelligence agency's automated passenger record filtering system might decide that you were of greater interest than the average traveller. They don't know *why* you've changed your address three times in the past year, and your bank account five times, but they have noticed that you have done so.