Posts by Nigel 11

Re: Urine is sterile

Potassium Cyanide can also be 'sterile' , but by your reasoning it would also be safe to 'drink'

Diluted to the extent that's being considered here, it would be.

Re: Doesn't add up

So why are they proposing to lay 13,000 km of track?

THINK BIG! By the time China Global Railroad is complete, much more than 13 Megameters.

From Seattle, across the USA, and South to Latin America (via Panama)

From Beijing, through Russia to Europe, and either across the Straits of Gibraltar into Africa or possibly via Iran and Saudi. Either way, ending at Capetown.

Don't forget the branch line tunneling under the Himalayas to India.

It's not even a new idea, but its time just might be coming (ie when the oil finally starts running out). Yes, the politics is "interesting", on top of which there are a few other rather tricky bits of geology asides from the Bering Strait.

Re: How long...

Which maybe points to why full migration to ipV6 isn't likely any time soon?

Re: Weights and Measurements

Was this not the basis of the Issac Azimov 'Foundation' books?

Sure was. And that's fiction. Which was pretty much the point I was making.

Re: ummm right....

And... Floating a balloon in that stuff with rather...uncomfortable.... conditions to crash right in to makes for a nice suicide bet.

Like, living on Earth during the cold war wasn't pretty much the same? (We came within minutes if not seconds of mutually assured nuclear destruction more than once). Come to that, how much better are things today?

People still live in Tokyo, Istanbul and San Francisco ... what are their chances when the big earthquake hits? Definitely when, not if, though maybe when is after their life comes to some other natural end. That's the key.

What are your chances if an airliner in which you are crossing an ocean develops a major mechanical malfunction? I'd expect a floating city to have a fair degree of self-repair capability, and lifeboats, both conspicuously missing from our airliners.

I can actually imagine the idea of floating cities above Venus working, but not in the near future. First, we'd have to solve the problem of getting raw materials to first build and then maintain those cities. Robot miners working down below (at 600C in Sulphuric Acid vapour)? Or mining asteroids, and delivery from above ... how, exactly?

Maybe five hundred years hence, if we don't wipe ourselves out or develop the social equivalent of senility.

And I think O'Neill colonies in Earth orbit or Earth's Lagrange points might be easier.

Re: "may make a good sci-fi writer"

"Halting state" is written in the second person. It didn't bother me that much. It's the sort of thing that authors do as part of being creative. I wasn't convinced it added anything compared to the conventional mode of narration, but I didn't find it hard to process.

Have you ever tried Iain Banks' "Feersum Endjinn", in which one of the narrators is dyslexic? Or (the book) "Clockwork Orange"?

Re: Weights and Measurements

Stross is a completely awesome writer of entertaining and thought-provoking fiction.

As for economics, I have yet to be convinced that anyone understands economics. As a physicist, I know that fluid dynamics is really hard, and climate modelling even harder. Now try climate modelling with particles (people) that make their own decisions about how they are going to behave, based on the conditions in which they find themselves. You really think you can do that?

Most economists I've talked to don't know enough maths to recognise an (impossibly?) hard problem when they see it. They just catalogue what's (mostly not) worked in the past and suggest on that basis things that might work in the future. Like one would expect,they mostly don't work. But what hey, sometimes you luck out, and then you're famous and influential and enjoying tidbits from the tables of the seriously rich.

To the extent that they are reminding us of the bits of history to remember rather than repeat, they're not entirely bad. Compared, say, to parasitic "professional managers" who claim that they don't need to know anything about the business activities that they are in charge of and the lives they fsck up.

Re: Well said that man.

Where are the EU alternatives for email, cloud storage, and social networking?

Email - if you care, use encryption. The e-mail protocols are absolutely as open as a postcard in the mail unless you encrypt. PGP also allows your correspondent to verify that it was you who sent the e-mail, not someone impersonating you. Alternatively just don't say anything in e-mail that you wouldn't write on a postcard.

Cloud Storage: again, if you care, keep your live data locally and encrypt your backup data before it enters the cloud. Or decide that the risk of putting your corporate crown jewels outside the physical boundaries of the corporation is not worth the cost savings from using cloud services instead of locally-hosted ones.

Social networking: oh really? I find the best way of not having spooks, burglars, con-men, salesmen, salesdroids, bosses, promotion rivals, exes, and random nutters knowing more about me than I know about myself, is not to use social networks at all. Call me paranoid if you want, but surely the USA gubmint comes very far down on the list of people that most social network users should concern themselves with?

If you are of dircet interest to the NSA none of the above will help. Your best bet would be to refuse to use any electronic device manufactured since 1990, but they'll probably still have you bugged and monitored 24x7. There are people out there who choose to live without any technology not available several centuries ago. I should think that a modern spook's biggest challenge would be spying on someone living an Amish lifestyle!

If a 50 metre chunk of iron is plummeting towards a city at 50000mph then there is nothing anybody can do about it one way or the other. There's no way to stop it happening and it's doubtful that you could evacuate the city in time

Depends how long ahead it is spotted. You don't need to impart much delta-V to convert an earth-hitting meteor into a near-missing meteor, if you spot it early enough.

Even if it's too late to move it (or even just to steer it away from an urban centre onto a less-populated area tens of miles away), with a single day's warning you could get people away from ground zero and into basements and strong buildings with all the glass taped up. They'd then survive (and with a meteor, there's no radioactive fallout).

Re: Maybe we need a couple hits near some major cities

Any hit with any human casualties, in a place that other folks can travel to, would be sufficient. Tunguska is too remote, in both space and time.

BTW a kiloton-equivalent object vaporising ten or more miles above the surface (ie Chelyabinsk) is no great deal. Lots of broken glass, but few severe injuries. It's anything that reaches (or comes very close to) the ground and creates a nuke-equivalent plasma ball there, which we have to be more concerned about.

The other danger, not mentioned above, is what might happen if a meteor strike devastated (say) Karachi. Would it be mis-identified, leading to an all-out nuclear strike and counterstrike in the following minutes? Indeed, are we sure that the USA or Russia would correctly identify what nature could throw at Washington or Moscow or other major cities?

Re: No change

Seriously, revelations reads like a bad trip

Probably, that's exactly and literally what it was.

Until recently, it was not understood that if grain was stored damp (ie after a bad harvest), a fungus called ergot would grow on it. The fungus produces ergotamine, which has effects similar to a bad LSD trip. And since an entire community likely ate bread baked from the same batch of bad wheat, they all went on a bad trip at the same time, and that made it even harder to dismiss the (shared) experience as mere hallucination.

Revelations indeed, though not divine.

Re: Assuming that..

the dinosaurs weren't very bright, and rather nasty to boot

You've got a time machine to hand?

Dinosaurs are still with us. We call them "birds". The big flightless ones all died out. The small flying ones didn't.

Of non-human intelligences on the planet, parrots and crows have to come pretty high up the list. Parrots have the verbal abilities of a human toddler, and that's speaking in human language. Some crows make tools (a step up from just using found tools). Considering that their brains are constrained to be so small, that's even more impressive.

So big dinosaurs might have been scarily smart critters. We'll never know (short of finding some 60My-old fossil tools made by intelligent 'saurs! ).

As for nasty, that's plain silly. Some were carnivores. So are many humans. They evolved to be carnivores, like tigers or killer whales. With humans, that's chosen behaviour.

Re: Wiped out species in existence?

impactor of that size would cause what is known as crustal tsunami. would just crush all underground shelters as it traveled around the globe

But life at that time was single-celled organisms living in oceans. Provided the water around them didn't vaporise or get hot enough to kill them, they'd survive with no trouble at all. An impact like his could sterilize all life on land and within rocks, but deepwater life away from the impact site would stay safe.

Re: @Tom 7

The hard thing about life is getting it started

Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe it's a virtual inevitability, given a planet continuously covered in liquid water for a few tens or hundreds of millions of years. There's only one instance of life known to us at present, and you cannot calculate anything about the likelyhood of an event from a single datum.

However, one can observe that life started within a few hundred million years of the formation of this planet, and closer still to the later time when Earth developed stable oceans that weren't periodically boiled or vaporised. So life got started fairly quickly compared to the length of time it's been running for.

The same cannot be said of multicellular life. It may be that almost every planet in a habitable zone around a star is covered in slime, that only one in a million has multicellular organisms, and that we are currently the only intelligent life in our galaxy. But that's also speculation - only one datum, from which it's hard to make deductions about the likelyhood of life of any sort.

Re: No win. (@LDS)

The gay community is several percent of the human race (many of whom feel obliged to conceal the fact). What you mean is that a small, vociferous, extremist minority of the gay community is acting like McCarthy.

Can you name any group of people numbered in the millions, which does NOT have an organised and extremist group claiming to be acting on behalf of the other millions when in fact it's just pushing its own agenda?

Don't be silly, and put Firefox back (unless you actually prefer some other browser, in which case don't claim you removed Firefox as a protest).

Re: Freedom of speech goes both ways here

Some people can, and some people can't, leave their beliefs as a private individual at home when they go to work. If he was one of the former group, then it was wrong to call for his resignation. If one of the latter group, it's his employees who shouuld have led the campaign to oust him.

In my book I'll contrast the speed with which he resigned to save his company embarassment (perhaps he should have toughed it out?), with a certain MP who resigned today after fighting an unjustifiable, legalistic, and threatening battle with the media over the facts of her abuse of the house of commons expenses system. I know who I'd rather work under!

Re: I'd guess none

Don't forget the "mere aggregation" and library linking exception clauses.

As long as they're shipping stock Ubuntu plus ordinary user-mode binaries, they aren't shipping any derived GPL code at all. The OS is Ubuntu's distribution, get yours through the usual channels. The proprietary user-mode binaries are merely aggregated.

Yes, if they have made changes to the kernel or to any of the GPL'ed programs in Ubuntu, they have to make source of those changes available. Even then, they can still keep their proprietary user-mode executables secret, just as long as they aren't derived from GPL code.

Re: Persnly...

The difference is that Windows XP pre SP1 (and Windows 2000 before that) were very buggy. Some called them "broken" because of that, but bugs can be fixed, and were fixed, and XP (specifically, the XP UI) became much liked.

Windows 8 is broken by design. There's nothing can be done to fix it. It's not prone to crashes. It works as it was designed to work. It just doesn't do what its users want. Compared to Windows 7 it's a large step backwards. Microsoft's best hope is to make Windows 9 ("Windows Desktop") an evolutionary improvement over Windows 7, and consign the Windows 8 user interface to the dustbin (or possibly the tablet/phone arena) where it belongs.

If they EOL Windows 7 without having a proper desktop UI to replace it, it's curtains for Microsoft. Ditto if they EOL all the Windows 7 APIs which proper desktop software uses. They're now in the last chance saloon.

Why on earth didn't they learn from Apple? Three device classes: Keyboard+Mouse, Tablet, Phone. Three user interfaces, each optimised for its device class.

Under the hood?

"can you really convince yourself that Windows 8.1 is better than XP"

Under the hood? Even speaking as someone who loathes Windows 8, it's definitely a large improvement over Windows XP in places where only systems guys ever venture. It's also an improvement over Windows 7. (In both cases, excluding the graphical configuration interfaces which are a step backwards).

All of which isn't worth a bean, against the fact that the NT 4 / Win 2000 / XP user interface which we knew and loved has been thrown away, and we're expected to enjoy being sent back to the nursery school. (Windows Programmers tell me it's much the same with the programming interfaces)

Linux gets this right. We can upgrade the user interface as and when there is a reason to do so. We can choose between many. If Microsoft did things the Linux way, you could install all of XP, Win 7 and Win 8 userr interfaces on the same system, and choose which you wanted when you logged in. You might have been able to install Windows 8 with a "boot to XP" environment, upgrade a user on a Saturday, and on Monday that user wouldn't notice that anything at all had happened.

But that's not the Microsoft way. Which is why I hate Windows 8, and the company that inflicted it on us.