Posts by Grikath

Re: nickel-56, amirite?

Same as any other ion that jets out from there.. Magnetism, Baby!

Re: And what did that interbreeding give us?

Not sure about that one , mr Manning...

The african continent, with it's occupants missing the Neanderthal genes, is decidedly non-peaceful and rather rife with various forms of agression, and has been as long as recorded history can prove.

Hell, the slave trade is practically an african invention, since it has proven to be more profitable to sell off your captured prizes, than to go through the trouble to domesticating them yourself. This has been the way since the egyptians. The Arabs and later the europeans simply jumped onto an existing wagon that was already rolling..

as far as maori are concerned.. Last time I checked the tribes in any area of that part of the world were quite accomplished, if not outright vicious, at warfare..

H. Sap. Sap was already agressive before they ever met their Neabderthal cousins. It's what made them successful in taking over the world as a species to begin with. What interbreeding *could* have accomplished is a rapid adaption to the rather frigid environment up north, since Neanderthals were ultimately perfectly adapted to the climate of the clacial period.

Re: what about the one we're exploring?

well, you're talking about a sequence of ïf"s, but...

The caldera of that volcano, once cooled down a bit, would make a lovely depression where water would collect. It would also keep that water at quite a nice temperature and environment for a number of "extremophiles" that are quite typical for life in earth's early development. In fact, as long as liquid water was present, the ecological conditions would be close to indistinguishable from early-biotic earth, even while the rest of the planets' climate would be going to hell in a handbasket, and would stay that way for a long time.

If any form of life was already present, it would have concentrated there. If it (still) was not, the conditions there would have been ideal for the final stages of formation. Either way, if there is *any* chance of finding evidence for past life on Mars, that caldera would be a prime spot to look for evidence of it.

Re: It's all gone a bit Princess Di

Jobs and Edison are indeed comparable. After all, it was Edison who perfected the modern labaratory setup, so he could get his hands on their ideas, patent, and market them. Jobs merely copied that, applied to modern tech.

Re: Interesting

The german secret service has the standard "european" mandate.. Believe me that they can still read your mail if there's a need.

But at least there still needs to be a court order, or "reasonable suspicion" before they can get away with it.

Re: What planet is Mr Orlowski living on..?

The planet where Amazon controls 90% of the e-book market. He forgets, however, that most of that stuff is hardly more than slush-pile method-writing. The real good stuff is increasingly self-published, as authors and their agents realise they don't need the old publishers and retail chain anymore unless they want dead-tree format out. And even dead-tree does not require the publishers anymore..

Seen from the point of the Industry, he may have a point, but publishing itself is changing fast and the old behemoths, like in the music industry, are unable and/or unwilling to adapt.

Re: Let's see....

Not really... The biggest problem for the publishers is that e-books cannot be DRM-ed sufficiently enough to make them behave like dead-tree-format books, where you *need* the physical copy to be able to read a book. If something is popular enough, any digital format will get cracked open, copied, and released into the wild. It's simply a given of the modern digital world, and the comapnies producing "media", including book publishers realise this all too well.

What they, and Apple, tried to do was game the system to push up the price of ebooks at the source so that they could sustain their outdated business model, not unlike the record industry continues to do. The publishers simply do not have a sufficient lobby/enforcement agency like the RIAA in place to cover things up for them, so they got burned.

Amazon made a smart move by "dumping" the e-books they bought wholesale to promote their e-reader to maximise their first-sale gain in the long term, since most people that still *do* read books will buy books regardless. They realised that the e-book price was too high to begin with, since it does not need the whole dead-tree manufacturing/distribution chain which is still incorporated in the price, and that the people who do read books tend to be intelligent enough to notice this, making them much more likely to go look for the "freetard" option of finding an un-DRM-ed copy online.

If publishers folded over this, even though they still received their inflated wholesale prices on e-books, their whole position in the market was untenable to begin with. As far as authors are concerned, there are plenty of self-publishing options, and even dedicated e-publishers that sell directly to the public. If you want to make money by telling stories you simply have to be good enough at it, and put in the legwork to make it a viable living. It's not as if there aren't plenty of examples out on the internet where content is provided for free yet still allow the authors/artists to raise a clutch of kids and run a successful business.

actually..

The possible states of the cat are : alive, dead, Greebo...

Re: A(nother) pedant writes

"the states' procurement...." Fixed that for you.

When will the humble apostrophe be declared State Enemy #1 for causing so much havoc and mayhem?

Re: To be fair, there's a naked selfie on mine, as of last week...

Magazines are so last millennium..

Rule 34 dictates that you're probably right when it comes to websites though.

Re: Bomb Threats @ AC 11:44

"And can we please stop calling it "trolling". Trolling is about winding someone up, pushing a finger into really oversensitive fans of One Direction, Harry Potter, Star Wars or whatever else. It's a barrel of laughs and not to be confused with threatening violence."

Given that the concept of semi-anonymously riling up an individual or community for "fun" is in and of itself rather ...lame.. and tells a lot about mindset and morals of the individuals engaging in this "pastime", I can see why you choose to use the wuss-option yourself.

In my experience, it is often quite easy to dig into those trolling, and have them burst an artery or two in indignant rage, with the resulting (usually gramatically incoherent) verbal diarrhea containing threats of violence more often than not.

So no, the "issues" shouldn't be separated. They're simply two of many afflictions of the Armchair Bully, and as such should be integrated in the definition of "internet troll".

Re: Don't forget the rest. @ Don Jefe

"We aren't all bastards!"

No, but a significant enough portion or your governement and bureaucracy is, and that's exactly the problem here. This isn't about individuals, but a whole morally corrupt system controlling not just its' own nation, but also trying to hold the rest of the world at ransom.

The vast majority of US citizens are most likely people I wouldn't mind having for a neighbour or a drinking buddy at the pub. The problem is that those people are not in power, the asshat minority is, and they are willing to do anything to preserve and expand their power.

Re: Oh the irony.

"Used to be"? You mean "it is still the case", surely.

Like it or not, open source applications , for many reasons, still lag in useability and features comapred to propietary/industry standard aoolications.

Re: Clueless

Not sure if they are clueless. I still need to dig into the specs and do a lot of comparing, but it looks like the thing can be hijacked into some applications where the Pi is not powerful enough and the "Commercial Options" makes the price tag...interesting.. even if you got to do a lot of developing/soldering( yes, that forgotten art still exists..) yourself.

Maybe El Reg could get their incrowd to do a Pi for Slice comparison?

Re: I thought

Not only that, but I was under the impression only the original copyright holder could issue one, not a third party.

Re: In this case ElReg is being even handed on the debate.

"When you put the same numbers through the same system on differenct machines it should give same answers."

Only when you're working with integers in a non-random process using discrete methods. Which climate/weather models , being emergent systems, using real numbers, involving quite a few random effects do not comply to.

Which is why most weather projections/predictions are averaged over a fair number of runs (500+ usually for our met office (KNMI) for 3-5 day predictions.) and published as nice little expanding graphs letting everyone + dog draw their own conclusions.

As far as the hotheads pro- and con-AGW are concerned: As you'd expect from a country where >50% of its' territory lies well below sea level, the dutch met office has had a long hard look at the current climate data to see if there's any serious threat to our dikes in the near future ( next 100 years), to see whether or not we should be training our fingers to plug holes in them ( once again), or top them up a bit. So far the simple answer is that the requirements set forth in the Delta-plan in the 1960's are more than sufficient to cope with any anticipated sea level rise with a reasonable amount of probability. Increased rainfall on the continent may cause some problems with rivers flooding locally, but we've been coping with that for centuries.

So that 10-meter surge? Not so much. Hockeystick temperature curve? Inconclusive evidence from available data. Deniers? No, but sufficiently sceptic to not accept the extreme ranges of incomplete models as Gospel.

Re: So, you didn't test your DR plan...

"sparking contact syndrome". Inviting Murphy for a 6-course dinner since the dawn of electric era.....

Oxygen had something to do with it, but there's some severe limitations to their body plan as well. There's plenty of modern insects that match the size of the *average* critter in the carboniferous period ( and there's some modern beetles that come pretty close to the giants of that age...) The giants are just that. Same as the dinosaurs and the glacial megafauna(s). There's a tendency for life to grow *big* up to the limitations of the bodyplan if there's no competition from other ("superior") bodyplans.