So the news is...
So there's apparently only 30.000 essentially different pictures that exist in this world?
1513 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Mar 2007
It's not like you've read the article, really? Just the title and it's whingeing time. Bla bla bla bla...
The message is feel free to break your legs and/or neck running after some stupid cheese, Health&Safety have no problem with that. You deserve what you get I suppose. It's the 10k too many people invading a village that cause the problem, people that have been turning up only the last few years because of all these "odd news" items about it. A local fete is now just 15000 drunken strangers mulling about.
Green! Oh ahr no blue! (falls into chasm of doom)
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The colour question is easily correctly remembered (and hard to guess) if you actually have a favourite colour. For example, #993333 (in HTML) or {.39 .13 .13} (in PSTricks/LaTeX) or whatever. Just use your favourite coordinate system, being RGB, CMYK, HSV, or other, with numbers 0.0--1.0, 0--256, 00--FF, or other. The problem is to invent a favourite colour and stick by it --- probably easiest is the colour code of your car's paint, as needed for small repair jobs.
@Alyn: "Aardvark" is bad if you expect a dictionary attack --- and a dictionary attack is exceedingly unlikely (and very stupid) on a "maiden name" question.
Possibly a directory attack there (let's start with Patel and Smith as likeliest surnames) but nobody named Aardvark exists in the UK, and that was the point. Also note the "strange word like" and "or similar" in the sentence, as in "no, mine's not Aardvark but Beerwolf, actually factually".
Not making downloads available, will that solve the problem? It's not like a GPS works both ways, and Garmin could track you down to personally upgrade your device.
So *if* you know of the problem, it's not that hard to ask an acquaintance with a pc (or visit local library) and search for explanations and hopefully update the problem away --- not using windoze I have to do the same once in a while. The problem is whether you invested in a data cable to make the connection, but once again: it's not like out-of-warranty problems get usually fixed for free, internet or not --- not making things available for free is not a solution.
/I'm dictating this via megaphone, as I also have never been on those intertubewebs.
Maybe you've mistaken lovable cetaceans or pinnipeds for evil squaliforms, and stuck your laser to a dolphin or seal, but the idea that sharks are so primitive that they drown if they stop swimming is mostly a myth (as seen from large numbers of sharks sleeping at seabottom, like nurse sharks and wobbegongs etc).
(well, little surprise there:) The dutch cyclists' league has a great door-to-door cycle route planner, with choices for touristic or speedy etc. It's based of course on the extensive cycling infrastructure there, with lots of road signs only for bikes: http://www.fietsersbond.nl/fietsrouteplanner/
Given this is useless in recreational and competitive paintball --- too high fps --- the application lies elsewhere.
Crowd control.
At the point where the police has to fire baton rounds, tear gas and rubber bullets at football hooligans, you know they can limp off acting all innocent bystanderish. With say 400 fps paintball they will limp off clearly marked (maybe give one colour to each police foursome, to help identification). It works both ways, police cannot claim somebody else's fault when an innocent gets hurt, and claiming to have been elsewhere will not work for those hit.
Let's get rid of all these pluviometers and tech thingymajiggies. Surround all weather stations with the right combination of frog ponds, rook-and-cone filled pine trees, and sundry other tools, and let the forecasting begin.
Probably quadruples the necessary staff, good news in these times.
You overlook the fact that quite a lot of passwords are limited to some arbitrary length, often 8digits. Meaning you have to vary the "website" part (so you may forget what you did), and the "fixed" part has to be short.
Still, as you use this approach to all sites (from relatively secure well-designed things via the ones that email you your password plaintext to whatever shoddy thing), it's not unthinkable that you get sniffed one or two --- and from that the attacker knows your recipe and can systematically try access to all.
I combine it with a security level system: I trust anyone that I borrow my bike to with my phone as well --- so my numerical bikelock (a wtf in itself) and phone have same access number. So my bank cards and logins have the same password, as they're equally trustworthy; and my computer and email do too. But borrowing my phone (old nokia, has no sensitive info outside phonebook) and my bank access are very different things, so those pass digits are different.
I had a car drive over my foot and nothing happened, no bruises or nothing. So that example is a strawman --- cars have a relatively well-distributed mass (plus suspension), so anything that doesn't stick out too much will remain relatively unharmed.
I agree with the difficulty of breaking the USB stick while semi-supervised though. He should've used an SDcard + adapter, and only try to break the SD.
Even Scott "Dilbert" Adams proposed one of the plans --- he remarked that "junk dna" may contain the creator's signature, so dna based life might turn out to be a show&tell project for some stellar student. [Ok Ok, junk DNA doesn't exist anymore.]
The "beacon" approach seems to suffer from its high success rate --- if it's likely to strike a planet with the signal, it's equally likely to miss the planet hidden behind. [And the gassy giants have a good chance of covering the rocky, inhabited worlds.]
"Start saying trisomy 21 again"?
<wiki>John Langdon Down, the British physician who described the syndrome in 1866. The disorder was identified as a chromosome 21 trisomy by Jérôme Lejeune in 1959. </wiki>
Are you going to tell me people have been saying "trisomy 21" until the late victorian times, when the "Down's" became in vogue? Of all topics to throw a wobbly about, this is far offbeat.
I once had the misfortune to be stuck in a house with only a short stories collection by the Archer fellow. It's title was wrong, it should have been "plots of movies I've seen," as each of them was a half-assed retelling of a story that was familiar. [Well, I can only vouch for the first few, sometimes boredom is preferable over annoyance.]
And some reported as distorted as the best of what the IPCC has to offer, well done.
The peasants who have it so go are those that are (a) not subsistence farmers by definition [as those cannot sell what they have, higher or lower prices] and (b) oh, not actually those who lost their crops [because someone has to lose their crops for shortages and pricerises to occur].
That added to the obvious observation that the problems lie mostly in the disruption [like the worst famines are not characterized by the least calories available, but by problems in distributing those due to local security situation, typically warlords] as the individuals cannot control timing [what good is a suddenly valuable crop if the neighbours cannot pay for it and you cannot store or transport it].
Another nicely avoided issue is that a change in local climate means a change in optimal local produce/seed type [against local culture/recipes, and against availability]. So even if it gets milder and wetter and theoretically more productive, fat lot of good it does you if your own seed crop becomes useless and you have to import expensive new types of grains [presumably having become useless in a neighbouring zone]. Since it takes a few seasons of underproductivity before you give up on the produce type your family has grown for generations, and choosing an unknown alternative for which you don't have the expertise, even a hypothetical exchanging of locally-obsolete-elsewhere-suddenly-useful seeds will be only on a fraction of the local needs.
The "inbox" simile seems an awkard updating of the old zen "teacup" story, where you cannot add tea to the cup until you have drained it.
A more appropriate comparison would be, thanks to Tom Lehrer, that the brain "is like a sewer --- what you get out of it depends on what you put into it". But some brains are more like sewers than others.
That would indeed be a easy way to do it. The normal approach is to import a vast quantity of your own onto your disputed territory --- say, Han chinese to tibet; but also many regions in france and spain earlier, parts of russia and the baltics, etc etc.
In short, asking the "locals" will not show you who/what's right, but who's locally dominant enough to control the demographics. Which is in itself also some information, as it's a fait accompli usually. But that's the way reality works --- if not, it's all of the USA to the native americans, all of Europe to the Basques probably.
Let's not consider Israel, where your proposed questioning of locals would have given us some different results in 1947.
Expressing a coherent opinion with a modicum of logical argumentation means you're not in the astroturf camp. Try again: your options are more CAPS, spurious and hilariously incomprehensible claims (e.g., firefox interface is by default unusable, whereas clearly fantastic experiences follow a browser they stopped development on for years and then took about a decade after opera to copy tabbed browsing), whatever --- be creative!
Yes, tobacco would be an organic pesticide, but that's backwards to use as an argument: the whole organic thing is fundamentally nonsense. It's some 19th century antroposophy blather, built on the same stable fundament as homeopathy. So even if well-intentioned, the protocol is unscientific (and proudly so).
"If it's from nature, it's OK; if it contains chemicals, it's bad" (what chemicals? Which molecule is free of chemistry?!). Say that loud in the seconds after you've been bitten by a mamba or gaboon viper.
So the point is that the (frankly stupid-sounding) teleconnections has the word "tele" in it and thus reminds us of telepathy (as clearly the telly and telephone must do to this nonscientist). Genius.
For realists: the teleconnection pattern is the collection of similar consequences of one large scale cause. It's been a cold winter in the south of england, as well as the north of scotland and the bits in between. Oh, and holland, france, germany, italy, etc. So our brave antiestablishment blogger says that anyone observing all trees suffered more this winter than last is a homeopathic nutjob? Genius, nothing more or less.
I thought it was comment pages that were populated with the ignorant, now I learn it's education. Hm.
And it seems there's a global conspiracy of auctioneers of all stripes and kinds, whether a tat shop like eBay, or Google's Adwords, or some doddering pensioners at the village fete. Please tell us more!
That argument doesn't hold, as hypothermia will make you very confused, and push you to wrong decisions. So this kind of death sentence is a bit unwarranted.
That said, I'd send them the bill for about £2500 in helicopter time etc. For that price I'd bring their wood home with a taxi though. Also they're clearly guilty of stealing a shopping trolley, the chance they bought it honestly being nil.
Letting people drive off in such a state moves the danger from themselves to other road users and seems borderline criminal.