re: Another thing
You are in need of the opposite of dried frog pills.
9265 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Nov 2007
This is High School Science day stuff to impress parents. It's not Boffin stuff or real engineering. A small solar panel like on cheap garden lights will get more waste energy, and sensible micro gadgets can run for about 5 years on 2 x Alkaline AA cells. Some NiMH with the low self discharge of primary Lithium coins or Alkaline would be better research. The Eneloop type are not good enough.
" giant battery of lasers to start a craft on its way to Barnard's Star, run by a guy named Eddie."
Strangely (as I write SF), I was pondering this last week and wondering how the lasers :
a) Were powered
b) could compete with a star at any distance (beam spreading)
c) could compete with a load of suitably angled giant parabolic mirrors collecting and focusing the light on the fleeing probe.
Actually that part of the story doesn't work.
Certainly though it's more Larry Niven than Star Trek.
About 8,000 years at least after Neanderthals. maybe 10,000 later.
They had MUCH better boats than a dug-out.
This is Bronze age, not pre-Neolithic.
Leprechauns are a 18th Century folk invention popularised later by Victorians and Hollywood. They don't exist in older tales.
Of course all of us are maybe a bit O' Neanderthal, supposedly only 0.12% DNA difference.
Oddly sort of true..
Probably 1850BC to 550BC was Tuath Dé, later renamed Tuatha De Danann by the Monks.
Lugh of the Long Arm was a famous Tuath Dé hero who killed Balor.
He later was regarded as God of Skills, inc shoe making. (Cordwainer)
He's in Welsh Legend too.
Lugh Lamfada (=long arm) is corrupted later to leprechaun, often deplicted as fairy shoe makers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lugh
Sidhe means mound.
Tuatha De Danann where later called the Sidhe (Shee in English), or Fair Folk, or Fairy Folk. In the oldest legends the Tuath Dé are Fair or Red hair, pale skin, tall and from the "North". They also like gold very much.
2000 to 550 saw export of huge amount of Copper to Europe from Cork and Tin from Cornwall to make Bronze. The start of Bronze age is actually the Copper Age. This period also is when most lowland forests in Ireland were cleared for agriculture. Perhaps Cattle was important (The Tain)
Spectroscopic analysis looking for combinations of chemicals that suggest industrial activity rather than natural sources may find Extra Terrestrial Life, if we have a big enough space telescope. I'll be very surprised if a Radio Search works, even if we currently have 100,000 civilisations in the Milky Way using Radio. (assuming too they were using it x 100s or 1000s or 10,000s of years ago, the disk of the galaxy is about 100,000 light years across).
Space is like a quarantine system, for travel and communication, unless there is some sort of FTL Starships and Ansibles possible.
Unintentional Radio probably only has about 5 light years range. Intentional Beamed transmissions maybe 100 light years range. They are unlikely.
So other than very near stars, SETI via radio isn't going to work. Also civilisations may only use high power transmissions terrestrial less than 100 years and then only local lower power broadcast, Satellite (very little into space) and cable / fibre.
"You were always entitled to your money back, if the goods were faulty. Accepting a replacement or in-store credit instead was your option as the customer."
No:
Replacement, repair or money back, sellers choice. Two years most products under SOGA in probably all of EU.
Forcing buyer to take a in-store credit is illegal.
They bought a phone company Sidekick/Danger, ran it into ground, so then paid amazing money to another phone division that have been given last rites to have little more than a licence for IP and liability of closing factories and paying off unwanted phone division staff. Nokia laughing all the way to the bank!
It's about 2003 since MS made logical decisions.
But MS SQL, Power Point, Visio, Mappoint, MS Money, MS Services for Unix, Skype were all acquisitions?
Was Zune UI bought in or in house? I don't know (Source of Metro really).
Might as well install Centos, Debian, redhat etc. You can even pick GUI at install time.
But we upgraded to Server 2003, decided it was too bloated compared to NT4.0 Enterprise and switched to Debian.
Are MS determined to alienate? Why would you want Win10 experience if you did decide to have a GUI shell?
More systems are relying on SW.
Never mind hackers or cyberwarfare. Companies can't even get simple bits of SW correct!
Just an hour ago:
Selected Eurosport Deutschland on Sat box.
Hit OK to go from list to full screen.
Sat box rebooted and erased all the channels on all the satellites!*
[*the four stored ones, 28.2, 19.2, 13 and 9 E, not the ACTUAL satellites. That would require a modem, ODU, 4.8m dish etc ... I hope!]
bring back 3mm power jacks. Properly made ones are fine.
Most devices there is now no way to use data and charge at same time as the ye old laptop doesn't do the 1A to 2.5A wanted by the USB gadget.
Or HOW do you put USB keyboard (USB2Go host mode) and charge?
The ORIGINAL RUBBISH USB spec was root of problem.
1) It was purely Host - Slave
2) Not reversable in any sense
3) only 100mA, later 500mA
It should have been
negotiable up to 1A
Peer to peer
Negotiable higher speed
Same plug at both ends
flipable too.
Hermaphrodite (IBM token ring plugs), so socket and plug identical.
Totally different functions on same plug is disaster.
The SCART (apart from falling out) was only reliable as Stereo + Composite as they had separate pins for each direction.
Basic Signalling (two pins) was unidirectional
RGB was unidirectional
S-Video AKA Y/C an afterthought
Data signalling was non-standard and there was I2C as well as RS232.
I've noticed that HDMI isn't perfect, sometimes it's too fussy about which end is on first and connecting cables first, but it's better than this disaster called USB C
I have now THREE incompatible types of cables for laptop Host to gadget for USB. They are now adding a 4th!
Not only that but some USB gadgets (not even counting Apple's USB Optical drive that originally only the Apple thing could power) came with a Y cable to try and get enough power. No luck on that from some USB hosts / Hubs were the power available wasn't per socket but shared!
You'd have thought on the USB 1.1 iteration they would have sorted out USB.
Gaaagh!!!!! Arrraggh!
It's a bit obnoxious the way the WiFi pay service has been bundled into Skype rather than separate. A lot of the other changes are obnoxious too:
No way to disable adverts
No way to disable microphone
No way to disable camera (perhaps accounts for the massive CPU usage on on some netbooks).
http://www.techtir.ie/QQ_replaces_Skype
QQ isn't 100% straight forward to get or configure in English. But when setup properly it's superior to Skype, I expect if the Chinese use it to Spy that's less bad than NSA if you are not Chinese?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis
Whiptail lizards.
Scary that komodo dragons can do it. They have an interesting predation method:
1) Bite prey, transferring infected gloop.
2) Follow prey till it dies from infection.
If you find one following you, you may need an antibiotic.
If you are running a Bank or other financial services you need to become world class IT experts and sell IT services to others. Absolutely not outsource it. Because today the core of banking isn't about a big safe full of banknotes and ledgers.
It's pure IT.
So unless you become an expert in IT, Programming, you are just a Franchise operation for an IT services company and not a real bank at all.
When they proposed making Sat boxes and TVs instead of welly boots people laughed
When they proposed making phones instead of Sat boxes and TVs people laughed.
They are still a quite large telecom infrastructure company, having absorbed the Siemens and Motorola sub divisions that did the same stuff.
It could be a Robin Reliant or a Volvo.
Worstall has said this before convincingly.
Are there still people that really don't get that it could be 5,000 years before we might need to mine asteroids?
No Interstellar war by hypothetical aliens with FTL travel / Jump drive or whatever would ever be over resources. Or for human slaves.
Oddly in UK & Ireland the Kindle touch is same price with or without advertising screen savers and by law in all of EU they have to offer two years warranty anyway. SOGA.
(Apple was fined in Italy for charging people for 2nd year).
About €79 in Tesco Ireland (high sales tax aka VAT compared to USA perhaps).