* Posts by david 12

2344 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2009

One door opens, another one closes, and this one kills a mainframe

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Tech support call

And then your air conditioning ices up.

It can handle some humidity, but it's not designed and specified as a de-watering system.

Gas supplier blames 'rogue' code for Channel Island outage

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Re: still wondering

They were used because the system of generating Town Gas from coal had no excess capacity: supply was built up during hours of low demand, then used during hours of high demand.

The natural gas wells have higher-than-demand capacity, and are buffered by long runs of transmission pipes. Gasometers are no longer required*.

*(explain OP joke here)

EPA flushes water supply cybersecurity rule after losing legal fight with industry, states

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Re: Ah, the land of the best Justice money can buy

For the benefit of UK readers, let's recognize that it's a little bit more complicated than that.

The USA has a fairly extreme doctrine of "separation of powers". That means that legislation coming out of congress is little more than "declaration of intent": congress makes policy decisions and pays the bills, the executive branch implements the policy.

That means that it's fruitless looking for legislation telling the EPA exactly what it must do about oversite of water quality and sewerage disposal. The executive branch has to make up it's own mind about what that means and how to do it.

Which is then subject to review by the third branch: the courts.

So this isn't an "unprecedented grab for power", this is the normal operation of the system: generic legislation requiring wide interpretation, clarified by the courts.

Canon claims its nanoimprint litho machines capable of 5nm chip production

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Re: Bit of an Aside, But ...

It's getting up there, but has anybody reached 30pHz with EUV?

The terminology is a perfectly logical progression: UV, deep UV, ultra UV, Extreme Ultra UV, and certainly when Extreme Ultra UV was introduced, it was still well below the frequency / energy level generally accepted as the start of "x-rays".

Microsoft gives unexpected tutorial on how to install Linux

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Re: WSL2 is not a VM in the sense that VMWare is a VM

difficulty in replicating every single facet

No doubt, but that wasn't the reason it was dropped. Running everything through the extra Windows system layer slowed everything down.

WSL2 runs file and network operations faster, but at the expense of not having access to hardware through Windows. Support for USB and PCI was lost.

david 12 Silver badge

Yes, it did result in better integration. But it resulted in a slower file system, so it was replaced with WSL2

Personally, I don't want my OS to be sandboxed: my work involves bare-metal integration. But I'm a minority, and more people just wanted Docker to run faster.

Microsoft says VBScript will be ripped from Windows in future release

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Re: Thin end of wedge.

MS's view is that "Enterprise" and "Home Entertainment" is where the money is. Green Screens and Television. Local scripting is not a part of that picture.

david 12 Silver badge

Scripting Languages

No, using a language that is more obscure does not mean that you are a smarter and better person.

david 12 Silver badge

Perhaps Microsoft can open-source the vbscript interpreter?

The WSE API is published, and there are (or used to be) third party scripting languages. Nobody ever published a VBscript clone, because VBscript already existed.

david 12 Silver badge

Re: ASP doesn't need VBScript

I assume that if "vbscript" is going, what they mean is that the Windows Scripting Engine (WSE) is going, and taking JScript with it.

As I remember, ASP classic is *another* implementation of something like WSE, and the disappearance of WSE from Windows doesn't have to mean the disappearance of Jscript from IIS, but it's certainly what I expect.

DoJ: Ex-soldier tried to pass secrets to China after seeking a 'subreddit about spy stuff'

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For whatever reason, he seems to be a bit adrift after leaving the army (late onset schizophrenia?). It seems that now he will be moving back to a more structured life.

It's 2023 and Microsoft WordPad can be exploited to hijack vulnerable systems

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kb5032314: There is simple (registery) setting to disable the wordpad feature (which is obscure anyway).

When there is a linked object in the (ole compound) document, Wordpad may receive an authentication request. Which means, I think, that I've got it blocked anyway, because I think I've got NTLM authentication blocked at the firewall. Should check that again.

I wonder if there is any connection to the recent announcement that Wordpad will be dropped? It looks like this behaviour is triggered by a conversion involving an old storage format used by Wordpad, and we were already wondering if 'old code' was the real reason for dropping Wordpad.

AI girlfriend encouraged man to attempt crossbow assassination of Queen

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Re: Convicted of Treason

The Treason Act 1842, with its large penalties, was introduced After Edward Oxford was charged with Treason in 1840, and got off with an insanity defense, partly due to the lack of evidence supporting an actual death attempt.

There were subsequent attempts, with heavy penalties like this, but Arthur O’Connor, 1872, the second last in the series, only got 12 months and 20 lashes.

The last in the series was clearly crazy, and spend the rest of his life in asylum.

david 12 Silver badge

Convicted of Treason

After several attempts on the life of Queen Victoria, the establishment (but not the Queen herself), realized that the publicity and seriousness with which the crime was treated, was encouraging young dickheads to make assassination attempts. Which, although no more well planned than this one, had the potential to result in loss of life.

They brought the series to a natural halt by determining that it was really just a typical act of young male stupidity, announcing the policy, and charging accordingly. The young (and crazy), while they were perfectly willing to attempt treason, were less interested in being considered and treated as stupid dickheads, and attempts on the life of Queen Victoria stopped.

I don't know why this young man was charged with "treason". "Because they could" is not a rational reason.

Not even the ghost of obsolescence can coerce users onto Windows 11

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Re: I don't quite care for Win10 updates.

the stupid myth that all it takes to secure an obsolete OS was a current web browser

Who said anything about security? You can't browse the web on an obsolete OS.

The javascript libraries choose to disable operation when the browser people increment the version number. When you can't use your computer anymore, you're forced to a new OS.

ELKS and Fuzix: Linux – and Unix – writ very, very small

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"can't envision a production role"

In manufacturing, cents are counted. A processor without MMU will be used if it can be, and is 10c cheaper.

And while "embedded" used to mean raw hardware, it has increasingly moved to linux-based implementations.

That means that your firmware developers are linux system programmers, not raw hardware programmers.

Which means that when you want a small (even single process) system, what you look for is the smallest minimalist linux-like system your people can use, rather than re-training or hiring in different people.

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

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Re: Unique keys

and when they married, she changed her name for free.

Some places have the rule that when you marry, you can keep your name or change it to a name from your husband. Where I live doesn't have that rule: when you marry, you can choose any name you want.

I don't know if that rule only works for women here: maybe it technically applies for men as well, but not in such a way that it's actually workable to do so.

Make-me-root 'Looney Tunables' security hole on Linux needs your attention

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Environment variable

Another fail linked to the use of environment variables in *nix.

Another chance to be down-voted for wishing that open-source cross-platform software would implement standard native methods on other operating systems, instead of choosing to import this well-known class of vulnerability.

Astronomers debate whether or not lightning strikes even once on Venus

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690,000km/h

Mach 890. Around the earth in 33 seconds.

(sea level, atmosphere, humidity etc etc).

UK judge rates ChatGPT as 'jolly useful' after using it to help write a decision

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Re: The correct way to use these tools...

. If you have to review and research each output to be 100% certain it's correct, you're not really saving any time

Different strokes for different folks.

Comparing myself to other folks, and judging by the comments of others and the jobs I get, I am really excellent at analysis. Judging by personal failures and the jobs I don't get, I'm actually rather poor at synthesis and original writing. I'll correct your facts and logic if you structure it and create the framework.

Perhaps if my schooling had included any writing tasks in grades 1-10, I might have learned better. But it didn't. I failed English at year 12, but got university entrance on the basis of my Physics, Chemistry and Math results.

Switch to hit the fan as BT begins prep ahead of analog phone sunset

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Re: What do other countries do?

AUS has mostly gone VOIP. (I say 'mostly' because I haven't heard news "last phone disconnected") There is some kind of legal requirement to offer connection to almost everybody, so some people got wireless internet or satellite connections. The exchanges have been decommissioned and the wires cut, so there is no 'retained' POTs-like system using the old wires.

You got about a year warning for the disconnection date for your address., with repeated reminders. You had to agree to a time to get the replacement service set up. People with medical/emergency services got more attention, but the result was the same. Along with that, there was sustained push to warn businesses about alarm systems and elevators. Wireless and satellite connections aren't necessarily the same as the land-line they replaced, so some complaints there, but no more complaints in total than there always used to be with the old landline system. Basically no complaints at all from "old people", just from people in some kind of technological black spot.

I stayed with my legacy provider because they sent me a dodgy warning letter with a one-month date that could be carelessly read as a one-month cut-off warning. And the phone connection on their box is bound to them, and the fall-over mobile phone data connection on the box is bound to them. That's the full-service residential offering. If I don't want to stick to the bound/integrated service, I can get lesser restrictions with less integration right down to "fully flexible system with redundant providers all at business rates all configured by you on business-level routers".

Patches to make WINE work on Wayland display server protocol are being merged

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Microsoft stop using undocumented APIs, or hacks

That was the subject of a court case, which is probably why you have heard of and mis-remembered it.

As the result of the court case, MS published a complete list of all the undocumented APIs used by Office. They are still being updated (there are still new applications and components) You can download the documents now (and for other MS applications), if you can be bothered to look: it's mostly pages and pages of boring legacy technical debt, where for clearly historical reasons Office wound up using some API that was latter published in a better form, or left unpublished because there was a better alternative. Certainly I never found anything actually interesting, but in the end, for a totally different reason, people building WINE or DOSbox or whatever would have used it.

There is still a lot of unpublished or poorly documented or trade-secret documented internal OS API, used for drivers or other windows components. Not Office.

Europe wants easy default browser selection screens. Mozilla is already sounding the alarm on dirty tricks

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The frameworks pretty much all have a policy decision that "unsuported" browsers will be disabled rather than partly-enabled. When you get that "upgrade your browser" message, it's determined by the framework in use, and happens when (for security reasons), the framework in use has been upgraded to the latest version.

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refusing to render validated HTML correctly

Which is hardly surprising, given that one of the main purposes in the design of the validation requirements was to create a workspace that did not match IE.

How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer

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Re: A 1980s minicomputer at the bottom of a mine ?

Your telephone ran on a current loop, and could be several miles from the nearest exchange. Telegraphs ran hundreds of miles without repeaters. The same kind of technology ran refineries and oil wells, with control circuits instead of telephone handsets. Technology to do remote process control and remote communication has existed since the earliest days of electricity. RS232 is special in that it was specifically designed for short lengths rather than "normal" distances, but the technology to connect short RS232 lengths to each other existed before RS232 itself.

Lawsuit claims Google Maps led dad of two over collapsed bridge to his death

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Re: Were there no signs indicating that the Bridge was out?

The way liability flows in these cases, each defendant found partly responsible for the loss is individually responsible for the whole judgement ('jointly and severally')

So if Google is found 0.5% liable, their insurance could still be paying a large lump sum. If it's a privately maintained public road (as happens in some parts of some states), there may not be any other money to pay the other 99.5%, and Google could be up for the lot.

Microsoft Edge still forcing itself on users in Europe

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Reasonable security settings

I've had to deal with infected computers over the years. It's entirely reasonable to use a web interface for some apps, including system components, and it's entirely reasonable to lock down the interface for some of those system components. You click on the MS 'help' button for MS help on MS system apps, you get the MS help in the MS browser. The failing there is the MS help, not the MS browser.....

But MS did head off in the wrong direction: this has never been a feature of Apple products that everybody liked, and, unlike Apple, MS was fighting a history of being an open platform.

And by "heading off in the wrong direction" I really do mean they got into the swamps: I was using a "canary" build of Edge that saved Edge shortcuts on the desktop instead of Hyperlink shortcuts: in spite of the obvious security and usability justifications, that became a reason for not using Edge, which in the end is not the direction even MS wanted.

These days you can teach old tech a bunch of new tricks

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Re: A first?

MS at the time was clearly operating as a number of separate silos. That may, perhaps, have been related to the stack ranking system: in any case the teams were obviously competing rather than working to a common goal. This showed up in other areas as well: MS office was built for compatibility with SQL Server 7, and the required functionality was destroyed for SQL Server 2000.

UK civil servants – hopefully including those spending billions on tech – to skill up in STEM

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Re: And how long will they be in post?

December 2020 (after the start of COVID), the "Institute For Government" recommended that:

• The prime minister and secretaries of state should prioritise developing strong working relationships with their scientific advisers, including through inductions and planning exercises.

• The government should strengthen science capability across the civil service, including by ensuring departmental chief scientific advisers have sufficient clout and resources.

I think this is part of the response -- they are trying to strengthen science capability across the civil service -- but it doesn't address the power or influence of scientific advisors -- it's still the same law/commerce/classics management class, upskilled so that they can do better at ignoring the boffins.

david 12 Silver badge

Re: How about the ministers go next?

Hoover was never a populist president: calling him a "disaster" is just Democrat partisanship. His inability to control congress was partly due to not being a demagog, but it's shear fantasy to suppose that a Democrat leader, even Roosevelt, would have been able to do better with that (Republican, fiscally conservative) congress.

Although it is common ground that he was not a successful president, it's not easy to see how anybody else could have been more successful in that position. Different, yes, successful, no. He was pre-Keynesian like Roosevelt, but he wasn't populist like Roosevelt, and he was saddled with the start of the Great Depression, which he did not cause. His economic and foreign policies, where he was able to implement them were good.

It's possible to argue that Presidents should be career politicians, rather than self-made millionaires or technocrats, without calling Hoover a 'disaster'.

Apple's iPhone 12 woes spread as Belgium, Germany, Netherlands weigh in

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Re: Follow the money

The association is made up of commercial companies that test for money. They don't go around randomly testing devices: you have to pay real money to get testing done. The governments generally have no ability to test and no process for doing so: the regulations provide that you have to initiate and pay for your own testing. Once the allegations have been made, the enforcement arms of government have budget for testing, but it's not something that happens automatically.

david 12 Silver badge

Follow the money

Who triggered this investigation? That's a human interest and commercial warfare story that would be fun to read.

You get your stuff tested by a certified tester, you submit/hold/certify the test results, you sell the product. Governments don't go around randomly testing devices for compliance: they don't even have that capability.

Somebody must have made the allegation that the device was not in compliance: somebody must have been investigating compliance or doing design comparisons.

Standards are primarily created by commercial interests, so it's never surprising to see attempts at evasion and enforcement: enforcement is triggered by commercial interests or by commercially funded "astroturf" grass-roots campaigns.

Apple has "woes", but somewhere, somebody is celebrating.

Airbus takes its long, thin, plane on a ten-day test campaign

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Door height in the A320 is around 6' 1'' -- 1854 mm. Some of us have to duck to get in. On the 777 its 6' 2" -- 1880. I still have to duck, but that extra inch is welcome.

Wide-body jets have a wider, flatter tube. That means there is less difference between the aisle height and the clearance height at the window.

My memory is that on the 777 I didn't have to crouch as much to get into the seat, as I do on the A320.

david 12 Silver badge

Cabin height is better on the 777 than on the 320. I don't have the numbers for floor-to-bin for the A320, but from memory, I didn't have to crouch as much to get into and out of the 777.

US Department of Justice claims Google bought its way to web search dominance

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The most irritating thing about using Edge is the way Google (gmail and search) keeps trying to ram Chrome down my throat.

I use Bing search in Edge unless I actually need to find something. Then I switch to Google (which pops up dialog suggesting I switch to Chrome).

Bing is OK if I see something in the top 5 results. I does tend to return pages and pages of hits from the same source, which is never what I want to see.

Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows

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Re: This is The Register

The Mac started out by trying to represent, on the screen, what you would get on your printer. In contrast, MS started out just trying to optimize the screen display.

In my opinion, they both succeeded.

Get ready to say hello to new Windows and goodbye to an old friend

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Re: I still cling to Windows 11 21H2

The linux community represented here never realized that NTFS had shadowcopy / snapshots in the first place. It's not a feature of NFS, so it's simply not on the radar of people whose knowledge of Windows is "what I read somewhere".

Power grids tremble as electric vehicle growth set to accelerate 19% next year

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Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

A battery has to have that temperature maintained constantly by external means, which requires expending energy for the entire time it's in storage.

Yes, with an IC engine, unless you keep your lead-acid battery fully charged, it will freeze at -20C. There are drivers who have to deal with temperatures below -20C. At those temperatures, you do need to act differently (including leaving your block heater on all night). That isn't a problem that is unique to EV vehicles.

david 12 Silver badge

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

Yes, resistance increases with low temperatures. So the batteries warm up in use.

FWIW, they try to keep the battery below 55C. Over the working temperature range, cold ambient temperatures help keep the battery cool.

There is a significant decrease in range if you are running the Air Conditioning and Seat Heater to keep warm. That isn't a 'battery' problem, and it can only be solved the old-fashioned way: long underwear with coat and gloves.

There are a lot of people observing that they get short range in cold weather. They aren't quoting 'battery temperature' in their claims. For good reason: whatever the cause, it's mostly not down to "battery temperature".

david 12 Silver badge

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

Batteries don't like the cold

Thats less important for a modern EV, down to 0F / -20C

When we say "Batteries don't like the cold", what we mean is that "loads which depend on battery regulation don't like the cold". That is a traditional battery system and load: your incandescent lights (including torch / flashlight / headlights / brake lights), but also your camera and tape-recorder and starter motor, depend on the battery voltage as well as on the battery charge.

At cold temperatures, lead-acid battery voltage drops more rapidly with discharge, so your regulation-dependent load drops out sooner, while the battery is still full of charge.

But for an EV designed to run Li batteries right down to low voltage, system voltage regulation is not important: they are designed to run at every battery voltage from high to almost nothing, and temperature dependence of the input voltage is not very important.

0F is also cold for a lot of IC engines: that's why we have block heaters. EV that are designed for cold climates have something similar.

Space junk targeted for cleanup mission was hit by different space junk, making more space junk

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Coat

Bio-degradable satelittes

Need to stop making objects out of long-life material. Make the satellites out of paper and bamboo

ArcaOS 5.1 gives vintage OS/2 a UEFI facelift for the 21st century

david 12 Silver badge

It's written in Assembler, so that's never going to happen. Next best thing would be to just fix the memory manager -- PAE enables it to allocate 4GB memory blocks from 64 bit memory. As MS learned, it would probably have to report less available memory to avoid problems with drivers.

Want tunes with that? India-made POS terminal includes a speaker

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Re: Why the confused headline and opening paragraph

Yes, everywhere you go there are people who would like to help you if you just give them your banking PIN.

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Why the confused headline and opening paragraph

It would also work for those who can't see the terminal

And for that reason, not an entirely unknown feature in any other (but generally more expensive) POS terminal found anywhere in the world.

For a start, the device provided by my bank: The Commbank SmartTerminal: https://www.commbank.com.au/content/dam/commbank-assets/business/merchants/2021-10/transcript-methods-to-activate-accessibility-mode.pdf. Also a headphone jack, so that when you type out your PIN, the whole world doesn't hear.

And then there are PC's and iPads --both widely used as POS terminals with POS software providing "accessibility" services for the blind/print handicapped.

The unusual feature about this one, that I haven't seen before, is the provision for background music. iPads and PC's will do that, but who uses that capability? To me, it suggests street traders (portability and music as a form of increased visibility), and "increased visibility" immediately leads to the observation that with the music turned on, the device will be harder to lose, harder to steal, and easier to find.

People who don't use POS terminals are sometimes surprised at the features they provide.

I think this device from India is pretty cool because it's so damn cheap. At that price, the basic functionality is impressive. Including a speaker adds to the size of the device without adding much to the cost, but in manufacturing, every cent counts.

Farewell WordPad, we hardly knew ye

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rich text component in the programming api

Yes, just a wrapper around the rich text component.

Which begs the question: are they retiring the rich text component? It's not .NET, it's not web/cloud, it's not in most supported applications and tools now. It's an attack surface written a long time ago by people who have retired or moved out of coding, so it doesn't have any internal champions.

david 12 Silver badge

I've gradually moved off Wordpad to Notepad++. My use case is more WordStar than MS Word 3.0 (which is RTF), most of my actual .DOC requirements are met by Word '97. and I mostly manage to avoid zipped XML files. I was mostly using Wordpad for text documents that didn't work in Notepad.

Microsoft calls time on ancient TLS in Windows, breaking own stuff in the process

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Who the hell relies on early TLS still?

Per the article, people using SQL Server 2016.

This won't affect me. Our SQL Server 2000 on Win 2000 won't be updated by this change. Running on a private network, with 3 automation clients.

Personally, I just wish that web sites using TLS would just switch to HTTP. That would solve all my TLS problems.

What happens when What3Words gets lost in translation?

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and just one or two extra characters would greatly enhance its resiliency in the cases of tranmission or transcription errors.

Which is exactly what W3W does.

I don't have a dog in this race. I'm not a user or provider of emergency services. As Shannon pointed out, natural language has enormous redundancy, and as forensic analysts have pointed out, natural language is constantly self correcting (it's easy to just cherry-pick communications to get any meaning you want). W3W may be a good system or a bad system, but a feature is the enhanced resiliency in the case of transmission or transcription errors, due added redundancy and error checking.

We all scream for ice cream – so why are McDonald's machines always broken?

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Re: Wait, their milkshake maker works like an HP printer ?

and they were counter-sued into oblivion

I'm not seeing any recent information: the Kytch website is still up, they had a restraining order on McD and Taylor, the court case is "pending", whatever that means.

Germany's wild boars still too radioactive to eat largely due to Cold War nuke tests

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Re: Care?

Our 'old' science museum used to have endless rooms of display cases showing 'rocks'. Filled in the 1800's, when geology was both "rocket science" and "brain surgery": the cutting edge of scientific endeavor that all pseudo-sciences like "chemistry" wished to be. Geology explained where we came from and where we are going (it's the father of Darwin's theory of the "origin of species'), and, once we'd classified and studied the "rocks" enough, would one day explain "mal-airia" and "miasma" (the causes of sickness), replacing naive theories about "God" and "evil spirits" still held by "Roman Catholics" and ignorant "natives"

Mostly gone now: just a large glass wall display in the new building.