Posts by Uffish 861 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Aug 2012
Penecillium Roquefortii is as common as muck and the blue varieries of Gorgonzola, Roquefort, Stilton most likely evolved independantly.
Louis Pasteur did sterling work on optimising yeast strains and would have been a good place to go for a good strain of whatever yeast you were looking for. No need to steal it, for a modest price you would get sufficient to breed your own, and with full after sales service.
... now I'm a bit slimmer. The 2 inch reduction in waist size coincided with eating a bit less and excercising a bit more. A lacadaisical monitoring of weight over a couple of years seems to show the following corrspondances:
- eating more (e.g. Christmas) --> weight gain
- excercising less (e.g. weeks of rain) --> weight gain
- back to previous levels of eating and excercise --> weight loss
Not scientific, not accurately recorded but nevertheless the result is that I think fat people eat too much and excercise too little.
Well, there's admirable goals and there's admirable goals - I have a preference for Gates' admirable goals if we're talking about Microsoft founder philanthropy.
The main point of the article, and the Mamaaa! coment, is just a little schadenfreude at a panzer buyer's expense, maybe not admirable but certainly fun.
.. is usually part of the book contract; he's got to say something that will get him headlines - and it worked!
Good for Assange, he probably wanted to make a bit of money so he wrote a book and got it published. George W. Bush and many other slightly less than perfect people have done the same thing.
The tossy shit? The one and only? I can't wait to meet him (or his similacrum) - he's unique!
Interestingly Waterstones web pages say all three books are in stock for on-line shopping. I shall be visiting a few small town bookshops in the next few days - let's see how many are physically on the shelves.
Sounds just like the American wheeze to destabilize Soviet Russia, same hype, same 'insouciance' as to whether it can ever work; the hype and the workout for the scientific/industrial team is well worth the money, and it will impress the uncritical masses too. Overall, a (small) win for China.
Good luck to the Boffins on this one! If I remember correctly, the last lot that found 'a noise they couldn't get rid of' had to spend a very long time tweaking and measuring, including time scraping bird shit off the antenna, before they could reasonably say that the noise probably wsn't an artifact.
"And still waiting for it to become mainstream" is a bit of clapped out stupidity. Microsoft based software was a huge industry when Linux was born. There has never been sufficient reason for business and private interests to drop Microsoft and invest in a new (and different) system. So why expect any other result than the continued success of Microsoft software? This is a race that can only be lost by Microsoft, not won by an outsider (and an outsider with almost no budget for advertising and market management, to boot).
The wonder is that from 'amateur' beginings Linux + GNU has matured into a world class entity, chosen on its merits the world over. That is something truly remarkable.
Beer for all those who contributed to a brilliant acheivement.
Not a big sample but where i worked the "obligatory regular password changes" resulted in about a third of the passwords being written on a post-it stuck to the bottom of the keyboard or laptop.
I couldn't believe it untill I checked one evening after working late. The regular change policy didn't last, probably because IT staff got tired of people moaning that they had lost their post-it. Mind you, I checked again later and a lot of the post-its were still there.
Many years ago also - Cape Cod, Mass, US of A. The parents found a nice camping site with surprisingly low prices. In the middle of the night we found out that we were at the end of a runway with single engined planes taking off on full afterburner. Think they were Starfighters, they had ridiculously short wings. Fabulous, never seen flames or heard a noise like it - but four big piston engines on a WWII bomber trumps it.
Health and safety laws around the world limit the allowable level of 'background' radio signals to something of the order of a few watts per square meter, weak but potentially usable with skill.
Solar cells + batteries are cheap, easy and much, much more powerful (unless you live underground).
I rest my case m'lud.
What are the current and future limits of observation from Earth or near earth? It seems a bit tricky to look for geysers on small moons of planets faf, far away. (Tthe diameter of Enceladus is only 500 kilometers, 310 miies). I would be much more in favour of flinging a few petri dishes at Enceladus (and perhaps Europa too).
An MRI scan showed that my lower back vertebrae were like a badly stacked pile of assorted crockery.I had regular bouts of back pain, simple pain killers (aspirin, paracetamol) were no good. Went to doctor who also suffered from bad back (tall) and was prescribed his own three pill cocktail (anti-inflamation, muscle relaxant, pain killer - can't remember the names) which was wonderfull, iboprufen was the emergency substitute (about half as good).
The bouts of back pain slowly got worse and included trapped nerve pain. I tried physiotherapy as a palliative and it worked. Basically, excercise built up the abdominal and back muscles,and I (re-)learned a better walking posture (straighter back). It has worked well.
Read the article "according to the NSA, [it] had the ability to seriously disrupt the exchange's activities". How would you like a live bomb under your house?
(Oh dear, I used the word bomb. Dear reader, and dear snooper, I am comparing malware to a bomb under someones house - both are very bad - I do not advocate either).
Negociating a good price for specialized software from Microsoft or any other source is one thing but the perennial 'Win n+1' and 'Office n+x' shenannigens do have the smell of a licence to print money. Nothing a tough negociator with the clout of the NHS couldn't handle of course, (aided and abetted by the combined purchasing depts of the gummint one would hope).
Wow ! Let me help you up again. That was a spectacular slip-up you had there.
Think again about what was written concerning time accuracy and the effect of bass reflex and transmission line designs. There is also mention of sealed loudspeakers. Then there is the stuff about compensating for room acoustic effects. Does that not seem like some real engineering going on?
I don't use Facebook so I don't know much about it. I would guess that it is in business to make money, which is ok, and to look after its own interests which may or may not be ok. The traditional approach to this situation is free competition and the handicapping of monopolies.
As a disinterested onlooker may I suggest nuking from LEO and seeing if a replacement occurs and if it is any different; purely as a sociological experiment, and in the interests of pure science, of course.
In one year Curiosity has provided conclusive proof that the conditions for life existed on Mars (a long time ago), and given some evidence that even if life got started there it didn't flourish. Right - what do we do next? The prize for the space race doesn't seem to exist. The science is there but the glory is not - cue in-fighting for budgets and slow progress for anyone who tries it.
All the more reason to praise Nasa and the USA for doing as much as they have.
Someone has to mention 1984.
Now that we have confirmation that most of the kit for universal surveillance is in place, is being used and will not go away, our right to privacy can no longer be assumed, and in any case has already been permanently removed in many areas of life.
Where are the safeguards? Where is the audit that believably shows that anything and everything is not being prepared for use against you (just in case). The UK is policed by consent (so they say) where is the consent to this, where is the reason to allow it? Fear of terrorism only goes so far; clear law and believable oversight would go a lot further.
There is also damage to a free society* caused by rampant bugging of everything that can be bugged, and the non-stop analysis of the data. There is also the damage caused to a free society by the neutralisation of democracy.
This damage is inflicted by the security services on the people they profess to be protecting - that is what has to be balanced against any damage done to the security services.
* free society on an international scale also
Microsoft may lose this battle but they sure as hell won't lose the war. I'd bet on a bunch of corporarate lawyers beating the Feds any day.
p.s. The standard method for US companies to be washed whiter than white over baksheesh is to do business with a local - who then does business with the end user. Might work for data centres too.
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