Posts by Doctor Syntax 42029 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
Concentrated Sulphuric acid and 95%+ Hydrogen Peroxide potassium dichromate?
Makes chromic acid. We used it to disinfect used bacteriology kit. Very effective disinfectant. The H&S briefing for the lab assistnat was to simply drop a few sheets of filter paper into it so she could see them instantly disappear.
" It must be handwritten because it gets sent for handwriting analysis."
It makes a big difference when you have to be prepared to stand over your conclusions in the face of cross-examination.
Due to the organisation of the forensic lab my boss was also a questioned documents examiner. They kept strictly to comparing texts to say whether they had been written by the same hand. In terms of characteristics of the writer they weren't even prepared to say what the gender might be.
"Great, we could type up and print our own letters, then we had to send them to the typing pool who retyped them"
We had the same experience with witness statements which couldn't be on plain stationery (II|RC there were 4 different pre-printed variants to cope with single and multi-page statements). This was referred to as "sending them to have typing errors inserted".
"These seem to have vanished. So we use Excel as the next best thing"
I think you may have swapped cause and effect.
And, of course, all these things are not only possible using FOSS, they're being used daily by "average users" who've been moved over to them by folk hereabouts who got fed up of supporting friends and family on Windows.
"You will never get wide-scale buy in from the business community to use Linux on the Desktop due to the retraining costs and lost productivity every time a bad design decision takes the desktop over a cliff."
Taking the UI of anything, not just the desktop, over a cliff seems to be industry standard procedure yet Windows shops give Microsoft a free pass in this.
"That's what facilities like Dinorwig are for."
Yes, I know. What we need is a supply of old slate mines to build a few more.
There's one local reservoir perched on a hillside with another, bigger one a few hundred feet below that could be used like that although the angling club that uses the upper one might be miffed if their water & fish suddenly drained away.
I also came across an idea for using weights in redundant coal mine shafts in a similar way although I wonder if the total capacity of that would be enough to do any good or even enough to make the installation pay for itself.
Once upon a time computers occupied large rooms. In the early days they needed a good stock of spare valves to be kept on hand. Nowadays you can put a far more powerful one in your pocket. It's called technological development. You may have heard of it. It enables things to be made smaller, better and more reliable.
One of our problems is that the naysayers had their way for a long time. We're now way behind where we should have been in terms of development and in the meantime we've been shoving huge quantities of carbonaceous fossil materials up power-station chimneys for decades so that (a) our descendants won't have those available as non-fuel industrial raw materials when they need them and (b) people are, if you haven't noticed, starting to worry about the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
I think the OP's point, however, is that demand can be subject to short peaks. It would need some form of short term storage to cover those. 1% of that million homes homes having an electric kettle switched on at the same time will take up a substantial percentage of the total output.
"Of course, it's in the interests of exactly zero office software suppliers to make this happen."
The solution, as ever, is to make it in their interest. All it would need would be a few large ITTs to specify open standards and working synchronisation across a few specified platforms.
