Exactly: pinpoint heat sources will see that energy rapidly disbursed throughout the entire suit rather than stay concentrated in a hot spot.

Water's heat conductivity, its ability to spread heat out into meaninglessness, is one of the reasons why it's effective at extinguishing fires.

I still have several machines that interchange mail with each other and the Internet via uucp mailnet. I poll an ISP twice an hour (or use an alias to force a poll if i don't want the mail to wait.)

I even check my personal mailbox on that domain every couple months. (Every three weeks or so I get another offer to buy my domain name, which has been around since the list of machines that exchanged email fit on three typeset pages.) But you wouldn't BELIEVE the amount of spam that accumulates on an account that has been around since before the first mass mail-merge spam scripts were offerd for sale. (I think I still have a saved copy of that original piece of spam - advertising spam software.) The spammers STILL include that address in their mailing lists.

If the NSA or ISIS ever kills the connected Internet, UUCP mailnet will still work, merrily bucket-brigading email among the hadnful of machines whose mail transfer agents still interconnect by routes that don't just hand the mail off to an Internet hop.

Also: Back when we ran mailing lists over UUCP, the polling delay limited the deluge of mail when someone on the list accidentally forwarded his mail to the list. This gave us time to catch it manually and suspend the account before everybody was buried in repeated messages. B-)

vi for me, too.

Not that I have anything against emacs. But I bought my first unix computer in the 80s, and it only had two megabytes of RAM and used an early member of the 68xxx series that couldn't do demand paging to act like it had more. This was too little to compile and run emacs.

After about three years of heavy bulletin-board participation I had the vi commands "wired into my brainstem". I tried emacs several times over the years and each time discovered that certain common things I did (and still do) with vi took about twice as many keystrokes.

Once I tried using its vi emulation mode - only to discover that it (the version at the time) had TWO of them, in true emacs kitchen sink style, and each had different deltas from getting the vi commands right. With only one I might have gone on to use it, and learn the deltas, while edging into native commands. But with two, and no obvious selection, I didn't bother.

Nowadays I use vim, which is close enough. (Especially if you tell it to act like vi in a couple important places.)

But they themselves can't get it to work, as was highlighted in the link I posted. So why would a Europe unable to deploy Galileo use GLONASS instead of GPS?

And it certainly isn't like Europe doesn't have its own space launch capabilities.

Russia has absolutely nothing to gain and much to lose by trying to fuck with this launch.

Those who are dead via saline solution can be told once they're... ummm... undead.

Wikipedia's WikiProject Editor Retention has looked at the same problem, but from a retention point rather than the perspective of attracting new women. There were no real answers, just lots of speculation. Lots of people blame the culture, or say the place is too "rough and tumble" but I found that conclusion rather sexist, as it says that women can't compete for ideas in the same environment as men. There doesn't seems to be a difference in retention of men and women, they just aren't coming to Wikipedia to begin with.

A couple thousand small claims cases a month might be more effective than a class action suit for getting their act cleaned up.

Did I just invent an open source / populist / minarchist alternative to the class action lawsuit? B-)

This is going to go no where unless he can get an independent expert to certify that his measuring technique is accurate.

We're talking small claims court here (where proceures are much more relaxed due to the small amount of the dispute) and civil procedure (where the standard of proof is "preponderance of evidence", not "beyond a reasonable doubt".

Also: A suitable expert shouldn't be THAT hard to find, and (with open source and things like the Raspbery Pi and Beagle Bone available for platforms), independently engineering a meter to check the first one should be quick work - and something a customer of another ISP might want to do, as well.

Heh. Once it's done it could be published open-source, bringing the tool into the hands of the technically-literate masses. A couple thousand small claims cases a month might be more effective than a class action suit for getting their act cleaned up.

A pitty, thugh. By the time this was discovered I had done an outline for a five-volume fiction cycle, working through at least four genres, based on the sun going "putt" from time to time. B-b

The Arthur C. Clarke sci-fi novel "The Songs Of Distant Earth" (1986) used the Case Of The Missing Neutrinos as the opening premise [followed by "the sun is about to nova" and humanity having] a few hundred years to develop interstellar-travel technology before the Sun went nova. 'Twas a good story.

Indeed it was.

In mine, though, there was nothing wrong with the sun at all. It's just that the high neutrino flux makes other physical phenomena more apparent and (by book three) usable at a practical level. FTL interstellar travel IS developed by the fifth book (when things are fully sorted out), which is in hard science fiction space-opera form.

Of course, by that time "magic" is hard science (though its engineering is more like animal husbandry), religion has merged with psychology, and one of the crew members (or is he the FTL engine?) is (and must be) a literal god. (For the engineering crew chief think "Scotty in Druidic Robes"...) Using a god plus a nuclear reactor for the engine leads to complications (but not the ones you're probably thinking of right now).

No, not like Clarke's story at all. More like Keith Laumer collaborates with Larry Niven. B-)

ok, so the effect of RISC vs CISC has absolutely *no* relation to power, right? so why in god's green earth is, for example, the allwinner a20 1.2ghz processor - which is still in 40nm btw - maxing out at 2.5 watts and delivering great 1080p video, reasonable 3D graphics and so on - yet intel is having to go to 14nm and, even at 14nm they STILL can't release a processor that, if you run it in a very limited configuration, is STILL listed as 3.5 watts??

there's a quad-core rockchip 28nm SoC. maximum (actual) top power consumption: below 3.0 watts. intel's haswell tablet SoC is 20nm: it's 4.5 watts "Scenario" Design Power i.e. if you only run certain apps in certain ways it *might* keep below 4.5 watts.

i really _really_ want to know why it is that intel cannot deliver an SoC that has an absolute peak limit of 2.5 watts.

Yeah, I can see you do great on statistics, too.

Death stopped being binary some years back (suggest you read medical news) but this isn't about that. This is simple numbers. If device X kills N times out of 100 and device Y kills M times out of 100, where N != M, the lethality of the devices is not the same.

Take them to small claims court.

Ask for the difference between the billing tier your meter says you should be in and the one they charged you for. Dump your data in a reasonably clear format and show and explain it to the judge. Be prepared to swear that it is correct.

If they overcharge you next month, do it again.

Keep it up until they fix the meter so the agreement is close enough for you to be happy with it (or until the judge gets tired of it and issues an order - either to you or them - to make the cases stop.) It's not barratry - no matter how vexing to the utility - if the suits are legitimate, with real grounds asking for restitution for real damages, nor if the the suits are repeated because there are new instances of the tort.

First time through, ask for all the months for which you have data that shows overcharging. (If you can demonstrate a rule for the systematic overcharging, ask for the overcharges back to the instalation of the system, but be prepared for the judge to reject that.) Up to the small claims price and time limits, of course.

Be polite to the judge. Assume he's smart enough to understand this if you explain it clearly. (Judges don't get to be judges without being smart and good at figuring these things out.)

Cops are not doing a good job. Estimates range from 400-1000 unjustified deaths a year. To put it into context, since 9/11, there may well have been 4 times as many unjustified deaths by cops in America as unjustified deaths by Al Queda.

That isn't acceptable by any standards.

Or perhaps if you'd like, I can put it another way. There have been three times as many incidents of manslaughter and murder by American cop per capita of population than there have been incidents of manslaughter or murder in Britain in total.

That number is WAY unacceptable.

Cops carrying guns confer no benefit to those in the area (80% of bullets fired by police handguns miss their target, they don't vanish and they do hit passers-by, sound crew, hostages, etc).

Cops carrying guns confer no benefits to law and order, since alternatives from stun guns to pain rays (microwave stimulation of nerve endings, if you prefer) to teargas (which isn't great but is less lethal than a lump of lead) already exist and criminals are less likely to carry when running is a more practical option than a shoot-out. That has always been the British experience, which is why you now get regular shoot-outs where British cops are stupid enough to carry where you'd previously have had maybe one a decade versus an armed response unit.

Cops carrying guns confer no benefits to the cop, since dead weight can result a cop becoming dead, accidental shootings are very likely to produce retaliation, and "utility" belts stop utilizing when they terrify locals, intimidate visitors, but bolster thugs who gain greater mobility and dexterity from not wearing them.

Look, this is all very simple. Too simple for nutters, perhaps, but simple nonetheless.

First, preventing crime by eliminating prime environmental and psychological causes is a good start. If there's no crime, there's nobody to shoot and nobody shooting back.

Second, preventing cops turning bad by preventing them developing a "them vs us" attitude is essential and you don't achieve that by giving them scrutineering powers and not those they are scrutinizing. It has to be a two-way street to prevent that kind of mindset.

But that requires one additional ingredient to work properly:

Third, preventing cops turning bad by preventing them from being have-a-go heros. They should work with the community, be a part of the community, guard it from within. And, like all good guards, they should NOT be on constant alert. They should be constantly engaging on a social level, not a paramilitary one. If a crime happens, let the criminal go somewhere where there ISN'T a huge danger to others. Inanimate objects can look after themselves, people need a bit more effort.

It is better to let a gang "get away" from the scene, with no bullets fired, be tracked safely and then be apprehended INTACT when it is safe to do so. Going in there guns blazing will cause excessive damage, risk the lives of those supposedly protected and served, and for what? Some carcases. No trial, no determination of the chain of events, no proof even that the dead body is the guilty party. It can't exactly answer questions in the dock, can it?

No, disarm the cops, give them high-res cameras (and maybe girls gone wild t-shirts, I dunno), and let them be what cops should be - good citizens. They are NOT the army, they should NEVER be allowed military-grade weapons, they should deal with matters calmly, quietly and sensibly.

If they're not capable of that, they're incapable of good. Of any kind.