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For most of the TV channels, if you subscribe to a service which offers the channel, you can login directly to that channel's site and stream their content. The movie studios need to set up a similar system, where if a service you subscribe to carries a movie, then they will stream it to you after confirming your subscription.

What we need now is some master app which coordinates all this. Right now if you try to stream like this directly from all the channels, you'll have to go through a login procedure for each channel, where they redirect you to your subscription service and you have to login. You have to repeat this every few months. What's needed is something which automates this step, automatically verifying your subscription whenever you try to access a channel's stream. That would make the entire procedure seamless and transparent.

The only remaining troublesome feature would then be compiling a list of which channels each subscription service gives you, so you can compare them and decide which ones to subscribe to. For some reason they don't make it easy to compare channel offerings. I've had to get channel lists from news websites, and those lists rapidly go out of date as channels are added or removed. If each service would just offer their current channel list in xml format on their website, it'd be trivial to create a website which automatically compares them. You could pre-select which channels were must-have, might-watch, and never-watch, and the website could figure out which single service was best for you, or which multiple services gave you what you wanted with fewest subscriptions, or for lowest subscription price.

http://www.discovery.com/tv-sh...

Basically, they tried to build a boat with 'pykrete' in the arctic and found that it fell apart PDQ.

They had a little more success building a boat with a mix of ice and sheets of newspaper, but it still didn't last an hour before coming apart.

NFW an aircraft carrier would ever manage to finish construction, let alone... y'know... launch aircraft.

Mayhaps not, but IIRC Mythbuster's constructions were not very big/thick. It's possible scaling up might provide better longevity as mass/volume goes up by the cube of the length. Icebergs tend to stick around for a while, and IIRC, tests showed Pykrete to melt slower than plain ice.

http://www.discovery.com/tv-sh...

Basically, they tried to build a boat with 'pykrete' in the arctic and found that it fell apart PDQ.

They had a little more success building a boat with a mix of ice and sheets of newspaper, but it still didn't last an hour before coming apart.

NFW an aircraft carrier would ever manage to finish construction, let alone... y'know... launch aircraft.

Hell, just imagine what a banana peel would do...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I didn't think this was physically possible. Mythbusters even listed this as BUSTED: http://www.discovery.com/tv-sh...

Mobile phone interference with plane instruments: Myth or reality?
https://www.edn.com/electronic...
or
http://www.discovery.com/tv-sh...
Finding: BUSTED

Or Mythbusters.

Busted

Mythbusters say you are wrong...

Hydrogen, combined with a rather flammable paint scheme. Mythbusters did this. http://www.discovery.com/tv-sh...

No Helium involved, which if you'll remember your high school Chemistry class, is a Noble Gas (doesn't burn, doesn't react)

Mythbusters did it:
http://www.discovery.com/tv-sh...

And I demand the right to cure my children by torturing their bodies until the demons possessing them flee back to Hell. Which one of you idiots gets to get shot trying to stop me?

Joke all you like, but you're closer to the truth than you think...

Read up on "Faith Healing" and the states that allow parents to withhold medical care for their children and provides immunity to charges for abuse or neglect, even if the child dies due to lack of medical care.

Indeed. There's a fuzzy line between freedom of religion and child neglect. Jehovah's Witnesses and their attitude re transfusions, for example. http://www.nytimes.com/1990/08... and http://news.discovery.com/huma... for another. kind of goes along with the "spare the rod and spoil the child" school of child abuse. sorry, child rearing.

There was one experiment a few years that attempted to show that time was quantized, but it showed the opposite IIRC.

Typically for these contest winning architect concepts, they are render-op first and... well stay that way because no one will ever build it because the architect is limited only by his imagination and artistic sensibilities, and is only interested in throwing practical sounding buzzwords vaguely at it.

Just FYI, I think these are cool things to get rendered up, just find it odd when people take it seriously. E.g. http://www.discovery.com/dscov....

Which of the following words:

An abysmal thrust to weight ratio means that you can't use it as an ascent stage. Not "it takes an unreasonably long time to burn".

... are you having trouble with?

"Abysmal"?
"An"?
"As"?
"Ascent"?
"Burn"?
"Can't"?
"It"?
"Long"?
"Means"?
"Not"?
"Ratio"?
"Stage"?
"Takes"?
"Time"?
"That"?
"Thrust"?
"To"?
"Unreasonably"?
"Use"?
"Weight"?
"You"?

Please help me out here because I'm not sure what part of that has been flying over your head.

Just to illustrate, VASIMR's incredibly low thrust is a significant issue

Nope.

Moreover, the proposed nuclear power reactors you describe are merely concepts at this point.

Dozens of them have been launched over the years.

By contrast, NERVA was effectively mission-ready in the 70s

Nope.

Flight component designs were used selectively, i.e., only when component characteristics had an important influence on overall system performance ... In so far as possible, facility type components were used to save cost and time. Examples were many valves and the pneumatic system... in addition, a radiation shield was added to the configuration to protect engine components. This eliminated the need to radiation harden many components used in system testing ... the paramount objective of this test was to demonstrate that engine system operational feasibility was successfully demonstrated and that no enabling technology issue remained as a barrier to flight engine development ... confirmed that a nuclear rocket engine was suitable for space flight, ... and the development of a flight nuclear rocket system could proceed with confidence ... Its goals and objectives were to demonstrate the feasibility of a nuclear rocket engine... A major key to the success of Rover/NERVA was the development of test facilities... (ED: These no longer exist) ... Perhaps the most significant facility .. was the nuclear furnace test facility ... the scrubber had a much smaller capacity than would be required for testing reactors planned in the future... the feasibility of scrubbers has been tested in the small scale ... The real future development challenge will be associated with engine and reactor ground testing in an environmentally acceptable fashion... (ED: If you think it would be hard to pass an environmental review back then, try today!)... it remains to be seen whether a Space Exploration Initiative management structure evolves which maximizes the probably of addressing the significant technical challenges associated with nuclear rocket development...

Got that? That's from an overall rather fawning report from proponents of resurrecting NERVA at NASA; even they aren't pretending that these were flight engines. It was simply an engine feasibility demonstration program. It wasn't flight hardware. And all of that is just concerning the engine. An engine is not a stage in and of itself. And even when you have a stage, it's not proven until running flight success (as the soviets saw with the N1). And even if it had been a full, tested flight stage, it'd be no more resurrectable than Apollo. Like with Apollo, most of the individual hardware components components and systems used in the manufacture no longer exist.

(In case you're curious why there's that talk of small-scale scrubbers as if their development was an afterthought... it was! Partway through development they were hit with a new enviro

"And while the company was not required to admit wrongdoing, it has agreed to hire a chief information security officer."

Wow, Golly Gee. A Chief Information Security Officer!!! That should do the trick right there.

Am I the only person on this planet that thinks that our current public communications and computing technology is completely incapable of securing anything?

I further think that the proposed solutions -- complex unique passwords, multi-factor authentication, BioID, ( http://www.discovery.com/tv-sh... ) etc aren't going to work. Anybody with me on that?

And I think that, yes, all that is likely to be a bit of a societal problem. Anybody else?

You're exactly right. It is impossible to secure anything.

All you can do is mitigate the risks as best you can.

A slap on the wrist like this does very little to increase the risks to companies.

They would take the low penalty rather than invest even more money in securing things to the level we are capable of (even that isn't 100% obviously).

Financial risks are all a company cares about, after all.

"And while the company was not required to admit wrongdoing, it has agreed to hire a chief information security officer."

Wow, Golly Gee. A Chief Information Security Officer!!! That should do the trick right there.

Am I the only person on this planet that thinks that our current public communications and computing technology is completely incapable of securing anything?

I further think that the proposed solutions -- complex unique passwords, multi-factor authentication, BioID, ( http://www.discovery.com/tv-sh... ) etc aren't going to work. Anybody with me on that?

And I think that, yes, all that is likely to be a bit of a societal problem. Anybody else?

Actually apparently the ancient Babylonians figured out something pretty much like it.
http://news.discovery.com/hist...

Also this indian guy in the 14 century seemed to have a pretty good go at it too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Are you saying for all possible chip designs and all possible compiler designs, bubble sort will ALWAYS be slower than merge sort (for non-trivial sort sets of relatively random keys)?

Yes, as long as it's the type of computer that follows a sequence of steps (as opposed to some kind of weird slime computer that is magic). Although if it doesn't follow a sequence of steps, it's not bubble-sort anymore.

If so, can you provide the proof?

Yes, the proof involves counting the number of steps required to complete each algorithm.

It depends on the efficiency of the computational steps available to you. The classic example is the spaghetti sort, which is O(n). Hang each bit of spaghetti from a pole. Repeat until pole empty [pick the longest length of spaghetti]. This presumes that [pick the longest length of spaghetti] is an O(1) operation, which it is in normal human experience. Logical architecture matters.

Are you saying for all possible chip designs and all possible compiler designs, bubble sort will ALWAYS be slower than merge sort (for non-trivial sort sets of relatively random keys)?

Yes, as long as it's the type of computer that follows a sequence of steps (as opposed to some kind of weird slime computer that is magic). Although if it doesn't follow a sequence of steps, it's not bubble-sort anymore.

If so, can you provide the proof?

Yes, the proof involves counting the number of steps required to complete each algorithm.

Exactly so: http://news.discovery.com/spac...

While this is nowhere near the hottest temperature that has ever been achieved in nuclear fusion research (that distinction belongs to the Large Hadron Collider which reached 4 trillion degrees Celsius), ...

Sadly, even at such temperatures, the LHC was, like the Mythbusters, also unable to successfully flash-fry shrimp in a shrimp cannon.

Not too hard to wrap your mind around, really...

It is FEDERAL LAW.

Though Statists might equate them, laws of men — unlike laws of nature — are changeable. This particular one appeared, because it was believed, the cell phones can interfere with the aircraft. That belief has been demonstrated wrong many times — or, to put it in other words, that myth was busted.

You understand nothing.

Darling, mind your tone.

ATC needs to know who is who because they have to control them if they are on an IFR flight plan.

ATC might need to know, yes. But whatever passes through the ATC, can be encrypted and sent to other planes — encrypted for each one — as well. This is a solvable problem, one just needs to acknowledge, it exists. And you do not...

This will.

you're really not supposed to use one in flight...

That myth has been thoroughly busted already. And not just once

And it really doesn't help much on the tracking aspect.

The coordinates, speeds, and even instrument read-outs can all be sent to the nearest tower(s) via the data-link. SSL-encrypted — with a handful of certificate authorities known to each plane.

Planes are are registered and have great big letters painted on the side of them

Right. And my face may be computer-recognizable already — or really soon. But that does not mean, I should be carrying an ID-chip in my pocket to make tracking me even easier.

But the biggest problem is that the system was designed from the ground up for safety not privacy the reason being so the fire trucks can beat you to the scene of the crash.

General-purpose fire trucks would be sent out by the air-dispatchers anyway, they don't listen to air-control AM "just in case". The specialized services at the airports, if they wish to have their own awareness independent of the control-tower, can be allowed to get the same SSL-encrypted data-links...

The origin of the issue is the bad old reliance on "obfuscation" — if I can not hear the plane broadcasting its unique ID and location, then no one else can hear it either and so there is not a problem. TFA will, hopefully, raise the awareness so the healing can begin.

Electromagnetic shielding tech is up to this task. Per my link, "no bigger than a large desk". Now that the USA is finally spinning back up RTG production, paintable solar cells, Tesla's advancement in battery tech, etc we COULD do quite a bit more than we are.

Any ship embarking on interstellar travel in the near future using any of the first two methods (a generation ship using conventional propulsion or a hyper speed ship using fuel, thrust or time improvements) is likely to be beaten to the destination by a explorers leaving earth hundreds of years later using superior interstellar travel technology.

Although a generation ship carrying massive amounts of fuel and a gigantic solar sail could boost up to speeds of hundreds of km/s, it could still be thousands of years before such a ship reached even the nearest star system... and then it would have to expend vast amounts of stored fuel to slow down, slip into a suitable orbit around the local sun and commence a search for potentially habitable planetary bodies, with no hope of ever being able to generate sufficient thrust to move on to a further star system, should the first prove to have no suitable planets to settle on.

Consider the rate of communications, propulsion, etc. advancement that would have taken place in the intervening 5000- odd years between the departure of interstellar explorers leaving earth over the next 100 years and those leaving earth, say, 2-3000 years from today. How would our present day explorers even communicate with earth using 5000 year old communication technology - heck, it would be tough to communicate with just 100 year old technology, let alone 5000 year old relics. And suppose the mission was successful... later and technologically more advanced departures travelling in the same direction would have to make first contact decisions not too dissimilar to the ones we make today about isolated peoples such as isolated tribes in the Amazon rain forest - only it would be more similar to travelling back 5000 years to the bronze age - round about the time when Stonehenge was built and Papyrus invented.

Future propulsion technologies, would not fare much better. The more efficient the propulsion technology, the faster the rate of travel. This might appear to be the answer, except that special relativity would mean that while time slowed down for the travelling explorers, hundreds or even thousands of years could pass here on Earth for a few years of time for our hyper-speed interstellar travellers. So, while interstellar travellers travelling at hyper-speed could reach their destination in a single life time, they too could be beaten to the punch by a later departure hundreds of years later (or just a months days later in time passed aboard the interstellar ship).

That special relativistic time dilation thingamajig can be a bitch!

Just my thoughts and observation

Artists who do the actual meat of games are not stupid enough to work on YOUR GAME for free.

There's the problem....modern games are more a matter of art than of programming. If you look at the credit list for the recent release of Starcraft, there are tons of artists and relatively few programmers.

You can't just hack shit together to make a work of art.

Wow, that's definitely not true. Art gets hacked together all the time. Look at the recent Star Wars movie, it's a rehash with elements hacked in from all over the place. In architecture, look at the spires of Chartres Cathedral for an especially clear example. In painting it happens too.

Here's the first written piece I came across:
http://news.discovery.com/spac...

They were able to, according to NPR, detect it with something to do with minimal shifts in light with the moon and the theory is we're growing a beard of Dark Matter.

Yes, yes I phrased it just like that for you. :D Also, per your other comment, I'm betting it's Pink Unicorn Farts. What *is* interesting is that they were able to make some predictions and the maths worked out so that they were able to catch this on film. That's a damned good indicator but, alas, we still haven't a clue. It could, I guess, be magnets but we'd have to show that magnets are able to cause the lensing effects that are being seen. I am unaware of any properties that photons have that will be influenced by magnetic force.

Did you RTFA? I'm not normally one to defend /. editors with their crappy proofing and duplicates, but in this case the click bait comes from outside /.

The original article and a few others:

• Diamond Nanothreads Could Support Space Elevator [2015-11-23]
• Diamond nanothread rivals graphene as the next big wonder material Now scientists want to build a space elevator out of it. [2015-11-27]
• We may soon be riding up to space in style in elevators made of diamonds [2015-11-23]
• Our Future Space Elevator May Be Built of Diamond [2015-11-21]
• Diamond Nanothreads Could Support Space Elevator [2015-11-19]
• Scientists Say We Could Build a Space Elevator Using Microscopic Diamond Chains [2015-11-19]

The Earth has feedback mechanisms to keep things cozy.

Yeah but these feedback mechanisms have serious consequences as well.

The oceans are becoming warmer and more acidic because they are absorbing some of the excess CO2 in the atmosphere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification

The warmer oceans are causing some species to die off http://news.discovery.com/earth/oceans/unusual-warming-kills-gulf-of-maine-cod-151029.htm

And we don't know what all of these feedback mechanisms are going to be and what their consequences are going to be either. But if we start having mass die-offs of phytoplankton, most animals will die off including us.

Earth's feedback mechanisms, are made to cope with temperature change over tens of thousands of years, not in a century or two. So either we can change now to help stabilize this change before it gets really bad or we can just sit back and watch it happen and continually adapt to all of the changes, while we kill off a lot of different species and alter the planet completely.

Were all the pictures taken by the astronauts? I would guess that an automated camera would have required too much film or manual reloading anyways.

No, they were taken by Stanley Kubrick.

http://news.discovery.com/spac...

I salute your act of retraction. It is praiseworthy.

I'm just pointing out that all that plastic lying around isn't as innocuous as everyone thinks.

I agree that putting time and effort into preventing plastic from entering our oceans is wise. I do believe we should do so in a rational way and choose the most efficient solutions for the problems. Research into bacteria that mitigate the issues is definitely one of the roads to efficient solutions. You may find this interesting:
http://news.discovery.com/eart...

Nature is a very versatile thing.

An 8 billion human population is overall better for mankind and also arguably for the planet, than just 1 billion.

Many extinct species would beg to differ. http://news.discovery.com/anim...

Why do you hate evolution?

An 8 billion human population is overall better for mankind and also arguably for the planet, than just 1 billion.

Many extinct species would beg to differ.
http://news.discovery.com/anim...

here ya go "The study is the first to document the biological communities living on the tiny particles of debris known as microplastics, and recorded many new types of microbe and invertebrate for the first time." This is pretty "new" discovery, from 2015, so yeah you might not have heard about it yet.

... marketing. The cat brain neurocomputer was a scam: http://news.discovery.com/tech... http://www.wired.com/2009/11/d... http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-... Henry Markram said "I thought that having gone through Blue Brain so carefully, journalists would be able to recognize that what IBM reported is a scam - no where near a cat-scale brain simulation, but somehow they are totally deceived by these incredible statements. I am absolutely shocked at this announcement. Not because it is any kind of technical feat, but because of the mass deception of the public."

btw a few days ago China had some VIPs and wanted to great them with clear blue skies. So they shut down the factories for a couple of days. Sure enough, beautiful skies. They can stop it when they want to.

yeah, I don't know if their idea of a three meter rock (mentioned in this article that is linked inside TFA) is thick enough to stop radiation once outside the heliosphere. But the second article is discussing intra-solar transfers, not between systems. I have no idea what level of shielding would be required to survive millions / billions of years of traveling through interstellar space.

Dharmendra Modha???? His earlier claim they created a computer as power as a cat brain was debunked here: http://news.discovery.com/tech...

I agree it's possible, and rarely do I see people mentioning the combination of biological and hardware, something that's moving along nicely these days.
2 examples.
http://news.discovery.com/tech...

http://www.the-scientist.com/?...

The most conspicuous organisms have long since been cataloged and fixed on the tree of life, and the ones that remain undiscovered don't give themselves up easily.

Certainly not true if by "conspicuous" they mean "ones you can easily see with the naked eye." Most insect and beetle species are not cataloged yet, and for smaller critters the situation is even worse. Heck, you might even find a new frog species in Manhattan.

Since you write "social justice" in citation marks I assume that you use your own perceived notion of what justice means rather than established terms.
There have however been tests on simians to see if they grasp the concept of justice and they do in fact react when treated in an unequal manner.
So unless you define what you mean properly instead of acting like the autistic people you seem to despise then perhaps it would be possible to have a reasonable conversation on the subject.

Oh and for the record: Stern calls Pluto a planet, and makes some very good arguments.

And I'll add more that he doesn't make (though his are best!): it's ridiculous to call something a "dwarf X" and then say that that doesn't count as an "X". In any other field of science, if you had an "adjective-noun", it would also be classified as a "noun". If you have a dwarf shrew, it's also a shrew. If you have a dwarf fern, it's also a fern. Heck, even in the same field, astronomy, the same rule applies - a dwarf star is also a star.

Under the IAU definition, extrasolar planets aren't planets either. They don't even have a name - they're not anything at all. Not like we'd be able to classify them under the definition without dispatching a spacecraft all the way to each different star system even if they weren't excluded. The IAU definition also claims that they will create a system to establish more dwarf planets - something that clearly has not been done. There hasn't been a new dwarf planet accepted in nearly a decade, despite the fact that we know the sizes of many of them better than already-accepted candidates were known at the time. Quaoar is much bigger than Ceres, and we know it's size down to a mere 5 kilometers margin of error, yet it's not a dwarf planet. The IAU not only made up their ridiculous definition, but they're not even upholding it.

As with pretty much every categorization of object in pretty much every field of science, you need heirarchies and multiple groupings to describe the world. Among planets, we already know of significant diversity, and should only expect it to grow - hence we have terrestrial planets, gas giants, ice giants, hot jupiters, super earths, etc, and yes, dwarf planets - which should be just another category among the significant diversity already out there. Everyone knows a planet when they see it - you don't have to scan its orbit to see if it's "cleared" it, with some still-not-yet-agreed-upon definition of "cleared". If it's large enough to relax into a hydrostatic equilibrium, that's both meaningful, intuitive, and what people expect when they hear the word "planet". By any reasonable definition, our solar system has at least dozens, potentially hundreds of planets. And that should be seen as something to celebrate, not to be appalled about.

the corn subsidies and the silly food pyramid.

We eat too much, we exercise too little, and we eat the wrong things.

More fruits, veg, and yes meat... and less starchy food.

As to getting people to move their fat asses every so often... good luck with that.

Out of curiosity, what observations would invalidate your hypothesis, Mr. "random some guy on the internet"?

If there were, for example, a rise in obesity in 6-month old babies - would that invalidate the hypothesis, or does it simple mean the 6-month old babies need to get out and exercise more?

How about lab animals? If lab animals grown with the same diet and same exercise regimens were getting progressively more obese over the last few decades, would that invalidate your views, or does it mean that the lab rats should just cut down on the calories?

A lot of people expound the virtues of this-or-that theory of obesity, there's thousands of miracle cure diets and theories of nutrition to choose from. Do I want the primitive diet? The all-meat diet? The vegetarian diet? The new fancy diet from some genuine charlatan interviewed on Oprah? (It's a diet made by a doctor... and it really works!!!)

How about basic thermodynamics? If I reduce my food intake, I'm guaranteed to lose weight... right? It's basic thermodynamics after all.

How about we all read up on the subject and look at some evidence. Nothing in people's diet - either type or amount - explains the rise of obesity in our culture, and neither does anything related to lifestyle.

If you have an alternate explanation, I'd like to hear it. Otherwise, stop shouting debunked views and commonly-held myths.

Modern obesity has nothing to do with diet, exercise, or lifestyle.

Only when I observe the magnetic pattern of the sea floor, and realize we're more than 500,000 years overdue for a magnetic pole flip ...

The underlying process seems to be random, so we're not necessarily 500,000 years 'overdue'.

The recent weakening is 'within spec'. If it does flip, it could do so rather quickly.

The military aren't going to sit around and wait. They are looking for a delivery vehicle that can act as a drone.
http://news.discovery.com/spac...
where it states in 2012 it completed a 224 day mission, terming it 'drone'.
With China's attempt in weaponizing space, the US military are being foresighted.
Ramming speed?

That's not what the pesky evidence says:

http://news.discovery.com/eart...

Now you know better.

Ferret

Scientists predict the arctic ocean will be ice free by2012. Or maybe by 2015. Or by the year 2000. Hard to say, really.

http://news.discovery.com/huma...

"Between 1990 and 1995 the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children handled only 515 stranger abductions"

100 stranger abductions a year vs. 166,000 non abused kids taken by CPS.

literally more than 1000 times as likely your kids will be kidnapped by the government than a 'stranger'.

Here's an article on basically the same thing from 2011:

http://news.discovery.com/huma...

Is this a new system of doing this, a new group following previous working, just rehashing old news?

Or is it the same group getting a lot closer to being approved for use?