Slashdot Mirror

It seems I may have read sarcasm into your words where none was intended, so I apologize for that.

Going back to the much earlier poster in this thread, I’ll agree with what he said: reinforced cockpit doors and passengers willing to resist have been the only two demonstrable improvements since 9/11. I know you just said there were no improvements, but surely we can agree on those two? Otherwise, despite my disagreement about your thinking they were relevant to his post, I agree that the expansion of the Air Marshal system after 9/11 has NOT made things safer. There are apparently now thousands of Air Marshals in service, which seems pointless to me.

Regarding my use of “Islamic”, I double-checked myself in a number of online dictionaries and grammar guides in response to what you wrote. So far as I can tell, “Muslim” would’ve worked just as well since I was talking about men, but “Islamic” broadly appears to be considered just as acceptable (when used as an adjective) when referring to something related to Islam or its adherents. The only dissenting view I found was a well-informed user comment in this exchange where they point out that—based on its original meaning in Arabic—“Islamic” should not be used to refer to practitioners. As such, I must acknowledge that from a prescriptivist angle it may not follow the original meaning, but that meaning has clearly been lost when it comes to actual usage in English today, which every other source I checked seems to either agree on or be silent about. In fact, I used the term here to match the specific usage I read when reading up on this topic.

Interestingly, I can’t recall ever seeing it being used this way except to refer to extremists and the like. Perhaps it’s a modern convention being used as a way of connoting that extremists are not legitimate Muslims? I don’t know, and I actually don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other, in all honesty, but it was a fun rabbit trail to research regardless.

But even that $60 is a ripoff

It's cheaper than buying 30 games on the Wii Virtual Console. And obviously piracy is cheaper and therefor a "better deal", so a home-built console with a PINE64, RPi3, or whatever is going to be a great deal.

But I'd like to warn you that until DMCA is overturned the status of ROM files is that they are illegal to download in the US and similar jurisdictions, even if you own the original cartridge. Much of the fair use and rights to back-up were destroyed in 1998. There is still a bit of a loophole for creating your own backups, but so far they have only been tested in courts for floppies and tapes. A ROM is not volatile and post-DMCA it's not clear that you can back up for personal use anymore.

sources: Nintendo legal (likely biased and potentially misinformation), Stackexchange (laypeople trying to make sense of complex legal code)

Like always, never a clue. It is easy to design a system that would float up high in the atmosphere, avoiding the pressures and temps. In fact, USSR already did. with more to come.

There is a maximum rate at which a black hole is allowed to rotate, and such a black hole is not a torus.
https://astronomy.stackexchang...

if talking performance , something in a server room with a heavy load, you're going to be using a real database, not MS SQL server running on windows.

Stack Overflow is written in C# and runs on IIS and MS SQL Server. Or would you characterize Stack Overflow as not being built for performance?

How can you possible say this is B.S.?

We already have huge fields of dead rusting wind turbines in California, and the south of Hawaii. Too expensive to remove so they just sit there, aging....

Given this is ALREADY A PROBLEM...

BECAUSE IT IS B.S.

Those huge fields of dead rusting wind turbines in California, and the south of Hawaii don't exist - or rather they only exist in the propaganda of the more unhinged climate deniers/fossil fuel shills who don't just distort the facts, they simply make stuff up.

I notice that when you repeat this B.S. you never provide links to your "alternative facts".

Note here is a lengthy in-depth discussion of the origins of this lie. It started with a climate denier doing the old distorted facts game - pointing out initially a large number of turbines were installed at the fields in California and Hawaii - but that there many fewer now. But omitting the correct explanation that it was because they were replaced by fewer, much larger, more efficient turbines. And no, the old ones are not just left there, they are removed over time. The actual percentage of non-operating turbines at any given time is about 2%. The fantasy version where there are dead fields (to say nothing of huge dead fields) is the result of climate deniers taking the original BS claim, and extrapolating from it in their imaginations, then posting it as if it was a fact.

I drive through two of the three California fields frequently, watched them go up and evolve, and they are impressive with the huge new towers spinning slowly, but producing far more power than the old ones - which have disappeared. Fields of abandoned turbines are nowhere to be seen. But who should I believe, citation-free climate denier rants or my own lyin' eyes?

All the main distros use it because it is good, a huge improvement.

SystemD is 2010s version of Microsoft wizards of the 1990s.

They're great. They really are. They're easy to use, helpful, and just work.

That is until they don't. And then you're screwed

"Domain interpreters", if you will, are superb at what they do. They make all of the hard stuff "go away", kinda like programming libraries. That is, as long as you stay WITHIN their domain and do things as expected.

The moment you take one minor baby step outside what they expect or control, it all goes to Hell. It's confused because: "You're doing ... wait, what ARE you doing? What IS that? Never mind, I'll just ignore it." And it gets confused or out of sync. And on any breakage, even better, now YOU'RE confused as well, and even worse YOU literally don't know what's going on.

SystemD hasn't broken on me yet, but I've heard horror stores of non-standard or even not-quite-mainstream configs that work and then they suddenly won't. And if you look at some of the bugs Pottering has declared WONTFIX (referred to by that random ignored bastion of unworthyness ;-) you begin to wonder.

The best thing about domain interpreters is that in a must-work complex situation is that you have to call for help. And who better than your distro maintainer? And then no reason at all, guess who SystemD's main author, Pottering, is employed by?

Oh, Debian is the literal base for a bunch of distros, including Ubuntu. RedHat also supports a few you might have heard of. You might be interested in the Debian vote for SystemD.

I'm a RHCE, SuSE something, Microsoft something, Novell CNE, and what-all else, or at least was -- retired, so guess I don't count anymore. Once I get my storage usage under control, I'm beginning a move to FreeBSD.

If you've "broken your web terminal" you should run "reset". And your homepage seems to be currently down, BTW.

There's not really any conceivable way to do any such thing, nor any purpose which would be best served by it, and other side effects of that much energy expenditure would be of far more immediate concern. If my math is right, the energy required to move Mars to Earth orbit would be about 20x its gravitational binding energy. You probably don't want to just give it a big whack, and the list of things that would probably be easier would probably include disassembling the planet and moving it to a new orbit piecemeal.

What's the difference between Personal and Enterprise profiles?

If an asteroid/meteor explodes depends on many things.
I gave you the energy formula. Now google yourself.
Whether a meteorite hits the ground depends mostly on its size ...
Here e.g. is an interesting read, not sure that you comprehend it, though :P https://physics.stackexchange....

If Apple loses this, then maybe they'll be forced to provide options for allowing side-loading apps with the general populace. This would allow GPL licensed libraries and applications to become available on iOS devices. The GPL requires that code licensed under it be redistributal and usable anywhere; however, there is a license agreement when you make and publish apps on the App Store that limits the code reuse capabilities. Some relevant links, 1 2.

Technical legal merits aside... and yes I think the Supreme Court will send this back to the lower courts because the plaintiffs should have standing to sue, but the crux of the issue is whether this is good or bad for consumers.

And it is clearly bad for consumers to allow Apple to continue to monopolize their ecosystem from top to bottom. Apple is too big for that now. This has or inevitably will lead to stagnation in the marketplace, higher costs for consumers, less choice already. It is the classic situation of bad for consumers and bad for the free market that drives anti-trust laws.

If Apple loses this, then maybe they'll be forced to provide options for allowing side-loading apps with the general populace. This would allow GPL licensed libraries and applications to become available on iOS devices. The GPL requires that code licensed under it be redistributal and usable anywhere; however, there is a license agreement when you make and publish apps on the App Store that limits the code reuse capabilities. Some relevant links, 1 2.

and we should just trust that.... because?

and why is apple getting rid of it, why?
Fuck off.

Honestly, I don't know exactly why Apple is Deprecating OpenGL and OpenCL. I believe it has to do with the fact that Metal is significantly more "performant". And don't we ALL want that?!?

Frameworks and standards come, change, and eventually go. It is the way of software development. Kind of an evolutionary process, much like nature. And like all evolutionary processes, there are winners and losers.

From what I understand, at this point, Metal 2 is a pretty good API; why not give it a chance?

Not very many people said the sky is falling, just because DirectX was MS-specific lo these many years. If there is enough call for OpenGL and/or OpenCL for specific App Development, then I am sure someone in the F/OSS "community" will maintain those Frameworks in a compatible-fashion for macOS. Or at least I hope so. Or, those Libraries will just be built into Applications, most of which are already the size of a modern OS...

Just like when, citing security reasons, Apple decided to remove a couple of typical Unix Utilities (ftp and telnet, IIRC) from the standard macOS build in High Sierra, someone quickly came along and put together a package that brought them back. Easy-peasey. Done!

https://apple.stackexchange.co...

I suspect, such will happen with OpenGL and maybe OpenCL, too.

And before you whine, that's the way EVERYTHING works in Linux; so how would it be so bad for a few things to work that way in macOS, too?

The only possible "casualties" would be that those Applications that remain dependent on OpenGL and OpenCL may not be accepted in the MacOS (and iOS?) App Store(s), until they are re-written for Metal.

Not only do we have fake news to deal with, but now we have old news to deal with?

I've known for over a decade that the earth's rotation has slowed drastically (see episodes 5). Anyone with any physics background in the last few decades knew this. Hell, even stackexchange would consider this old news.

After reading the article, I get the feeling that the person writing it knows as much about science as an ant knows about baking pizzas.

https://apple.stackexchange.co...

The text "You may switch an Associated Device to a different Account only once every 90 days" appears twice in the current iTunes, Mac App, App Store and iBookstore T&C

It may well not be implemented in such a way that it's a problem but I remember that addition to the T & C around the time I stopped bothering with using two separate AppleIDs.

Updates with two AppleIDs were a pain anyway because you needed to sign out from one to sign in to the other, & if there were a bunch of updates, they weren't sorted by appleID and you might have to do so more than once (or twice or ...) to get everything updated.

The article only says they used a CDN (and therefore presumably multiple servers), but some things can be plausibly inferred about how any single server handles connections.

Apparently they offer their streaming service as a website, so presumably they use standard web streaming protocols. TCP-based protocols don't allow multicast. WebRTC precludes the use of multicast, but allows the use of peer-to-peer connections.

Therefore we can reasonably infer that it's probably P2P and not multicast, unless you're right and they do simply use 10M connections.

c) Teslas have a Ludicrous mode which is a big selling point - they're more of a drivers car than anything else you're used to.

They've gone to plaid!

A folding wing option was offered when the 777 was first being developed. No airline wanted to pay for it, so it never happened.

Here is a discussion on why that was, and how the new 777x folding wing differs from the old rejected folding wing plan. The new folding wing section is much smaller and lighter than the old proposal. The old plan required flight controls on the folding section, which the new plan does not.

So, they should use tanks to move planes around? Interesting...

They don't use treads because tread systems cost more than hard rubber tires. Tugs don't need armor.

You especially wouldn't use an Abrams because it uses a turbine engine. The Abrams has four times the horsepower output and twice the torque of a tug. It costs too much to maintain and consumes too much fuel to do that kind of work. (There is a vehicle based on the Abrams MBT which is used for tank recovery, but that's a fairly different job.)

Exactly!

The cost per launch (not price per launch) is what makes Starlink possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

They're talking about 12,000 satellites! (A few less than that, but they'll probably have to replace a few that fail.) And they're looking at a 5-7 year lifespan per satellite, which means once it's up and running, it will require putting up another 2,000 satellites per year. Even if they can do 20 satellites per launch, that's still a hundred launches per year. For reference, there were only 90 launches last year, and that's counting every launch by every country and company.

https://space.stackexchange.co...

Estimates are that the Falcon 9 could lift 24 Starlink satellites per launch. The Falcon Heavy could get up to 67. The BFR could deploy over 300 per launch. Considering the need to deploy to different orbits, the Falcon 9 is probably the way to go.

Once they get serious about Starlink, they'll probably start adding a few to every launch that has excess capacity. (And by "serious" I mean having gotten the satellites in real production.)

It's the same reason they tell you to put your oxygen mask on in a plane before you help others. You will pass out quite quickly, because your lungs change from an oxygen input system to an oxygen output system--your lungs work by osmosis. At 40,000 ft, you'll pass out in 15-20 seconds--whereas most people can hold your breath for 1-2 minutes (without training). Also keep in mind this is "useful consciousness", not death. You will be living, but unconscious, for a while longer. If the plane descends quickly enough, you'll simply wake up with no permanent effects.

What this means is that the prisoner could extend their life for 1-2 minutes by holding their breath. But eventually, they'll run out of oxygen either way, and it gets quite uncomfortable to hold your breath for an extended period of time due to the buildup of CO2 and lung reflexes.

You also wouldn't want to hold your breath during explosive decompression, because your lungs would be at risk of damage or rupture. See [2]. So either way, if you're at high altitude without oxygen or a suit, you're in serious trouble. Likewise if you're strapped to a table and people are just waiting for you to finally breathe and die.

Source:
[1] https://aviation.stackexchange...
(See the accepted answer there, although the FAA has updated their website).

[2] http://www.geoffreylandis.com/...

What like the utterly needless computer that you typed that on? Computers are luxuries, not survival. You are a god damned hypocrite.

Almost everything in the world today is built to be competitive to the last cent. That means that it's all shit compared to what it could be. Once upon a time, we built things as strong as we could. Then we realized that there was a lot of efficiency to be had by making them weaker, and more failure-prone. That is perfectly legitimate in many situations, but something has certainly been lost. It's true of electronics and it's true of mechanical things like cars. But the kicker is that most of it isn't to make life better for humanity, but so that some particular person can get richer.

Take computers, which have been good enough for most people to do the things they want to do for longer than the typical MTBF. If you make your PCB with a little more copper, a little more solder, a little thicker board, solid capacitors... you know the drill, it will last longer. But companies want to sell more parts, so it's not in their best interest to make it last any longer than their competitors' hardware, unless they're selling into a niche market that will pay more. All very logical, but the end result is that a lot of unnecessary garbage is produced, and there is an environmental cost just to its production — let alone its disposal .

Cars have been improving a lot quicker than computers lately, and are more aggressively recycled pound for pound, but they could have "all" been made out of Aluminum by the early nineties (following the 1991 Acura NSX and 1994 Audi A8) and all full-frame vehicles long before that; the first aluminum-bodied automobile dates from 1899, JLR vehicles were covered in war-surplus Alumin[i]um, and here in the USA Peterbilt has been building Aluminum truck bodies for some seventy years. Aluminum costs more up front (both in energy and dollars) but is easier and thus cheaper to recycle than steel. It also saves weight, meaning it improves efficiency. But all these car companies have to compete with one another for the last damned dollar, so we have to get whatever they can stamp out cheaply. (Tooling is cheaper and/or lasts longer for stamping Aluminum, too...) Most interior parts are still not designed to be recycled, either, so they simply get landfilled.

The discussion should really be about what preferences are for typing (what you type into your word processor) vs. typesetting (what the text looks like when printed); the two are not the same thing. When printed (or previewed, or rendered on a display for reading) the amount of space after a full stop would depend on the spacing guidelines for the font itself. When being edited, the mechanism to indicate an end of sentence (full stop) should be consistent.

Personally I use proportional fonts and I don't have detailed typesetting requirements, so I just use a single space after a full when typing and printing. If I cared or did it professionally, I would use a typesetting language in my editor where I could specifically call out if the dot I typed meant an abbreviation or a full stop. For example in TeX/LaTex the space after a dot is treated as a full stop unless you indicate otherwise. The point is if you really care about the details, you want to separate typing from typesetting because if you don't and you want to do something like change the font, you have to go back and edit your whole document.

If they tell you they're in a marginalized group.... Even if they ARE in that marginalized group... Isn't that the definition of "Playing the race card"?

(Although, this whole issue might be restricted to.... weird stack exchange sites. Apparently there's an "interpersonal skills" site? Yeah, they keep making new ones. Maybe this shit comes up more there? Oh, but no, the article is specifically talking about Stack Overflow. shrug)

"The USSR had an autonomous drone fly... on another planet"

What do you mean by this?

I don't know of any aircraft that have flown on other planets or moons. Venus is probably the only viable option, but I don't think anyone, not even the Russians, did that. Can you correct me?

Perl's pretty stinky. It's like 10 languages all mashed together. To write it, you only need to know one of the 10. To read it, you never know which of the many duplicate features will be required. Also, it over-relies on regular expressions for doing things that could've taken less squinting.

Bash is more of a 4GL than a general purpose programming language. It's great at some things, and awful at others - but that's intentional. One thing about bash people often ignore: It's highly parallel on multicore systems, with a simple syntax - more so even than something like OCaml or Haskell. However, it's getting more line-noisy lately; it's not as elegant as plain old Bourne Shell was, which was remarkably similar to a Lisp variant if you think of a file's lines as being like the elements of a list.

I doubt Chet will be merging OpenGL patches to bash anytime soon. However, a GL-based zenity would be reasonable.

"Bitmain Launches Ethereum ASIC Miner With Hash Rate Performance Of 8 GTX 1080 GPUs For Just $800"

Wow. I'd expect to see a flood of used GPU's piling up on Ebay with this news. Let's see...

Search GTX 1070, click "used", results: 971 listings with the first ~275 under $400.

Yep. "Crisis" over. Expect prices to fall precipitously.

I believe Ethereum is/was the real source of GPU demand given that bitcoin miners long since moved to ASICs. Ethereum was designed to be ASIC resistant. So what has changed? Has there been some breakthrough in ASIC design, driven by cryptocurrency?

I'm not sure what your wife's definition of "Barely" is; but I don't have ANY kind of experience that I would call "barely working".

The brokenness of multi-display support in the last two releases of macOS her her biggest issue. It's a battle to get her late 2015 5k iMac to wake her 2nd display after the machine sleeps, which has only been an (widely reported, mind you) issue since Sierra. It's not the Mac, either; nor is it the display. Every Mac we have with Sierra or newer (2 personal laptops, 1 business laptop and the iMac) exhibits this issue when this, or any other display is connected. These are Macs and displays which worked together just fine prior to Sierra.

Milti-display support isn't a niche feature; it's integral to the workflow of many a graphic designer -- drawing tablets with built-in displays are quite popular among that crowd -- and the vast majority of professional users who actually have a desk to work at. It's quite a major issue for them to seemingly be ignoring; it's the kind of thing you'd expect they'd have addressed in an early point release of Sierra, not something they'd let linger nearly half a year into the following release (and still not have fixed).

That's just one of many issues she's encountered in the past handful of years; to someone who remembers Macs "Just Working" since the mid 1980's, though, that's a world-breaking issue.

> Everything is toxic at a particular level.

You don't know what the fuck you are talking about.

Not everything has an LDLo or LD50.

https://biology.stackexchange....

My memory is a bit funny, but I don't think there's anything that prevents you from encrypting with your private key. In fact, I believe signing is just creating a hash of the message and then encrypting the hash with your private key. As the receiver, I computer the hash on the message, then decrypt the signature with your public key and validate it matches the hash I calculated. However in this case I believe they were encrypting the entire message with the private key. Again, it's been a while.

Uhh, you do know that foreign hackers have been doing the same things for basically as long as there's been an internet, right?

Did you never wonder why people wanted to, say, block China from hitting their SSH ports?

That may very well be true... Who is to say the person who stepped out is not a brand new person?

It's "not" "true". (This is a fictional universe we're talking about here, right?) In the Trek universe, by the time we catch up with them (even on the prequel, Enterprise) they have already gone through the phase of having "transporters" which make a copy and destroy the original. Instead, some fantasy process actually converts the person (or whatever) into a pattern which is transferred from one transporter to the other and then rematerialized. They actually make mention of this in one episode of Enterprise, and there are multiple episodes which use the transporter as a gimmick which make it clear that the person is transferred whole.

In short, beings in Trek have an animating consciousness which could be termed a "soul" which is indeed sent by the transporter.

Yes, and?

And therefore you're mistaken.

I came not up with that stupid active/passive talk that emerged in this thread.

Possibly so, but you were the first I spotted who got it wrong in a really obvious way.

And why would an inductor be "passive"?

This sounds about right.

Why would anyone declare single electric components as either active or passive anyway?

Because they're all stupid, of course.

http://www.writersdigest.com/o...

https://english.stackexchange....

https://www.newyorker.com/book...

http://grammarist.com/eggcorns...

Grammar nazis REPRESENT!

HEIL WEBSTER!

#SayNoToJive

Half your list is games, there are now LOTS of good games that run on Linux. If you look around you can find games like those on your list.

But none that are network-compatible with those on my list. Unlike business software, whose users can collaborate through a shared file format, different games do not interoperate in multiplayer. A user would have to get all his friends to purchase a different game and switch from their preferred game to that (possibly inferior) game.

I don't know your use case for Stone Edge so kind of hard for me to find a drop in replacement.

Consider the e-commerce back end of a toy shop. Tasks include adding and updating product information, taking orders from customers in person (POS), importing customer orders from the seller's account on online sales channels such as Amazon, purchasing stock to cover existing and future orders (comprising making a purchase order with a distributor, adjusting the PO quantities based on the invoice, and receiving it to stock), updating stock quantity on online sales channels, allocating stock to orders, and mobile or web applications to pick, pack, and ship.

Photoshop can probably be replaced with GIMP. This again would require some learning and probably some plugins to get all the features you need.

In Photoshop, an adjustment layer is a layer generated by applying one or more filters to the pixels in layers below it. It automatically updates itself when the layers below it change. It's sort of like a spreadsheet, where a cell can contain a formula for its value, or a makefile, which applies a recipe to some files to create another file. A web search produces results showing that this functionality is highly desired by users of GIMP but not implemented, such as "How to create the equivalent of an Adjustment Layer in an editor that does not support it?". What plugin for GIMP automates this process of tracking dependencies on lower layers and applying a filter when they change?

Adobe Animate can be replaced by a number of animation tools. Again you would have to find best for your use case.

The features I'm looking for in a replacement for Adobe Animate include timeline-based editing, automatic inbetweening, rendering the finished animation to video, and exporting to HTML5 vector animation using Canvas or SVG (which is much smaller in bytes than video). Slashdot users often mention Synfig Studio as a replacement for Adobe Animate, but "export" in Synfig Studio means something completely different. If I wanted to animate and just render to video, I'd probably use Blender, but exporting to HTML5 vector animation is important to users on slow or capped connections to the Internet.

In the end though I am too lazy to do all your homework for you.

Then a measurable advantage of sticking with Windows, at least for a small business without the resources to hire a specialist in migration to GNU/Linux, is that sticking with familiar industry-standard software requires spending less time==money on doing homework.

The very worst case you use virtualbox and run a VM for that program.

Because this VM would require purchasing an operating system license, for the purpose of the article, this would correspond to Betteridge's answer: "no".

Nope, this won't prevent Meltdown, see https://security.stackexchange... where the same thing is discussed. TL;DR you can use variant 3 to train the branch predictor to effectively suppress exceptions without using TSX. There is no way to mitigate Meltdown in microcode.

I believe this clock is accurate up to ±2ns per day, not per second. In fact I would be shocked if it were per second.

Plus, this has to be understood as a random walk of time keeping. When a clock "looses" a second, it's not necessarily slower than some other reference. It may be faster.

Now, if relativity states time dilation slows clocks (from the point of view of Earth-based observers), this is something we can agree upon and take into account. This is not clock imprecision of random loss (or gain) of time. It has in fact and must be taken into account for the GPS system to work at all.

See: https://physics.stackexchange....

But it does look like it can only be offset against vat charged to customers, so I guess these companies would simply have to buy from vat&sales tax-free regions like some areas in the US.

At least in the UK if you import stuff from outside the EU you need to pay VAT

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/va...

If there's customs duty (tariff) you'd have to pay that too

https://www.gov.uk/goods-sent-...

It's the same in other EU countries

https://travel.stackexchange.c...

Incidentally personal belongings usual don't count. The rules on this are a bit vague though - I've flown all over the place with a laptop and no one has demanded VAT or duty on it. It's rumoured that so long as you don't have the original box you're OK, but it's probably really up to whether customs catch you and whether they think it's a personal possession or something you intend to sell. It also seems like if you fly with something it's mostly ignored but if you post it will almost always get clobbered for VAT, duties and a handling fee from the shipper.

Now Iceland is in the EEA but not the EU. But I bet the EU impose EU VAT rules on them. Also arguably even a country that wasn't in the EU wouldn't allow people to avoid VAT by buying things abroad. I.e. I bet the UK keeps the same sort of rules on VAT from non EU countries to keep collecting VAT. And probably the same rules on VAT from EU countries too, because the UK doesn't want to have additional trade barriers for EU/UK trade.

If it's 0C outside and 25C inside, the electric heater is about 8% efficient.

https://physics.stackexchange....

What now? Are you going to repeat tour drivel again?

Redundancy is always good

No! There are two extreme cases. One, where the probability of total system failure is the sum of the probabilities of failure of components (bad), the other where it is the product (good)

1% chance of failure + 1% chance of failure = 2% chance of total failure

1% chance of failure * 1% chance of failure = %0.01 chance of total failure

There here are also intermediate cases, for example when failure of redundant components have some probability greater than 0% and less than 100% of bleeding over into the other components, such as explosive failure of one engine damaging another engine.

The CH-47 Chinook helicopter is an example of the bad, additive case. If one rotor fails, that leads to catastrophic failure. To quote this guy:

the situation ... is called a de-sync and it's a catastrophic failure. The forward and aft rotors are linked by a driveshaft that drives the forward transmission and synchronizes the rotors. In a de-sync the intermeshed rotors will collide and the aircraft will tear itself to pieces.

Also, setting aside for a moment the consequences of a de-sync, the flight controls for both rotors are linked so it would be impossible to flatten the pitch to autorotate just the front rotor head. I suppose it would be mathematically possible to keep the rotors in sync and match the rate of deterioration in the rotor speed, but the odds would be extremely low, and the chances of recovering from any altitude beyond a few feet would be near nil.

Funny how other phone manufacturers don't seem to have the "phone shuts down when it is cold" bug that Apple had and was the excuse to throttle old devices.

Also funny Apple didn't just have a message saying "Your battery is worn out. Please visit an Apple store for a repair. In the meantime you may see lower performance".

Posting as AC to avoid undoing mods.

You are a either a moron, or are willfully ignorant.

Do about 2 seconds worth of Googling, and you will see EXACTLY this issue for EVERY phone OEM, including the supposed "bulletproof" iPhone 4s and 5.

But Samsung, LG, HTC, et al., ALL have multiple reports of "sudden shutdowns" when battery charge is in the 50% or lower range, and/or the phone gets cold.

Here's some random examples:

https://us.community.samsung.c...

https://us.community.samsung.c...

https://forums.androidcentral....

https://thedroidguy.com/2016/1...

https://www.ifixit.com/Answers...

https://www.reddit.com/r/lgv20...

https://forums.androidcentral....

https://forum.xda-developers.c...

https://androidforums.com/thre...

https://android.stackexchange....

https://discussions.apple.com/...

http://iphone-tricks.com/tutor...

https://apple.stackexchange.co...

So, it appears that Apple actually found a REASONBLE software fix for an INDUSTRY-WIDE problem.

Their ONLY "sin" was in not being clear about the fix.

Funny how other phone manufacturers don't seem to have the "phone shuts down when it is cold" bug that Apple had and was the excuse to throttle old devices.

Also funny Apple didn't just have a message saying "Your battery is worn out. Please visit an Apple store for a repair. In the meantime you may see lower performance".

Posting as AC to avoid undoing mods.

You are a either a moron, or are willfully ignorant.

Do about 2 seconds worth of Googling, and you will see EXACTLY this issue for EVERY phone OEM, including the supposed "bulletproof" iPhone 4s and 5.

But Samsung, LG, HTC, et al., ALL have multiple reports of "sudden shutdowns" when battery charge is in the 50% or lower range, and/or the phone gets cold.

Here's some random examples:

https://us.community.samsung.c...

https://us.community.samsung.c...

https://forums.androidcentral....

https://thedroidguy.com/2016/1...

https://www.ifixit.com/Answers...

https://www.reddit.com/r/lgv20...

https://forums.androidcentral....

https://forum.xda-developers.c...

https://androidforums.com/thre...

https://android.stackexchange....

https://discussions.apple.com/...

http://iphone-tricks.com/tutor...

https://apple.stackexchange.co...

So, it appears that Apple actually found a REASONBLE software fix for an INDUSTRY-WIDE problem.

Their ONLY "sin" was in not being clear about the fix.

https://android.stackexchange....

>> Mazda powertrain chief Mitsuo Hitomi said that the main goal with Skyactiv-3 is to increase the engine's thermal efficiency to roughly 56 percent.
Yeah. Not really.
A typical gasoline engine may have an efficiency of 20-30% at best.
The maximum efficency of an otto cycle gasoline engine is 40-47%, which is limited by physics.
More would mean a different cycle needs to be used. You can't beat entropy.
https://physics.stackexchange....

Moreover all these efficiencies are totally misleading and completely wrong for an automobile.
The real efficiency of a gasoline engine may be 30%. But the real average efficiency of a gas engine in a car is no more than 12% !!!!
Why ? because this top efficiency is only achieved at a single point in the motor torque/rpm graph.
At all other regimes, the efficiency drops like a rock into the Marianna trench.
The real world gas powered engine efficiency is 12% at best. Diesel achieves 15-17% at best.

I believe sg_oneill has discovered what he thinks is an XY problem and is trying to solve the underlying root issue.

AMD apparently do a privilege check which either stops the speculated code running or at least makes it side effect free.

I found this interesting comment on how Intel could fix it

https://security.stackexchange...

Fixing Meltdown is relatively easy (compared to Spectre), although it probably can't be done with a microcode update. As well as setting a fault-if/when-this-reaches-retirement bit on the uop, a TLB lookup could gate the page-address bits (to all ones) with the privilege-check. e.g. a load in user-space from any kernel page could micro-architecturally execute as a load from the very top physical page. (And systems with less than the max amount of RAM wouldn't have any physical RAM at that physical address.)

I.e. you do the virtual to physical translation using the TLB but you make invalid addresses map to an address with all ones. Since you have to do the V to P translation anyway, that seems like a good option.

So illegal addresses would map to address (all ones). So that address would be loaded into the cache but the operation would later fault. Since all the addresses you don't have access to map to (all ones) you can't later do a side channel attack to find out if they're cached. And you have to do the virtual to physical translation anyway, so it doesn't cost you anything.

Very elegant.

The process doing the probing gets the GP faults. It's relying on the fact that even though the accesses fault they still affect the cache. So you could clean up that in the GP fault handler before you return to the process, do a context switch or execute any untrusted code.

Actually you could do this in software. Which makes me wonder why no one has thought of it, because it seems a bit obvious. Maybe it's flawed in someway.

A bit of Googling turns up this

https://security.stackexchange...

Fixing Meltdown is relatively easy (compared to Spectre), although it probably can't be done with a microcode update. As well as setting a fault-if/when-this-reaches-retirement bit on the uop, a TLB lookup could gate the page-address bits (to all ones) with the privilege-check. e.g. a load in user-space from any kernel page could micro-architecturally execute as a load from the very top physical page. (And systems with less than the max amount of RAM wouldn't have any physical RAM at that physical address.)

Or a failed privilege check could maybe still allow the load to happen microarchitecturally, but mask the result to all-zero in the load port. (Remember, the Meltdown problem isn't that an unprivileged load can bring kernel data into cache, it's that the secret data load result can be used to make another load with a data-dependent address. Continuing speculative execution with a zero result for any under-privileged load that hits in the TLB wouldn't allow any data-dependent microarchitectural effects).

I.e. you do the virtual to physical translation using the TLB but you make invalid addresses map to an address with all ones. Since you have to do the V to P translation anyway, that seems like a good option.

I'm guessing Intel will do something in the next generation batch of chips out - basically hack the current generation with the fix. With a bit of luck Meltdown has put the ph3ar of the h@xx0rz into them and they'll do that at top priority.

It still means it's not a good time to buy a new PC though - anything you buy now will need KPTI or the equivalent enabled. It's claimed that on chips with PCID support KPTI isn't too bad, but that is dependent on what you're doing with the machine.

Hmm. I always thought that the effects of nuclear bomb are significantly influenced by the height and most of the damage is done by the shockwave and heatwave rather than direct thermal and radioactive radiation.

/me searches the web
Perhaps here is a better explanation.

You may have an XY problem here. You say want to stream in HD, but you probably just want to watch in HD. One workaround is to install a BD player in your camper or bring one with you to your hotel room. Another is to use a video service that allows downloading in advance for later play while offline and do so while connected to fiber, cable, or DSL. Or what makes those impractical for the use cases you describe?

Visibilty testing server side is very straight forward it's not a hard problem. You just need basic representation of geometry via bounds and test for line intersection.

That's not based on research, that's based on actually implementing it for real games.

This is so not even close to reality. See this Stack Exchange comment for an explanation https://gamedev.stackexchange....

That article is people not actually making games trying to figure out how to do it, as most noobs do via the most visually obvious brute force approach.

As I mentioned above, this kind of thing is almost always done via colliders and raycasting of some type.