Slashdot Mirror

The crane to do that would have to be massive. They already have a solution though, it's a giant Roomba that goes under the center of the rocket and clamps on like a giant weight like this, the problem is it's not yet compatible with the Falcon Heavy center. If the weather had been better they could have welded it to the deck, that's what they did before but maybe the conditions were too rough for that. Either way once they adapt the clamps this won't happen again.

It's really cute that some people think that you can publish Secret documents from any nation

Meanwhile, Slashdotlawyers should probably read this https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/1...

Better call the DOJ to let them know that they can't do that.

People like you can't read between the lines, you can't hold a corrupt government accountable when they can make they can classify their corruption and bad behavior as state secrets. So while you are sitting their in a pile of your own festering stupidity unable to see through the lies of the corporate state, people with a brain know how corruption actually works. When corrupt people are writing the laws and making the policies, of course you're going to be "breaking the law" that's how corruption works idiot. The laws are corrupt themselves and can be made to mean anything depending on "who's guys" are interpreting them.

If in doubt just look at what has happened to the public domain in intellectual property law in the united states. It's been totally destroyed.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

Please enlighten everyone about what happened to the corals in the Great Barrier Reed during the Medieval Warm Period. It was quite warm then, too, yet we still have plenty of corals today.

The Medieval Warm Period was a similar temperatures in the 1980s. It's gotten a lot warmer since then.

Weren't paying attention, eh?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

After the US, Soviet and China shit in it first. Whenever a big nation goes "We've already have weapons with that capability, but you shouldn't have it." they're not exactly coming from neutral ground. The US is very often trying to freeze the status quo when it's to the American advantage, while acting oblivious to the fact that they're asking to carve permanent differences in stone. Take for example CO2 emissions, the US has one of the highest rates per capita in the world but the American focus has been about curbing growth. Which is nice, if you're already a post-industrial high-pollution low-growth country. But if you're China or India you look at that graph and think fuck that, why should I have to pollute less than an American? It's just as much my planet as yours. I'm not a huge fan of India doing this, but US criticism is the pot calling the kettle black.

Not poison ivy, but nettle if you have noticed. This one to be clear

they require you to do a bit of soldering

Someone is going to get smart and add an option to order these with 0.1" pitch pins already attached.
So we can plug them into a plugboard, just like the old DIP packages.
SMD packaging sort of screwed up the "plug and jumper" method of prototyping.

I can't tell if you are joking with some form of sarcasm or just ACKing my comment.

However, I do not think that would be a solution approach that would lead anywhere. In the specific context of Slashdot, I think the two most important approaches would be (1) Make the dimensions properly orthogonal and symmetric and (2) Make moderation reflexive and symmetric with a multidimensional form of karma. In more general contexts, I think the broadest brush I've painted with is currently called MEPR. One version is at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wik....

Weird thought of the morning is that programming is a kind of meta-thinking. Leading to the conclusion that I was only a second tier programmer because I am too meta or not meta enough, or perhaps because I lack sufficient control when my thoughts move between levels. I've definitely convinced that the first tier programmers I've worked for and with are more clear and focused in their meta-thinking. (I see it as a related topic, though I'm not sure how to express the closeness of the relationship... I feel it, but I can't say it. Another aspect of my zen collapse?)

I know this is going to be a shocking revelation, but the planet's climate has always been in a changing state. The problem is that climate changes span longer periods of time than the time frame in which humans have been capable of collecting usable data. The most reliable source on the entire planet (/s for idiots who can't spot sarcasm), Wikipedia, Notably, we've been in a period of cooling for several thousand years and large jumps and drops for "short" time frames (years, not centuries) are not unusual; in fact, multiple ice cores show several large oscillations over multiple millennia.

How long have we been collecting real-time climate data again? Oh yeah, since 1880, or just under 140 years. Not even a blip on the goddamn radar. And "the science is settled!" retards wonder how people can be skeptical. It'd be a shame if the actual data disagreed with them...which it does.

"Stop lying. Stop with the Fox talking points."
Association fallacy

"Just stop. We have heard it all before."
  'old news' fallacy

"The evidence, the data says otherwise."
What evidence since you couldn't be bothered to provide any?

Other countries following the US lead with steel tariffs?
2016 election results by county and the Census bureau map of hispanic population?
More countries phasing out ICE vehicles, thus dramatically decreasing their demand and profitability?

"This is the worst kind of decision making by feelz instead of facts and reason."
Projection.

Interesting comment and even more interesting that it got modded as interesting. I do think it's a bit simplistic. Also too bad the ACs can't read or understand your sig, eh?

I actually think there's a more general problem here, and I even proposed and discussed a more general solution approach with some people on WIkipedia. I am NOT surprised that nothing came of it. However, I would say that it was somewhat useful for me in terms of understanding the underlying symmetries more clearly.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wik...

I'm not sure for which dimensions the anti-hero of this story should receive negative reputation. However I think he should have a enormously negative reputation even relative to other lawyers. Dickishness of the highest caliber should not produce PROFIT.

P.S. I think the same approach has some relevance to Slashdot, but there is even less chance of Slashdot significantly improving. At least Wikipedia has some money to play with.

This was like fitting a V-12 engine into a model T.

How dare you speak badly of such things!

Also, have a look at the state of corruption in the country as seen by its own citizens. And that was in 2009. As of 2019 the situation is a even worse.

As soon as you sit down and learn them. Here, this image contains most of the information that you need to effectively use basic trig, and will help you to visualize how the primary trig functions interact: https://commons.wikimedia.org/...

sine and cosine are probably the most important ones, as they decompose angle-and-distance polar coordinates into (x,y) rectangular ones, and it's extremely difficult to perform rotations or general-case not-perfectly-horizontal-or-vertical translations without them.

If we're going to have time zones at all, then the right time tries to align noon with the sun's zenith. A balance of sunrise and sunset at equal distances from noon (or midnight). At least as best as possible, since there are variations throughout the year, as well as each location within the time zone. Daylight saving time aligns that high point of the sun with 1pm instead of noon.

Some countries are worse than others in this:

World_Time_Zones_Map.png
DST_Countries_Map.png

Argentina is in UTC-3, even though it is entirely within the UTC-4 and UTC-5 regions (parts of it are the same longitude as New York City). Spain is in UTC+1 despite being directly south of the U.K. (UTC+0). And Spain then celebrates DST, making the sun's high point at 2pm or later. There are lots of other examples, though many of them occur at extreme latitudes where time zones have less meaning (and there are less people around to be affected).

What's interesting about the time zone map is how many time zones drift west of their natural boundaries. Almost none drift to the east. This already pushes for later sunrises and sunsets. It's clearly a strong human societal force, pushing for unbalanced time reckoning. There may be advantages to it, but they are psychological, existing in how people work. The same could be said for the concept of time zones itself.

I'm not really arguing against time zones or DST. Just hoping people would realize that DST is just about tricking people into getting up earlier. Though if enough people realized that, it probably would stop working :)

If we're going to have time zones at all, then the right time tries to align noon with the sun's zenith. A balance of sunrise and sunset at equal distances from noon (or midnight). At least as best as possible, since there are variations throughout the year, as well as each location within the time zone. Daylight saving time aligns that high point of the sun with 1pm instead of noon.

Some countries are worse than others in this:

World_Time_Zones_Map.png
DST_Countries_Map.png

Argentina is in UTC-3, even though it is entirely within the UTC-4 and UTC-5 regions (parts of it are the same longitude as New York City). Spain is in UTC+1 despite being directly south of the U.K. (UTC+0). And Spain then celebrates DST, making the sun's high point at 2pm or later. There are lots of other examples, though many of them occur at extreme latitudes where time zones have less meaning (and there are less people around to be affected).

What's interesting about the time zone map is how many time zones drift west of their natural boundaries. Almost none drift to the east. This already pushes for later sunrises and sunsets. It's clearly a strong human societal force, pushing for unbalanced time reckoning. There may be advantages to it, but they are psychological, existing in how people work. The same could be said for the concept of time zones itself.

I'm not really arguing against time zones or DST. Just hoping people would realize that DST is just about tricking people into getting up earlier. Though if enough people realized that, it probably would stop working :)

Not a She. His XY Chromosomes says he's a male. That is how science classifies him.

Well, science also classifies you as a moron. Since we both agree SCIENCE[*] is always right we therefore both accept my statement.

Anyway just to show you that your sub-schoolboy level of understanding of genetics is wrong, see if you can guess which of these people are XY:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

(none of them have had gender reassignment surgery). It's all of them!

Also you plonker, science doesn't bother itself with your silly pronouns. It's more concerned with more precise words like "phenotype".

[*] i.e. some rando claiming it's what "science says".

I agree that this story is an opinion presented as fact, but as to the sciency parts of your post... science makes it possible to know things. Sometimes those things are very simple to discover, like whether pumping carbon into a volume of air will cause it to retain additional heat from sunlight travelling through it. Or whether vaccines cause autism. A simple study of kids with and without vaccines, with a tiny bit of statistical analysis is all that's needed. Very very simple things.

And yet, a huge number of people disagree with these findings. It's a conspiracy by left-wing types pushing their hidden agendas, and they explain that if we reduce carbon emissions then left-wing types will benefit at the expense of right-wing types, because only left-wing types build hippy electric cars and renewable bullshit. And also the scientists make millions by fooling us in some way. And we'll lose jobs and life will suck and the other side will -win-. Also, vaccines fit in there somehow now.

As an outside observer who could care less about the left vs right political struggle in the US, (I assume you're from the US?) I'm amazed at this mental thrashing about. Otherwise intelligent people are unable to see that, in spite of everything else, and all of the scandals and conspiracies and scientists making bad predictions, that adding carbon to air causes it to retain more heat from sunlight. And we are adding carbon to our air, and therefore... what? What will happen? This is not a trick question.

All of the bickering over climate models and jobs and whatever else is just a distraction. It's irrelevant. It doesn't change the physics of very simple experiments like this one. Measuring the carbon in the athmosphere, also not that hard to do: https://commons.wikimedia.org/...

But enough of this. I think we can both agree on one thing: Apple products are overpriced and overrated, and minor improvements to smartphones aren't real news.

It's really not terribly complicated to figure out. Roads and highways have a non-zero width. Space occupied by the highways is space that isn't being used for productive uses. Some parts of the interstates through major cities carve canyons through the area that are between 350 and 500 feet wide. Parking lots needed to store all the cars on those highways create endless expanses of paved areas. With more and more lanes and wider roads, it means destinations are farther apart because there is more paved space in between them. Compare historic, even rural downtowns, to more auto-centric design that is inhospitable to anyone not in a car: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

Additionally suburban cul-de-sac style, single use residential planning forces commercial and other areas far away from where people live, also requireing more car travel. Said developments usually have winding one-way and non-thru streets which dump all traffic onto already overused arterial feeders.

Just try using your brain for once.

wikipedia added some auth params to the url that stopped it from working on my end here is the working link

Tibet comes first I guess?

Might also check this:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/...

Don't forget to use an authorised Communist Dog Leash.

There are some cards with more than a single flash chip inside them, but they are always full size sdcards.

Here's an example.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

Most will only be a single chip though.

The big bottleneck is the controller itself, which manipulates the flash. SDCard uses a serial protocol, not a parallel data IO direct to the flash chip. The flash chip could be hella fast, but if there is a cheap and slow controller driving it.. That's like putting an SSD on a SATA I interface.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

and before there were spell checkers to fubar a word that was never a word before.

We ached for video phone calls for decades [...]

I don't know of anyone who wished for video calls or uses them now that webcam hardware is so commonly available. I know of people who go to some effort to disable video in their calls (apparently including Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg who probably has access to a lot of webcams given how many people still use Facebook).

[...]but now that it's dead-easy we're all monkey about it. Grow up, humanity. Nobody cares about your mundane life.

Apparently the NSA and their many partners do, and trading data about people is very big business as well. The evidence from Ed Snowden alone is far more compelling than your summary and actually informative. Mass surveillance simply doesn't work as you claim. As Snowden, Greenwald, Poitras, and others have told us for years: mass surveillance is non-discriminatory. Data is collected en masse (NSA's strategy is "collect it all" not "collect some of the data"), decrypted, indexed, retained, and searched through later. The impression I got from Snowden's description was that much like someone using a web search engine, what's deemed interesting (what somebody "cares about") is decided at search time. So it's impossible to conclude that "Nobody cares about your mundane life" because the data you generate helps a lot of businesses every day. Another example is "LOVEINT"—people with access to this collected data using it to track what their love interests or spouses (current or former in both cases) are doing, perhaps another more clear-cut counterexample to your evidenceless claim.

As I write this your post is moderated "informative" but I can't find a single part of your post that points to any information or backs any of its claims with evidence.

And for those who don't believe me, here's a photo of her.

You dream a pretty dream, but you should probably wake up and smell the swamp. The plutocracy is only growing more entrenched over time with the wealthiest members of society getting exactly what they want and everyone else getting crumbs. I just hope the rich wake up before their heads are on pikes.

I know that many of you avoid 'smart' TVs for various reasons. I'm struggling with my 'smart' phone that seems to do things whenever it pleases despite my preferences. I don't want a car that decides for itself what it should do. I don't want a car that connects to the internet whenever it, or some outside intelligence, wants it to.

I'd much prefer a 1956 Corvette, dumb as a bucket of rocks, to the smartest car on the market.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

A bank of lights. These or similar. The picture is from a test at 100 feet. The longer distance is reported but not photographed.

White is a synonym for Caucasian, dupshit.

Christ you're thick. And dishonest. Probably both. Here's a picture of an idian guy you complete moron:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/...

still think that guy is white?

I know from past experience that you know what it means;

I know exactly what it means: you bleat about race and gender and whatnot and how you're so virtuous for making *just* the right comments on it, so your fellow idiots from whichever nutty political wing you stick to think you're marvellous.

Now this part I'm not sure about; are you actually stupid enough to believe that a 9th century madrasa was anything remotely like the later European universities? :)

I knew you'd fall righ into that little trap I laid for you. You are so predictable. All the oldest universities in Europe were founded essentially as centres of religous teaching.

Or are you aware of the difference,

And what difference is that? The icky brown religion makes it not a proper university unlike the clean white religion?

>Health care and women's education are the main factors that drove reproduction rates down, not stable governments or wealth

No, that was the reason of pre-war sharp decrease in births. The last one was because of the pill.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

For reference: the pill was introduced in 1960.

The global reason why we have less people is because we need less people.

That's all there is to it. Larger number of children does not give any advantage to family nowadays.

That's why there is huge "family" propaganda business in US. People who try to sell crap to people need more consumers, while on the other hand the only conditions that stimulate people to have more children are removed.

Give women nothing else to do than raising children and you will get more children.

And this pretty much sums up why the scale is weird and hard to use. Many people can relate to the temperature water freezes (0c) and the temp it boils at (100c).

Of course... Those temperatures are at sea-level (or, more precisely, 1 atmosphere). Water can be made to "boil" at room-temperature in a vacuum (or reduced pressure) and (theoretically) be made to "freeze" at room pressure with enough added pressure (more than 632.4 MPa) -- even staying frozen at 100 C @2.216 GPa ... see Phase Diagram of Water

In this respect, most scale correlations are arbitrary, or only accurate under specific conditions.

We already do this to collect the closing costs of a nuclear plant. For every dollar a customer pays for electricity generated with nuclear power, a few cents go into building up a fund to pay for the cleanup of any accidents. Japan's nuclear plants have produced roughly 200 TWh per year for the last 30 years, or 6000 TWh. The Fukushima cleanup cost is currently estimated at $180 billion. So its cost relative to the amount of power generated is ($180 billion) / (6000 TWh) = $30 million / TWh = $30 / MWh = 3 cents / kWh.

So a surcharge of just 3 cents/kWh on all electricity generated by nuclear power would have paid for the Fukushima cleanup costs. As there have only been two major nuclear accidents, 3 cents/kWh is probably towards the high end. But it's small enough you could just go with it and collect that into a disaster fund. (The third-biggest accident - 3 Mile Island - had a $1 billion cleanup cost. If you amortize that over all nuclear power production in the U.S., it works out to just 0.006 cents/kWh. A Fukushima-sized cleanup here would work out to a 1.1 cent/kWh surcharge.)

And to address AC's comment, Insurance doesn't work because only a small number of nuclear plants are necessary to power the world. The U.S. has about 100 nuclear plants, which generate 20% of all our electricity. About 450 nuclear plants throughout the world provides 10% of the world's electricity. For insurance to work, insurers have to be able to reliably predict what the rate of payout will be year-to-year. This requires a huge number of individual insurance policies.

The greater your sample size (the more individual insurance policies there are), the tighter the probability distribution gets. That's what turns unexpected costs of accidents and disasters into predictable costs. To get a distribution tight enough for insurance to be reliably predictable requires at least ~10,000 individual insured. Fewer than that and it becomes dfficult to make business decisions with a high degree of certainty. (i.e. their profit margin fluctuates by several percent each year based on random chance, swamping out any effects of their actual business decisions, making it difficult for them to determine if a good year was due to good decisions or good luck, or a bad year was due to bad decisions or bad luck.)

This is why insurance on nuclear plants is astronomical. The insurers can't sell enough policies to make the risk predictable. So they end up having to charge a premium several hundred or several thousand times the expected payout to minimize their risk exposure.

You don't know what you're talking about.

Well, I beg to differ.

Concentrators work.

In a limited set of geographic locations with mostly direct insolation. For most of the world, they're completely useless.

That crippled their adoption because everyone wanted the cheapest panel solution possible, not the most efficient possible, for their rollouts.

Efficiency can be measured in various ways (thermodynamic? economic? raw material utilization?), and economy of operation is of paramount importance. Whatever different pet peeve you have with current installations is probably because you're not the one who has to pay for it.

If you're not factoring in the cost of replacing cheap panels in 15-20 years

Make that 25-30 years at least.

and are agog at the 2x~ price of such efficient collector panels

Make that more like half the price of what you're paying today. (Not sure what's an agog, though.)

Also, you don't seem to understand how far Mars is away from Earth, relative to Melbourne Australia.

Wut? :-p

Yes, this Apple mouse is quite clearly an EXACT copy of this three-button mouse from the Alto, only a slightly different shade of beige.

On a much longer timescale, this work is suggesting that there has been a persistent increase in cratering events in the Earth-Moon system.

If genes from bacteria from a petri dish get in the human germ line then there's lots of weird questions to ask regardless of if they were GMO or not. Anyhow, look up the amino acid coding sequences and you'll see why they are how they are: contingent chemistry. The third base pair of the triplicate doesn't even matter much of the time. https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

Not a nice thing to say about Wikipedia-Chan

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

United Nations logo

OMG! Star Trek is based on the Chinese!
Chinese National Space Administration logo
United Federation of Planets logo

OMG! Star Trek is based on the Chinese!
Chinese National Space Administration logo
United Federation of Planets logo

How about if Google showed a map of Mexico that included Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California? USA wouldn't be happy.

I doubt the United States would object to a historic map labeled "Mexico prior to American intervention". If it did, then a map of Mexico as of 1824 would already have been removed from an article about American intervention in Mexico on an American website.

Would the map of Kurdish regions have been removed if its author eschewed the disputed name "Kurdistan" in favor of "Historically Kurdish regions of modern-day Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria"?

This tells you everything you need to know:
"Scientist Mark Svoboda started the drought map 20 years ago, when Congress took an interest after drought struck Washington, D.C."

There have been occasional short and long droughts across the US forever. Grapes of Wrath, anyone? But it suddenly becomes "of interest" to the Federal government when congress people suddenly can't (have some illegal lawn care worker) water their lawns.

The current "crisis" is mostly one of reporting; utterly pedestrian in it's extent and well within the norm of the past century's variability.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

The solution is the same - monitoring the populations and setting quotas accordingly.

But is effective management possible? The IWC was founded in 1946 to manage whaling, and the moratorium came in 1982. So they couldn't figure it out over four decades. From the Wikipedia article on the IWC, I noticed this:

At the IWC's annual meeting in 1991, the Scientific Committee submitted its finding that there existed approximately 761,000 minke whales in Antarctic waters, 87,000 in the northeast Atlantic, and 25,000 in the North Pacific. With such populations, it was submitted, 2000 minke whales could be harvested annually without endangering the population.

That's 2000 animals per year. Suppose 10 countries want to hunt whales. That's 200 whales per country. Have a look at this chart on historical catches. There's a table too. Do you think countries would abide by such a low catch number? Have a look at this article. All while the IWC existed to "manage" things. Of course, we could all agree that only Japan and Norway can hunt substantial numbers, but I don't think that is really fair to the rest of the world.

I think managing whale hunting is like providing safe injection rooms for addicts rather than telling people to eat healthy food. It isn't an activity that should be treated as normal. I don't trust countries to be honest in their reporting, and I think that the way whales are killed is barbaric and many of them suffer.

For whales, some of the whale species are in direct competition with otherwise sustainable fishing, and some are even threatening other vulnerable marine life that's at risk of extinction. Sure, if we stopped overharvesting and polluting the oceans, it would be less of a problem, but fat chance of that.

Fair enough, but at the end of the day, I think that humans will have to face their impact on the planet, particularly with regard to overharvesting. Since 1985, 55,073 whales have been harvested by IWC countries. If that isn't enough to protect other species, we need a new plan.

You were saying?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

I mean, maybe in general. But this is California we're talking about.

LOL. Uh, no. You'll have to provide some pretty hefty citations and facts to back up that ludicrous bunch of baloney.

Really? You're that lazy? And also ignorant? So... you're stupid. From fucking Wikipedia:

The bare wire conductors on the line are generally made of aluminum (either plain or reinforced with steel, or composite materials such as carbon and glass fiber)..

Or you could just look at the fucking pictures, since you're too stupid to read:Sample cross section Carbon Core.

Idiot.

LOL. Uh, no. You'll have to provide some pretty hefty citations and facts to back up that ludicrous bunch of baloney.

Really? You're that lazy? And also ignorant? So... you're stupid. From fucking Wikipedia:

The bare wire conductors on the line are generally made of aluminum (either plain or reinforced with steel, or composite materials such as carbon and glass fiber)..

Or you could just look at the fucking pictures, since you're too stupid to read:Sample cross section Carbon Core.

Idiot.

That's a pretty questionable definition, since air-breathing aircraft like the SR-71 can sustain altitudes where the sky is black. That "looks" like space, but since you're still talking about atmospheric flight, it obviously isn't.

Here's a photo from 83k feet with a black sky: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
The aircraft's altitude record for sustained flight was roughly 2k feet higher than that, and it's reached higher in climbs. Baumgartner jumped from 128k feet from a balloon, where there an even sharper transition from the haze on the horizon to deep black in the sky.