Slashdot Mirror
How We Know North Korea Didn't Detonate a Hydrogen Bomb
StartsWithABang writes: The news has been aflame with reports that North Korea detonated a hydrogen bomb on January 6th, greatly expanding its nuclear capabilities with their fourth nuclear test and the potential to carry out a devastating strike against either South Korea or, if they're more ambitious, the United States. The physics of what a nuclear explosion actually does and how that signal propagates through the air, oceans and ground, however, can tell us whether this was truly a nuclear detonation at all, and if so, whether it was fusion or fission. From all the data we've collected, this appears to be nothing new: just a run-of-the-mill fission bomb, with the rest being a sensationalized claim.
(Related: Yesterday's post about how seismic data also points to a conventional nuke, rather than an H-bomb.)
WARNING: The link goes to Forbes.com. Do no click on it.
Just a normal fission nuke? Oh, ok, we're safe then.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
I'm no Korean speaker, but did they actually announce a hydrogen bomb explosion, or certain technologies involved hydrogen bomb production? It's not like they wouldn't be aware that foreign organisations would know what's going down, of course, so this might just be an internal propaganda exercise that the RoW decided to pick up on. Maybe they wanted to see sensationalised headlines from the West to prove to their people that they were under threat again.
*rolls eyes*
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
OK, over half of the topics you suggest are your personal pet peeves, rather than current news stories. The others have already had their run here. What do you suggest, that they keep rerunning your issues with software development until your satisfied with the end result? Now, that being said, some of the articles here have been pretty bad.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
WTF Slashdot.
Two fucking Forbes articles in one day.
Two fucking StartsWithASlashvertisement posts in one day.
How many more readers do you want to leave? I'm getting to my breaking point!
This is my favorite theory of why N Korea detonated a bomb, because China snubbed the dear-leader's hand-picked girl band. Things are strange over there.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I've posted this, today, on slashdot and I'm posting it again.
In particular, Fuck Ethan Siegel, the handle resembling a human name used by the StartsWithABang guy, well-known Internet troll and manipulator of disinformation ("digital strategist" in today's Internet dysphemism), who is claimed to be "professor" perhaps of nothing but the art of aggressive marketeering.
dieethandie.
Forbes is a well known scam site.
The website "offers" 17 trackers on a single page serving what they claim to be "content", by the count of Ghostery. In comparison, Slashdot serves 6.
The site claims to promise "light ad" and nags you to turn off the ad blocker. In reality, it's 4% content and 96% ads.
What's worse, the blogs hosted there offers no information that is so unique that is worthy of whitelisting the site in your content blocker. The "Starts with a bang" blog, for example, "publishes" stories that are actually regurgitated, thinly-wrapped, dumbed-down, borderline plagiarism from science journals, websites and blogs. The link to the actual news is usually buried with a wall of distracting text and images copied or re-phrased from the original source. The whole blog serves no other purpose than baiting the reader for the purpose of tracking.
In addition, it appears that the purpose of hosting ads includes malware delivery.
The behavior of Forbes.com is at best sociopathic and outright criminal at worst. They look really desperate.
It's only a matter of time before this hub of mal-adverts gets its page ranks bitchslapped by Google, and pulling down the rank of all prolific referrers, including Slashdot.
Which is completely deserved.
His list was also what I'd call my list. Perhaps you just don't fit in with us.... I'm with him.
You mean you *are* him.
I don't want to look silly, after all.
The destruction of the GNOME project thanks to the horribly failed GNOME 3 debacle. * The destruction of the Firefox web browser thanks to numerous fucking idiotic changes being forced on its users by Mozilla.
Nobody cares any more because realize that Mozilla is so f'ed up that it has to get worse before it gets better.
* The destruction of Linux as a viable OS, especially when used on servers, all thanks to systemd being forced by all of the major distros.
FreeBSD FTW. If it's good enough for Sony and Apple, ...
* The fall of the GPL thanks to people wanting to use truly free licenses like the BSD and MIT licenses.
You say that like it's a bad thing to replace a restrictive license like the GPL with a freer license.
* The fall of Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
That was an easy one to figure out pretty much right from the get-go. Only the n00b language-of-the-month people got sucked into that.
* The Rust and Perl 6 programming language disasters.
And? There weren't that many people using Rust, and Perl 5x still works fine.
* The Go and Swift programming language success stories.
Nobody who's not using it cares. Replacing a set of tools with another because "NEW" has been done too many times.
* The rise of FreeBSD and OpenBSD, thanks to systemd ruining Linux.
Again, what's so bad about a system with no licensing restrictions, as opposed to the GPL?
* Microsoft porting .NET to OS X and Linux.
They're free to do whatever they want. That's not suddenly going to make someone who didn't use it before suddenly want to use it.
* Firefox OS failing worse than nearly any software project has failed in a very long time.
How is this not a GOOD thing? Maybe it will force them to concentrate more effort on core products, like fixing the memory leaks and other bugs in Firefox.
See, there's always a silver lining around every cloud.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
According to the Norh Koreans:
"...The Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and the Gaddafi regime in Libya could not escape the fate of destruction after being deprived of their foundations for nuclear development and giving up nuclear programs of their own accord, yielding to the pressure of the US and the West keen on their regime changes... a bitter lesson should be drawn from those events..."
I wonder why I am inclined to believe them. Am I alone?
...my daughter is a seismologist you insensitive clod!
Achille Talon
Hop!
Well I don't know about these other assholes... But I'm not him. I'm not me either. Maybe I'm you.
Ha, ha, and ha, very funny but completely unoriginal.
In the Chelmyabinsk asteroid air burst, there was a video of people who saw the flash and then stood there for multiples of seconds until the blast wave bloodied their faces with glass shards.
Duck and Cover is for real for all wide-are effect events in the kiloton to megaton range, whatever their source. If you are close enough, yes, you will be vaporized. If you are far enough away that you can be conscious after seeing the flash, it will take some time for the blast to arrive. Instead of just standing there with your mouth open, get your face under cover so people don't have to pick the glass splinters out of your hide.
Jesus wept.
You are welcome on my lawn.
No, you are definitely him.
I miss the old Slashdot. This Socialist Justice editorial selection seems to be betting in the way of interesting tech subjects. Perhaps Slashdot needs a #GamerGate to bring stuff back to "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters" again ?
I'm pretty sure Bill Clinton got a treaty out of the North Koreans that they wouldn't make nukes. In return the US gave lots of aid to prop up the regime. With that 'success' Obama has just done the same with the Iranian theocracy, even using the same negotiators to make sure the best deal was hammered out. Totalitarian dictators don't tell fibs, right? (I was talking about Iran, not about the US regime).
* The fall of the GPL thanks to people wanting to use truly free licenses like the BSD and MIT licenses.
Your phrasing clearly shows an agenda. This "fall" is occurring only in the dreams of those who want to corporatise OSS software while giving nothing back.
* The Go and Swift programming language success stories.
*What* Go and Swift programming language success stories?
* The rise of FreeBSD and OpenBSD, thanks to systemd ruining Linux.
While I'm not a huge fan of systemd (wouldn't miss it, were it to... die in a fire, for instance), this hasn't kept *me* from using Linux for the last decade-plus. I don't see it stopping many other folks, either.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Forgot one:
* The destruction of the GNOME project thanks to the horribly failed GNOME 3 debacle.
"And nothing of value was lost".
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
It exists, and it's really good:
pipedot.org
The UK did the same thing in 1957.
to lazy to do that.
Man.. we're old. :(
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Like k5 all over again. :(
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
So to a business owner, _no_ commodity is more valuable than feedback.
People have a bad meal at a restaurant, and 90% of the time, leave without saying a word. The business owner is perplexed, and eventually goes out of business.
"The roast beef here is terrible."
Six words could have saved his business.
The same is true for every business.
AC is certainly free to stop reading, and AC knows that. You're not really adding to the conversation, but you could dissuade them from providing an extremely valuable service to businesses in the future - feedback.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
I'm not him.
I'm Spartacus.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I think he means 'compared to older windows versions'. I think in that case he is right. It became a lot less awkward doing admin things since windows 7.
Nothing in comparison to a well-configured unix derivative, though.
soylentnews.org is updated more frequently than pipedot.org and seems to have a bigger (though still small) community.
Anything to back that up? We didnt pretend anything in 1957.
No I'm AC!
I've found that SN has a serious problem with abusive moderation. Like you stated, it has a small community. This means that a small number of people have mod points. And to put it nicely, pretty much all of the mods over there are crazies. If you post a comment that doesn't fit into their rather fucked up world view, then they will very often gang up on you and downmod you. At least Slashdot has a big enough mod community that it isn't monopolized by a small number of whackos. If somebody mods abusively here, it's often undone by somebody else.
Many of the stories at SN are the same ones as here, like the exact same shitty Hugh Pickens submissions submitted to both sites. The rest of the submissions are typically poorly written and very poorly edited, too. There are some frequent contributors there with a very heavy leftist slant, and the articles they submit are total rubbish (and I say this as somebody who is quite liberal). Even Slashdot manages to have better articles than SN, that's how bad SN is!
And Pipedot is a fucking joke. It's basically a dead site. One or two new submissions each week combined with maybe two or three comments each is not sufficient.
I think we need a technical solution in FOSS.
I think the climate of the internet is ready for it. Everyone is sick of Slashdot's turn for the worse. Redditors are crying about reddit going down. Everyone is complaining about the twitter sinking ship. Facebook is... facebook.
We haven't seen a new, good, decentralized site in years. Personally I think all of the software is already written, it just needs a bit of tweaking.
- Usenet for discussion.
- IRC for chat.
- nginx front end.
The only thing that needs to be written is a decent moderation on top of it all.
I assume he's referring to Orange Herald, which was a big fission bomb that was meant as a "backup" in case the actual H-bomb didn't work, so they could pretend that they'd developed the technology.
However, since the real H-bomb (Grapple X) was tested successfully less than 6 months later, it was all a bit moot.
* The fall of the GPL thanks to people wanting to use truly free licenses like the BSD and MIT licenses.
This is still news. It's an ongoing issue. It's causing the FSF and software like GCC to become irrelevant.
This is silly, GCC is just a technologically inferior option to LLVM/clang -- ask anyone working in the compiler space about it. Even the folks working on GCC admit that's not aging gracefully.
If GCC becomes irrelevant, they will have no one to blame but themselves.
His list selections are all SLASHDOT material. That's kinda what this site used to be about. If you want "current news stories" go to ..er.. FOX ;-)
Remember when all nukes were "unconventional"? I guessed we missed the invite to the first annual nuke convention.
It probably didn't have a catchy name like "Nuke Expo" or "Nukecon".
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
We have equipment that distinguish a large conventional explosion from a nuclear one - called seismometers. Using them one can detect the power and the impulse of an explosion meaning that either the NK have a nuclear weapon or an unknown type of conventional explosive with similar characteristics of that of a nuclear weapon. And if they have a conventional explosive of that type it would be even more dangerous than the nuclear alternative.
But don't worry - it is impossible to make conventional explosives with similar impulse of a nuclear one.
I've been here quite a while too, if that counts. I am in violent agreement with the others in this thread. I like my 4 digit uid, but I long ago realized that Slashdot can't be saved. When cmdrtaco left and it was sold to dice, that was the end.
Slashdot has always been about its user community, so I am sure that a technical solution can easily be made, and that community will find it when that happens.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I wholeheartedly agree with this post. When I was first on Slashdot there weren't many items in the daily email with the links in it that I wouldn't read, nowadays I am struggling to find 2 or 3 each day out of the 15 stories that are sent.
Let's get back to Linux, programming, web and general IT Industry news like it used to be!
Siv
Martley, Near Worcester UK.
Trapper: Count off!
Radar: [to Hawkeye ]Are you one?
Hawkeye: Yes, are you one too?
Bark less. Wag more.
It's called monetization. Looks like Slashdot tries to become MSM, not news for nerds.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
Me too, certainly more than half.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
+1 Funny !
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Mobile friendly pages can die in a fire.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Grouping these up in a way that makes a touch more sense.
The destruction of the GNOME project thanks to the horribly failed GNOME 3 debacle.
* The destruction of the Firefox web browser thanks to numerous fucking idiotic changes being forced on its users by Mozilla.
Nobody cares any more because realize that Mozilla is so f'ed up that it has to get worse before it gets better.
* Firefox OS failing worse than nearly any software project has failed in a very long time.
How is this not a GOOD thing? Maybe it will force them to concentrate more effort on core products, like fixing the memory leaks and other bugs in Firefox.
See, there's always a silver lining around every cloud.
Firefox lost me with the insatiable pace of updates knocking my extensions out of compatibility. The fact that Google offered a hugely more streamlined experience sealed it's fate. Now, I only use it when I am testing something that requires cross-browser support. It can die and I could not care less, neither would I care to read an article about it.
* The rise of FreeBSD and OpenBSD, thanks to systemd ruining Linux.
* The destruction of Linux as a viable OS, especially when used on servers, all thanks to systemd being forced by all of the major distros.
This has to be some of the most cleverly disguised FUD campaigns I have ever seen. Linux is still quite relevant, and is still overtaking MS products which have recently begun charging licenses *by the core* for it's 2016+ Server products. Then there's the Windows 10 thing which I am witnessing people begin their migration to Linux. I work at a very large global corporation with thousands of AWS servers and I have seen at MAX one or two OSX servers.
As for Systemd I was angry that they were changing things that didn't really seem to have a purpose but it makes a lot of sense with the bottom statement.:
"One of systemd's main goals is to unify basic Linux configurations and service behaviors across all distributions."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
FreeBSD FTW. If it's good enough for Sony and Apple, ...
Again, what's so bad about a system with no licensing restrictions, as opposed to the GPL?
You say that like it's a bad thing to replace a restrictive license like the GPL with a freer license.
* The fall of the GPL thanks to people wanting to use truly free licenses like the BSD and MIT licenses.
You mean Profitable. Under the BSD License I can take any open source you develop and change it a bit and be completely free to return that code to a proprietary format and NOT share *any* code in my product or offering.
* The fall of Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
That was an easy one to figure out pretty much right from the get-go. Only the n00b language-of-the-month people got sucked into that.
^^ This right here. Thank god that support / upgrade Nightmare is going to be over soon.
* The Rust and Perl 6 programming language disasters.
And? There weren't that many people using Rust, and Perl 5x still works fine.
* The Go and Swift programming language success stories.
Nobody who's not using it cares. Replacing a set of tools with another because "NEW" has been done too many times.
* Microsoft porting .NET to OS X and Linux.
They're free to do whatever they want. That's not suddenly going to make someone who didn't use it before suddenly want to use it.
No matter the language there will always be sloppy programmers available to make it look bad. Some languages just seem to invite a disproportionate number than others. I can't wait to see the looks on the .net goofs!
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Even the first "failed" British test in 1957 has a 300kt yield. The recent NK test was about 10kt.
I don't think we can say that NK is claiming to have an H-bomb in the usual sense of the word.
They've probably attempted to boost it with tritium, which I've learned from Tom Clancy is a lot easier than a Teller-Ulam design.
Is there any evidence that NK has progressed beyond a gun-type u235 weapon like the South Africans had?
A 10kt weapon is peanuts compared to their conventional capability. Unless/until they can make it small enough to deliver by long-range missile, it is of little military value.
My workstation at home has never had a BSOD, never any data corruption, and never any issues at all for over 2 years. But I also make it a rule to not buy my computers from Walmart. I also implement configurations to mitigate code execution from the user profile. Windows is an exceptionally stable and powerful platform assuming you didn't install it on top of complete garbage for hardware and assuming you don't run it using an administrator account - just like on Linux.
Let's make like a bird... and get the flock outta here.
Thanks. That;s interesting. But I would argue that it is the immoderate and SJW-biased 'moderation' that is killing Slashdot. I think we need more Free Speech and not more censorship ("moderation") - that way all points of view come across and Darwinian evolution hammers out the best ideas. I believe that my points of view can stand up to scrutiny, and I'm sure many others do to - but it is the censorship and stealthy pushing of Collectivist memes over Individualist ones that is strangling Slashdot and other places. The gamers fought this off with their #GamerGate exposure of the censorious control freaks. I record Slashdotters can do this too - no matter what you believe, this is should be News for Nerds - not propaganda for the Borg Collective.
Your forgot...Freshmeat.net is renamed and static content. Much like Slashdot, but without being renamed.
I mod, therefore I am part of the collective. I don't care about SJW issues and I don't care for censorship in most forms. That being said, if your being an ignorant troll, I will mod you as such without hesitation and if you want to create a flamewar, your post will be modded into -1 purgatory. If someone does abuse their mod points to silence criticism and legitimate debate, I both use my points to counter them and report them to the admins. If you're a moderator and you don't do these things, you're not doing your job.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Thanks. I agree with much of what you say. The problem is the editors select articles that interest THEM and new editors seem to be selecting SJW issues. If one wants to do SJW then Huffpost is a good place to do it - but it is inappropriate on Slashdot. With regard to modding - I try to never, ever mod down. Ever. The solution to bad speech is more speech, pointing out the errors - censorship is one of the greatest evils on the planet.
For example, despite your best of intentions what if someone is telling you something unpopular and you consider it trolling, but it is true and is "speaking truth to power"? you might be against the idea, but perhaps you could be persuaded of the facts, if only people can freely say how they understand the situation. This is the only way we can learn the truth (as in reality) despite a sea of disinformation out there. A great example is recently when there was clearly orchestrated molestation of rapes of young women in German, Austria, Norway, Finland, and Sweden by Muslim immigrants (following the depraved example of Mohammed, but we won't get into that). The mainstream media squashed the story, the German government used police against protesters trying to get the truth out, and then the media was forced to release articles but they distorted everything (in short, the media lied). It was only social media where people got to tell the truth about what happened, and the Orwellian way the German government trying to squash and distort all information - calling anyone against the rape "racist". Now on Slashdot a moderator may not know the truth, and thus mods the posts down as "flamebait" or "troll" - yet what is coming out is the truth that is not yet well known. Hence, modding down is extremely problematic.
If someone does abuse their mod points to silence criticism and legitimate debate, I both use my points to counter them and report them to the admins. If you're a moderator and you don't do these things, you're not doing your job.
Yes, you are an excellent example of a moderator. However, the SJWs among us don't believe in Free Speech at all - where Free Speech includes true facts that offend their extremist worldview. They mod down ruthlessly - they can't win debates on facts, so their main weapon is censorship. Thus, when I try and present facts, including uncomfortable truths, I have been modded down ruthlessly and systematically. These people then watch for other posts you make - no matter how innocuous, and continue to mod you down until you have negative karma and are no longer granted mod points, which means you cannot challenge the SJW cultural Marxist Narrative by modding up people pointing out informative and interesting posts that refute their propaganda. I know these SJW types do this because I've had to ask Slashdot admins to examine vicious modding against me and they looked at the pattern and saw the censorship - fortunately they they stripped the crazed SJW censors of the ability to mod ever again. But it is out there.
Free Speech is not about things we agree on. It's not about ponies and rainbows and unicorns and things that make you feel good. Free speech is all about the things we find uncomfortable to talk about. Free Speech is about truths that people don't yet understand. This is why I say that modding down is bad, we should strive to mod up informative and factual posts not matter how we emotionally feel about them. What may be a "troll" to someone who doesn't yet know the truth is a "truth teller" to other people that do. Just as you do, we need to fight censorship - but we also need to fight censorship in *ourselves* if the post contains facts and no personal attacks, no matter what we feel about a subject. Only then can we use Diversity of Opinion (the only diversity that actually matters) to filter many ideas through an evolutionary process and arrive at the best picture of reality despite the massive amounts of disinformation we are subjected to daily.
His UID has an entire extra digit than ours. Not just an extra digit, nearing 3x. I don't think he remembers old mods or moderation.
I got 5 mod points once every other month. I certainly didn't squander them on bad posts. It's not like Reddit where it takes a fake account (or bot net) and you can easily push conversation however you want it.
Nah man. This is a second account since my first one was targetted by the SJW trolls I talked about. I speak in truth !