Thanks to living in Australia, almost all my Blu-Rays are from the US region, and have been ripped and de-DRM'd so I can actually, you know, watch them.
That's not really your private data though. Name's, by definition, are for the benefit of yourself when interacting with others. They're delivery metadata.
Well exactly, it's not fundamentally illegal to make alcohol, and in that case it's probably more important to give accurate information so people who might try it don't in advertently poison themselves with methanol.
Whereas conversely, the way it's presented in Breaking Bad you'd go right down the wrong path trying to obtain precursor compounds (and set off a bunch of red flags at chemical companies) anyway.
That's cute and all, but today's Russia commands higher power than Soviet Union did. Russia owns the largest oil company in the world. Russia has the power to completely dictate Europe's foreign policy because it supplies enough of Europe's natural gas to be able to grind European economy to a halt. It doesn't have the same consumer or production power as the civilized world. But that is not to say that it has no power. In addition to its ridiculously unproportional influence in Europe, it also commands the world's largest nuclear arsenal and can still manufacture long range bombers and mass-scale traditional arms.
Again: it's a nuclear power. But it's not a superpower. And it's oil influence is questionable because it needs Europe more then Europe needs it, and it's recent actions have been promoting more interest in staying the hell away from Russian gas. It's not like there isn't a whole pile of more pliable middle eastern states who'd like to fill that space in.
It's bombers would be defeated by pretty much any modern AA, and definitely by US systems and tons of countries make small arms. Nobody particularly cares who since anyone can do it.
Conversely R2-D2 was damaged regardless, which tends to imply that the deflectors weren't really enough to save you when someone got you in their sights - TIE fighters could put enough rounds downrange to overwhelm the shields in any situation where the fighter was genuinely bested.
If you assume that the TIE was more manoeuverable, then the logic of mass producing them the way they were makes a good deal of sense.
For one, it's unlikely the postmaster general would say that even if it was true.
It's very likely the comment on "digital being a fad" is being taken out of context: because it's pretty obvious that the idea of scanning and digitizing ones mail for you is a fad. Doing that en masse makes no sense, because if it can be done en masse then the companies sending mail which would be digitized can just do that themselves (and by and large, have - I get very little physical mail from companies anymore).
From the USPS's perspective, digitized mail is stupid. Either a physical thing needs to be delivered or it doesn't, and in both cases then it needs to go to an actual receiving address and not some service.
I am pretty skeptical molten salt reactors are going to be cheaper to decommission. Liquid anything is going to contaminate whatever it's stored in more or less permanently. The real issue is almost certainly that we simply haven't been doing enough decommissions (because we keep extending the license and operating periods) for any sort of standard practice to really emerge. A decent fuel reprocessing industry would help a lot, because at least you could ship the rods somewhere and remove radioactive materials from the site - which would make everything else a lot easier.
Well also that he's jamming the phones of everyone he passes by, because I seriously doubt he switched it off when he got to suburban streets. He's also jamming 3G for navigation systems/OnStar etc, cell-augmented GPS etc.
Nobody on Slashdot would be defending him if he was driving around with a wi-fi jammer.
Safety is about the likelihood of a negative outcome. For example we would obviously never get into a car which is on rails and will crash into a wall. Because the near guaranteed outcome of that is you die.
The question is always about whether the activity is intrinsically unsafe (like the above example) or has a theoretic mode of operation where there are no negative outcomes (which cars do) and if so, how do we reach a suitably low probability of that?
The issue with BitCoin isn't the acquisition, its the storage and spending. Giving each student easy access to a university-run "bank" with safe backed-up storage and good access would be a big step in the right direction.
So you know, something functionally identical to the role currently played by regular US dollars?
If Bitcoins advocates were a little more self-aware, the whole thing would have value as a giant educational exercise into why the modern financial system is structured the way it is. Unfortunately...
Knowledge tests of any sort are always gamed for political outcomes. The White Australia Policy of the freakin' 1970s was enforced principally through administering language tests to would be immigrants. Not english language tests mind you - pretty much whichever language we knew you didn't know.
The same crap has showed up again in the ridiculous citizenship tests we've now got. The first draft and implementation includes a bunch of random sporting facts about cricket. It's been improved since then (so I've heard) but the point remains: what possible relevancy does Donald Bradman's test score accomplishments have on participation within our civil society?
How come they don't collide? Why didn't they collapse into just being, you know, stars?
Even at 200 times, collisions would be extremely rare. And the collision would be a non-event as far as the earth is concerned. Why don't they collapse into stars [assuming the collision produced a star with sufficient mass to be a star]. Maybe they are? Still the collisions would be so rare that we'd almost certainly never witness the event.
Here's the problem: you can't argue collisions would be rare. Collisions in the accretion disk of a gravitational body are extremely rare, but an object like a black hole is very bright because over the life time of the universe that's still a lot of collisions relatively.
The issue is, you're adding 200 times the number of entities and really underestimating that value, that's 200 brown dawrfs, larger then Jupiter, within the local neighborhood of Sol alone, along with another 400-600 around Alpha Centauri, 4 light years away. So 600 brown dwarfs, that we somehow have never discovered, sitting somewhere - generously - in the range of ~10 light years of Sol.
And this article, the article we're talking about, is discussing how we've just discovered 1 7 light years away. 1, since we've been observing the sky. Now, it's a hard problem, but, 1? Out of almost 1000 that people are arguing should be there?
Again: you're proposing that somehow, 96% of the mass of the universe is in unseen brown dwarfs that are all floating around the edge of the galactic disk.
That is a huge amount of mass, to the point that it would be more significant then all the other mass in the galaxy. If this mass is not evenly distributed, then it would both form a binary system with the galaxy, and also promptly start collapsing itself into actual stars and a much denser body.
If it's evenly distributed, you still have to answer the question of how it stays that way, since you can't hand-wave billions of years of stellar interactions as "hydrogen doesn't interact very much". Well, yes it does, that's why we have stars in the first place. In fact it's why galaxies aggregate into disks and not spheres in the first place - because in 3-dimensional space collisions are much more likely then if everything is moving in roughly the same direction.
And of course you can't explain the observational problem: if this is what happened it would be really obvious from gravitational lensing experiments - we'd see a very tight cylindrically aberrated lens when observing other galaxies side on. But we don't - we see an approximately spherical halo of dark matter which resists aggregation because it doesn't interact with itself.
We know there are a lot of red dwarfs in the vicinity of Sol, but we don't know that this trend continues throughout the galaxy because they're hard to observe.
Of course, that's % of stars we can see. The problem is, the math says of that % we can see, they only make up about 4% of all matter in the universe.
Which again, gets to the problems of scale. 20 times more stuff that we somehow never see is a lot. And it's not just that we never see it - it's that somehow it avoids clumping up into being matter we can see. Dark matter is proposed because the amount of extra mass is ludicrous if it's ordinary baryonic matter, because over the evolution of the universe the forces which normally give rise to stars and planets would have caused all the "unseen" matter - if it can interact non-gravitationally - to also form stars and planets.
Then you get into other problems: stars can be relatively isolated because they have radiation pressure once they form. They actively blow material and gas away from them. Things that aren't fusing though don't really have this, which means they'll have an easier time picking up new matter, which in turn means they can keep gaining mass till they can ignite (at which point they'll slow down again).
Now do that 20 more times and come back with an explanation as to why all that matter doesn't ever seem to interact. You're proposing to solve dark matter by saying there's about 200 brown dwarfs per star. How come they don't collide? Why didn't they collapse into just being, you know, stars?
We know why we'd have trouble finding near cold objects: the sky is relatively poorly lit, and so you have to hope to see them crossing or occluding another light source.
But how do you explain why we don't detect these hundreds of objects in front of other stars? These aren't small things, and we can detect wayward exoplanets, but if there's so many how come they haven't been turning up at a clipping rate?
Actually it's galactic rotation curve stuff: you can show what the observed vs. dark mass difference is by looking at the motion of stars along the plane of the galaxy. And when you start to propose that it's all asteroids and brown dwarfs, you run into problems - because if there were so many out there, then why don't they ever get heated up by all the radiation they'd be absorbing? And why don't they seem to ever meaningfully collide and experience other types of interactions (the famous bullet nebula picture).
Except the goal of USB3 as a I understand it is to reverse the process: use the 12V USB3.1 standard to charge laptops through the one port.
That's a goal worth striving for. Everyone can get behind that goal because to hell with every laptop having a separate special charger when we know they all max out at about 100W.
A flexible screen would let you get away from gluing the touch sensor and panel together, which would let you replace the touch sensor (which is cheap) whenever it got damaged.
The real magic would be for processor makers. Being able to reliably ship new processors to the entire mobile phone market would be a hell of a thing for ARM. Just put out a new system module...
Hi! Sit here and answer support tickets from users. But do it enthusiastically! We never have any plans to promote you, or provide on-the-job training, and we'd like you to help out these indian fellows overseas who are much cheaper to employ...but we really want you to be dedicated and enthusiastic to the company. I mean, we're not that enthusiastic about you, but in this* economy everyone has to make sacrifices!
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks to living in Australia, almost all my Blu-Rays are from the US region, and have been ripped and de-DRM'd so I can actually, you know, watch them.
It feels like there's a lesson in here.
If I could take a ride in a U2 spyplane I'd do it, for that matter.
That's not really your private data though. Name's, by definition, are for the benefit of yourself when interacting with others. They're delivery metadata.
Well exactly, it's not fundamentally illegal to make alcohol, and in that case it's probably more important to give accurate information so people who might try it don't in advertently poison themselves with methanol.
Whereas conversely, the way it's presented in Breaking Bad you'd go right down the wrong path trying to obtain precursor compounds (and set off a bunch of red flags at chemical companies) anyway.
I always assumed its possible it could be nanoparticulate aluminium contamination. Metals are a pretty good way to give things odd colors.
That's because it would also be oh so convenient if they could be persuaded to stop doing things which would allow their message to be heard.
But frankly the fact you seem to believe the term is "punished" speaks more to your own biases.
Literally every single thing in this post is wrong. It is a work of art.
Russia lost superpower status a long time ago.
That's cute and all, but today's Russia commands higher power than Soviet Union did. Russia owns the largest oil company in the world. Russia has the power to completely dictate Europe's foreign policy because it supplies enough of Europe's natural gas to be able to grind European economy to a halt. It doesn't have the same consumer or production power as the civilized world. But that is not to say that it has no power. In addition to its ridiculously unproportional influence in Europe, it also commands the world's largest nuclear arsenal and can still manufacture long range bombers and mass-scale traditional arms.
Again: it's a nuclear power. But it's not a superpower. And it's oil influence is questionable because it needs Europe more then Europe needs it, and it's recent actions have been promoting more interest in staying the hell away from Russian gas. It's not like there isn't a whole pile of more pliable middle eastern states who'd like to fill that space in.
It's bombers would be defeated by pretty much any modern AA, and definitely by US systems and tons of countries make small arms. Nobody particularly cares who since anyone can do it.
Conversely R2-D2 was damaged regardless, which tends to imply that the deflectors weren't really enough to save you when someone got you in their sights - TIE fighters could put enough rounds downrange to overwhelm the shields in any situation where the fighter was genuinely bested.
If you assume that the TIE was more manoeuverable, then the logic of mass producing them the way they were makes a good deal of sense.
Well, nuclear power.
Russia lost superpower status a long time ago. Any practical conventional conflict would see their military obliterated in a matter of months.
That quote is almost certainly bullshit.
For one, it's unlikely the postmaster general would say that even if it was true.
It's very likely the comment on "digital being a fad" is being taken out of context: because it's pretty obvious that the idea of scanning and digitizing ones mail for you is a fad. Doing that en masse makes no sense, because if it can be done en masse then the companies sending mail which would be digitized can just do that themselves (and by and large, have - I get very little physical mail from companies anymore).
From the USPS's perspective, digitized mail is stupid. Either a physical thing needs to be delivered or it doesn't, and in both cases then it needs to go to an actual receiving address and not some service.
I am pretty skeptical molten salt reactors are going to be cheaper to decommission. Liquid anything is going to contaminate whatever it's stored in more or less permanently. The real issue is almost certainly that we simply haven't been doing enough decommissions (because we keep extending the license and operating periods) for any sort of standard practice to really emerge. A decent fuel reprocessing industry would help a lot, because at least you could ship the rods somewhere and remove radioactive materials from the site - which would make everything else a lot easier.
Well also that he's jamming the phones of everyone he passes by, because I seriously doubt he switched it off when he got to suburban streets. He's also jamming 3G for navigation systems/OnStar etc, cell-augmented GPS etc.
Nobody on Slashdot would be defending him if he was driving around with a wi-fi jammer.
Wrong definition of safety.
Safety is about the likelihood of a negative outcome. For example we would obviously never get into a car which is on rails and will crash into a wall. Because the near guaranteed outcome of that is you die.
The question is always about whether the activity is intrinsically unsafe (like the above example) or has a theoretic mode of operation where there are no negative outcomes (which cars do) and if so, how do we reach a suitably low probability of that?
The issue with BitCoin isn't the acquisition, its the storage and spending. Giving each student easy access to a university-run "bank" with safe backed-up storage and good access would be a big step in the right direction.
So you know, something functionally identical to the role currently played by regular US dollars?
If Bitcoins advocates were a little more self-aware, the whole thing would have value as a giant educational exercise into why the modern financial system is structured the way it is. Unfortunately...
Knowledge tests of any sort are always gamed for political outcomes. The White Australia Policy of the freakin' 1970s was enforced principally through administering language tests to would be immigrants. Not english language tests mind you - pretty much whichever language we knew you didn't know.
The same crap has showed up again in the ridiculous citizenship tests we've now got. The first draft and implementation includes a bunch of random sporting facts about cricket. It's been improved since then (so I've heard) but the point remains: what possible relevancy does Donald Bradman's test score accomplishments have on participation within our civil society?
How come they don't collide? Why didn't they collapse into just being, you know, stars?
Even at 200 times, collisions would be extremely rare. And the collision would be a non-event as far as the earth is concerned. Why don't they collapse into stars [assuming the collision produced a star with sufficient mass to be a star]. Maybe they are? Still the collisions would be so rare that we'd almost certainly never witness the event.
Here's the problem: you can't argue collisions would be rare. Collisions in the accretion disk of a gravitational body are extremely rare, but an object like a black hole is very bright because over the life time of the universe that's still a lot of collisions relatively.
The issue is, you're adding 200 times the number of entities and really underestimating that value, that's 200 brown dawrfs, larger then Jupiter, within the local neighborhood of Sol alone, along with another 400-600 around Alpha Centauri, 4 light years away. So 600 brown dwarfs, that we somehow have never discovered, sitting somewhere - generously - in the range of ~10 light years of Sol.
And this article, the article we're talking about, is discussing how we've just discovered 1 7 light years away. 1, since we've been observing the sky. Now, it's a hard problem, but, 1? Out of almost 1000 that people are arguing should be there?
Again: you're proposing that somehow, 96% of the mass of the universe is in unseen brown dwarfs that are all floating around the edge of the galactic disk.
That is a huge amount of mass, to the point that it would be more significant then all the other mass in the galaxy. If this mass is not evenly distributed, then it would both form a binary system with the galaxy, and also promptly start collapsing itself into actual stars and a much denser body.
If it's evenly distributed, you still have to answer the question of how it stays that way, since you can't hand-wave billions of years of stellar interactions as "hydrogen doesn't interact very much". Well, yes it does, that's why we have stars in the first place. In fact it's why galaxies aggregate into disks and not spheres in the first place - because in 3-dimensional space collisions are much more likely then if everything is moving in roughly the same direction.
And of course you can't explain the observational problem: if this is what happened it would be really obvious from gravitational lensing experiments - we'd see a very tight cylindrically aberrated lens when observing other galaxies side on. But we don't - we see an approximately spherical halo of dark matter which resists aggregation because it doesn't interact with itself.
We know there are a lot of red dwarfs in the vicinity of Sol, but we don't know that this trend continues throughout the galaxy because they're hard to observe.
Of course, that's % of stars we can see. The problem is, the math says of that % we can see, they only make up about 4% of all matter in the universe.
Which again, gets to the problems of scale. 20 times more stuff that we somehow never see is a lot. And it's not just that we never see it - it's that somehow it avoids clumping up into being matter we can see. Dark matter is proposed because the amount of extra mass is ludicrous if it's ordinary baryonic matter, because over the evolution of the universe the forces which normally give rise to stars and planets would have caused all the "unseen" matter - if it can interact non-gravitationally - to also form stars and planets.
Then you get into other problems: stars can be relatively isolated because they have radiation pressure once they form. They actively blow material and gas away from them. Things that aren't fusing though don't really have this, which means they'll have an easier time picking up new matter, which in turn means they can keep gaining mass till they can ignite (at which point they'll slow down again).
Now do that 20 more times and come back with an explanation as to why all that matter doesn't ever seem to interact. You're proposing to solve dark matter by saying there's about 200 brown dwarfs per star. How come they don't collide? Why didn't they collapse into just being, you know, stars?
We know why we'd have trouble finding near cold objects: the sky is relatively poorly lit, and so you have to hope to see them crossing or occluding another light source.
But how do you explain why we don't detect these hundreds of objects in front of other stars? These aren't small things, and we can detect wayward exoplanets, but if there's so many how come they haven't been turning up at a clipping rate?
Actually it's galactic rotation curve stuff: you can show what the observed vs. dark mass difference is by looking at the motion of stars along the plane of the galaxy. And when you start to propose that it's all asteroids and brown dwarfs, you run into problems - because if there were so many out there, then why don't they ever get heated up by all the radiation they'd be absorbing? And why don't they seem to ever meaningfully collide and experience other types of interactions (the famous bullet nebula picture).
Except the goal of USB3 as a I understand it is to reverse the process: use the 12V USB3.1 standard to charge laptops through the one port.
That's a goal worth striving for. Everyone can get behind that goal because to hell with every laptop having a separate special charger when we know they all max out at about 100W.
A flexible screen would let you get away from gluing the touch sensor and panel together, which would let you replace the touch sensor (which is cheap) whenever it got damaged.
The real magic would be for processor makers. Being able to reliably ship new processors to the entire mobile phone market would be a hell of a thing for ARM. Just put out a new system module...
Hi! Sit here and answer support tickets from users. But do it enthusiastically! We never have any plans to promote you, or provide on-the-job training, and we'd like you to help out these indian fellows overseas who are much cheaper to employ...but we really want you to be dedicated and enthusiastic to the company. I mean, we're not that enthusiastic about you, but in this* economy everyone has to make sacrifices!
* It's never not this economy.