"How does this happen, if a black hole exerts so much gravitational force that not even light can escape?" The stars don't form inside the black hole, so I don't see how that is related. Instead they are at a distance of several light years, where some of the gas that falls towards the center stops (angular momentum; similar gravitational attraction of black hole and galaxy stars). The gas can collapse and form stars. These are called "nuclear star clusters".
The question of open source is really -- do you have a secure upgrade path. If Windows goes away, and software you use depends on their software, you do not. If you use software based on a BSD/Apache2 license, and someone extends it and makes the result non-open source, and the software you use begins to require these extensions, you don't have a secure upgrade path anymore. GPL solves this problem and guarantees that you will always have an upgrade path, because derivatives need to be open source.
I think this is really the key point, and why purism in software licensing should not be laughed at by "pragmatists". Like for example distributions that do not include closed source software (Flash) or drivers (nvidia), because "pragmatists" want it to "just work". If you go down that path, you are making yourself dependent on a company going the path you want. You get into a situation 5 years down the line where even more software depends on closed source (e.g. mono/.NET), and it is out of your control. That's why I think purism in open source software is still relevant.
Pragmatically speaking, the upgrade path of open source software packages is not in your hands, but in those who are experts in that package's code, and those who invest time in it. The point is rather that if you get annoyed enough to pay someone, you would be able to get control back, while with closed-source extended BSD/Apache2 packages, you would not. You would need to re-invent that software.
For Web services, I think it depends. If the company provides proprietary data, then it doesn't really matter whether the software to access it, or the API is open source. You will have that dependency, until you have open data.
In summary, I think one should ask oneself: In 5 years, when this platform is outdated, and the company goes away or refocuses, what will I do, and am I prepared for that. Who am I dependent on? Having a community of millions of programmers which are in the same situation helps, because only one has to solve the problem and open-source it for an upgrade path.
Wasn't the NSA accused of suggesting/modifying various encryption standards in order to weaken them? In which case they don't need back doors into the software as they can already unlock the data.
Yes, and the authors of said algorithms (CS researchers) agree that that was ok (a security - speed/implementation tradeoff).
The revelations did not change the way *I* looked at the Internet and privacy. It merely confirmed my well-justified suspicions. I think the same statement can be made by most people on slashdot, and by most technicians in general. The only people who were surprised were the technically ignorant.
There is a difference between suspecting and being looked at as paranoid, and everyone knowing something as a fact.
ArXiv's problem is recognizing when human-written, realistic sounding papers are actually BS.
Actually each ArXiv section has an editor who screens the papers, checking if they have reasonable content. And it unfortunately happens that legitimate papers are withheld for several weeks, and the ArXiV administration is not responding reliably to emails (being understaffed and having many submissions). So unfortunately, ArXiV is not just a pre-print server anymore where everyone can upload, but has turned into a intransparently half peer-reviewed journal, which scientists read every day.
That the thing about dark matter... it has a perfectly reasonable explanation (WIMPs). It's not that weird of a "thing".
Having one solution does not suffice, you need to prove it. WIMPs have been proposed, but they require Supersymmetry (which is not proven), and also WIMPs have never been detected in particle accelerators. Dark matter is a weird thing, because one way or another, you need new physics which does not interact using the strong force or electromagnetism, is present already in the very early Universe (380000 years after the Big Bang).
I think you meant/dev/random, which gives you more entropy per bit. urandom is a PRNG on top of random, which gives fast throughput. urandom is also the default random source of sort.
Unless there's a fire, a break-in, an earthquake, a tsunami... Or do you also have backups all over the world?
Amazon also had incidents where natural disasters or human failure led to data loss for business customers, so I doubt they have distributed backups for 100% of the data.
For credit cards, frauds are nothing to banks. They just pay it from their profits, and the customer doesn't have to worry. Maybe it is the same here? Perhaps it still pays off for the banks and Apple to do that extra business, and it works out in their calculation.
How dare you challenge the might of Jupiter! It weighs 320 times the mass of Earth -- even if those 100,000 trojan asteroids weighed as much as its minor moons (which they don't, they are 0.0001 Earth masses according to wikipedia), it would still dominate its gravitational field by several (9) orders of magnitude.
Compare that to Pluto: Charon already weighs 10% of Plutos mass. The center of rotation in that system is not even inside Pluto.
Also, there are other criteria that apply: a planet has to be spherical due to gravitation (there is a more technical definition). Is that the case for Pluto?
Finally, you can not have 9 planets anymore. You can choose between 8 planets and 13 planets, the latter group growing every year.
"My predictions have enormously high variance, I can imagine completely plausible, incredibly positive scenarios, but they're only about as probable as actually quite dystopian futures that I can imagine."
The future is uncertain, and we can not predict this aspect with the information we have. So how valid is the 30-50% number then, if it is +-50%?
Even if you turned off Hawking radiation, it would still be hard for a black hole from a particle accelerator to actually eat the planet. Let's say you have an accelerator much more powerful than the LHC, with a center-of-mass energy of 1 PeV. If all that were used to produce a black hole, it would have a mass of 1.8e-21 kg. An electron or proton a single hydrogen radius away from it (which we can use as a typical intermolecular distance in the Earth for simplicity) would feel an acceleration of 1e-11 m/s^2, which is absolutely tiny compared to the electrical forces that govern motion on those scales. A small black hole like that behaves much like a neutrino - it hardly interacts with anything. And it needs to do that to grow. I think we could have lots of these inside the Earth and not even notice (dun-dun-DUUN!).
There is an even easier answer to address the fears about LHC micro-black holes. Particles with energies comparable or exceeding LHC energies hit the atmosphere of earth every day, and we observe their effects with Cosmic-ray observatories such as Cerenkov Detectors. Business as usual, and nothing exciting happened for the last billion years.
Black holes that small would be hard to see. And if created by advanced civilizations with LHC-sized accelerators, very rare. And then these black holes would evaporate via Hawking radiation quite rapidly (on astronomical time scales).
You are way off. Macroscopic black holes, for all intents and purposes, do not evaporate. A Earth-mass black hole will take 10^50 years to evaporate. (The age of the universe is ~10^10 years).
If you want a black hole that evaporates within a reasonable time, like the age of the universe, you are looking at 10^11 kg. That is tiny compared to a planet, somewhat comparable to the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Nim looks syntactically a little bit like Kotlin, which compiles to either JVM bytecode or JavaScript. If you compile to the JVM then you can not only use libraries written in Java, but also JavaScript, Python 2.x (via Jython), Ruby, Scala, C (via JNA), there's even a Haskell for the JVM called Frege.
Interesting. Unfortunately, many Python packages use compiled C code (Cython etc.) which only work in CPython, i.e. not in Jython, not even in PyPy. The most important such difficult-to-port package is NumPy.
Slashdot Mirror
If people want to fight a war, they need to do it with a gun in hand on the battlefield.
How about without a gun? Then you really have to be determined.
"How does this happen, if a black hole exerts so much gravitational force that not even light can escape?"
The stars don't form inside the black hole, so I don't see how that is related. Instead they are at a distance of several light years, where some of the gas that falls towards the center stops (angular momentum; similar gravitational attraction of black hole and galaxy stars). The gas can collapse and form stars. These are called "nuclear star clusters".
If you want to go for avoiding ambiguity, go for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban
AGPLv3 solves exactly this problem.
The question of open source is really -- do you have a secure upgrade path. If Windows goes away, and software you use depends on their software, you do not. If you use software based on a BSD/Apache2 license, and someone extends it and makes the result non-open source, and the software you use begins to require these extensions, you don't have a secure upgrade path anymore. GPL solves this problem and guarantees that you will always have an upgrade path, because derivatives need to be open source.
I think this is really the key point, and why purism in software licensing should not be laughed at by "pragmatists". Like for example distributions that do not include closed source software (Flash) or drivers (nvidia), because "pragmatists" want it to "just work". If you go down that path, you are making yourself dependent on a company going the path you want. You get into a situation 5 years down the line where even more software depends on closed source (e.g. mono/.NET), and it is out of your control. That's why I think purism in open source software is still relevant.
Pragmatically speaking, the upgrade path of open source software packages is not in your hands, but in those who are experts in that package's code, and those who invest time in it. The point is rather that if you get annoyed enough to pay someone, you would be able to get control back, while with closed-source extended BSD/Apache2 packages, you would not. You would need to re-invent that software.
For Web services, I think it depends. If the company provides proprietary data, then it doesn't really matter whether the software to access it, or the API is open source. You will have that dependency, until you have open data.
In summary, I think one should ask oneself: In 5 years, when this platform is outdated, and the company goes away or refocuses, what will I do, and am I prepared for that. Who am I dependent on? Having a community of millions of programmers which are in the same situation helps, because only one has to solve the problem and open-source it for an upgrade path.
Wasn't the NSA accused of suggesting/modifying various encryption standards in order to weaken them? In which case they don't need back doors into the software as they can already unlock the data.
Yes, and the authors of said algorithms (CS researchers) agree that that was ok (a security - speed/implementation tradeoff).
The revelations did not change the way *I* looked at the Internet and privacy. It merely confirmed my well-justified suspicions. I think the same statement can be made by most people on slashdot, and by most technicians in general. The only people who were surprised were the technically ignorant.
There is a difference between suspecting and being looked at as paranoid, and everyone knowing something as a fact.
It is a Unity plug in that is legit. It basically caches the data and compiles the c++ to ecmascripten a fork of asm.js.
You can download the source and compile it yourself as an executable if you do not want the browser
And why can't they compile the c++ to ecmascripten or asm.js before they put it on the website?
Sometimes you just need to build from the ground up.
That's gonna be difficult for a space station.
ArXiv's problem is recognizing when human-written, realistic sounding papers are actually BS.
Actually each ArXiv section has an editor who screens the papers, checking if they have reasonable content. And it unfortunately happens that legitimate papers are withheld for several weeks, and the ArXiV administration is not responding reliably to emails (being understaffed and having many submissions). So unfortunately, ArXiV is not just a pre-print server anymore where everyone can upload, but has turned into a intransparently half peer-reviewed journal, which scientists read every day.
That the thing about dark matter... it has a perfectly reasonable explanation (WIMPs). It's not that weird of a "thing".
Having one solution does not suffice, you need to prove it. WIMPs have been proposed, but they require Supersymmetry (which is not proven), and also WIMPs have never been detected in particle accelerators. Dark matter is a weird thing, because one way or another, you need new physics which does not interact using the strong force or electromagnetism, is present already in the very early Universe (380000 years after the Big Bang).
sort -R --random-source=/dev/urandom
I think you meant /dev/random, which gives you more entropy per bit. urandom is a PRNG on top of random, which gives fast throughput. urandom is also the default random source of sort.
Unless there's a fire, a break-in, an earthquake, a tsunami...
Or do you also have backups all over the world?
Amazon also had incidents where natural disasters or human failure led to data loss for business customers, so I doubt they have distributed backups for 100% of the data.
For credit cards, frauds are nothing to banks. They just pay it from their profits, and the customer doesn't have to worry. Maybe it is the same here? Perhaps it still pays off for the banks and Apple to do that extra business, and it works out in their calculation.
The upstart team will be disappointed.
Here are two interesting talks presenting the two approaches: systemd vs Upstart for Debian.
I learned a lot about what systemd actually is and does.
I don't expect any contrary opinions here on /.
How dare you challenge the might of Jupiter! It weighs 320 times the mass of Earth -- even if those 100,000 trojan asteroids weighed as much as its minor moons (which they don't, they are 0.0001 Earth masses according to wikipedia), it would still dominate its gravitational field by several (9) orders of magnitude.
Compare that to Pluto: Charon already weighs 10% of Plutos mass. The center of rotation in that system is not even inside Pluto.
Also, there are other criteria that apply: a planet has to be spherical due to gravitation (there is a more technical definition). Is that the case for Pluto?
Finally, you can not have 9 planets anymore. You can choose between 8 planets and 13 planets, the latter group growing every year.
What every basement-dweller already knows.
Why not make a base on Daimos or Phobos? They should be easy to dwell into, and you could start rotate them for extra gravity.
Any scammer worth his salt does his homework and already knows the victim's kids' / grandkids' names anyway
That is not web-scale :)
Oil is not made from fossils. Oil is mainly compressed sea flora.
The moon is probably a good place to store time capsules (or backups). Well, except for the meteorites and the annoying dust that gets everywhere.
"My predictions have enormously high variance, I can imagine completely plausible, incredibly positive scenarios, but they're only about as probable as actually quite dystopian futures that I can imagine."
The future is uncertain, and we can not predict this aspect with the information we have. So how valid is the 30-50% number then, if it is +-50%?
We will not run out of ideas on what we could work on, but the question is will anyone pay for that work (i.e. need it desperately enough).
Even if you turned off Hawking radiation, it would still be hard for a black hole from a particle accelerator to actually eat the planet. Let's say you have an accelerator much more powerful than the LHC, with a center-of-mass energy of 1 PeV. If all that were used to produce a black hole, it would have a mass of 1.8e-21 kg. An electron or proton a single hydrogen radius away from it (which we can use as a typical intermolecular distance in the Earth for simplicity) would feel an acceleration of 1e-11 m/s^2, which is absolutely tiny compared to the electrical forces that govern motion on those scales. A small black hole like that behaves much like a neutrino - it hardly interacts with anything. And it needs to do that to grow. I think we could have lots of these inside the Earth and not even notice (dun-dun-DUUN!).
There is an even easier answer to address the fears about LHC micro-black holes. Particles with energies comparable or exceeding LHC energies hit the atmosphere of earth every day, and we observe their effects with Cosmic-ray observatories such as Cerenkov Detectors. Business as usual, and nothing exciting happened for the last billion years.
Black holes that small would be hard to see. And if created by advanced civilizations with LHC-sized accelerators, very rare. And then these black holes would evaporate via Hawking radiation quite rapidly (on astronomical time scales).
You are way off. Macroscopic black holes, for all intents and purposes, do not evaporate.
A Earth-mass black hole will take 10^50 years to evaporate. (The age of the universe is ~10^10 years).
If you want a black hole that evaporates within a reasonable time, like the age of the universe, you are looking at 10^11 kg. That is tiny compared to a planet, somewhat comparable to the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Nim looks syntactically a little bit like Kotlin, which compiles to either JVM bytecode or JavaScript. If you compile to the JVM then you can not only use libraries written in Java, but also JavaScript, Python 2.x (via Jython), Ruby, Scala, C (via JNA), there's even a Haskell for the JVM called Frege.
Interesting.
Unfortunately, many Python packages use compiled C code (Cython etc.) which only work in CPython, i.e. not in Jython, not even in PyPy. The most important such difficult-to-port package is NumPy.