With perfect light speed transition (so not including routing and other delays) putting the server in Iowa will save 7ms ping from one coast to the other. Reality is going to be more like 15-20. I don't see that alone being worth it for the likes of facebook, but if you were running the servers for a fast paced action game it would certainly be something to think about.
The petawatt laser is installed on a 10m long optics table, and is controlled by 1 19" server rack. Granted, that's a Big Freakin Laser (tm), but hardly half the physics building, and I'm not sure, but if I understand their explanations correctly making the accelerator longer needn't necessarily require higher power from the laser. Besides, this is the engineering phase, we'll see in 10 years or so if it's actually useful and interesting from a useful science perspective. As it stands, there are facilities that can produce X-rays at these power levels, this system just seems to be designed to put one in every major college campus, rather than having 2 or 3 in the nation.
Yes, but a high profile enough environmental disaster will cause people to fall out of favor. Look at the tainted infant formula, you think that CEO got where he was without connections? It comes out that he allowed "bad thing" to happen, bad enough that it made China and the Chinese leadership look bad and he's tried and executed in a matter of weeks. The thing about buying politicians is that they don't stay bought, especially if your baggage suddenly costs more than your bribe.
If you're running an open WiFi you are standing on the porch with a bullhorn yelling your personal information. I don't see how you can reasonably be upset about someone walking by with a notepad and writing down what you're saying.
I'm not seeing a lot of Catholics nor Baptists suicide bombing anything.
Yep, christians never take place is such activities.
You know... except during The Troubles. And the civil rights movement. And lets just ignore the pro-lifers who murder. Oh, and the Westburrow Baptist church. And the 2011 car bombings in Norway. And the National Liberation Front of Tripura in India. And the Lord's Resistance Army. And going back a bit further the crusades, the inquisition, the forced conversion of natives and slaves. But I guess those aren't suicide attacks, so that makes them better.
The issue the author is bringing up is that you have no way to easily determine that the published binary is, in fact, functionally identical to the published source code. Imagine you write an app that accesses private data and open source it, saying "check the source, the only thing we use the data for is X". And if you look at the source, that's certainly true. But there's no way to verify that the binary download was built from the published source; especially if the resulting binary is different every time you build it and different if you build it on different machines with different configurations. So, everyone who grabs the binary instead of building from source is taking it on trust, just like proprietary software, that the program does what it claims.
The droids talk, react in fear, happiness, excitement. Saying they are not alive because they are built out of different parts from you and me is a dangerous road to walk down.
I don't think people realize how many times we've come so close to having a real space program. And that's not to knock the good engineers, managers, and astronauts at NASA, it's just a description of reality. We were laying down plans for a thermal nuclear rocket when the space race was abruptly canceled. We were getting ready to attach a small rocket to lift the external fuel tanks into orbit for use as space station components (one of which would double the usable volume of the ISS) when disaster struck and the plans were canceled (imagine 100 space shuttle external tanks linked together in orbit). We were getting ready to do an asteroid capture mission which had real potential, through in situ mining and refining, of opening up the solar system; a project that is apparently now getting the ax.
It happens again and again and again. An accident, a funding cut, a change in leadership. And every time we lose decades of potential progress. I'm tired of it. I want my space ship dammit!
And yet, there have been autonomous cars on the road for hundreds of thousands of miles without an accident (and please don't like to the articles that talk about the accident that occurred when the vehicle was being driven by a human being). Sometimes reality doesn't conform to what you expect, I know lots and lots of people that I wouldn't trust to drive 300,000 miles without an accident, but Google has managed to do just that.
safety. I just don't buy that the computers in these things are as situationally aware as a human driver. we can't even get trains to run fully autonomously yet.
I think you overestimate how situationally aware the average driver is. I have no doubts that in 10 years systems will be in place that, if everyone had autonomous cars, would save thousands of lives a year.
You can still ride a horse, just don't expect to be able to ride it down the middle of the freeway. Generation one automated cars will be safer than human drivers, by the end of that generation having automated driving will get you an insurance discount. Gen 2 will have cars that have accidents only in extreme nearly unavoidable circumstances, driving your car on manual will require special insurance that will cost significantly more than the standard. Gen 3 will move toward doing away with road laws as we understand them. The rules will be created ad-hoc in real time based on information provided by the road and the cars themselves. The flexibility this affords will make traffic jams virtually unheard of and significantly improve fuel efficiency and travel time, but driving a car on manual in that world would be borderline suicidal. At that point, the old timers who insist will have to take their classic cars to the race track or equivalent.
Actually, if you expanded the table in the way that is intuitively obvious (and provides the most meaning) it's about 5x wider than it is tall making it difficult to work with in a physical sense. As it is almost always presented, important information is totally lost on most people when they look at it.
Hoarding cash would be the absolute worst thing you could possibly do if you were worried about a "greater depression". Worse than spending all your cash on funyuns and diet coke. Your cash is worth something now, if there's a huge wave of inflation coming it would be worth a fraction of that value in the future.
No. Just no. The title of the article says the find will "cost" the couple $5k. The subtitle says the same thing. The first 3 paragraphs are about how they're going to have to pay and why and snarking at how ridiculous the law was. Then, after another half dozen paragraphs, and after a "more articles from the star" link box, they mention that the couple won't have to pay. That's practically the definition of abusing the format to sell stories that aren't really stories.
Lots of people are "trouble". Thousands... tens of thousands of people are "trouble". If you go global that number probably approaches millions. "kept an eye on them" is almost impossible with realistic amounts of resources.
and warehousing it to mine via some secret warrant.
This, I suspect is not true, at least not literally. Based on the originally leaked document, we know the program is small, in the range of $20 million. We also have this description, which sounds much more like a black box than what you would expect if they were storing everything for later retrieval. What I suspect they are doing is pulling the data on a daily basis (or more or less often), processing it into the worlds biggest social graph, and then dumping it. They trust their algorithm, whatever it is, to build the map because there's simply too much information for a human to look at it and they can always get the full records from the provider at a later date if they need it.
Read it again. They never claim the system doesn't exist, they claim that it has extensive oversight. They never claim the information isn't available, only that Snowden didn't have access to it. Actually, they don't even say that, they say he never had access "to the content of the communications" which they claim they aren't gathering in the first place.
Pay no attention to the ticking time bomb that guy warned you about, he doesn't even have the activation codes!
President Merkin Muffley: General Turgidson, I find this very difficult to understand. I was under the impression that I was the only one in authority to order the use of nuclear weapons.
General "Buck" Turgidson: That's right, sir, you are the only person authorized to do so. And although I, uh, hate to judge before all the facts are in, it's beginning to look like, uh, General Ripper exceeded his authority.
I used it to predict the Peak Oil concept was, in fact, BS, and it's indeed turning out to be.
That's highly debatable and depense largely on what someone means when they say "peak oil". We hit peak "light sweet crude" quite a while back. We probably, though the numbers aren't quite in yet, hit peak crude in general within the past few years. What we haven't hit is peak "complex liquid hydrocarbons", we keep finding more sources that, while harder to extract and refine, are still energy positive, though not as much as oil used to be.
Slashdot Mirror
With perfect light speed transition (so not including routing and other delays) putting the server in Iowa will save 7ms ping from one coast to the other. Reality is going to be more like 15-20. I don't see that alone being worth it for the likes of facebook, but if you were running the servers for a fast paced action game it would certainly be something to think about.
Looking into it:
The petawatt laser is installed on a 10m long optics table, and is controlled by 1 19" server rack. Granted, that's a Big Freakin Laser (tm), but hardly half the physics building, and I'm not sure, but if I understand their explanations correctly making the accelerator longer needn't necessarily require higher power from the laser. Besides, this is the engineering phase, we'll see in 10 years or so if it's actually useful and interesting from a useful science perspective. As it stands, there are facilities that can produce X-rays at these power levels, this system just seems to be designed to put one in every major college campus, rather than having 2 or 3 in the nation.
It will be enforced when the "serious pollution" incident hits the international news cycle.
"Knowingly poisoning hundreds of thousands of people." isn't called pollution, it's called mass murder.
Yes, but a high profile enough environmental disaster will cause people to fall out of favor. Look at the tainted infant formula, you think that CEO got where he was without connections? It comes out that he allowed "bad thing" to happen, bad enough that it made China and the Chinese leadership look bad and he's tried and executed in a matter of weeks. The thing about buying politicians is that they don't stay bought, especially if your baggage suddenly costs more than your bribe.
If you're running an open WiFi you are standing on the porch with a bullhorn yelling your personal information. I don't see how you can reasonably be upset about someone walking by with a notepad and writing down what you're saying.
I'm not seeing a lot of Catholics nor Baptists suicide bombing anything.
Yep, christians never take place is such activities.
You know... except during The Troubles. And the civil rights movement. And lets just ignore the pro-lifers who murder. Oh, and the Westburrow Baptist church. And the 2011 car bombings in Norway. And the National Liberation Front of Tripura in India. And the Lord's Resistance Army. And going back a bit further the crusades, the inquisition, the forced conversion of natives and slaves. But I guess those aren't suicide attacks, so that makes them better.
The issue the author is bringing up is that you have no way to easily determine that the published binary is, in fact, functionally identical to the published source code. Imagine you write an app that accesses private data and open source it, saying "check the source, the only thing we use the data for is X". And if you look at the source, that's certainly true. But there's no way to verify that the binary download was built from the published source; especially if the resulting binary is different every time you build it and different if you build it on different machines with different configurations. So, everyone who grabs the binary instead of building from source is taking it on trust, just like proprietary software, that the program does what it claims.
The droids talk, react in fear, happiness, excitement. Saying they are not alive because they are built out of different parts from you and me is a dangerous road to walk down.
I don't think people realize how many times we've come so close to having a real space program. And that's not to knock the good engineers, managers, and astronauts at NASA, it's just a description of reality. We were laying down plans for a thermal nuclear rocket when the space race was abruptly canceled. We were getting ready to attach a small rocket to lift the external fuel tanks into orbit for use as space station components (one of which would double the usable volume of the ISS) when disaster struck and the plans were canceled (imagine 100 space shuttle external tanks linked together in orbit). We were getting ready to do an asteroid capture mission which had real potential, through in situ mining and refining, of opening up the solar system; a project that is apparently now getting the ax.
It happens again and again and again. An accident, a funding cut, a change in leadership. And every time we lose decades of potential progress. I'm tired of it. I want my space ship dammit!
So... no one should be allowed to read in the car because some people get motion sickness?
And yet, there have been autonomous cars on the road for hundreds of thousands of miles without an accident (and please don't like to the articles that talk about the accident that occurred when the vehicle was being driven by a human being). Sometimes reality doesn't conform to what you expect, I know lots and lots of people that I wouldn't trust to drive 300,000 miles without an accident, but Google has managed to do just that.
safety. I just don't buy that the computers in these things are as situationally aware as a human driver. we can't even get trains to run fully autonomously yet.
I think you overestimate how situationally aware the average driver is. I have no doubts that in 10 years systems will be in place that, if everyone had autonomous cars, would save thousands of lives a year.
You can still ride a horse, just don't expect to be able to ride it down the middle of the freeway. Generation one automated cars will be safer than human drivers, by the end of that generation having automated driving will get you an insurance discount. Gen 2 will have cars that have accidents only in extreme nearly unavoidable circumstances, driving your car on manual will require special insurance that will cost significantly more than the standard. Gen 3 will move toward doing away with road laws as we understand them. The rules will be created ad-hoc in real time based on information provided by the road and the cars themselves. The flexibility this affords will make traffic jams virtually unheard of and significantly improve fuel efficiency and travel time, but driving a car on manual in that world would be borderline suicidal. At that point, the old timers who insist will have to take their classic cars to the race track or equivalent.
It's also the end of one of the most dangerous jobs in modern society. Would you cry if someone fully automated coal mining?
inherent expand-ability
Actually, if you expanded the table in the way that is intuitively obvious (and provides the most meaning) it's about 5x wider than it is tall making it difficult to work with in a physical sense. As it is almost always presented, important information is totally lost on most people when they look at it.
Hoarding cash would be the absolute worst thing you could possibly do if you were worried about a "greater depression". Worse than spending all your cash on funyuns and diet coke. Your cash is worth something now, if there's a huge wave of inflation coming it would be worth a fraction of that value in the future.
No. Just no. The title of the article says the find will "cost" the couple $5k. The subtitle says the same thing. The first 3 paragraphs are about how they're going to have to pay and why and snarking at how ridiculous the law was. Then, after another half dozen paragraphs, and after a "more articles from the star" link box, they mention that the couple won't have to pay. That's practically the definition of abusing the format to sell stories that aren't really stories.
Yep, because of muckraking reporting that neglects to mention that the couple can file for relief which will almost certainly be granted.
Lots of people are "trouble". Thousands... tens of thousands of people are "trouble". If you go global that number probably approaches millions. "kept an eye on them" is almost impossible with realistic amounts of resources.
It sounds like they are pulling ALL call data
Yes, almost cetainly true.
and warehousing it to mine via some secret warrant.
This, I suspect is not true, at least not literally. Based on the originally leaked document, we know the program is small, in the range of $20 million. We also have this description, which sounds much more like a black box than what you would expect if they were storing everything for later retrieval. What I suspect they are doing is pulling the data on a daily basis (or more or less often), processing it into the worlds biggest social graph, and then dumping it. They trust their algorithm, whatever it is, to build the map because there's simply too much information for a human to look at it and they can always get the full records from the provider at a later date if they need it.
You are playing the wrong games my friend.
Read it again. They never claim the system doesn't exist, they claim that it has extensive oversight. They never claim the information isn't available, only that Snowden didn't have access to it. Actually, they don't even say that, they say he never had access "to the content of the communications" which they claim they aren't gathering in the first place.
Pay no attention to the ticking time bomb that guy warned you about, he doesn't even have the activation codes!
President Merkin Muffley: General Turgidson, I find this very difficult to understand. I was under the impression that I was the only one in authority to order the use of nuclear weapons.
General "Buck" Turgidson: That's right, sir, you are the only person authorized to do so. And although I, uh, hate to judge before all the facts are in, it's beginning to look like, uh, General Ripper exceeded his authority.
I used it to predict the Peak Oil concept was, in fact, BS, and it's indeed turning out to be.
That's highly debatable and depense largely on what someone means when they say "peak oil". We hit peak "light sweet crude" quite a while back. We probably, though the numbers aren't quite in yet, hit peak crude in general within the past few years. What we haven't hit is peak "complex liquid hydrocarbons", we keep finding more sources that, while harder to extract and refine, are still energy positive, though not as much as oil used to be.