Is groundbreaking science over? No, not remotely. Is the era where groundbreaking science is publicized and sort of vaguely understood by a lot of non-scientists over? Probably not, but that's at least closer to the truth.
Java... free. VirtualBox... free. Oracle Linux... free. How can you say they're greedy?
On Windows, Java installs the Ask Toolbar (for now - other times it installs other shit) every time it updates to a new version unless the user realizes Oracle is a two bit hole in the wall company and unchecks the default boxes to opt out. That's greedy. To an even greater extent that's sleazy and just...trashy.
And American's innovating the medical breakthroughs they pool their money to socialize. We maintain a military second to none, and as a result, European nations get the luxury of not having to spend much money maintaining a capable military. America is fine if you're not a lazy shitsack. If you want the government to be a replacement for mommy and daddy after you move out, Europe is great.
According to the pharma industry's top spokesperson in a BBC World News interview a few weeks back, 80% of the R&D money that goes into medicine is supplied by the government. It took the host maybe 2 full minutes of repeating the same question before the PR guy would give up the actual number. So that American medical innovation to which you refer is almost entirely based on socialized medicine, not private funding.
From a software engineer who has never lived in Silicon Valley, the whole idea is ridiculous to me. No team I've ever worked with would even consider working while drunk.
Maybe teams in California work differently, who knows. Personally, I know that any code I write while intoxicated beyond a certain point is complete shit. If you think yours does not, you're lying to yourself.
Not even going to start on how accurate the movie is to real software engineering (hint: it's not).
Alcohol constantly flows at Google. When I've visited I've been surprised at what fraction of the coders are legitimately drunk at 2 in the afternoon.
Chinese hacking you? You don't say? They have been messing with us for as long as I can remember. They will ding your firewall so many times that it stops being amusing and starts to give one a nasty attitude. Let's couple that with how they will hack your MMO accounts, rip off your items, sell them to venders if they have to so that they can farm gold. The way they disrespect us by messing with our gaming culture to me is rude. We don't go messing with their entertainment, or messing with their computers. To me it shows how disrespectful, and antagonistic they are.
I think we should hammer them for it. They are way overdue for retribution of the nastiest sort in my opinion.
Did you really just advocate a declaration of war against China because your purples were disenchanted?
I have seen the graphic showing your countdown to the singularity and something I've always wondered is how you picked these events and what makes the significant? For example, your list seems to be made of things that would prolong our existence but entries like "Human ancestors walk upright" and "art, early cities" are confusing in that I don't understand how they can be marked as epic achievements. Are you saying that if we had never learned to walk upright we would not have developed intelligence? Are you saying that early cities were somehow superior to ant colonies? Didn't they help spread disease and cause sanitation problems? Can you convince me that this list isn't just arbitrary things that fit into a line?
They were chosen because they create a line on a log-log plot.
So yes, cauliflower mosaic virus with "a full length, terminally redundant 35S RNA" exists in normal cauliflower, too. Maybe TFA has some answers but TFS fails for not answering your question, which is the first thing any of us should be asking.
This will revolutionise electricity generation in such diverse fields as, uh... space craft and... um... space stations.
Aerospace uses non-flexible crystalline at about twice the power output, because what matters is more or less watts/Kg. For non-panel satellites with cells mounted right on the satellite body, what really matters is watts/sq meter.
Now you need flexible cells for... um...
Easy of manufacturing, for one, but more importantly the cost of manufacture (watts/$) is very, very low.
Was that physics book that Feynman loved so much written by you?
Wasn't the answer in the book "energy," which he thought was too nuanced and incomplete, while his "the Sun" example was the kind of thing he said his dad would have taught?
Which would be great, if you leave your car in the garage all day. Most of us drive around, so if the panels aren't on the car to keep it charged they're utterly useless to us.
I can't decide whether this was a joke or not. For the benefit of those who might not take it that way, I'll point out that these cars have batteries that allow them to collect energy from their garages and (gasp!) drive around with it.
I now know that the Spitfire's "performance" was located under the fuselage, and its "aerodynamics" were located in the tail section.
Which funnily enough is about right. The aircraft was a hack, a case of fix-what-we-have. The development history of the Spitfire is one of constant attempts to keep-up with the state-of-the-art as set by Germany and, to a lesser degree, the USA.
Constantly out-performed, out-manoeuvred and over-rated; the only reason the RAF continued to fly Spitfires is that there weren't enough Lend-Lease aircraft from the USA to meet demand. P-51s and P-47s couldn't come quick enough for European theatre and the P-40s held the line in North Africa.
There are plenty of airworthy Spitfires for anyone who feels dewy-eyed about them. What we really need to find is a cache of buried Beaufighters or Battles. Now THAT would really add to the historical record.
You overstate your case. The Spitfire had a higher power to mass ratio than any of its competitors and had a much better rate of turn than, for instance, the P-51. It had many shortcomings and many advantages compared to P-51s and P47s. Overall the range and cruise speed certainly made a P-51 a more valuable aircraft for flying the kind of missions most common late in the war, but Spitfires were pretty well suited for the Blitz.
You know that war you're fighting? The one with no point or purpose?
You're going to have to be a little more specific. The war in Afghanistan? The continued occupation of former Axis powers that are now allies? The war on drugs? The war on dignity at airports? The wars on poverty where we spend $1 million/year to create one $10k/year job? All of them, or just some of them? Please specify.
I think the American plan can be concisely described as the war on liberty.
Lemme know when you can stream a 4k render (as in 4096i) to my house with a 50ms latency and reaction time.
50 ms network latency can be unplayable. The local hardware, display, and controller will add another 50-75 ms of latency on top of that. They already do with consoles. If playing on a computer with a good monitor instead of a television this might be cut down to 25 ms, in which case a 25-50 ms latency from the network might be acceptable overhead.
Additionally, connections don't maintain constant latency. A 50 ms latency will jump to 200 ms (or in my ISP's case, 5 s) every few minutes. If you've ever played pre-Quakeworld Quake 1 you know what that will feel like when streaming.
it's a USB Mass Storage device you can drag-and-drop DRM-free ebooks (in.mobi and a few other formats) perfectly fine.
But what professional-quality ebooks are lawfully distributed DRM-free? I can see pre-1923 works, Baen Books, works of Cory Doctorow and a few other authors who have embraced Creative Commons, and what else?
Lawful doesn't matter much to me. I care more about ethical. I enjoy ebooks and convenience but I like to support authors and local bookstores, so I read most of my books via Kindle after downloading them for free, but I only download them after I buy a physical copy of the book in a store.
Chang'E's flyby of 4179 Toutatis is certainly an impressive feat. But, given that Hayabusa took samples while several meters above the surface of 25143 Itokawa, and that NEAR-Shoemaker actually landed on 433 Eros, I don't see how the term "closest" (which the article uses as well as the summary) can apply. Unless they mean "the asteroid flyby mission that took place nearest to Earth," which, while interesting, doesn't seem to be how this is being presented.
Some of the source articles from which Gizmag stole this story referred to this being the closest flyby of this particular asteroid. The wording was such that when I first skimmed one of them even I thought the claim was that this was the closest approach to any asteroid. When I went back and parsed the whole sentence it became much clearer - Gizmag must never have read their sources carefully.
How is a Super Nintendo emulator in any way comparable to WiFi when they're looking for a way to stay connected to the internet while they're traveling? I'm glad you can so easily be amused by your foresight to entertain yourself in such a lightweight manner, but for some people there's business to do, people to contact, emails to write, travel arrangements to make, and countless other tasks that someone would want and need internet for.
Hit up up down down left right left right b a select start and you get full broadband access from any SNES emulator.
This, exactly. For my purposes, Google has become significantly more inconvenient to use, and its results much less useful, over the past 5 years or more. I now have to use an 'allintext' operator for almost every search, and often the directive is simply ignored. And increasingly I have to put double quotes around every search term, because otherwise I get results that contain Google's idea of synonyms, (and not-so-synonyms), of my search terms; the 'synonyms' almost universally represent irrelevant junk.
I often start from the advanced search page when I don't feel like typing out behavior-modifying operators and I too have problems with things like allintext just being ignored in my results or some of my words being replaced with a list of supposed synonyms that don't make any sense for me.
So use another search engine. Bing and Yahoo! still exist. Heck, AltaVista still exists. So do Metacrawler and Dogpile. Go back in time, my friend, until you are happy.
Thanks to Google, the majority of results on most of those search engines is a steaming pile of fake linkfarm websites. That's not to say you shouldn't go try other search engines - Google is the main target of the SEO that leads to the linkfarms and it does a pretty poor job of avoiding them. But they were better back before Google, when well planned (often boolean heavy) searches were more likely to lead to relevant results.
Slashdot Mirror
Is groundbreaking science over? No, not remotely. Is the era where groundbreaking science is publicized and sort of vaguely understood by a lot of non-scientists over? Probably not, but that's at least closer to the truth.
Java... free. VirtualBox... free. Oracle Linux... free. How can you say they're greedy?
On Windows, Java installs the Ask Toolbar (for now - other times it installs other shit) every time it updates to a new version unless the user realizes Oracle is a two bit hole in the wall company and unchecks the default boxes to opt out. That's greedy. To an even greater extent that's sleazy and just...trashy.
And American's innovating the medical breakthroughs they pool their money to socialize. We maintain a military second to none, and as a result, European nations get the luxury of not having to spend much money maintaining a capable military. America is fine if you're not a lazy shitsack. If you want the government to be a replacement for mommy and daddy after you move out, Europe is great.
According to the pharma industry's top spokesperson in a BBC World News interview a few weeks back, 80% of the R&D money that goes into medicine is supplied by the government. It took the host maybe 2 full minutes of repeating the same question before the PR guy would give up the actual number. So that American medical innovation to which you refer is almost entirely based on socialized medicine, not private funding.
From a software engineer who has never lived in Silicon Valley, the whole idea is ridiculous to me. No team I've ever worked with would even consider working while drunk.
Maybe teams in California work differently, who knows. Personally, I know that any code I write while intoxicated beyond a certain point is complete shit. If you think yours does not, you're lying to yourself.
Not even going to start on how accurate the movie is to real software engineering (hint: it's not).
Alcohol constantly flows at Google. When I've visited I've been surprised at what fraction of the coders are legitimately drunk at 2 in the afternoon.
Chinese hacking you? You don't say? They have been messing with us for as long as I can remember. They will ding your firewall so many times that it stops being amusing and starts to give one a nasty attitude. Let's couple that with how they will hack your MMO accounts, rip off your items, sell them to venders if they have to so that they can farm gold. The way they disrespect us by messing with our gaming culture to me is rude. We don't go messing with their entertainment, or messing with their computers. To me it shows how disrespectful, and antagonistic they are.
I think we should hammer them for it. They are way overdue for retribution of the nastiest sort in my opinion.
Did you really just advocate a declaration of war against China because your purples were disenchanted?
I have seen the graphic showing your countdown to the singularity and something I've always wondered is how you picked these events and what makes the significant? For example, your list seems to be made of things that would prolong our existence but entries like "Human ancestors walk upright" and "art, early cities" are confusing in that I don't understand how they can be marked as epic achievements. Are you saying that if we had never learned to walk upright we would not have developed intelligence? Are you saying that early cities were somehow superior to ant colonies? Didn't they help spread disease and cause sanitation problems? Can you convince me that this list isn't just arbitrary things that fit into a line?
They were chosen because they create a line on a log-log plot.
'nuff said
And as a hardware corollary, the 80 column video card that allowed visicalc to show a useful amount of screen real estate.
You can read more here, http://www.folklore.org/
Folklore.org paints an extremely rosy picture of Jobs compare to what the people in the photo on the top of the page say in person.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauliflower_mosaic_virus
So yes, cauliflower mosaic virus with "a full length, terminally redundant 35S RNA" exists in normal cauliflower, too. Maybe TFA has some answers but TFS fails for not answering your question, which is the first thing any of us should be asking.
This will revolutionise electricity generation in such diverse fields as, uh... space craft and... um... space stations.
Aerospace uses non-flexible crystalline at about twice the power output, because what matters is more or less watts/Kg. For non-panel satellites with cells mounted right on the satellite body, what really matters is watts/sq meter.
Now you need flexible cells for ... um...
Easy of manufacturing, for one, but more importantly the cost of manufacture (watts/$) is very, very low.
Right. The current record for all solar cells is 44%. 27% has been achieved without rare materials.
When you see indium and gallium in the materials list, it's not going to be a high-volume product.
Quite the opposite. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_indium_gallium_selenide_solar_cells
"What makes it go?"
Was that physics book that Feynman loved so much written by you?
Wasn't the answer in the book "energy," which he thought was too nuanced and incomplete, while his "the Sun" example was the kind of thing he said his dad would have taught?
Which would be great, if you leave your car in the garage all day. Most of us drive around, so if the panels aren't on the car to keep it charged they're utterly useless to us.
I can't decide whether this was a joke or not. For the benefit of those who might not take it that way, I'll point out that these cars have batteries that allow them to collect energy from their garages and (gasp!) drive around with it.
I now know that the Spitfire's "performance" was located under the fuselage, and its "aerodynamics" were located in the tail section.
Which funnily enough is about right. The aircraft was a hack, a case of fix-what-we-have. The development history of the Spitfire is one of constant attempts to keep-up with the state-of-the-art as set by Germany and, to a lesser degree, the USA.
Constantly out-performed, out-manoeuvred and over-rated; the only reason the RAF continued to fly Spitfires is that there weren't enough Lend-Lease aircraft from the USA to meet demand. P-51s and P-47s couldn't come quick enough for European theatre and the P-40s held the line in North Africa.
There are plenty of airworthy Spitfires for anyone who feels dewy-eyed about them. What we really need to find is a cache of buried Beaufighters or Battles. Now THAT would really add to the historical record.
You overstate your case. The Spitfire had a higher power to mass ratio than any of its competitors and had a much better rate of turn than, for instance, the P-51. It had many shortcomings and many advantages compared to P-51s and P47s. Overall the range and cruise speed certainly made a P-51 a more valuable aircraft for flying the kind of missions most common late in the war, but Spitfires were pretty well suited for the Blitz.
FAIL:
Finding and correcting said junk data becomes an impossible task if enough people do it.
What percentage of social media users enter junk data?
75%? 85%?
Undoing accidental moderation. Someone else please successfully mod this up without missing and modding down.
You know that war you're fighting? The one with no point or purpose?
You're going to have to be a little more specific. The war in Afghanistan? The continued occupation of former Axis powers that are now allies? The war on drugs? The war on dignity at airports? The wars on poverty where we spend $1 million /year to create one $10k /year job? All of them, or just some of them? Please specify.
I think the American plan can be concisely described as the war on liberty.
Lemme know when you can stream a 4k render (as in 4096i) to my house with a 50ms latency and reaction time.
50 ms network latency can be unplayable. The local hardware, display, and controller will add another 50-75 ms of latency on top of that. They already do with consoles. If playing on a computer with a good monitor instead of a television this might be cut down to 25 ms, in which case a 25-50 ms latency from the network might be acceptable overhead.
Additionally, connections don't maintain constant latency. A 50 ms latency will jump to 200 ms (or in my ISP's case, 5 s) every few minutes. If you've ever played pre-Quakeworld Quake 1 you know what that will feel like when streaming.
it's a USB Mass Storage device you can drag-and-drop DRM-free ebooks (in .mobi and a few other formats) perfectly fine.
But what professional-quality ebooks are lawfully distributed DRM-free? I can see pre-1923 works, Baen Books, works of Cory Doctorow and a few other authors who have embraced Creative Commons, and what else?
Lawful doesn't matter much to me. I care more about ethical. I enjoy ebooks and convenience but I like to support authors and local bookstores, so I read most of my books via Kindle after downloading them for free, but I only download them after I buy a physical copy of the book in a store.
Posting AC for obvious reasons...
Chang'E's flyby of 4179 Toutatis is certainly an impressive feat. But, given that Hayabusa took samples while several meters above the surface of 25143 Itokawa, and that NEAR-Shoemaker actually landed on 433 Eros, I don't see how the term "closest" (which the article uses as well as the summary) can apply. Unless they mean "the asteroid flyby mission that took place nearest to Earth," which, while interesting, doesn't seem to be how this is being presented.
Some of the source articles from which Gizmag stole this story referred to this being the closest flyby of this particular asteroid. The wording was such that when I first skimmed one of them even I thought the claim was that this was the closest approach to any asteroid. When I went back and parsed the whole sentence it became much clearer - Gizmag must never have read their sources carefully.
This was done better and cheaper than the USA could have accomplished.
Citation needed.
Seriously, guys. I don't want to download them over mobile. Stop this crap.
Install a system-wide ad blocker on your phone.
How is a Super Nintendo emulator in any way comparable to WiFi when they're looking for a way to stay connected to the internet while they're traveling? I'm glad you can so easily be amused by your foresight to entertain yourself in such a lightweight manner, but for some people there's business to do, people to contact, emails to write, travel arrangements to make, and countless other tasks that someone would want and need internet for.
Hit up up down down left right left right b a select start and you get full broadband access from any SNES emulator.
This, exactly. For my purposes, Google has become significantly more inconvenient to use, and its results much less useful, over the past 5 years or more. I now have to use an 'allintext' operator for almost every search, and often the directive is simply ignored. And increasingly I have to put double quotes around every search term, because otherwise I get results that contain Google's idea of synonyms, (and not-so-synonyms), of my search terms; the 'synonyms' almost universally represent irrelevant junk.
I often start from the advanced search page when I don't feel like typing out behavior-modifying operators and I too have problems with things like allintext just being ignored in my results or some of my words being replaced with a list of supposed synonyms that don't make any sense for me.
So use another search engine. Bing and Yahoo! still exist. Heck, AltaVista still exists. So do Metacrawler and Dogpile. Go back in time, my friend, until you are happy.
Thanks to Google, the majority of results on most of those search engines is a steaming pile of fake linkfarm websites. That's not to say you shouldn't go try other search engines - Google is the main target of the SEO that leads to the linkfarms and it does a pretty poor job of avoiding them. But they were better back before Google, when well planned (often boolean heavy) searches were more likely to lead to relevant results.