1) Man gets criminal conviction for severely beating a woman, gets travel restrictions when applying for visas. 2) Holidaying teenagers get detained and deported for tweeting that they were going to party hard.
If you can't see a difference, you're beyond help.
It reminds me of the Palm Pre. Much hyped as an "iPhone killer", massive advertising campaign, utopian TV adverts, massive billboards- but no actual customers batted an eyelid.
I'm genuinely sad that this is happening to Nokia. They've been a favourite company of mine for years, the N9 looks like a fantastic phone (not that it's available here, of course), MeeGo has lots of potential; and they're pissing it all away on an OS that customers don't want to buy and salesmen don't want to sell.
Go look at your Soda, Candy and Chip aisle in the grocery store.
Perhaps you've seen these new "110cal" cans that are 230ml instead of 355. Perhaps you've noticed Coke is only putting 10 cans in the Fanta fridge boxes, but 12 cans in the Coke and Sprite fridge boxes. Yet they are the same price. 25% less, same price.
16.5% less in the Fanta pack. 25% more in the Coke pack. [/pedant ]
Roger that. I've added both this game and this studio to my mental list of ones to avoid.
It's not different to Spore, really. I really wanted to play Spore. I still do. But that slimy weasel move of limiting you to a set number of "uses" of the software meant that I never did. I'm not paying £30 for something I can only use 3 times, when traditionally £30 gets me a game for life. Blacklisted- and EA in general are on my "soft blacklist", of ones to avoid if I can be bothered.
According to TFA (well, the BBC article on the same subject, anyway) it blocks helium molecules with what appears to be 100% efficiency. Helium molecules are smaller than the molecules in a standing mass of hydrogen, since hydrogen atoms bond together to form H2.
In the UK, journalists can be arrested for disclosing non-authorized statements from police officers and there are other restrictions on the press that would simply not be thinkable in the US.
Citation very much needed.
The UK is currently having a serious bout of soul-searching (via the Leveson Enquiry) on media ethics. Newsprint in particular in the UK is more or less completely unregulated. They've been hacking phones, email accounts, and stalking people for years without any legal intervention- only now are people starting to ask why behaviour that is criminal for everyone (e.g., hacking into a private computer) is OK if you work for Heat Magazine.
More relevantly, they've also been caught bribing, blackmailing and seducing information out of police officers. There has been barely a whisper that the journalists might have been acting illegally in these cases (despite the fact they clearly were), with the legal ire instead being focused on police officers who take bribes and leak onfidential information.
Fair enough. A better measure would be to look at how a country compares with its neighbours in the list.
In its new position, the USA is below Comoros, a country which had it's first ever peaceful election in 2006, and has a legal system based on Sharia law. It is now level-pegging with Taiwan, Argentina and Romania. With a score of 14,000, it is only 1,000 points ahead of Haiti. It's score is now closer to those of Bosnia, Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic than it is to the UK (at around 20k for the former, 0.2k for the latter).
So, probably best not to break out the party hats just yet.
I don't get it, and I don't get the suspicious quotes in the headline either. Why on earth would O2 be doing it on purpose? What possible reason would they have to pass your phone number to every random non-affiliated website you visit (particularly when they freely admit that they've always passed it to trusted websites such as ones they own, and will continue to do so).
Sounds like a text-book coding cock up to me. Embarassing for the developers involved, possibly indicative that they don't test things properly, or are rushing releases- but that sounds pretty familiar to me.
Just a guess is that they have also thought of it, and are doing something to deal with it.
Unfortunately I think I know what their answer would be. They claim its network abilities make it "unable to crash", because it know where all the other traffic is. Therefore, it should never need to do an emergency break- it can just roll to a gentle halt. And seeing as it's auto-driving, you can't manually emergency break it.
So my guess is- it won't be doing any emergency breaking, ever. It will either roll to a gentle halt- or spectacularly rear-end some other vehicle.
Why hide it? And why would the Air Force not say how it happened, if they know? Why, indeed.
I can't think of a situation in which the Air Force wouldn't be acting evasive. We know the Iranians have the drone- that means there are only really three possibilities:
1) The Iranians downed it. That's an embarassing loss for the US Air Force. 2) The drone crashed due to a malfunction. Losing top technology because of a cock up is even more embarassing. 3) The drone was crashed on purpose, for obscure conspiracy reason of choice. Whatever the conspiracy, it's unlikely to work if the Iranians knew it were done on purpose.
And finally, the very fact that US military aircraft routinely violate the airspace of peace-time rivals is hardly top trumps in diplomatic circles. Avoiding talking about it is about the only defense they have.
Great when you're flying over enemy-infested desert mountain ranges, but not so great when flying over a city or key piece of infrastructure. The military is (generally) not in the business of "let's just blow everything up regardless!".
Noise jamming is not "technical wizardry." It is the crudest form of electronic jamming known to man. It's the "hail mary" of the jamming world. If Iran used it, they did so because their technology is primitive, not because they had inside information.
Well, it did work. Seeing as they successfully netted themselves a USAF unmanne drone with simple noise jamming (if that is indeed what happened), anything "more sophisticated" would have been wasted effort. Like picking the lock on a door when the window is wide open.
Project Orion (the 1970's attempt at a thermonuclear rocket) would have take 44 years to reach Alpha Centauri (assuming a fly-by with no deceleration time, and excluding 36 days worth of acceleration to it's top speed). A long time by human standards, but a very very long way short of "10s of thousands of years". If you launched one today, you could get your first pictures back in almost the same amount of time as between Apollo 11 and today. That's travelling about 10% the speed of light.
There was also Project Daedalus, which was a similar concept using fusion rather than fission. That could go 12% the speed of light, and was not really that much less practical than Orion.
I've no idea how to write a web browser, or a large modern website for that matter, but here I am using Firefox to browse Slashdot. Better call me a script kiddie!
No need to be an asshat. While the UDHR is a mere "declaration", and therefore non-binding, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (which is completely derived from it) is a full international treaty, ratified by most major countries, and is an accepted part of international law. Free speech is in Article 19 (thanks Wikipedia!).
So you might be pedantically correct that the UDHR is "merely" the opinion of the UN General Assembly, it is international law under an only slightly different name.
Not usually, no. Usually the mitigator is that you're only supposed to sign extradition treaties with countries who's legal system you trust. So the UK has an extradition treaty with the US on the basis that US law is supposed to be of a shared level of quality as our own.
Vaguely relevant is the Julian Assange extradition case (from the UK to Sweden). Even though some of the offences he is charged with in Sweden aren't covered by UK law, the treaty works on the basis that the Swedish legal system is generally close enough to our that we'll trust their national laws are just.
Hey, fun fact: most of the water the bottling companies bottle rained out of the same clouds as the stuff piped through your taps. Collected in the same reservoirs, too!
And on the other hand, if you go to YouTube and watch a video of Justin Bieber doing his musical (!) thing, you haven't actually deprived Universal Music of any CDs or records or digits or anything like that. So it's not even the same thing as "stealing water directly from a bottling plant's tanks". In that case, the bottling plant is actually left with less water.
All you can say is that by watching a Justin Bieber video on YouTube there is a marginally smaller chance that you would have gone out and bought his CD- so unless you were actually planning to buy a CD before watching him on YouTube, Universal haven't lost a penny.
I don't know why they'd want it either, seeing as they're heavily invested in Android, also have Bada, and have god knows how many no-name smart phone OSs on their low end devices. What would they want to buy a company for when their only appreciable asset is their (struggling) smart phone OS?
If someone does by RIM (and I can see it happening), my money is on one of the gadget-makers without a successful smart phone brand already. I could see one of the PC manufacturers going for it, such as Dell, Lenovo, Asus, etc.
Their claims aren't even consistent. They give "we will all be telepathic" (a technology that has never had even the most basic of basic elements successfully demonstrated) 10/10 for liklihood, as they do for controlled nuclear fusion (on which the jusry is still out on whether it is even possible). On the other hand, they give "80% of the world will allow gay marriage" 8/10, despite the fact it is already allowed in a wide array of countries- and homosexuallity was still a crime in most of the world only half a century or so ago. And they give "wars by the West will be fought by remote control" 5/10- despite the fact we already are using a wide array of robotic weapons, and have dozens in the pipeline!
If I remember rightly, nuclear fusion in a reactor environment is often laser-triggered. As with an H-bomb, you need a collossal amount of energy to kick start the reaction- as you say, more than you get out. The principal and the problem is basically the same. And I don't believe nuclear fusion reactors have ever gotten around the "use the fuel up quickly" problem either- the reaction uses up pretty much as much fuel as is available as fast as it can. You can stop that being a huge explosion by only reacting a small amount of fuel, but it doesn't really get around the long-term problem.
"Conventional nuclear fusion" (aka "hot fusion") is easy; we've been doing it for decades. That's the basis behind the bang in a Hydrogen bomb.
The tricky thing is not making nuclear fusion happen. The tricky thing is making it happen "cold" (that is, without needing to detonate a nuclear fission device to kick start the fusion) and making it happen in a controlled fashion (that is, create a steady source of heat continuously while being fed a constant supply of fuel, rather than using up all its fuel in one go in a massive city-destroying explosion).
1) If you can't ravel faster than light (and practical FTL travel is still considered physically impossible by standard scientific theory), an interstellar war would be impossible in any meaningful sense. Lets say that our alien foe lives at Epsilon Eridani, which is one of the nearest stars to Earth at 10 light years away. At 12% the speed of light (the proposed top speed of the fusion powered Project Daedalus spacecraft) the journey would take you 83.5 years, one way. Assuming you're fighting for any actual reason (say, resources), it's tricky to see how you could possibly hope to achieve anything that would benefit your home civilization. And Epsilon Eridani is remarkably nearby; of all the planets spotted so far by Kepler, the nearest is 123 light years (so a one way journey of more than 1000 years for Daedalus). The furthest is 4338 ly away, so a 36200 year Daedalus trip. Even if you can go faster than Daedalus, you're still not going to be fighting any wars at those speeds.
2) If you can travel at the speed of light you can destroy planets pretty much at whim, making wars a bit short. As an object approaches the speed of light, the energy it contains approaches infinity (which is why you can't go that fast). If you unleash an amount of energy which was even distantly approaching infinite on a planet (by crashing into it), you make a very big explosion. 1 tonne travelling at 90% the speed of light would contain something like 1.2 x 10^20 Joules of energy- something like a 40 gigaton explosion. 6.6 x 10^26 Joules is enough to evaporate all of Earth's oceans. You only need something like 2 x 10^32 Joules to shatter planet Earth completely, reducing it to gravel.
I agree with you that practice and broader understanding are far more important than just knowing the basics.
I work in IT, but I'm not a developer. I "know" code- in that I can look at a piece of code written in one of the more common languages and read what it's doing, and I can hold meaningful conversations with developers, and I can write amateurish little programmes for my own pleasure. But I am definitely not a developer; you ask me to write something of even moderate complexity and you're going to be dissapointed. It's not my job, and it's not a skill I've mastered to a professional level.
If this CodeAccademy thing can get large number of people to just understand coding, understand what can and can't be done, understand the consequences of certain requests or decisions, and able to write BASIC macros for Excel, then it's no bad thing. But there's no short cut to training up a proper developer.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Man gets criminal conviction for severely beating a woman, gets travel restrictions when applying for visas.
2) Holidaying teenagers get detained and deported for tweeting that they were going to party hard.
If you can't see a difference, you're beyond help.
It reminds me of the Palm Pre. Much hyped as an "iPhone killer", massive advertising campaign, utopian TV adverts, massive billboards- but no actual customers batted an eyelid.
I'm genuinely sad that this is happening to Nokia. They've been a favourite company of mine for years, the N9 looks like a fantastic phone (not that it's available here, of course), MeeGo has lots of potential; and they're pissing it all away on an OS that customers don't want to buy and salesmen don't want to sell.
Go look at your Soda, Candy and Chip aisle in the grocery store.
Perhaps you've seen these new "110cal" cans that are 230ml instead of 355. Perhaps you've noticed Coke is only putting 10 cans in the Fanta fridge boxes, but 12 cans in the Coke and Sprite fridge boxes. Yet they are the same price. 25% less, same price.
16.5% less in the Fanta pack. 25% more in the Coke pack. [ /pedant ]
Roger that. I've added both this game and this studio to my mental list of ones to avoid.
It's not different to Spore, really. I really wanted to play Spore. I still do. But that slimy weasel move of limiting you to a set number of "uses" of the software meant that I never did. I'm not paying £30 for something I can only use 3 times, when traditionally £30 gets me a game for life. Blacklisted- and EA in general are on my "soft blacklist", of ones to avoid if I can be bothered.
According to TFA (well, the BBC article on the same subject, anyway) it blocks helium molecules with what appears to be 100% efficiency. Helium molecules are smaller than the molecules in a standing mass of hydrogen, since hydrogen atoms bond together to form H2.
In the UK, journalists can be arrested for disclosing non-authorized statements from police officers and there are other restrictions on the press that would simply not be thinkable in the US.
Citation very much needed.
The UK is currently having a serious bout of soul-searching (via the Leveson Enquiry) on media ethics. Newsprint in particular in the UK is more or less completely unregulated. They've been hacking phones, email accounts, and stalking people for years without any legal intervention- only now are people starting to ask why behaviour that is criminal for everyone (e.g., hacking into a private computer) is OK if you work for Heat Magazine.
More relevantly, they've also been caught bribing, blackmailing and seducing information out of police officers. There has been barely a whisper that the journalists might have been acting illegally in these cases (despite the fact they clearly were), with the legal ire instead being focused on police officers who take bribes and leak onfidential information.
Fair enough. A better measure would be to look at how a country compares with its neighbours in the list.
In its new position, the USA is below Comoros, a country which had it's first ever peaceful election in 2006, and has a legal system based on Sharia law. It is now level-pegging with Taiwan, Argentina and Romania. With a score of 14,000, it is only 1,000 points ahead of Haiti. It's score is now closer to those of Bosnia, Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic than it is to the UK (at around 20k for the former, 0.2k for the latter).
So, probably best not to break out the party hats just yet.
I don't get it, and I don't get the suspicious quotes in the headline either. Why on earth would O2 be doing it on purpose? What possible reason would they have to pass your phone number to every random non-affiliated website you visit (particularly when they freely admit that they've always passed it to trusted websites such as ones they own, and will continue to do so).
Sounds like a text-book coding cock up to me. Embarassing for the developers involved, possibly indicative that they don't test things properly, or are rushing releases- but that sounds pretty familiar to me.
Just a guess is that they have also thought of it, and are doing something to deal with it.
Unfortunately I think I know what their answer would be. They claim its network abilities make it "unable to crash", because it know where all the other traffic is. Therefore, it should never need to do an emergency break- it can just roll to a gentle halt. And seeing as it's auto-driving, you can't manually emergency break it.
So my guess is- it won't be doing any emergency breaking, ever. It will either roll to a gentle halt- or spectacularly rear-end some other vehicle.
Why hide it? And why would the Air Force not say how it happened, if they know? Why, indeed.
I can't think of a situation in which the Air Force wouldn't be acting evasive. We know the Iranians have the drone- that means there are only really three possibilities:
1) The Iranians downed it. That's an embarassing loss for the US Air Force.
2) The drone crashed due to a malfunction. Losing top technology because of a cock up is even more embarassing.
3) The drone was crashed on purpose, for obscure conspiracy reason of choice. Whatever the conspiracy, it's unlikely to work if the Iranians knew it were done on purpose.
And finally, the very fact that US military aircraft routinely violate the airspace of peace-time rivals is hardly top trumps in diplomatic circles. Avoiding talking about it is about the only defense they have.
Great when you're flying over enemy-infested desert mountain ranges, but not so great when flying over a city or key piece of infrastructure. The military is (generally) not in the business of "let's just blow everything up regardless!".
Noise jamming is not "technical wizardry." It is the crudest form of electronic jamming known to man. It's the "hail mary" of the jamming world. If Iran used it, they did so because their technology is primitive, not because they had inside information.
Well, it did work. Seeing as they successfully netted themselves a USAF unmanne drone with simple noise jamming (if that is indeed what happened), anything "more sophisticated" would have been wasted effort. Like picking the lock on a door when the window is wide open.
I won't answer it again (siblings posts have done a far better job of it than I could), but to sum up- no. That isn't how space works.
Reminds me of one of my favourite geek-out websites:
www.projectrho.com/rocket/
If only more writers of science fiction television trash would spend just one afternoon of their life skimming that website...
Citation needed, on the travel time aspect.
Project Orion (the 1970's attempt at a thermonuclear rocket) would have take 44 years to reach Alpha Centauri (assuming a fly-by with no deceleration time, and excluding 36 days worth of acceleration to it's top speed). A long time by human standards, but a very very long way short of "10s of thousands of years". If you launched one today, you could get your first pictures back in almost the same amount of time as between Apollo 11 and today. That's travelling about 10% the speed of light.
There was also Project Daedalus, which was a similar concept using fusion rather than fission. That could go 12% the speed of light, and was not really that much less practical than Orion.
I've no idea how to write a web browser, or a large modern website for that matter, but here I am using Firefox to browse Slashdot. Better call me a script kiddie!
No need to be an asshat. While the UDHR is a mere "declaration", and therefore non-binding, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (which is completely derived from it) is a full international treaty, ratified by most major countries, and is an accepted part of international law. Free speech is in Article 19 (thanks Wikipedia!).
So you might be pedantically correct that the UDHR is "merely" the opinion of the UN General Assembly, it is international law under an only slightly different name.
Not usually, no. Usually the mitigator is that you're only supposed to sign extradition treaties with countries who's legal system you trust. So the UK has an extradition treaty with the US on the basis that US law is supposed to be of a shared level of quality as our own.
Vaguely relevant is the Julian Assange extradition case (from the UK to Sweden). Even though some of the offences he is charged with in Sweden aren't covered by UK law, the treaty works on the basis that the Swedish legal system is generally close enough to our that we'll trust their national laws are just.
Hey, fun fact: most of the water the bottling companies bottle rained out of the same clouds as the stuff piped through your taps. Collected in the same reservoirs, too!
And on the other hand, if you go to YouTube and watch a video of Justin Bieber doing his musical (!) thing, you haven't actually deprived Universal Music of any CDs or records or digits or anything like that. So it's not even the same thing as "stealing water directly from a bottling plant's tanks". In that case, the bottling plant is actually left with less water.
All you can say is that by watching a Justin Bieber video on YouTube there is a marginally smaller chance that you would have gone out and bought his CD- so unless you were actually planning to buy a CD before watching him on YouTube, Universal haven't lost a penny.
I don't know why they'd want it either, seeing as they're heavily invested in Android, also have Bada, and have god knows how many no-name smart phone OSs on their low end devices. What would they want to buy a company for when their only appreciable asset is their (struggling) smart phone OS?
If someone does by RIM (and I can see it happening), my money is on one of the gadget-makers without a successful smart phone brand already. I could see one of the PC manufacturers going for it, such as Dell, Lenovo, Asus, etc.
Their claims aren't even consistent. They give "we will all be telepathic" (a technology that has never had even the most basic of basic elements successfully demonstrated) 10/10 for liklihood, as they do for controlled nuclear fusion (on which the jusry is still out on whether it is even possible). On the other hand, they give "80% of the world will allow gay marriage" 8/10, despite the fact it is already allowed in a wide array of countries- and homosexuallity was still a crime in most of the world only half a century or so ago. And they give "wars by the West will be fought by remote control" 5/10- despite the fact we already are using a wide array of robotic weapons, and have dozens in the pipeline!
If I remember rightly, nuclear fusion in a reactor environment is often laser-triggered. As with an H-bomb, you need a collossal amount of energy to kick start the reaction- as you say, more than you get out. The principal and the problem is basically the same. And I don't believe nuclear fusion reactors have ever gotten around the "use the fuel up quickly" problem either- the reaction uses up pretty much as much fuel as is available as fast as it can. You can stop that being a huge explosion by only reacting a small amount of fuel, but it doesn't really get around the long-term problem.
"Conventional nuclear fusion" (aka "hot fusion") is easy; we've been doing it for decades. That's the basis behind the bang in a Hydrogen bomb.
The tricky thing is not making nuclear fusion happen. The tricky thing is making it happen "cold" (that is, without needing to detonate a nuclear fission device to kick start the fusion) and making it happen in a controlled fashion (that is, create a steady source of heat continuously while being fed a constant supply of fuel, rather than using up all its fuel in one go in a massive city-destroying explosion).
Hey, two fun facts to roll around your mind:
1) If you can't ravel faster than light (and practical FTL travel is still considered physically impossible by standard scientific theory), an interstellar war would be impossible in any meaningful sense. Lets say that our alien foe lives at Epsilon Eridani, which is one of the nearest stars to Earth at 10 light years away. At 12% the speed of light (the proposed top speed of the fusion powered Project Daedalus spacecraft) the journey would take you 83.5 years, one way. Assuming you're fighting for any actual reason (say, resources), it's tricky to see how you could possibly hope to achieve anything that would benefit your home civilization. And Epsilon Eridani is remarkably nearby; of all the planets spotted so far by Kepler, the nearest is 123 light years (so a one way journey of more than 1000 years for Daedalus). The furthest is 4338 ly away, so a 36200 year Daedalus trip. Even if you can go faster than Daedalus, you're still not going to be fighting any wars at those speeds.
2) If you can travel at the speed of light you can destroy planets pretty much at whim, making wars a bit short. As an object approaches the speed of light, the energy it contains approaches infinity (which is why you can't go that fast). If you unleash an amount of energy which was even distantly approaching infinite on a planet (by crashing into it), you make a very big explosion. 1 tonne travelling at 90% the speed of light would contain something like 1.2 x 10^20 Joules of energy- something like a 40 gigaton explosion. 6.6 x 10^26 Joules is enough to evaporate all of Earth's oceans. You only need something like 2 x 10^32 Joules to shatter planet Earth completely, reducing it to gravel.
I agree with you that practice and broader understanding are far more important than just knowing the basics.
I work in IT, but I'm not a developer. I "know" code- in that I can look at a piece of code written in one of the more common languages and read what it's doing, and I can hold meaningful conversations with developers, and I can write amateurish little programmes for my own pleasure. But I am definitely not a developer; you ask me to write something of even moderate complexity and you're going to be dissapointed. It's not my job, and it's not a skill I've mastered to a professional level.
If this CodeAccademy thing can get large number of people to just understand coding, understand what can and can't be done, understand the consequences of certain requests or decisions, and able to write BASIC macros for Excel, then it's no bad thing. But there's no short cut to training up a proper developer.