Awesome? It's quite a substantial set of kit i'll grant you. But I was keeping a (pretty crude) processor count as I RTFA. There's the equivalent of around 50 recent commodity processors in there, and a relatively modest amount of hard drive. If I counted up the onshore computing hardware in my work (development, beancounting and admin) and the active offshore hardware (the revenue earning stuff, apart from software sales) then I'd probably come to a similar total amount of processor cycles running on a week day. We're a medium-size enterprise - with current recruitment, we're probably sustaining 50 full-time people on the payroll at the moment when last year would have been in the low 40s, doing nothing awesome.
What obviously makes the difference in the hardware described is quality of componentry and sustained workload. Much of our productive work goes on inside people's heads while they absorb and interpret information on screen in front of them. During those times, the machines could switch the processor down to a 20Hz monitor on keyboard and mouse and no-one would notice any change. Terminal server territory? My biggest bitch about hardware is that the development and testing people get the newest, fastest hardware, and code to that. which leaves us grunts in the field twiddling our thumbs at the hourglass icon on our vintage laptops. The obvious flow path for hardware to be retired is for front-line systems to be retired to development, then to testing, so that the testing people have the oldest, crankiest equipment in the company. If new developments work adequately there, then they should be OK on the newer hardware in the rest of company. Of course, the testing guy doesn't see it like that.
I don't have the option of installing OOo on machines at work, so I just use OOo formats for my own use (including when I'm doing stuff at work, using OOo on a memory stick) and I output the results for target users in PDF format. WHEN people ask me for a format that they can edit (not unreasonable when I'm producing first-draft stuff for people to work on as more data arrives over the next few months), then I send it to them in an antiquated format since there's been nothing significant new invented in word processing in the 2 decades that I've been doing it. (Things have generally been going downhill since Word 5 if you ask me. They should never have ported it to Windows.) Then when Word fucks up on importing a working document (they know it works - they've seen the PDF), I blame Word. Ditto for spreadsheets, though the increase in cell count in the last decade is actually a significant improvement, so it normally has to be a vintage '97 XLS. Of course, when I'm archiving stuff, the DEFINITIVE version is always the OOo document, and any alternative formats presented are labelled as being non-definitive. The client's generally don't care - PDF is fine once the job is finished and the data is going to the archive boxes.
If theory says that black holes beyond 10 solar masses cannot form, how do they explain the conjectured supermassive black holes at the center of our and other galaxies?
If "theory" did indeed say that, then there might be a bit of a problem. But what theory actually says is more like
"for the evolution of a large, otherwise uninteresting main sequence star isolated in space, a black hole of mass 10*M/sol is an easy to envisage endpoint of evolution."
It doesn't say that other end points are impossible, or implausible, just harder to envisage. An honest politician is harder to envisage than a thieving corrupt drug addict getting to the most powerful figurehead in global politics, but not impossible. Tony Benn is contemplating re-entereing parliament after standing down to spend more time with his politics.
Here's a scenario which could produce a 16*M/sol black hole without necessarily violating any laws of physics : take 2 large stars in a binary, one 20*M/sol, one of 25*M/sol (large but by no means unreasonable), which are in close orbit, but outside each other's Roche lobes (so there's negligible mass transfer between them in their red giant phases ; another not unreasonable stipulation). The 25*M/sol star will evolve significantly faster than the 20*M/sol star, so gets to the point where it goes supernova while the 20*M/sol star is still on the main sequence. In the supernova a neutron star is generated at 1.5*M/sol (below Chandreshakar's Limit, nothing unusual or incredible about that), but as is common, the supernova is slightly asymmetric resulting in the neutron star getting a hefty kick up the pants and being ejected from the centre-of-mass of the dismantled star at a considerable velocity (several self-diameters per second ; this happens in many if not most neutron star formations which is why we find neutron stars outside supernova remnants). Pure chance points the ejected neutron star at the 20*M/sol star, which it impacts obliquely after a few months. The neutron star starts a "dance of death" through the photosphere of the 20*M/sol star, accreting mass until it collapses into a black hole which continues to eat the 20*M/sol star. Some of the 20*M/sol is ejected in this fairly energetic interchange, but most goes into the black hole in a fairly short period of time. Voila! One 16*M/sol black hole generated from a stellar explosion coupled with rapid accretion. Certainly an unusual sequence of events, but by no means implausible.
Supermassive black holes at galactic centres are thought to have formed by a considerably different process, early in the construction of the galaxies. It's quite hard to get two black holes to collide (energy is conserved and space is large, so most of the time they just fly past each other unless there's something to damp the system. That means it needs pretty congested space to get them to merge.
No, the author is implying that algorithmic advances combined with more computing power will allow computers to beat humans at Go in the near future. Just because your Core 2 Duo box isn't competitive at Go doesn't mean that a hypothetical computer with, say, 500 FPGAs (we're talking about the FPGAs of 2017, not 2007) can't be.
I look at the question of "how long will it take to develop a human-beating go program" from a different perspective :
When I started learn to play Go, in 1983 (I still haven't finished learning to play ; I don't know a player who'd claim that), the very best Go-playing programs would be able to play at a strength somewhere in the high-teens of kyu. That's the sort of strength that I'd get a novice player to in about 3 hours of tuition and play. I've taught something like 100 people to play the game over the years.
The strongest Go-playing programs of 2007 are playing at about 6~8 kyu.
So, the combination of hardware speed/ memory increases and algorithmic sophistication is improving playing strength at around 2.5 years per kyu of strength. There are about another 16 kyu (and dan) grades of strength between where Go program strength is at the moment and the strongest amateurs. Maybe another 4 or 6 grades further in the professional ranks.
Deduction : Go will be effectively solved around 50 years from now.
Unless humans get stronger, which is probably going to happen. Playing strengths in the professionals have probably improved by about a grade a generation in the last century, which we could hope to continue for a short while.
The promise of a solution to Go in about 50 years time sounds rather like the promise of a fusion power plant in about 40 years time. Which suggests that we'd need the fusion plant to power the Go computer. Sounds credible to me.
There's a lot of interesting activity going on in Go program development. Very good model of collaborative/ competitive development.
Of course, the other question is whether anyone would actually use the program. I've pretty much given up on online Go. It's much more fun sitting across the board from a real person and playing the break-the-stone-and-embed-slate-splinters-in-your-opponent's-eyes tesuji.
"The Performing Rights Society, one of the UK's royalties collecting societies, has taken a Scottish car servicing company to court because the employees are alleged to have been listening to the radio at work, allowing the music to be 'heard by colleagues and customers'. The PRS is seeking £200,000 in damages for the 'performances of the music' which they claim equates to copyright infringement. The judge, Lord Emslie, has ruled that the case can continue to hearing evidence, commenting that the key point to note was that music was 'audibly blaring from employee's radios'. Where do the extents of a 'public performance' end? Radios on in cabs?"
In best Slashdot style, I haven't RTFA because I don't think that I need to. It has long been established that playing juke boxes in pubs, or having the telly blaring with news, music or sport constitutes a "public performance" and therefore attracts additional copyright licensing fees. I've even seen people form the PRS coming into pubs and checking their documentation - IIRC on 2 out of the 3 occasions the pub as in compliance and in the third one the landlord's response was to turn the telly off and that the PRS guy could go and fuck himself. 5 minutes after the PRS man had left (and was being shadowed by one of the customers to make sure that he wasn't coming back) the telly was back on.
A typical pub would be one or several dozen punters.
Similarly, for years I've been noticing phrases like "... this DVD is not for public performance, broadcast, presentation in hotels, prisons or oil rigs..." in the blurb scrolling past as the DVD starts to play. Again, that's a piece of law or licensing that's honoured more in the breach than the observation. (As a side comment, almost every rig I've been on has at least one person running a DVD copying shop, probably on work's time and work's equipment ; certainly with work's electricity. There's not a rig that could stand a visit from the PRS.)
Typical audiences on the rigs would be a few dozen or less people.
Having the radio playing where a dozen or fewer customers could hear it isn't even a significant extension of what is already banned. IANAL, but I'd expect that the case would hinge on whether the radio was in control of the grease monkeys (who were playing it for their own entertainment) or in the control of the management (who were playing it as an inducement to customers). If it's the latter, and the PRS can prove it, then the PRS have got them bang to rights.
"Cool research: Geologists at Stanford University and the US Geological Survey have drilled a 2.5 mile deep borehole into the San Andreas fault. They've extracted over one ton of rock from 2 miles down, and they'll be installing sensors down the length of the borehole."
Cutting 135ft of core from 12000-odd feet is absolutely routine. I've pulled similar lengths of core myself on 3 occasions in the last couple of years.
Absolutely routine.
I see the lazy so-and-so's are doing up the Jubilee clips with a power drill, instead of suffering with the traditional bent screwdriver that's the wrong size. And it's not snowing either, which is normally the case for core catching. Obviously there's a lazy shit-bagger somewhere up in the chain of command, doing the organisation. No way is this the first time this bunch has cored.
Blue ray doesn't work. Film at 11.... or maybe not.
If only i could persuade my wife to let me get rid of the TV. I lived without it for a decade and never missed it ; now it sits there, cluttering up the living room and costing nearly $50 every month. <SIGH> WOMBAT : Waste Of Money Brains And Time.
The Department of Technology Services (DTS) has notified us that the Federal Government inadvertently deleted the CA.GOV domain.
That's not a mistake, someone just put FEMA's earthquake-recovery plan into action a little bit early.
Boringly, I wish that people would remember that not all of California is destined to fall into the sea and go down the Cascadia subduction zone plug-hole. Little, unimportant bits which are full of people are destined to take a billion-year dive, but the interesting bits in the deserts along the Nevada border are reasonably stable.
cat/dev/random > secret_encrypted_file.NOT Enough people do this and you will have tied up the courts with, what's the word, oh right. RED HERRINGS.
What's going on here? Oh, I see. Humour. How quaint. And on Slashdot too.
I'll refrain from the tempting riposte that you'd tie the courts up better with red EELS than red HERRING (which you can feed to the penguins and preserve Linus' finger from further nibbling).
Not enough people use encryption FULL STOP.
And I hate to say it, that includes me.
The really, really, really annoying thing is, when I come across good reasons to employ encrypted communications and data storage (for example, working on highly commercially sensitive oil wells for small clients) and I suggest using respected techniques (PGP, GPG, TrueCrypt), the clients come back with "No, that's too complex for us. Just put the data into a zip file and use 'drowssap' as the password."
That's bad enough. They then insist on continuing with that technique even when I demonstrate a 30-minute turn around on breaking into one of their "secure" files when they've typo'd the password.
Pass me the brick wall. I feel like beating myself unconscious against it. Again.
This law seems like it'd be either unenforcable (if the person can argue that they don't have or forgot the key),
The magic phrase is "plausible deniability". As the proposal stands, refusal to hand over a password which the courts know did or does exist is a specific offence with serious consequences. And the presence of a pile of "white noise" files on a memory device in your possession is primae facie evidence of the existence of an encrypted space. BUT it's quite possible to design encryption systems so that you have layers of encryption which will hide the presence of deeper layers of encryption. So you nest your secrets : an outer password to protect your email ; within which lies your porn collection protected by your inner password. And buried in the porn container you keep your plans for "World Domination (Fast)".
The authorities can see the existence of the outermost container, and demand the keys for that. But they can't prove the presence of the inner containers unless they have the keys for it alreay. Without the keys, it's a pile of white noise data on a background of white noise.
or asking for people to be set up (if they can't).
Anyone is susceptible to blackmail. With or without encryption.
The world has noticed the situation in Burma, but we have not actually done anything to stop the oppression.
The most deeply shameful thing about the whole "Burma Affair" is that knowledge of the situation has been out in the open for over 20 years, and almost every government in the world has actively colluded with the junta to allow them to stay in power. And pretty much every major corporation too. Restricting myself to the sector I know best, one of the biggest actors in Burma is Total Oil (see, for example, IndyMedia, unless the police have stolen their servers again). Of course, Total have been major purchasers of our software for most of the last generation of products, which makes the non-sales and non-computing side of the company feel pretty shitty, I can tell you. But do we feel dirty enough to move? Not yet.
Similarly, for most of my "formative years", the Government was lead by the wife of a director of Burmah Oil. And you can guess where their business foundation was. While Thatcher, D. seems to have been politically astute enough to not openly push Thatcher, M. to favour the Junta, throughout that period there was near-total inactivity on the "pressurise the junta into democritisation" front, compared to South Africa as an example. The politically aware were well aware of this, but could we get anyone to give a fuck? Come off it, this was the society where The Maggon could get away with claiming that "there's no such thing as society". Did that make a lot of people unhappy enough to move out of the country and stop paying taxes? Well, it certainly made people unhappy, but given that france is no better in this respect, and Spain is too hot for my liking... we haven't moved yet.
The only people who can claim innocence in the continued existence of the Junta are those in locked mental asylums, those under the age of criminal responsibility (varies between countries), and maybe some members of Amazonian Indian tribes who haven't contacted the modern world yet.
I wish they would publish a table showing the relationship between UID and date registered.
It would be nice, but publishing the details of how to relate a UID and the number of subscribers/ date of subscription could give away more advertising-sensitive information than they'd like. Advertisers value information about target demographics, their age distribution, etc. And "churn rates" are always a really sensitive topic. Another organisation I'm involved with (memo to self - phone to book conference dinner tomorrow a.m.) had to put a randomly chosen digit in front of assigned membership numbers about 2 years after it was established because it's competitors were fighting against them using the membership statistics. Generally, you add a modest amount of salt to such encoded data just to confound simple interpretation of membership numbers. You just do it on general principles, and stir the salt pot from time to time.
What happens if the magnet field flips, or drops completely for few millenia, as is speculated has happened before and will likely happen again?
For any level of knowledge that isn't completely subsumed by being a biblical-fundamentalist young-Earth creationist idiot, you can drop the "speculated" in favour of "known". BFYECIs might not like it, but that's no reason to waste effort worrying about their feelings. That's a pretty pertinent question, which is illuminated by the question of what happens with the relatively short-term "secular" variation in the location of the geographic poles, and the absence of flocks of birds permanently circling in certain highly-magnetic mountain regions (the Black Cuillin of Skye being an example). In both cases you'd get extreme errors of navigation - in the mountains, the magnetic field can be up to 180 degrees out from the geographic direction when the local difference between magnetic and geographic Norths is a handful of degrees. (The year-to-year variation in this correction is the "secular" variation mentioned above). When trying to navigate around in Northern Canada, a 50 mile shift in the position of the magnetic north pole (a perfectly credible shift) could have your flock of geese either trying to graze on grass a hundred miles out to sea, or trying to survive up in high, glaciated mountains.The answer is, of course, that the birds don't rely exclusively on any one piece of navigation equipment. Maybe they only use the magnetic field on heavily overcast days, to give them a crude direction to fly in, but still follow the rivers/ coasts once they've decided which way to fly that day.
The family may even win their suit, but not without causing their friend a great deal of harm in the process.
There's no mention in the summary that the photographer had any relationship at all with the photographed person other than through the lens. In fact, taking photographs of a minor (I assume the photographee is a minor as it's the family that are sueing, not the photographee) without the prior permission of the family would be considered grounds for assault and battery in many parts of the world. Posting them under a license that one isn't entitled to would probably add fraud to the bill of charges too, somewhere after the anaesthetic-free castration and the extra bends in the legs.
Err, this ShellyTheRepublican site is a spoof, right? I mean it's even got the minimalist necessary evidence of slack-jawed-yokel illiteracy and inability to understand the English language:
Osama uses Linux because he knows designed to counterfit DVDs,
in addition to the usual dribbling insanities. Do all the rest of American lunatic asylums have Internet access?
You show a suspicious knowledge of the chemistry of nitrate compounds. Since the only people who study such "small molecule" old chemistry these days are terrorist bomb-makers, I predict you spending a long period of time on a dark room answering vigorously put questions. But don't worry, you'll get a nice new pack of playing cards for your recreation (q.v. Birmingham Six).
You don't want to do the Blackwater incident in Times Square, people should always have an escape route.
From what I've heard of the Grosvenor Square assaults, the police have known this for decades. And not used it when it's been politically convenient.
If they don't have any escape they are highly likely to attack you, close and personal; then you only need to kill them all, in self-defense, regardless of how many thousands of them there are.
OK, I'll take that allegation of the political convenience of attacking crowds of dissidents back to nearly a century ago at Amritsar.
Mind you, I am writing from a country that's only just considering mentioning the murders by the militia at Peterloo. We've been suppressing dissent for centuries here, with only a few slips of the velvet glove to expose the iron fist.
If you have a closely-related population (not unlikely in a village-bound culture), it's quite possible to have duplicates within the limited number of markers that make up the standard profile.
One of the standard "test cases" for examining the influence of relatedness on genetics and genetic diseases is to study the appropriate variation in several subsets of the Jewish population (mostly IIRC shamans of some form). The reason for this is that they've got long, reasonably accurate genealogies. But they're not exactly the pitchfork- and firebrand- wielding bunch of extras charging up to Frankenstein's castle from the village which your comment suggests to me.
Police are looking into whether excessive force was used to prevent the student from going over his alloted question period
Perhaps they should bring in a similar policy for Oscars acceptance speeches.
Students are in a state of learning, without having actually claimed particular competence at <whatever>, so a certain amount of leeway should be allowed for their learning the arts of rhetoric and/ or pedagogy. Neither are simple arts and do require both training and practice. Professional actors on the other hand... yep, bring out the tasars and lets watch those suckers writhe in unendurable agony on the ground. [What to do about the people winning Oscars for backstage technical wizardry... hmmm. They should certainly be discouraged from rambling on endlessly, but since they're "backstage" people they should get a modicum of slack too, tempered to be appropriate to the fact that they are (generally) more mature people than students. Not tasars, but bull whips, trapdoors, or the well-exercised custard pie.]
When tasars were introduced into the UK (for use only by firearms officers, as an alternative to assaulting someone with a highly-lethal weapon), a publicity stunt was arranged involving a police sergeant being tasared on-camera by his colleagues. The guy struggled through the rest of his piece-to-camera after the hit, but he was clearly struggling hard to maintain his balance, his train of thought and his reasoning ability and had to receive medical attention afterwards (still with the cameras rolling). A pretty good advert for the tasar's effectiveness, but also a recommendation for how to control the lunatic fringe of legitimate users - you'd be a lot more proportionate about using a tasar on someone if you knew that you'd be getting hit the same number of times later, by your colleagues. Or even by the tasared party.
Remember the video of some guy getting tasared a dozen times for returning his library books late (or something equally serious) and the police threatening to tasar the people videotaping their assault - now imagine the the same cop getting tasared a dozen times later that day before he's allowed back onto the streets with a tasar again. How likely is he to over-use it next time? Tasars were introduced as an alternative to using highly-lethal weapons in confrontations. As such, someone who is expected to use one should equally be prepared to get hit by one (since they're designed to be low-lethality). And you'll find the occasional S&M freak, but they'll be pretty obvious. And they'd make good videos.
The term is "star burst" galaxy, as you use later in your posting. To be more precise, although these galaxies contain reasonably normal amounts of gas and dust, they seem to be turning them into stars at a higher than normal efficiency. But most of the mass of the galaxy remains in the form of dispersed dust and gas, not in aggregates like stars and planets. (How much the dark matter component aggregates is a separate question, and quite disputed.)
and how the stresses of gravity were used to "tear" space apart and create matter from the resulting energy differential.
This is the tattered remains of Fred Hoyle's "continuous creation" mechanism for squaring his preferred "steady state universe" with the observed "cosmological red shift". When Penzias and Wilson discovered the cosmic microwave background, this theory eventually started to die a well-earned death. It has now shuffled off this mortal coil... <#insert dead-parrot-sketch-euphemisms-for-joining-the-choir-immortal.h> and is no longer even nailed to it's perch.
I wonder if that's similar to these starburst galaxies. [SNIP] by BadAnalogyGuy (945258)
Your sig is surprisingly appropriate ; it's not just a bad analogy, it's also a mixing of metaphors from discarded science which was based on personal prejudices.
What's that phrase which is sometimes used... "not even wrong".
Note that the idea of using fingerprints as forensic evidence is not without problems.
The local (well, Edinburgh) police are deeply regretting trying to get one of their forensics officers sacked for some internal political reasons (gender, ugliness, supporting the wrong football team ? - I neither know nor care why) - they accused her of having inappropriately returned to a crime scene and leaving one of her prints behind, so they sacked her. Bad move, because she's going for an industrial tribunal over unfair dismissal and has already shown, in a court of law, that the Scottish Police's fingerprint experts can't distinguish between her prints and one of the genuine suspects in the case. (I may have got some of the details garbled - it's not a case that's either educational or interesting to me.) As a consequence for a couple of years now the Scottish public have been entertained by regular reports of mixed-up fingerprints and other forensic errors, which is doing quite a good job of challenging the perception that "a fingerprint match means he did it". Now all we need to do is to educate people about the real uncertainties in DNA evidence, and we might have a better educated populace. What was that... oh yes, little "Maddie" is doing just that, from beyond the grave (probability better than 90%).
(This isn't to say that I think that fingerprints and DNA are worthless as evidence. It means that I don't think that they are as high a reliability of evidence as popular presentation suggests. For example, because the human DNA variation between races is less than that between individuals (on average), then a set of markers that might be shared by one in a billion people selected at random but by one in 10,000 amongst male Vietnamese with some maternal Chinese ancestry ; that's strong evidence, but not overwhelming. "Reasonable doubt" is the important criterion here ; it's even more important where it might lead to you (the juror) participating in a state-sanctioned murder.)
... for $1300. Hmmm. I'll assume that it's USD, which I'll convert to my local currency to get GBP 651.74. Then I'll compare it to the cost of an 80W solar panel system (including an 8A charge controller) (GBP 569.99, "Specifications : Power 80 watts / Peak Output 5.0A @ 17.2V / Approximate watt-hours per day* 560 / Approximate amp-hours per day* 35 / Dimensions 1196 x 534 x 35mm Weight 7.9kg / * Based on 7 hours of average daily peak sunlight hours") ; I'll add in about GBP 30 for a reasonable-sized car battery. I might need to throw in a DC-DC converter depending on the voltage requirements of the laptop in question - I'll have to think about that when I'm specifying my next laptop but I'll allow another £30 for that. Total? GBP 629.99. What have I forgotten? Oh yes - delivery. Well, I just phone Maplin and get them to deliver it at their cost to the store at the bottom of the hill, put my rucksack on, and go to collect it. I can pick up the battery from the garage next door at the same time. Net saving GBP 21.75, which is enough for a goo night on the beer, thank you very much. OK, Lenovo's source might have more amp-hours per kilo (NiMH cells, maybe?), but it's hardly a ground-shaking advance.
Slashdot Mirror
Awesome?
It's quite a substantial set of kit i'll grant you. But I was keeping a (pretty crude) processor count as I RTFA. There's the equivalent of around 50 recent commodity processors in there, and a relatively modest amount of hard drive. If I counted up the onshore computing hardware in my work (development, beancounting and admin) and the active offshore hardware (the revenue earning stuff, apart from software sales) then I'd probably come to a similar total amount of processor cycles running on a week day. We're a medium-size enterprise - with current recruitment, we're probably sustaining 50 full-time people on the payroll at the moment when last year would have been in the low 40s, doing nothing awesome.
What obviously makes the difference in the hardware described is quality of componentry and sustained workload. Much of our productive work goes on inside people's heads while they absorb and interpret information on screen in front of them. During those times, the machines could switch the processor down to a 20Hz monitor on keyboard and mouse and no-one would notice any change. Terminal server territory?
My biggest bitch about hardware is that the development and testing people get the newest, fastest hardware, and code to that. which leaves us grunts in the field twiddling our thumbs at the hourglass icon on our vintage laptops. The obvious flow path for hardware to be retired is for front-line systems to be retired to development, then to testing, so that the testing people have the oldest, crankiest equipment in the company. If new developments work adequately there, then they should be OK on the newer hardware in the rest of company. Of course, the testing guy doesn't see it like that.
I don't have the option of installing OOo on machines at work, so I just use OOo formats for my own use (including when I'm doing stuff at work, using OOo on a memory stick) and I output the results for target users in PDF format.
WHEN people ask me for a format that they can edit (not unreasonable when I'm producing first-draft stuff for people to work on as more data arrives over the next few months), then I send it to them in an antiquated format since there's been nothing significant new invented in word processing in the 2 decades that I've been doing it. (Things have generally been going downhill since Word 5 if you ask me. They should never have ported it to Windows.) Then when Word fucks up on importing a working document (they know it works - they've seen the PDF), I blame Word. Ditto for spreadsheets, though the increase in cell count in the last decade is actually a significant improvement, so it normally has to be a vintage '97 XLS.
Of course, when I'm archiving stuff, the DEFINITIVE version is always the OOo document, and any alternative formats presented are labelled as being non-definitive.
The client's generally don't care - PDF is fine once the job is finished and the data is going to the archive boxes.
If "theory" did indeed say that, then there might be a bit of a problem. But what theory actually says is more like It doesn't say that other end points are impossible, or implausible, just harder to envisage.
An honest politician is harder to envisage than a thieving corrupt drug addict getting to the most powerful figurehead in global politics, but not impossible. Tony Benn is contemplating re-entereing parliament after standing down to spend more time with his politics.
Here's a scenario which could produce a 16*M/sol black hole without necessarily violating any laws of physics : take 2 large stars in a binary, one 20*M/sol, one of 25*M/sol (large but by no means unreasonable), which are in close orbit, but outside each other's Roche lobes (so there's negligible mass transfer between them in their red giant phases ; another not unreasonable stipulation). The 25*M/sol star will evolve significantly faster than the 20*M/sol star, so gets to the point where it goes supernova while the 20*M/sol star is still on the main sequence. In the supernova a neutron star is generated at 1.5*M/sol (below Chandreshakar's Limit, nothing unusual or incredible about that), but as is common, the supernova is slightly asymmetric resulting in the neutron star getting a hefty kick up the pants and being ejected from the centre-of-mass of the dismantled star at a considerable velocity (several self-diameters per second ; this happens in many if not most neutron star formations which is why we find neutron stars outside supernova remnants). Pure chance points the ejected neutron star at the 20*M/sol star, which it impacts obliquely after a few months. The neutron star starts a "dance of death" through the photosphere of the 20*M/sol star, accreting mass until it collapses into a black hole which continues to eat the 20*M/sol star. Some of the 20*M/sol is ejected in this fairly energetic interchange, but most goes into the black hole in a fairly short period of time.
Voila! One 16*M/sol black hole generated from a stellar explosion coupled with rapid accretion. Certainly an unusual sequence of events, but by no means implausible.
Supermassive black holes at galactic centres are thought to have formed by a considerably different process, early in the construction of the galaxies. It's quite hard to get two black holes to collide (energy is conserved and space is large, so most of the time they just fly past each other unless there's something to damp the system. That means it needs pretty congested space to get them to merge.
I look at the question of "how long will it take to develop a human-beating go program" from a different perspective :
So, the combination of hardware speed/ memory increases and algorithmic sophistication is improving playing strength at around 2.5 years per kyu of strength. There are about another 16 kyu (and dan) grades of strength between where Go program strength is at the moment and the strongest amateurs. Maybe another 4 or 6 grades further in the professional ranks.
Deduction : Go will be effectively solved around 50 years from now.
Unless humans get stronger, which is probably going to happen. Playing strengths in the professionals have probably improved by about a grade a generation in the last century, which we could hope to continue for a short while.
The promise of a solution to Go in about 50 years time sounds rather like the promise of a fusion power plant in about 40 years time. Which suggests that we'd need the fusion plant to power the Go computer. Sounds credible to me.
There's a lot of interesting activity going on in Go program development. Very good model of collaborative/ competitive development.
Of course, the other question is whether anyone would actually use the program. I've pretty much given up on online Go. It's much more fun sitting across the board from a real person and playing the break-the-stone-and-embed-slate-splinters-in-your-opponent's-eyes tesuji.
In best Slashdot style, I haven't RTFA because I don't think that I need to.
It has long been established that playing juke boxes in pubs, or having the telly blaring with news, music or sport constitutes a "public performance" and therefore attracts additional copyright licensing fees. I've even seen people form the PRS coming into pubs and checking their documentation - IIRC on 2 out of the 3 occasions the pub as in compliance and in the third one the landlord's response was to turn the telly off and that the PRS guy could go and fuck himself. 5 minutes after the PRS man had left (and was being shadowed by one of the customers to make sure that he wasn't coming back) the telly was back on.
A typical pub would be one or several dozen punters.
Similarly, for years I've been noticing phrases like "... this DVD is not for public performance, broadcast, presentation in hotels, prisons or oil rigs
Typical audiences on the rigs would be a few dozen or less people.
Having the radio playing where a dozen or fewer customers could hear it isn't even a significant extension of what is already banned.
IANAL, but I'd expect that the case would hinge on whether the radio was in control of the grease monkeys (who were playing it for their own entertainment) or in the control of the management (who were playing it as an inducement to customers). If it's the latter, and the PRS can prove it, then the PRS have got them bang to rights.
Cutting 135ft of core from 12000-odd feet is absolutely routine. I've pulled similar lengths of core myself on 3 occasions in the last couple of years.
Absolutely routine.
I see the lazy so-and-so's are doing up the Jubilee clips with a power drill, instead of suffering with the traditional bent screwdriver that's the wrong size. And it's not snowing either, which is normally the case for core catching. Obviously there's a lazy shit-bagger somewhere up in the chain of command, doing the organisation. No way is this the first time this bunch has cored.
Blue ray doesn't work. Film at 11 .... or maybe not.
If only i could persuade my wife to let me get rid of the TV. I lived without it for a decade and never missed it ; now it sits there, cluttering up the living room and costing nearly $50 every month. <SIGH> WOMBAT : Waste Of Money Brains And Time.
Boringly, I wish that people would remember that not all of California is destined to fall into the sea and go down the Cascadia subduction zone plug-hole. Little, unimportant bits which are full of people are destined to take a billion-year dive, but the interesting bits in the deserts along the Nevada border are reasonably stable.
There would have been a surge in the mid 600s.
:-}
[666]
What's going on here? Oh, I see. Humour. How quaint. And on Slashdot too.
I'll refrain from the tempting riposte that you'd tie the courts up better with red EELS than red HERRING (which you can feed to the penguins and preserve Linus' finger from further nibbling).
Not enough people use encryption FULL STOP.
And I hate to say it, that includes me.
The really, really, really annoying thing is, when I come across good reasons to employ encrypted communications and data storage (for example, working on highly commercially sensitive oil wells for small clients) and I suggest using respected techniques (PGP, GPG, TrueCrypt), the clients come back with "No, that's too complex for us. Just put the data into a zip file and use 'drowssap' as the password."
That's bad enough. They then insist on continuing with that technique even when I demonstrate a 30-minute turn around on breaking into one of their "secure" files when they've typo'd the password.
Pass me the brick wall. I feel like beating myself unconscious against it. Again.
The magic phrase is "plausible deniability". As the proposal stands, refusal to hand over a password which the courts know did or does exist is a specific offence with serious consequences. And the presence of a pile of "white noise" files on a memory device in your possession is primae facie evidence of the existence of an encrypted space. BUT it's quite possible to design encryption systems so that you have layers of encryption which will hide the presence of deeper layers of encryption. So you nest your secrets : an outer password to protect your email ; within which lies your porn collection protected by your inner password. And buried in the porn container you keep your plans for "World Domination (Fast)".
The authorities can see the existence of the outermost container, and demand the keys for that. But they can't prove the presence of the inner containers unless they have the keys for it alreay. Without the keys, it's a pile of white noise data on a background of white noise.
Anyone is susceptible to blackmail. With or without encryption.
The most deeply shameful thing about the whole "Burma Affair" is that knowledge of the situation has been out in the open for over 20 years, and almost every government in the world has actively colluded with the junta to allow them to stay in power. And pretty much every major corporation too. Restricting myself to the sector I know best, one of the biggest actors in Burma is Total Oil (see, for example, IndyMedia, unless the police have stolen their servers again). Of course, Total have been major purchasers of our software for most of the last generation of products, which makes the non-sales and non-computing side of the company feel pretty shitty, I can tell you.
But do we feel dirty enough to move? Not yet.
Similarly, for most of my "formative years", the Government was lead by the wife of a director of Burmah Oil. And you can guess where their business foundation was. While Thatcher, D. seems to have been politically astute enough to not openly push Thatcher, M. to favour the Junta, throughout that period there was near-total inactivity on the "pressurise the junta into democritisation" front, compared to South Africa as an example. The politically aware were well aware of this, but could we get anyone to give a fuck? Come off it, this was the society where The Maggon could get away with claiming that "there's no such thing as society".
Did that make a lot of people unhappy enough to move out of the country and stop paying taxes? Well, it certainly made people unhappy, but given that france is no better in this respect, and Spain is too hot for my liking
The only people who can claim innocence in the continued existence of the Junta are those in locked mental asylums, those under the age of criminal responsibility (varies between countries), and maybe some members of Amazonian Indian tribes who haven't contacted the modern world yet.
It would be nice, but publishing the details of how to relate a UID and the number of subscribers/ date of subscription could give away more advertising-sensitive information than they'd like. Advertisers value information about target demographics, their age distribution, etc. And "churn rates" are always a really sensitive topic.
Another organisation I'm involved with (memo to self - phone to book conference dinner tomorrow a.m.) had to put a randomly chosen digit in front of assigned membership numbers about 2 years after it was established because it's competitors were fighting against them using the membership statistics. Generally, you add a modest amount of salt to such encoded data just to confound simple interpretation of membership numbers. You just do it on general principles, and stir the salt pot from time to time.
For any level of knowledge that isn't completely subsumed by being a biblical-fundamentalist young-Earth creationist idiot, you can drop the "speculated" in favour of "known". BFYECIs might not like it, but that's no reason to waste effort worrying about their feelings.
That's a pretty pertinent question, which is illuminated by the question of what happens with the relatively short-term "secular" variation in the location of the geographic poles, and the absence of flocks of birds permanently circling in certain highly-magnetic mountain regions (the Black Cuillin of Skye being an example).
In both cases you'd get extreme errors of navigation - in the mountains, the magnetic field can be up to 180 degrees out from the geographic direction when the local difference between magnetic and geographic Norths is a handful of degrees. (The year-to-year variation in this correction is the "secular" variation mentioned above). When trying to navigate around in Northern Canada, a 50 mile shift in the position of the magnetic north pole (a perfectly credible shift) could have your flock of geese either trying to graze on grass a hundred miles out to sea, or trying to survive up in high, glaciated mountains.The answer is, of course, that the birds don't rely exclusively on any one piece of navigation equipment. Maybe they only use the magnetic field on heavily overcast days, to give them a crude direction to fly in, but still follow the rivers/ coasts once they've decided which way to fly that day.
There's no mention in the summary that the photographer had any relationship at all with the photographed person other than through the lens. In fact, taking photographs of a minor (I assume the photographee is a minor as it's the family that are sueing, not the photographee) without the prior permission of the family would be considered grounds for assault and battery in many parts of the world.
Posting them under a license that one isn't entitled to would probably add fraud to the bill of charges too, somewhere after the anaesthetic-free castration and the extra bends in the legs.
Err, this ShellyTheRepublican site is a spoof, right? I mean it's even got the minimalist necessary evidence of slack-jawed-yokel illiteracy and inability to understand the English language
in addition to the usual dribbling insanities.
Do all the rest of American lunatic asylums have Internet access?
You show a suspicious knowledge of the chemistry of nitrate compounds. Since the only people who study such "small molecule" old chemistry these days are terrorist bomb-makers, I predict you spending a long period of time on a dark room answering vigorously put questions.
But don't worry, you'll get a nice new pack of playing cards for your recreation (q.v. Birmingham Six).
I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised.
From what I've heard of the Grosvenor Square assaults, the police have known this for decades. And not used it when it's been politically convenient.
OK, I'll take that allegation of the political convenience of attacking crowds of dissidents back to nearly a century ago at Amritsar.
Mind you, I am writing from a country that's only just considering mentioning the murders by the militia at Peterloo. We've been suppressing dissent for centuries here, with only a few slips of the velvet glove to expose the iron fist.
One of the standard "test cases" for examining the influence of relatedness on genetics and genetic diseases is to study the appropriate variation in several subsets of the Jewish population (mostly IIRC shamans of some form). The reason for this is that they've got long, reasonably accurate genealogies. But they're not exactly the pitchfork- and firebrand- wielding bunch of extras charging up to Frankenstein's castle from the village which your comment suggests to me.
No, Mr Sketch, we haven't "coined" the click2005 law, we've witnessed click2005 coin the click2005 law.
But yes, it is a nice demonstration of the postulated click2005 law.
Don't give up the day job. Unless you're a lawyer, in which case DO give up the day job.
Students are in a state of learning, without having actually claimed particular competence at <whatever>, so a certain amount of leeway should be allowed for their learning the arts of rhetoric and/ or pedagogy. Neither are simple arts and do require both training and practice.
Professional actors on the other hand
[What to do about the people winning Oscars for backstage technical wizardry
When tasars were introduced into the UK (for use only by firearms officers, as an alternative to assaulting someone with a highly-lethal weapon), a publicity stunt was arranged involving a police sergeant being tasared on-camera by his colleagues. The guy struggled through the rest of his piece-to-camera after the hit, but he was clearly struggling hard to maintain his balance, his train of thought and his reasoning ability and had to receive medical attention afterwards (still with the cameras rolling). A pretty good advert for the tasar's effectiveness, but also a recommendation for how to control the lunatic fringe of legitimate users - you'd be a lot more proportionate about using a tasar on someone if you knew that you'd be getting hit the same number of times later, by your colleagues. Or even by the tasared party.
Remember the video of some guy getting tasared a dozen times for returning his library books late (or something equally serious) and the police threatening to tasar the people videotaping their assault - now imagine the the same cop getting tasared a dozen times later that day before he's allowed back onto the streets with a tasar again. How likely is he to over-use it next time?
Tasars were introduced as an alternative to using highly-lethal weapons in confrontations. As such, someone who is expected to use one should equally be prepared to get hit by one (since they're designed to be low-lethality). And you'll find the occasional S&M freak, but they'll be pretty obvious. And they'd make good videos.
The term is "star burst" galaxy, as you use later in your posting. To be more precise, although these galaxies contain reasonably normal amounts of gas and dust, they seem to be turning them into stars at a higher than normal efficiency. But most of the mass of the galaxy remains in the form of dispersed dust and gas, not in aggregates like stars and planets. (How much the dark matter component aggregates is a separate question, and quite disputed.)
This is the tattered remains of Fred Hoyle's "continuous creation" mechanism for squaring his preferred "steady state universe" with the observed "cosmological red shift". When Penzias and Wilson discovered the cosmic microwave background, this theory eventually started to die a well-earned death. It has now shuffled off this mortal coil
Your sig is surprisingly appropriate ; it's not just a bad analogy, it's also a mixing of metaphors from discarded science which was based on personal prejudices.
What's that phrase which is sometimes used
The local (well, Edinburgh) police are deeply regretting trying to get one of their forensics officers sacked for some internal political reasons (gender, ugliness, supporting the wrong football team ? - I neither know nor care why) - they accused her of having inappropriately returned to a crime scene and leaving one of her prints behind, so they sacked her. Bad move, because she's going for an industrial tribunal over unfair dismissal and has already shown, in a court of law, that the Scottish Police's fingerprint experts can't distinguish between her prints and one of the genuine suspects in the case. (I may have got some of the details garbled - it's not a case that's either educational or interesting to me.) As a consequence for a couple of years now the Scottish public have been entertained by regular reports of mixed-up fingerprints and other forensic errors, which is doing quite a good job of challenging the perception that "a fingerprint match means he did it".
Now all we need to do is to educate people about the real uncertainties in DNA evidence, and we might have a better educated populace. What was that
(This isn't to say that I think that fingerprints and DNA are worthless as evidence. It means that I don't think that they are as high a reliability of evidence as popular presentation suggests. For example, because the human DNA variation between races is less than that between individuals (on average), then a set of markers that might be shared by one in a billion people selected at random but by one in 10,000 amongst male Vietnamese with some maternal Chinese ancestry ; that's strong evidence, but not overwhelming. "Reasonable doubt" is the important criterion here ; it's even more important where it might lead to you (the juror) participating in a state-sanctioned murder.)
... for $1300. Hmmm.
I'll assume that it's USD, which I'll convert to my local currency to get GBP 651.74.
Then I'll compare it to the cost of an 80W solar panel system (including an 8A charge controller) (GBP 569.99, "Specifications : Power 80 watts / Peak Output 5.0A @ 17.2V / Approximate watt-hours per day* 560 / Approximate amp-hours per day* 35 / Dimensions 1196 x 534 x 35mm Weight 7.9kg / * Based on 7 hours of average daily peak sunlight hours") ; I'll add in about GBP 30 for a reasonable-sized car battery. I might need to throw in a DC-DC converter depending on the voltage requirements of the laptop in question - I'll have to think about that when I'm specifying my next laptop but I'll allow another £30 for that. Total? GBP 629.99. What have I forgotten? Oh yes - delivery. Well, I just phone Maplin and get them to deliver it at their cost to the store at the bottom of the hill, put my rucksack on, and go to collect it. I can pick up the battery from the garage next door at the same time. Net saving GBP 21.75, which is enough for a goo night on the beer, thank you very much.
OK, Lenovo's source might have more amp-hours per kilo (NiMH cells, maybe?), but it's hardly a ground-shaking advance.