For legacy reasons, some (but not all) videos that are nominally 24Hz are actually 23.97Hz, some that are 30Hz are actually 29.97Hz, some that are 48Hz are actually 47.95Hz, some that are 60Hz are actually 59.94Hz, and some that are 120Hz are actually 119.88Hz. I suspect this new "unit" is the greatest common denominator between all those.
That $80M is the cost to use a fab - the cost in setting up the masks to have the fab make your processor. Building a modern fab is on the order of tens of billions of dollars.
I am not down on blockchain technology. It's nifty tech.
But I've written transaction-processing systems. I know how to get tens of thousands of transactions per second out of the cheap-ass repurposed desktops some people insist on using as financials servers. Bitcoin is an absolute wreck as far as being able to exchange it for goods and services (ie. being a currency) goes. None of the other cryptocoins I've seen have told me how they want to fix that problem. Most of them won't even tell me what they do different from Bitcoin.
Blockchain is also getting proposed for a lot of situations where it doesn't make sense. Blockchain is a nifty tech to allow public, tamper-resistant, distributed data storage. So why do people keep suggesting it for private (health records), low-integrity (video game records), or non-distributed (stuff that's currently on an internal corporate server) uses?
Are there good uses for blockchain? Sure! But cryptocoins are not that.
Something else I'd like is better feature parity between desktop and mobile. Live Bookmarks is literally the main reason I chose Firefox over Chrome and everything else - but it doesn't exist on Mobile.
Still a better business proposition than investing in cryptocoins, at this point. Nobody has yet made a *useful* cryptocoin - Bitcoin is proving to be an absolutely horrid transaction processor, Ethereum is trying to be something else, and nobody I have seen will accept anything else. Without the utility value of a currency enabling transactions, cryptocoins have only speculation value - and things with only speculation value trend towards zero.
Meanwhile, J-Pop idol groups are pretty bog-standard entertainment, from an economics standpoint at least. "Entertainment" does have intrinsic value, after all. I don't know if they'll be successful, but it's at least *possible* for them to succeed. And when cryptocoins crash, they can switch to some other gimmick.
In other words, I would much rather invest by buying shares in whatever music label owns this band, than in any cryptocoin company.
Languages evolve slowly, so they act as evidence for human migration patterns. The exact details of the migration into the Americas is still under debate, and languages form quite a bit of evidence. Consider the extent of the Dene-Yeniseian language family - members exist in parts of Siberia, Alaska, Canada and Southwest America (Navajo is the most well-known of these languages). This is good evidence that humans entered the continent from Siberia - but also good evidence that the migration occurred in at least two distinct, widely-separated waves, as no DY language is known in South America or eastern North America. Perhaps Taushiro, the Peruvian language the article focuses on, could have provided evidence for or against that theory.
Languages also tell us things about the human brain. There are languages with no words for relative position (eg. left or right), but speakers can simply use absolute position (eg. east or west), and more interestingly, do so correctly. Apparently keeping track of your heading is something you can just do, if your language and lifestyle require it. There was quite a bit of uproar when a study of a certain Amazon language completely upended a lot of theories about human syntax - specifically, the language seemed to not allow recursion. Every sentence is a simple declarative, not allowing things like this sub-clause you're reading right now. (I will note that the study was not very rigorous, and ongoing follow-up studies may prove it false - some of the other claims are already overturned.) But, either way, we learn something about the human mind and its capacity for language.
So I disabled the addon as soon as I read the article, and I am legit mad that Mozilla would do this, but... what does the addon actually do? I didn't notice any difference before disabling it, and I've dug through all the links and nobody seems to be saying what it does.
Even if it was just a blank addon, no effect other than putting what's essentially an ad into my addon list (pun unintended), that would be bad, but it would be less bad than if it actually disrupted the browser in some way.
Mozilla's half-assed apology seems to indicate the addon only starts doing things once you "opt-in", with no mention of how or where one would do that. Which is probably the least evil way you could do this, I'll admit.
Ah, that would indeed throw my math off. I went through several different sources looking for one that actually defined their units, but the only ones I could find simply labeled the axis "TH", if they labeled it at all.
If your figure is correct, the gap shrinks to one order of magnitude, which is small enough that I'd want to redo the whole calculation with more detailed figures than one significant digit. But the rough figure puts Bitcoin's value distribution as 10% utility, 90% speculation, which doesn't seem wrong on the face of it.
Bitcoin (all cryptocurrency, really) is clearly in a bubble. (You did not need me to tell you this)
You can obtain Bitcoins three ways: by mining, by exchanging it for another currency, or in exchange for a good or service.
Outside of darkweb drug markets and ransomware payments, I don't see much exchange going on for goods/services. That raises some red flags, but isn't itself cause to write it off as a bubble - it can have utility value as an intermediate between other currencies.
The exchange rates, right now, are in the realm of 10,000 USD per Bitcoin.
Getting a USD->XBT conversion rate via mining isn't straightforward, but a Fermi estimate can be done. Mining with current ASICs is about 1W per GH/s, and with electricity prices at roughly 0.10 USD per KW-h, and a mining difficulty of about 1TH, that works out to 1 USD per 36,000 Bitcoin.
Those numbers are drastically, drastically off. This is not an ideal market - the cost of the ASICs is non-zero, currency exchanges take money for overhead, etc. etc.
But these numbers are off by eight orders of magnitude. Any sane person with money to risk on this would be buying mining kit as fast as possible, selling all their bitcoins immediately to buy more electricity and gear, and repeating until the cost of power/ASICs increased, the Bitcoin mining difficulty increased, and the value of Bitcoin dropped, to make the exchange rates more or less equal no matter whether you take your dollars to an exchange, or use your dollars to buy electrons and convert them into Bitcoin.
Many people are doing just that, but the price disparity is instead growing greater, in defiance of every rule of capitalist economics. And that's because the price is not based on Bitcoin's utility as a currency, but instead as an investment vehicle.
It's mostly that Latin has a bunch of different words for "fuck", not just one, and they vary by "configuration". It's like if we had words for "ass-fuck" and "face-fuck" without having a general "fuck".
So one might say "pedica se", to tell them to go fuck their own ass (with an implication of pederasty), or "irruma sororem tuum", to tell them to go skull-fuck their sister (or possibly cousin, because the Romans had weird priorities when it came to giving things words). You've also got "cevere" for "get fucked in the ass", and of course "futuere" for "fuck a cunt" (and the corresponding "crisare" for the female act), because the Romans did have to occasionally have to have reproductive sex and not just fun.
(Although, that quote you said gave me an idea for the next call I get. To recite in my best Church Latin: "In illo tempore, dixit Iesus hoc parabulus discipulis suis: vir erat, quo interrupebat cenam aliorum, sperarem defraudare. Illo vir erat malus, et in laco stercoris aestuabit ad diem iudicamentem. Amen.")
That's why I answer calls from unrecognized numbers in Classical Latin. Nobody programs bots for it. Hell, nobody programs PEOPLE for it - it's not in their script anywhere.
And it's a really beautiful language for telling people to go fuck themselves in.
Windows 10 had multiple stock apps that could play audio/video. In addition to the old WMP, there was "Groove Music" for audio and "Movies & TV" for video. WMP was pretty crashy and bug-prone - and the UI didn't scale well to touch devices. Ditching WMP was a pretty solid move - cuts down on the bloat, all the functionality remains, and serious users will install something better anyways.
Ah, so it's more a ban on terrorist training videos than terrorist propaganda.
I'm not sure if that's fully compatible with a free society - a chemistry textbook would be pretty useful for a would-be bomber, but we don't want to ban stuff like that - but it's not as wholly incompatible with it as a ban on all pro-terrorist video.
My history does not begin in 2002, but sports are not something I have any real knowledge of, particularly not collegiate-level sports. Even for the military academies. It's just never been my thing.
The name similarity, combined with my vague recollection of a FalconSAT on one of the Falcon rocket launches, was enough that I went to check whether there was an actual link between them. I found that there was not, and learned a couple other fun facts, and thought that it would be nice of me to share that info with others.
The "FalconSAT" name certainly suggests a link to SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, but it is actually unrelated, predating SpaceX's founding. The satellite series has used a number of different lift vehicles - FalconSAT-3 used an Atlas V 401 rocket, as part of a multi-satellite launch.
The closest the two Falcons came was the launch of FalconSAT-2, which got bumped from the Space Shuttle's manifest after Columbia. It got re-used as the payload on SpaceX's first-ever launch, the first Falcon 1 flight. Which failed catastrophically a half-minute in. The satellite apparently survived with "minor" damage, falling back onto the island, but it was never re-launched to my knowledge.
The Air Force probably doesn't need FalconSAT-3 anymore because they have FalconSAT-5, which presumably can fill a similar purpose.
Hurricane Sandy made landfall in the United States as a Category 1 hurricane (technically, a "post-tropical cyclone", not a hurricane, but they use the same scale). A "Major Hurricane" is classified as Category 3 or higher.
I don't know the specifics of this mission, but most satellite launches are announced at least a year out, and there's a mandatory NOTAM to clear the flight zone. It was not in any way a surprise.
It also launched from Canaveral, not a missile silo in Montana. And Russia and China have advanced enough tech to distinguish a suborbital missile from an orbital launch pretty quickly - hell, at this point, civilian space fans are usually able to figure out orbital parameters, for those NSA payloads that don't disclose what orbit they're going to.
The Minotaur series consists of various configurations of Minuteman and Peacekeeper missile stages, plus some stages from the Pegasus launch vehicle. All stages are solid rocket motors.
Minotaur I, II and II+ are based on the Minuteman missile. Minotaur I will carry about 600kg to LEO, while II and II+ are both strictly suborbital.
Minotaur III, IV, IV Lite, IV+ and V are based on the Peacekeeper missile. III is designed as the suborbital rocket, and has not yet launched. IV, its derivatives, and V, are orbital rockets of varying capacity. III seems unlikely to fly because there's just not much call for a heavy suborbital rocket. Who would need to put a ton-and-a-half into a half-orbit?
Minotaur C is a mostly a Pegasus rocket, but using the first stage of a Peacekeeper instead of launching from an aircraft. It used to be known as Taurus, but was rebranded after a string of failures. Nobody has yet fallen for it.
Slashdot Mirror
For legacy reasons, some (but not all) videos that are nominally 24Hz are actually 23.97Hz, some that are 30Hz are actually 29.97Hz, some that are 48Hz are actually 47.95Hz, some that are 60Hz are actually 59.94Hz, and some that are 120Hz are actually 119.88Hz. I suspect this new "unit" is the greatest common denominator between all those.
That $80M is the cost to use a fab - the cost in setting up the masks to have the fab make your processor. Building a modern fab is on the order of tens of billions of dollars.
Correction: you probably meant anthropogenic, not anthropomorphic.
I am not down on blockchain technology. It's nifty tech.
But I've written transaction-processing systems. I know how to get tens of thousands of transactions per second out of the cheap-ass repurposed desktops some people insist on using as financials servers. Bitcoin is an absolute wreck as far as being able to exchange it for goods and services (ie. being a currency) goes. None of the other cryptocoins I've seen have told me how they want to fix that problem. Most of them won't even tell me what they do different from Bitcoin.
Blockchain is also getting proposed for a lot of situations where it doesn't make sense. Blockchain is a nifty tech to allow public, tamper-resistant, distributed data storage. So why do people keep suggesting it for private (health records), low-integrity (video game records), or non-distributed (stuff that's currently on an internal corporate server) uses?
Are there good uses for blockchain? Sure! But cryptocoins are not that.
Something else I'd like is better feature parity between desktop and mobile. Live Bookmarks is literally the main reason I chose Firefox over Chrome and everything else - but it doesn't exist on Mobile.
Still a better business proposition than investing in cryptocoins, at this point. Nobody has yet made a *useful* cryptocoin - Bitcoin is proving to be an absolutely horrid transaction processor, Ethereum is trying to be something else, and nobody I have seen will accept anything else. Without the utility value of a currency enabling transactions, cryptocoins have only speculation value - and things with only speculation value trend towards zero.
Meanwhile, J-Pop idol groups are pretty bog-standard entertainment, from an economics standpoint at least. "Entertainment" does have intrinsic value, after all. I don't know if they'll be successful, but it's at least *possible* for them to succeed. And when cryptocoins crash, they can switch to some other gimmick.
In other words, I would much rather invest by buying shares in whatever music label owns this band, than in any cryptocoin company.
If I wanted to punish them, I'd have said Trump.
We should hack their elections and make Hillary win.
Language studies are valuable.
Languages evolve slowly, so they act as evidence for human migration patterns. The exact details of the migration into the Americas is still under debate, and languages form quite a bit of evidence. Consider the extent of the Dene-Yeniseian language family - members exist in parts of Siberia, Alaska, Canada and Southwest America (Navajo is the most well-known of these languages). This is good evidence that humans entered the continent from Siberia - but also good evidence that the migration occurred in at least two distinct, widely-separated waves, as no DY language is known in South America or eastern North America. Perhaps Taushiro, the Peruvian language the article focuses on, could have provided evidence for or against that theory.
Languages also tell us things about the human brain. There are languages with no words for relative position (eg. left or right), but speakers can simply use absolute position (eg. east or west), and more interestingly, do so correctly. Apparently keeping track of your heading is something you can just do, if your language and lifestyle require it. There was quite a bit of uproar when a study of a certain Amazon language completely upended a lot of theories about human syntax - specifically, the language seemed to not allow recursion. Every sentence is a simple declarative, not allowing things like this sub-clause you're reading right now. (I will note that the study was not very rigorous, and ongoing follow-up studies may prove it false - some of the other claims are already overturned.) But, either way, we learn something about the human mind and its capacity for language.
So I disabled the addon as soon as I read the article, and I am legit mad that Mozilla would do this, but... what does the addon actually do? I didn't notice any difference before disabling it, and I've dug through all the links and nobody seems to be saying what it does.
Even if it was just a blank addon, no effect other than putting what's essentially an ad into my addon list (pun unintended), that would be bad, but it would be less bad than if it actually disrupted the browser in some way.
Mozilla's half-assed apology seems to indicate the addon only starts doing things once you "opt-in", with no mention of how or where one would do that. Which is probably the least evil way you could do this, I'll admit.
Ah, that would indeed throw my math off. I went through several different sources looking for one that actually defined their units, but the only ones I could find simply labeled the axis "TH", if they labeled it at all.
If your figure is correct, the gap shrinks to one order of magnitude, which is small enough that I'd want to redo the whole calculation with more detailed figures than one significant digit. But the rough figure puts Bitcoin's value distribution as 10% utility, 90% speculation, which doesn't seem wrong on the face of it.
Bitcoin (all cryptocurrency, really) is clearly in a bubble. (You did not need me to tell you this)
You can obtain Bitcoins three ways: by mining, by exchanging it for another currency, or in exchange for a good or service.
Outside of darkweb drug markets and ransomware payments, I don't see much exchange going on for goods/services. That raises some red flags, but isn't itself cause to write it off as a bubble - it can have utility value as an intermediate between other currencies.
The exchange rates, right now, are in the realm of 10,000 USD per Bitcoin.
Getting a USD->XBT conversion rate via mining isn't straightforward, but a Fermi estimate can be done. Mining with current ASICs is about 1W per GH/s, and with electricity prices at roughly 0.10 USD per KW-h, and a mining difficulty of about 1TH, that works out to 1 USD per 36,000 Bitcoin.
Those numbers are drastically, drastically off. This is not an ideal market - the cost of the ASICs is non-zero, currency exchanges take money for overhead, etc. etc.
But these numbers are off by eight orders of magnitude. Any sane person with money to risk on this would be buying mining kit as fast as possible, selling all their bitcoins immediately to buy more electricity and gear, and repeating until the cost of power/ASICs increased, the Bitcoin mining difficulty increased, and the value of Bitcoin dropped, to make the exchange rates more or less equal no matter whether you take your dollars to an exchange, or use your dollars to buy electrons and convert them into Bitcoin.
Many people are doing just that, but the price disparity is instead growing greater, in defiance of every rule of capitalist economics. And that's because the price is not based on Bitcoin's utility as a currency, but instead as an investment vehicle.
It's mostly that Latin has a bunch of different words for "fuck", not just one, and they vary by "configuration". It's like if we had words for "ass-fuck" and "face-fuck" without having a general "fuck".
So one might say "pedica se", to tell them to go fuck their own ass (with an implication of pederasty), or "irruma sororem tuum", to tell them to go skull-fuck their sister (or possibly cousin, because the Romans had weird priorities when it came to giving things words). You've also got "cevere" for "get fucked in the ass", and of course "futuere" for "fuck a cunt" (and the corresponding "crisare" for the female act), because the Romans did have to occasionally have to have reproductive sex and not just fun.
(Although, that quote you said gave me an idea for the next call I get. To recite in my best Church Latin: "In illo tempore, dixit Iesus hoc parabulus discipulis suis: vir erat, quo interrupebat cenam aliorum, sperarem defraudare. Illo vir erat malus, et in laco stercoris aestuabit ad diem iudicamentem. Amen.")
That's why I answer calls from unrecognized numbers in Classical Latin. Nobody programs bots for it. Hell, nobody programs PEOPLE for it - it's not in their script anywhere.
And it's a really beautiful language for telling people to go fuck themselves in.
The engine, not so much.
Or, they could put it on a steel barge in the middle of the ocean. If some fuel spills and catches fire, what's it gonna do? Burn down the ocean?
Windows 10 had multiple stock apps that could play audio/video. In addition to the old WMP, there was "Groove Music" for audio and "Movies & TV" for video. WMP was pretty crashy and bug-prone - and the UI didn't scale well to touch devices. Ditching WMP was a pretty solid move - cuts down on the bloat, all the functionality remains, and serious users will install something better anyways.
A hell of a lot of bad news, actually. Maybe save the ATI acquisition for later.
Ah, so it's more a ban on terrorist training videos than terrorist propaganda.
I'm not sure if that's fully compatible with a free society - a chemistry textbook would be pretty useful for a would-be bomber, but we don't want to ban stuff like that - but it's not as wholly incompatible with it as a ban on all pro-terrorist video.
My history does not begin in 2002, but sports are not something I have any real knowledge of, particularly not collegiate-level sports. Even for the military academies. It's just never been my thing.
The name similarity, combined with my vague recollection of a FalconSAT on one of the Falcon rocket launches, was enough that I went to check whether there was an actual link between them. I found that there was not, and learned a couple other fun facts, and thought that it would be nice of me to share that info with others.
The "FalconSAT" name certainly suggests a link to SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, but it is actually unrelated, predating SpaceX's founding. The satellite series has used a number of different lift vehicles - FalconSAT-3 used an Atlas V 401 rocket, as part of a multi-satellite launch.
The closest the two Falcons came was the launch of FalconSAT-2, which got bumped from the Space Shuttle's manifest after Columbia. It got re-used as the payload on SpaceX's first-ever launch, the first Falcon 1 flight. Which failed catastrophically a half-minute in. The satellite apparently survived with "minor" damage, falling back onto the island, but it was never re-launched to my knowledge.
The Air Force probably doesn't need FalconSAT-3 anymore because they have FalconSAT-5, which presumably can fill a similar purpose.
Could have been going there to try to deposit them or exchange them, converting them to "real" money, and got cold feet at the last second.
Hurricane Sandy made landfall in the United States as a Category 1 hurricane (technically, a "post-tropical cyclone", not a hurricane, but they use the same scale). A "Major Hurricane" is classified as Category 3 or higher.
I don't know the specifics of this mission, but most satellite launches are announced at least a year out, and there's a mandatory NOTAM to clear the flight zone. It was not in any way a surprise.
It also launched from Canaveral, not a missile silo in Montana. And Russia and China have advanced enough tech to distinguish a suborbital missile from an orbital launch pretty quickly - hell, at this point, civilian space fans are usually able to figure out orbital parameters, for those NSA payloads that don't disclose what orbit they're going to.
The Minotaur series consists of various configurations of Minuteman and Peacekeeper missile stages, plus some stages from the Pegasus launch vehicle. All stages are solid rocket motors.
Minotaur I, II and II+ are based on the Minuteman missile. Minotaur I will carry about 600kg to LEO, while II and II+ are both strictly suborbital.
Minotaur III, IV, IV Lite, IV+ and V are based on the Peacekeeper missile. III is designed as the suborbital rocket, and has not yet launched. IV, its derivatives, and V, are orbital rockets of varying capacity. III seems unlikely to fly because there's just not much call for a heavy suborbital rocket. Who would need to put a ton-and-a-half into a half-orbit?
Minotaur C is a mostly a Pegasus rocket, but using the first stage of a Peacekeeper instead of launching from an aircraft. It used to be known as Taurus, but was rebranded after a string of failures. Nobody has yet fallen for it.