I know blockchain is a cool technology. Decentralised database with entirely untrusted nodes? Cool. But enough already! It's a niche idea, with very niche applications. I wouldn't trust any company that emphasises their use of blockchain. Blockchain should be a tool to support a real application, not an end in itsself.
"How useful." The commenter was obviously posting from a mobile device, as how->house is consistent with what would be expected of an on-screen keyboard and autocorrect.
You can put headquarters where you like, but physics says that the launch sites should be as close to the equator as you can get them - it saves fuel and thus lift mass, which is very expensive. There's a reason the US launches from Florida - it's as south as you can be and still be on the continental US.
Us Brits use a launch site in French Guiana, run by the ESA. Another thing which we may lose convenient access to following the great brexit cock-up.
What do we do until fusion is ready? You can't just turn the world economy off and wait for it. We need power right now, and that may mean building more fission plants. Even if they get decommissioned in a few decades, when fusion becomes practical.
One day. But it's on an uncertain schedule. You can't depend on something which may still be decades away. Right now we don't even have a research reactor that can sustain fusion - it's a long way to commercial production.
All true. Good reason why a mobile operator cannot offer an unlimited plan. The problem here is that Verizon are calling their plan unlimited, when it is not. The name of it is a complete lie. Transparently and boldly so. They are promoting the service as if it were something they both will not and can not deliver.
I've long suspected that use of personal email accounts is so rampant in government that if the FBI did prosecute, half of congress would be torn between destroying their own emails and trying to dig up anything the other party sent them from a person address. It's only a big deal with it can be turned into a political weapon.
Or c) Reacting to a subtle signal that even the handler doesn't realise. Dogs have been selectively bred to pick up on human emotions better than many humans can - they are quite capable of recognising when the handler would like them to detect something, and learning that a detection in those circumstances means a happy handler.
That's exactly the same argument that was used in the UK regarding the ban on fox hunting with dogs, some years ago. A few hunt organisers went on television to warn that their horses and dogs are working animals, and if there was no work they would be killed.
I'd rent it out. Sell processing time on it. How else would one pay the power bills? You can rent a lot of processing power on Amazon, but you can't rent a supercomputer-grade high performance interconnect between your nodes. Not from them, anyway.
I'd offer a special service for non-profit customers: They can pay power costs only, but then they only get to use idle resources. Commercial-rate customers take priority - got to pay the bills somehow.
"Grammar school" is a type of school in the British education system. It does not actually focus upon grammar any more than other schools. There was a time they did, some generations ago when knowledge of latin and greek was respected, and the name is just a vestige of that era.
The main characteristic of a grammar school is an academically selective admission. Potential students need to demonstrate good grades to be accepted, while the regular comprehensive schools will take students regardless of academic ability.
Epicycles. You have your planets moving in circles which are centered upon points which are themselves moving in circles. Add more circles if you need to. That's how the geocentric astronomers did it. They didn't realise it, but they'd gotten half-way towards inventing the fourier transform. The model actually does work to some extent - it's unwieldy, but it will predict the motions of the planets with a good degree of accuracy. The geocentrists of old were not idiots - they simply had limited observational data with which to test their models.
There are two great holes in archive formats, traditionally. This is one.
The other is the 'zipbomb.' An exabyte of file consisting of nothing but 0x00 bytes, all nicely packed down to practically nothing by the compression algorithm. If precautions are not taken, guaranteed to crash your target be exhausting either memory or disk space.
They don't have to win. They just have to make losing expensive enough for the other side that Reddit's owners would rather just delete any posts which might invite legel action.
SDXC, yes. The standard requires they be formatted with ExFAT by the manufacturer, though it's still possible to reformat them yourself. Also many embedded devices like cameras only support ExFAT.
Personally I think Micosoft hit 'peak evil' in the 2000s. The company at that point was aggressive in fighting against not just specific open source software, but the movement as a whole. This is the era when Ballmer described open source software as 'cancer.'
One of the more aggressive things I saw from them back then was the "identified software" clause in the license for supporting Windows media technologies. It specified that any software developed under that license may not be published in source code form, as you might imagine, but it went a lot further than that - it forbade the developer from using any software with source code openly available during the development process of their software, or using libraries with published source. It even forbade them from allowing their software to be distributed on the same physical media - if you made your software open source, you couldn't even allow it to be shared on a PC magazine cover disc in case there was something open source on there. It also stated that, if your software supports windows media, it may save *only* in Windows media: Once a movie goes into WMV format, there was supposed to be no way out of it.
One notable piece of software ignored the license conditions by reverse-engineering the container format, thus never needing to look at the specification which was only available by agreeing to this super-restrictive licence. Virtualdub. In response threatened legal action, which is why versions after 1.3C dropped support for opening ASF files and instead display a message explaining why.
They haven't done anything quite so blatantly aggressive in more recent years, but there are more subtle actions they still take. They lag behind in support for open standards - they were the last major browser developer to support transparent PNG, and still do not support APNG, and were the last browser developer to support VP8, Vorbis or Opus codecs - doubtless because these are direct competitors to Microsoft's favoured h264 and AAC codecs, both of which feature Microsoft in the patent pool.
Windows likewise is very restrictive in filesystem support - when it became apparent that the FAT32 format was ageing, Microsoft invented their own replacement, ExFAT, rather than support any of the several viable open-standard options. A filesystem upon which Microsoft holds patents, and the licence for which specifically forbids the publishing of source code. As a result of this, most Linux distributions are unable to read ExFAT formatted media - which means many USB sticks and SD cards - out of the box, and require the installation of dubiously-legal FUSE modules developed by people in countries where software patents are not recognised.
So while microsoft may not be as aggressive as they once were, I think it's safe to say that there are still many at the company who regard open source software as a threat that must be suppressed.
Wealth signaling. Throwing resources away into something highly visible but otherwise pointless is a way to proclaim that you are so well-off, you can afford to.
It's basically the human version of a peacock's tail. Just less attractive.
Why does Javascript even need a repository? Between that, node.js and jquery, it's starting to look like someone has been reinventing the library stack with quickbasic at the foundation.
I've encountered the 451 code myself, when making a web crawler: It's the code that the ipfs.io gateway will return if you request from it an object which is on their blacklist of things they have received takedowns for.
That being IPFS though, it's trivial to just use another gateway.
You are not familiar with the classic British beer glass? It is short. It is also wide. They have largely disappeared from pubs these days, as they are expensive to replace and make excellent brawling weapons.
Doesn't work. I tried to make a laser grass cutter once. I failed dismally, and still have the retinal damage*. I did learn that plants are surprisingly hard to cut with lasers, due to their high water content - all the laser does is burn the very surface and start boiling off the water, thus keeping the plant from getting hot enough for the burn to penetrate.
*I was manning the camera and inadvertently caught the reflection.
Slashdot Mirror
I know blockchain is a cool technology. Decentralised database with entirely untrusted nodes? Cool. But enough already! It's a niche idea, with very niche applications. I wouldn't trust any company that emphasises their use of blockchain. Blockchain should be a tool to support a real application, not an end in itsself.
"How useful." The commenter was obviously posting from a mobile device, as how->house is consistent with what would be expected of an on-screen keyboard and autocorrect.
You can put headquarters where you like, but physics says that the launch sites should be as close to the equator as you can get them - it saves fuel and thus lift mass, which is very expensive. There's a reason the US launches from Florida - it's as south as you can be and still be on the continental US.
Us Brits use a launch site in French Guiana, run by the ESA. Another thing which we may lose convenient access to following the great brexit cock-up.
What do we do until fusion is ready? You can't just turn the world economy off and wait for it. We need power right now, and that may mean building more fission plants. Even if they get decommissioned in a few decades, when fusion becomes practical.
One day. But it's on an uncertain schedule. You can't depend on something which may still be decades away. Right now we don't even have a research reactor that can sustain fusion - it's a long way to commercial production.
In common parlance, hacking means noticing that a website has '?user=2383' in the address bar and wondering what happens if you change the number.
All true. Good reason why a mobile operator cannot offer an unlimited plan. The problem here is that Verizon are calling their plan unlimited, when it is not. The name of it is a complete lie. Transparently and boldly so. They are promoting the service as if it were something they both will not and can not deliver.
I've long suspected that use of personal email accounts is so rampant in government that if the FBI did prosecute, half of congress would be torn between destroying their own emails and trying to dig up anything the other party sent them from a person address. It's only a big deal with it can be turned into a political weapon.
Or c) Reacting to a subtle signal that even the handler doesn't realise. Dogs have been selectively bred to pick up on human emotions better than many humans can - they are quite capable of recognising when the handler would like them to detect something, and learning that a detection in those circumstances means a happy handler.
That's exactly the same argument that was used in the UK regarding the ban on fox hunting with dogs, some years ago. A few hunt organisers went on television to warn that their horses and dogs are working animals, and if there was no work they would be killed.
I'd rent it out. Sell processing time on it. How else would one pay the power bills? You can rent a lot of processing power on Amazon, but you can't rent a supercomputer-grade high performance interconnect between your nodes. Not from them, anyway.
I'd offer a special service for non-profit customers: They can pay power costs only, but then they only get to use idle resources. Commercial-rate customers take priority - got to pay the bills somehow.
"Grammar school" is a type of school in the British education system. It does not actually focus upon grammar any more than other schools. There was a time they did, some generations ago when knowledge of latin and greek was respected, and the name is just a vestige of that era.
The main characteristic of a grammar school is an academically selective admission. Potential students need to demonstrate good grades to be accepted, while the regular comprehensive schools will take students regardless of academic ability.
Epicycles. You have your planets moving in circles which are centered upon points which are themselves moving in circles. Add more circles if you need to. That's how the geocentric astronomers did it. They didn't realise it, but they'd gotten half-way towards inventing the fourier transform. The model actually does work to some extent - it's unwieldy, but it will predict the motions of the planets with a good degree of accuracy. The geocentrists of old were not idiots - they simply had limited observational data with which to test their models.
There are two great holes in archive formats, traditionally. This is one.
The other is the 'zipbomb.' An exabyte of file consisting of nothing but 0x00 bytes, all nicely packed down to practically nothing by the compression algorithm. If precautions are not taken, guaranteed to crash your target be exhausting either memory or disk space.
They don't have to win. They just have to make losing expensive enough for the other side that Reddit's owners would rather just delete any posts which might invite legel action.
SDXC, yes. The standard requires they be formatted with ExFAT by the manufacturer, though it's still possible to reformat them yourself. Also many embedded devices like cameras only support ExFAT.
They instead trademarked Windows and started threatening to sue anyone else who used the term.
Personally I think Micosoft hit 'peak evil' in the 2000s. The company at that point was aggressive in fighting against not just specific open source software, but the movement as a whole. This is the era when Ballmer described open source software as 'cancer.'
One of the more aggressive things I saw from them back then was the "identified software" clause in the license for supporting Windows media technologies. It specified that any software developed under that license may not be published in source code form, as you might imagine, but it went a lot further than that - it forbade the developer from using any software with source code openly available during the development process of their software, or using libraries with published source. It even forbade them from allowing their software to be distributed on the same physical media - if you made your software open source, you couldn't even allow it to be shared on a PC magazine cover disc in case there was something open source on there. It also stated that, if your software supports windows media, it may save *only* in Windows media: Once a movie goes into WMV format, there was supposed to be no way out of it.
One notable piece of software ignored the license conditions by reverse-engineering the container format, thus never needing to look at the specification which was only available by agreeing to this super-restrictive licence. Virtualdub. In response threatened legal action, which is why versions after 1.3C dropped support for opening ASF files and instead display a message explaining why.
They haven't done anything quite so blatantly aggressive in more recent years, but there are more subtle actions they still take. They lag behind in support for open standards - they were the last major browser developer to support transparent PNG, and still do not support APNG, and were the last browser developer to support VP8, Vorbis or Opus codecs - doubtless because these are direct competitors to Microsoft's favoured h264 and AAC codecs, both of which feature Microsoft in the patent pool.
Windows likewise is very restrictive in filesystem support - when it became apparent that the FAT32 format was ageing, Microsoft invented their own replacement, ExFAT, rather than support any of the several viable open-standard options. A filesystem upon which Microsoft holds patents, and the licence for which specifically forbids the publishing of source code. As a result of this, most Linux distributions are unable to read ExFAT formatted media - which means many USB sticks and SD cards - out of the box, and require the installation of dubiously-legal FUSE modules developed by people in countries where software patents are not recognised.
So while microsoft may not be as aggressive as they once were, I think it's safe to say that there are still many at the company who regard open source software as a threat that must be suppressed.
Wealth signaling. Throwing resources away into something highly visible but otherwise pointless is a way to proclaim that you are so well-off, you can afford to.
It's basically the human version of a peacock's tail. Just less attractive.
Rings can be resized.
There's already a company that will convert human ashes into diamond.
Why does Javascript even need a repository? Between that, node.js and jquery, it's starting to look like someone has been reinventing the library stack with quickbasic at the foundation.
I've encountered the 451 code myself, when making a web crawler: It's the code that the ipfs.io gateway will return if you request from it an object which is on their blacklist of things they have received takedowns for.
That being IPFS though, it's trivial to just use another gateway.
You are not familiar with the classic British beer glass? It is short. It is also wide. They have largely disappeared from pubs these days, as they are expensive to replace and make excellent brawling weapons.
Doesn't work. I tried to make a laser grass cutter once. I failed dismally, and still have the retinal damage*. I did learn that plants are surprisingly hard to cut with lasers, due to their high water content - all the laser does is burn the very surface and start boiling off the water, thus keeping the plant from getting hot enough for the burn to penetrate.
*I was manning the camera and inadvertently caught the reflection.