IOW, people who refer to the F-22's supercruise ability as something new or unique, are wrong. Concorde could do this. (So could the English Electric P.1, prototype for the EE Lightning, by the way [thunder-an...ings.co.uk]).
So could the F-14D and the later versions of the F-15.
There isn't really much way to be "secure" against social engineering because it exploits the one system you can't secure - the human mind.
Why not? When you establish service with a company, they should require you to provide them with a security question and answer of your choosing, and not simply ask you to select a common one from a list. Then when someone calls to access information from your account, they simply read back the question to you, and wait for the answer. If it matches, fine, they can presume it's you. If you don't know the answer, then they don't give out any information. If you've forgotten, they can mail it to the billing address on record (or email it to the address on record) and you can call them back later. Why wouldn't that work?
It's difficult to steal cars with complex security, but not impossible. There are weaknesses in any system," Tim Hart of the Auto Locksmith Association told the U.K.'s Auto Express magazine. "At key steps the car's software can halt progress for up to 20 minutes as part of its in-built protection," said Hart.
There's an Auto Locksmith Association? As opposed to a House Locksmith Association or a Train Locksmith Association? Are we getting a little bit too highly specialized these days?
I'm a content provider, albeit a small one (www.McHenryAreaChess.org if you're into chess, but please don't slashdot my server otherwise). I pay my hosting company for the server space and the bandwidth I use or may use. The people who use my site pay their hosting ISP for the bandwidth they consume or may consume in getting to me. If my popularity grows beyond the agreed upon limits, I have to pay for a bigger pipe. Fair enough. Those resources cost money, and I'll pay for the services provided.
But my small site can't afford to pay premium rates because some poker site wants to monopolize the gaming activity that goes over the internet. It's not just an issue about bandwidth, it's an issue about tying in content to fair and equal access. Like someone said, how would you feel if there were high speed lanes on the highway, but only for GM cars? How about if your access to highways were restricted because you also own a Honda? How about if your Verizon phone connection with a friend on SBC was intentionally made noisier than calls to other Verizon customers. Sure, you as an adult have a legal right to look at porno online, but should an intermediate link be allowed to throttle transmissions to 16 bits per minute? How about if your access to news is specially filtered because you voted democrat in a primary? These are the content based issues that will destroy the internet and our personal freedom of speech.
RTFC (Read the fuckin' contract) and note your signature at the bottom, guys. You agreed to this. Should've thought about that before signing yourselves away to a corporate babylonian whore like Sony.
Perhaps. But fraudulent claims in a contract are unenforcable. IANAL, but note that the contract doesn't say 15% for the possibility of breakage.
News.com reports that Dell's PC sales are growing more slowly than the overall PC market for the first time on record.
Decline? The summary indicates Dell's sales continue to grow, so how is that a decline? Not growing as fast as you used to doesn't mean you're shrinking. Also, if the growth of the PC market is accounted for by the entry of new companies, Dell could still be growing faster than any other single competitor and still not grow as the market overall.
This isn't to say that Dell doesn't suck, only that the numbers game being used here is a tad misinformative.
The WSJ reports that the Bush administration has appointed a Civil Liberties Protection Officer in order to assuage the public's privacy concerns.
Under the Bush doctrine of Unitary Executive, this posting is a contradiction in terms and not just useless but completely meaningless. The "Officer" will be implicitely or explicitely prohibitied from taking any corrective action against anyone in the executive branch, along the same lines that the EPA cannot sure the Department of Defense to clean up depleted uranium dust because both are agents of the executive, and the president cannot sue himself. ridiculous, but that's what it is.
Now, who are the ones in government trampling the hardest on civil liberties?
What has six limbs, a prehensile tail, its brain in its chest, and reproductive organs in its mouth? The alternate human designed by biologist PZ Myers
This goes to show the problem of trying to use any design on such complicated systems as biological organisms. Reproductive organs are relatively external in the male because their requirements are very different from the other organs like the heart and kidneys. In they female they also require unique capabilities. The jaw cannot be as functionally flexible as the pelvis and cervix is. What woman would want to deliver through her mouth? A brain in the chest might have some serious overheating problems on top of the wiring issues mentioned elsewhere. Etc...
Evolution has proven superbly effective at creating workable systems because any component which is serious suboptimal causes the extinction of the entire line that contains it. Nature is extremely wasteful in the trial and error process which is natural selection, but nature is also extremely prolific so those creatures that survive can thrive on the failure of others. No designed organism can compete with an organism that evolved, even if that evolved organism has some defects like vestigial organs or an enhanced tendancy towards cancer in the post reproductive years.
I find this one of the biggest defects in the whole (un)intelligent design argument, what I call (u)ID. Design is not a desirable process, it is actually undesirable. A designed creature is not at all to be considered better or more noble than one that wasn't designed. Quite the opposite, as the preposterous article shows. Designs are oversimplistic, inflexible, assume fixed conditions in the environment, and cannot function beyond their designed requirements specifications. For things as trivially simplistic as watches or cars or air traffic control systems, the process of designing the product may be profitable (though even there it can be difficult or impossible to achieve all goals), but not for something as complex as a living organism.
According to theory, the event horizon of a black hole that is not spinning is spherical, and its singularity is (informally speaking) a single point. If the black hole carries angular momentum (inherited from a star that is spinning at the time of its collapse), it begins to drag space-time surrounding the event horizon in an effect known as frame-dragging. This spinning area surrounding the event horizon is called the ergosphere and has an ellipsoidal shape. Since the ergosphere is located outside the event horizon, objects can exist within the ergosphere without falling into the hole.
This makes me wonder about something. Granted that it's exceedingly unlikely for a black hole to form with zero angular momentum, let's posit one for the sake of argument. So assume we have a spherical, non-spinning black hole. The hole can acquire angular momentum from the material that falls into it, right? Now there has to "suddenly" be normal space at the center of the spinning black hole, but that used to be inside the spherical event horizon. So somehow this normal space had to get "out." But I thought that was impossible. Something doesn't make sense here. Perhaps it's because ordinaty use of terms like "sudden" and "out" don't apply in the warped space-time evironment of black holes with their normal meaning.
However, because space-time itself is moving in the ergosphere, it is impossible for objects to remain in a fixed position. Objects grazing the ergosphere could in some circumstances be catapulted outwards at great speed, extracting energy (and angular momentum) from the hole, hence the name ergosphere ("sphere of work") because it is capable of doing work. Once all the angular momentum is extracted from a spinning black hole, what do you think happens, it stops spinning.
I suspect as the black hole loses angular momentum the transfer mechanism becomes less efficient, so it will always hold onto at least some spin. It just can't get rid of that last little bit of spin. At least that avoids the kind of question posed above. Too bad the same kind of scenario doesn't prohibit acquiring that first little bit of spin.
Any real physicists out there know the answer, and can explain it?
A good leader would delegate tasks like communication security to someone who could do that well.
Well sure, but then you have to rub out the guy who did the encoding so he doesn't squeal later. After a few dozen messages, good encoders get harder to find.
Sorry, but if you're going to be sharing a public road with other automobiles, then as your fellow driver I vote that you keep those safety features turned on. Furthermore, the statistics prove that if your car does have those safety features, you're foolish not to keep them turned on 100% of the time, even if they may cause more harm than good in some rare set of circumstances - because it's impossible for you to know in advance what those circumstances will be if you're involved in an accident.
While this may be true with existing safety features, it may not always be so. I think there's tremendous potential for additional automotive automation, combined with an intelligent highway system.
Let's say that Detroit (or Tokyo or wherever foreign cars are designed) comes up with a car that can sense what the speed limit on the road it's driving down is, and limits the car to no more than that speed. Great safety feature, no doubt about it. Also one that most people would want to disable, for good reason or not. I know if I had to rush a kid to the hospital from the park, I'm not going to want to adhere to a 35 mph limit when the road is empty. So let me temporarily override that safety feature. I don't care if the car then broadcasts a signal to the nearest police station that I'm exceeding the speed limit -- I'd welcome the escort or pay the fine if in my best judgment I was doing what's best for my kid.
Another example, say a car is available that senses immenent collissions and automatically applies the breaks and/or swerves the car to a more empty area ahead. In most circumstances that a good thing, but it may not always be true. If I have to choose between hitting a little kid or the big dog he's running after, it's going to be bad news for the dog. Unless an automatic system can assure that it'll do the best thing in all circumstances -- clearly an impossible requirement -- or unless the manufacturer accepts legal liability and absolves the driver, then if I'm ultimately responsible for what my car does then I need the ability to have authority over that car. It's as much a legal issue as a technological one.
I'm all for advances in automatic safety features, but as cars take control away from the driver, the situation becomes more complicated. Seat belts and ABS brakes do not fit that description, because they give the driver more control, not less.
No one gives a shit about enforcing anti-trust laws in the current administration.
This is a technical problem that can be solved in Nov 2006. Help elect a House and/or Senate where the Republicans do not have a majority lock, and things will start to change. Articles of impeachment would be a nice first order of business. The rest will follow suit naturally.
I would really like to see a free Windows OS "Core" kernal system that doesn't have any features but can be downloaded and installed easily.
Given that M$ has required OEMs to pay a Windows Licensing fee even for computers that don't have Windows installed, I think they should be legally obligated to make such a free core available. That'd be only fair.
So, no reading of a report on the train, no after-dinner report writing. Nothing. Ambitious people break the rules to perform better. So they take stuff home anyway. As long as the hardware doesn't get stolen, nothing is noticed. Big publicity when sensitive information makes it to the press.
If thisis only about company sensitive information, then fine. But if you're talking about military secret or confidential, then the rules are a bit different. You can't read a classified document on the way home on the train, as other people around you could see it. And unless your home was certified as a secure site, it would be illegal to have the docement there. You'd also need special paperwork to take the document out of it's original building.
I have to ask who is doing this stealing. If it's by uncleared civilians, then what are they doing in proximity to classified material? Otherwise the stealing must be done by cleared personnel, which is a whole different story of criminal intent. Something doesn't add up here.
But it could one day be shrunk to insect size and used for search and rescue.
Like everybody else has said, this has "spy on everyone" written all over it, in teeny tiny little letters. And naturally, once this new surveillance method is released onto the public, it will become a criminal offense to destroy one of these drones. And they'll know who just did the destroying too, of course. So the next time you hear that little buzzing sound, and raise your hand to swat at the annoying pest, expect a squad of storm troopers, er, police in full riot gear to arrive in the next moment.
Okay, I admit, I'm a bit of a bumpkin when it comes to understanding the scale of all this. I was just curious: Would this be visible to the naked eye?
No, the effects of the impact will be much too small, even if favorably placed.
"... it is expected to create a hole 16 feet deep and send up a 2.2 million-pound (998,000-kg) plume of debris"
I think they're most likely ballpark figures for a 5 metre deep crater, and 1000 tonnes of debris. Convert these to imperial measurements and back again without thinking too much, and you gain many significant figures of accuracy!
The parent was modded +5 Informative?!? It's a joke, people. You don't gain any significance by changing units. If the final exclaimation mark wasn't enough of a giveaway, the phrase "without thinking too much" might have been a clue.
Funny, perhaps, but not Informative. Oh well, at least the author is probably laughing.
The big problem is getting people to move. Regions change and shift and grow, and one of the terrible problems is that to get talent, you may have to get it from somewhere else. I worked with one company who, essentially, raided a neighboring state for talent. Even if the job count stays the same, the type changes.
Moving can be economically risky. If you own a home in your present location, say you've been there for ten years, and now relocate to a new state and a new home, you're likely back at the beginning of a 30 year mortgage. It seems to me the way to primary way people accumulate personal wealth is in their home, and that means staying put until you make real progress in paying down the principal on your home loan, which means the later years.
I've moved three times for my career, and actually lost a little money on a home sale when the Long Island economy collapsed in the mid 90's, and despite a decent income my personal wealth ain't much to brag about. I suspect that had I been more reluctant to move and found a way to stay put, I'd be far better off today.
Granted, my one experience may not be extendable to you. What do others think anout this?
What bugs me about these bots is that they don't know what they're talking about. Most are responding to what the user says. It's difficult to hold a conversation with such a small attention span. Even if they do hold some kind of state, they still don't know they're talking about, say "chatterbots", and that those have attributes and do actions, and so have something to say about them.
Sounds to me like you've come up with a winning strategy. Build a little domain knowledge into your bot, design an algorithm so it steers the conversation to that topic, and profit!!!
I presume most people here have read Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, right? He pointed out decades ago that a phone can still operate even if the user isn't on it -- the phone is a ubiquitous bug, if anybody in control of the technology wants it to be used that way. We already know that cell phones have been used as medium resolution GPS trackers of people. Now we know that they are capable of listening in to our private moments as well.
It wouldn't take much for the manufacturers to put in enough memory to store random or prescheduled episodes of speech from our environment, even if we thought our phones were off. These could later be transmitted in a burst to some gov't agency and we wouldn't even notice the power drain. And cell phones always remain somewhat enabled, even when the main power is off. It's possible the time could come when the gov't requires manufacturers to build in some kind of continuous monitoring capability in order to be given their licenses to use the airwaves. If they suspect you, or if they suspect they might suspect you, they can remotely enable this mode.
This all sounds insanely paranoid to me, and now we have to to line our tin-foil hat with acoustic foam? There was a time not long ago when I'd dismiss anyone thinking about such things as a lunatic. But we have enough documented cases of policy corruption to go with the amazing advances in technology capabilities to make this all practical, if not practiced.
Well, I'm not about to go live as a trapper in the woods, and the technological genie can't be forced back into the bottle. Hopefully we can return to a benign government of the people and avoid the headlong rush into a police state. Now there's a crazy idea!
Something I always wondered: When two black holes are close together, then something that has exactly the same distance to each of them should not fall into either one. What happens when they are so close that their event horizons overlap? Shouldn't there always be some flat zone between them that is not part of either event horizon? So how can they merge?
There's a difference between the strength of a gravitational field and a gravitational gradient. It's like at the center of the Earth. The gravitational gradient there (relative to the Earth's field) is zero, but the force of all that overhanging rock is pretty high. You wouldn't float there comfortably with no force acting on you. You'd be squished.
And that's in a conventional, Nwtonian view of gravity, which is where most people are comfortable thinking about these things. In the relativistic world things get a bit more complicated. The gravitational field itself has energy, and energy at sufficiently high densities has an appreciable mass equivalence and so itself gravitates. At high enough values, like at the event horizon of a black hole, this kind of positive resonance causes the equations describing the system to diverge and the solutions go to infinity, and this divergence is called a singularity.
The event horizon isn't a physical thing, it's the point where the divergence is assured. You can't really think of a black hole as a single hard little ball agt the center of a black hole surrounded by black empty space up to the event horizon, though I believe that's now most people think of it. All spatial and temporal points within the event horizon are indistinguishable - but it's be somewhat misleading to say that they're all the same point either, because the equations that describe those points can't be solved rationally since they contain infinities and it's like asking how infinity +1 is different from infinity + 2.
If you were able to maneuver in space such that you were always equidistant from two black holes of identical mass, you would float around comfortably as long as the bh's were sufficiently far from you. As they approached, you'd feel significant tidal stretching. As the bh's got closer, you would be stretched further, and smaller regions even closer to that exact midpoint would feel increased stretching. At the point where they merged, even the infinitestimal point at the exact center would be stretched to infinity (that one zero volume point could not resist the force that was stretching it out to fill the volume of the whole universe). Of course, this is a somewhat poetic way to describe events that cannot really be described because the physical equations contain infinities and have no meaningful interpretations.
At times like that, poetry is all you can do. It's hard to resist making analogies with this scenario and the creation of the universe, but such analogies, like any other analogy what talk about on or inside the event horizon of a black hole, are meaningless here. But it's still fun.
Slashdot Mirror
IOW, people who refer to the F-22's supercruise ability as something new or unique, are wrong. Concorde could do this. (So could the English Electric P.1, prototype for the EE Lightning, by the way [thunder-an...ings.co.uk]).
So could the F-14D and the later versions of the F-15.
There isn't really much way to be "secure" against social engineering because it exploits the one system you can't secure - the human mind.
Why not? When you establish service with a company, they should require you to provide them with a security question and answer of your choosing, and not simply ask you to select a common one from a list. Then when someone calls to access information from your account, they simply read back the question to you, and wait for the answer. If it matches, fine, they can presume it's you. If you don't know the answer, then they don't give out any information. If you've forgotten, they can mail it to the billing address on record (or email it to the address on record) and you can call them back later. Why wouldn't that work?
It's difficult to steal cars with complex security, but not impossible. There are weaknesses in any system," Tim Hart of the Auto Locksmith Association told the U.K.'s Auto Express magazine. "At key steps the car's software can halt progress for up to 20 minutes as part of its in-built protection," said Hart.
There's an Auto Locksmith Association? As opposed to a House Locksmith Association or a Train Locksmith Association? Are we getting a little bit too highly specialized these days?
I'm a content provider, albeit a small one (www.McHenryAreaChess.org if you're into chess, but please don't slashdot my server otherwise). I pay my hosting company for the server space and the bandwidth I use or may use. The people who use my site pay their hosting ISP for the bandwidth they consume or may consume in getting to me. If my popularity grows beyond the agreed upon limits, I have to pay for a bigger pipe. Fair enough. Those resources cost money, and I'll pay for the services provided.
But my small site can't afford to pay premium rates because some poker site wants to monopolize the gaming activity that goes over the internet. It's not just an issue about bandwidth, it's an issue about tying in content to fair and equal access. Like someone said, how would you feel if there were high speed lanes on the highway, but only for GM cars? How about if your access to highways were restricted because you also own a Honda? How about if your Verizon phone connection with a friend on SBC was intentionally made noisier than calls to other Verizon customers. Sure, you as an adult have a legal right to look at porno online, but should an intermediate link be allowed to throttle transmissions to 16 bits per minute? How about if your access to news is specially filtered because you voted democrat in a primary? These are the content based issues that will destroy the internet and our personal freedom of speech.
RTFC (Read the fuckin' contract) and note your signature at the bottom, guys. You agreed to this. Should've thought about that before signing yourselves away to a corporate babylonian whore like Sony.
Perhaps. But fraudulent claims in a contract are unenforcable. IANAL, but note that the contract doesn't say 15% for the possibility of breakage.
Blame it on piracy?
Sure, but the piracy is Sony's theft of the artist's value.
Pi = 3.
Looks like it's time to change my handle.
News.com reports that Dell's PC sales are growing more slowly than the overall PC market for the first time on record.
Decline? The summary indicates Dell's sales continue to grow, so how is that a decline? Not growing as fast as you used to doesn't mean you're shrinking. Also, if the growth of the PC market is accounted for by the entry of new companies, Dell could still be growing faster than any other single competitor and still not grow as the market overall.
This isn't to say that Dell doesn't suck, only that the numbers game being used here is a tad misinformative.
The WSJ reports that the Bush administration has appointed a Civil Liberties Protection Officer in order to assuage the public's privacy concerns.
Under the Bush doctrine of Unitary Executive, this posting is a contradiction in terms and not just useless but completely meaningless. The "Officer" will be implicitely or explicitely prohibitied from taking any corrective action against anyone in the executive branch, along the same lines that the EPA cannot sure the Department of Defense to clean up depleted uranium dust because both are agents of the executive, and the president cannot sue himself. ridiculous, but that's what it is.
Now, who are the ones in government trampling the hardest on civil liberties?
What has six limbs, a prehensile tail, its brain in its chest, and reproductive organs in its mouth? The alternate human designed by biologist PZ Myers
This goes to show the problem of trying to use any design on such complicated systems as biological organisms. Reproductive organs are relatively external in the male because their requirements are very different from the other organs like the heart and kidneys. In they female they also require unique capabilities. The jaw cannot be as functionally flexible as the pelvis and cervix is. What woman would want to deliver through her mouth? A brain in the chest might have some serious overheating problems on top of the wiring issues mentioned elsewhere. Etc...
Evolution has proven superbly effective at creating workable systems because any component which is serious suboptimal causes the extinction of the entire line that contains it. Nature is extremely wasteful in the trial and error process which is natural selection, but nature is also extremely prolific so those creatures that survive can thrive on the failure of others. No designed organism can compete with an organism that evolved, even if that evolved organism has some defects like vestigial organs or an enhanced tendancy towards cancer in the post reproductive years.
I find this one of the biggest defects in the whole (un)intelligent design argument, what I call (u)ID. Design is not a desirable process, it is actually undesirable. A designed creature is not at all to be considered better or more noble than one that wasn't designed. Quite the opposite, as the preposterous article shows. Designs are oversimplistic, inflexible, assume fixed conditions in the environment, and cannot function beyond their designed requirements specifications. For things as trivially simplistic as watches or cars or air traffic control systems, the process of designing the product may be profitable (though even there it can be difficult or impossible to achieve all goals), but not for something as complex as a living organism.
According to theory, the event horizon of a black hole that is not spinning is spherical, and its singularity is (informally speaking) a single point. If the black hole carries angular momentum (inherited from a star that is spinning at the time of its collapse), it begins to drag space-time surrounding the event horizon in an effect known as frame-dragging. This spinning area surrounding the event horizon is called the ergosphere and has an ellipsoidal shape. Since the ergosphere is located outside the event horizon, objects can exist within the ergosphere without falling into the hole.
This makes me wonder about something. Granted that it's exceedingly unlikely for a black hole to form with zero angular momentum, let's posit one for the sake of argument. So assume we have a spherical, non-spinning black hole. The hole can acquire angular momentum from the material that falls into it, right? Now there has to "suddenly" be normal space at the center of the spinning black hole, but that used to be inside the spherical event horizon. So somehow this normal space had to get "out." But I thought that was impossible. Something doesn't make sense here. Perhaps it's because ordinaty use of terms like "sudden" and "out" don't apply in the warped space-time evironment of black holes with their normal meaning.
However, because space-time itself is moving in the ergosphere, it is impossible for objects to remain in a fixed position. Objects grazing the ergosphere could in some circumstances be catapulted outwards at great speed, extracting energy (and angular momentum) from the hole, hence the name ergosphere ("sphere of work") because it is capable of doing work. Once all the angular momentum is extracted from a spinning black hole, what do you think happens, it stops spinning.
I suspect as the black hole loses angular momentum the transfer mechanism becomes less efficient, so it will always hold onto at least some spin. It just can't get rid of that last little bit of spin. At least that avoids the kind of question posed above. Too bad the same kind of scenario doesn't prohibit acquiring that first little bit of spin.
Any real physicists out there know the answer, and can explain it?
Too bad I used up my mod points yesterday. I'd have liked to give this post more visibility.
A good leader would delegate tasks like communication security to someone who could do that well.
Well sure, but then you have to rub out the guy who did the encoding so he doesn't squeal later. After a few dozen messages, good encoders get harder to find.
Sorry, but if you're going to be sharing a public road with other automobiles, then as your fellow driver I vote that you keep those safety features turned on. Furthermore, the statistics prove that if your car does have those safety features, you're foolish not to keep them turned on 100% of the time, even if they may cause more harm than good in some rare set of circumstances - because it's impossible for you to know in advance what those circumstances will be if you're involved in an accident.
While this may be true with existing safety features, it may not always be so. I think there's tremendous potential for additional automotive automation, combined with an intelligent highway system.
Let's say that Detroit (or Tokyo or wherever foreign cars are designed) comes up with a car that can sense what the speed limit on the road it's driving down is, and limits the car to no more than that speed. Great safety feature, no doubt about it. Also one that most people would want to disable, for good reason or not. I know if I had to rush a kid to the hospital from the park, I'm not going to want to adhere to a 35 mph limit when the road is empty. So let me temporarily override that safety feature. I don't care if the car then broadcasts a signal to the nearest police station that I'm exceeding the speed limit -- I'd welcome the escort or pay the fine if in my best judgment I was doing what's best for my kid.
Another example, say a car is available that senses immenent collissions and automatically applies the breaks and/or swerves the car to a more empty area ahead. In most circumstances that a good thing, but it may not always be true. If I have to choose between hitting a little kid or the big dog he's running after, it's going to be bad news for the dog. Unless an automatic system can assure that it'll do the best thing in all circumstances -- clearly an impossible requirement -- or unless the manufacturer accepts legal liability and absolves the driver, then if I'm ultimately responsible for what my car does then I need the ability to have authority over that car. It's as much a legal issue as a technological one.
I'm all for advances in automatic safety features, but as cars take control away from the driver, the situation becomes more complicated. Seat belts and ABS brakes do not fit that description, because they give the driver more control, not less.
No one gives a shit about enforcing anti-trust laws in the current administration.
This is a technical problem that can be solved in Nov 2006. Help elect a House and/or Senate where the Republicans do not have a majority lock, and things will start to change. Articles of impeachment would be a nice first order of business. The rest will follow suit naturally.
I would really like to see a free Windows OS "Core" kernal system that doesn't have any features but can be downloaded and installed easily.
Given that M$ has required OEMs to pay a Windows Licensing fee even for computers that don't have Windows installed, I think they should be legally obligated to make such a free core available. That'd be only fair.
So, no reading of a report on the train, no after-dinner report writing. Nothing. Ambitious people break the rules to perform better. So they take stuff home anyway. As long as the hardware doesn't get stolen, nothing is noticed. Big publicity when sensitive information makes it to the press.
If thisis only about company sensitive information, then fine. But if you're talking about military secret or confidential, then the rules are a bit different. You can't read a classified document on the way home on the train, as other people around you could see it. And unless your home was certified as a secure site, it would be illegal to have the docement there. You'd also need special paperwork to take the document out of it's original building.
I have to ask who is doing this stealing. If it's by uncleared civilians, then what are they doing in proximity to classified material? Otherwise the stealing must be done by cleared personnel, which is a whole different story of criminal intent. Something doesn't add up here.
But it could one day be shrunk to insect size and used for search and rescue.
Like everybody else has said, this has "spy on everyone" written all over it, in teeny tiny little letters. And naturally, once this new surveillance method is released onto the public, it will become a criminal offense to destroy one of these drones. And they'll know who just did the destroying too, of course. So the next time you hear that little buzzing sound, and raise your hand to swat at the annoying pest, expect a squad of storm troopers, er, police in full riot gear to arrive in the next moment.
Okay, I admit, I'm a bit of a bumpkin when it comes to understanding the scale of all this. I was just curious: Would this be visible to the naked eye?
No, the effects of the impact will be much too small, even if favorably placed.
"... it is expected to create a hole 16 feet deep and send up a 2.2 million-pound (998,000-kg) plume of debris"
I think they're most likely ballpark figures for a 5 metre deep crater, and 1000 tonnes of debris. Convert these to imperial measurements and back again without thinking too much, and you gain many significant figures of accuracy!
The parent was modded +5 Informative?!? It's a joke, people. You don't gain any significance by changing units. If the final exclaimation mark wasn't enough of a giveaway, the phrase "without thinking too much" might have been a clue.
Funny, perhaps, but not Informative. Oh well, at least the author is probably laughing.
I notice that the article calls Venus `Earth's Evil Twin'.
They're just saying that to justify the invasion by this spacecraft before the full scale attack.
The big problem is getting people to move. Regions change and shift and grow, and one of the terrible problems is that to get talent, you may have to get it from somewhere else. I worked with one company who, essentially, raided a neighboring state for talent. Even if the job count stays the same, the type changes.
Moving can be economically risky. If you own a home in your present location, say you've been there for ten years, and now relocate to a new state and a new home, you're likely back at the beginning of a 30 year mortgage. It seems to me the way to primary way people accumulate personal wealth is in their home, and that means staying put until you make real progress in paying down the principal on your home loan, which means the later years.
I've moved three times for my career, and actually lost a little money on a home sale when the Long Island economy collapsed in the mid 90's, and despite a decent income my personal wealth ain't much to brag about. I suspect that had I been more reluctant to move and found a way to stay put, I'd be far better off today.
Granted, my one experience may not be extendable to you. What do others think anout this?
What bugs me about these bots is that they don't know what they're talking about. Most are responding to what the user says. It's difficult to hold a conversation with such a small attention span. Even if they do hold some kind of state, they still don't know they're talking about, say "chatterbots", and that those have attributes and do actions, and so have something to say about them.
Sounds to me like you've come up with a winning strategy. Build a little domain knowledge into your bot, design an algorithm so it steers the conversation to that topic, and profit!!!
Today it's Madison Avenue, tomorrow it's DHS.
I presume most people here have read Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, right? He pointed out decades ago that a phone can still operate even if the user isn't on it -- the phone is a ubiquitous bug, if anybody in control of the technology wants it to be used that way. We already know that cell phones have been used as medium resolution GPS trackers of people. Now we know that they are capable of listening in to our private moments as well.
It wouldn't take much for the manufacturers to put in enough memory to store random or prescheduled episodes of speech from our environment, even if we thought our phones were off. These could later be transmitted in a burst to some gov't agency and we wouldn't even notice the power drain. And cell phones always remain somewhat enabled, even when the main power is off. It's possible the time could come when the gov't requires manufacturers to build in some kind of continuous monitoring capability in order to be given their licenses to use the airwaves. If they suspect you, or if they suspect they might suspect you, they can remotely enable this mode.
This all sounds insanely paranoid to me, and now we have to to line our tin-foil hat with acoustic foam? There was a time not long ago when I'd dismiss anyone thinking about such things as a lunatic. But we have enough documented cases of policy corruption to go with the amazing advances in technology capabilities to make this all practical, if not practiced.
Well, I'm not about to go live as a trapper in the woods, and the technological genie can't be forced back into the bottle. Hopefully we can return to a benign government of the people and avoid the headlong rush into a police state. Now there's a crazy idea!
Something I always wondered: When two black holes are close together, then something that has exactly the same distance to each of them should not fall into either one. What happens when they are so close that their event horizons overlap? Shouldn't there always be some flat zone between them that is not part of either event horizon? So how can they merge?
There's a difference between the strength of a gravitational field and a gravitational gradient. It's like at the center of the Earth. The gravitational gradient there (relative to the Earth's field) is zero, but the force of all that overhanging rock is pretty high. You wouldn't float there comfortably with no force acting on you. You'd be squished.
And that's in a conventional, Nwtonian view of gravity, which is where most people are comfortable thinking about these things. In the relativistic world things get a bit more complicated. The gravitational field itself has energy, and energy at sufficiently high densities has an appreciable mass equivalence and so itself gravitates. At high enough values, like at the event horizon of a black hole, this kind of positive resonance causes the equations describing the system to diverge and the solutions go to infinity, and this divergence is called a singularity.
The event horizon isn't a physical thing, it's the point where the divergence is assured. You can't really think of a black hole as a single hard little ball agt the center of a black hole surrounded by black empty space up to the event horizon, though I believe that's now most people think of it. All spatial and temporal points within the event horizon are indistinguishable - but it's be somewhat misleading to say that they're all the same point either, because the equations that describe those points can't be solved rationally since they contain infinities and it's like asking how infinity +1 is different from infinity + 2.
If you were able to maneuver in space such that you were always equidistant from two black holes of identical mass, you would float around comfortably as long as the bh's were sufficiently far from you. As they approached, you'd feel significant tidal stretching. As the bh's got closer, you would be stretched further, and smaller regions even closer to that exact midpoint would feel increased stretching. At the point where they merged, even the infinitestimal point at the exact center would be stretched to infinity (that one zero volume point could not resist the force that was stretching it out to fill the volume of the whole universe). Of course, this is a somewhat poetic way to describe events that cannot really be described because the physical equations contain infinities and have no meaningful interpretations.
At times like that, poetry is all you can do. It's hard to resist making analogies with this scenario and the creation of the universe, but such analogies, like any other analogy what talk about on or inside the event horizon of a black hole, are meaningless here. But it's still fun.