I just checked, TLS 1.2 when supported, but they will fall back to 1.0 if the browser doesn't support newer 1.1/1.2. Didn't see if they'll fall back to SSL or not (or if it falls back to 1.1 at all).
hire unqualified people just because they are black or latino
If minority candidates aren't qualified then the problem is unfairly tough and racially biased requirements. Get your mind right.
Or minorities aren't following the education or career paths to become qualified even under reasonable requirements. This could be because of cultural bias among the minority group or bias against the minority group in the education system.
I'm not even sure what "unfairly tough and racially biased requirements" means (aside from the obvious "you must be white to apply", which seems... well, unlikely): if some people are qualified (no matter their race), than it doesn't seem to be unfairly tough... unless you're implying minorities are incapable of meeting those requirements.
4) Passwords are short, intended to be remembered and typed. Asymmetric keys are long, meant to be transported as files (or certificate blobs). The former is vastly easier to brute force (an extremely strong password might take weeks on typical commodity hardware but most would only take minutes)
This bit is false, an extremely strong password still cannot be brute forced (once you get over ~10 characters long, even an Amazon E3 instance starts taking unrealistic times to brute force it). Most password cracking, even GPU powered, relies on passwords being either short or sufficiently non-random.
Sure, we technically don't have to intervene. Unless we want the entire world to know that assurances of protection given in exchange for giving up their nuclear weapons are worth slightly less than the paper they're written on. Which means every country in the world will (and ought, if they intend to remain safe) seek nuclear weapons to prevent this kind of aggression in the future. You sure that humanity won't start using nuclear weapons if 90%+ of countries have them? Because I'm definitely not sure about that.
I'm certainly no nuclear physicist, but doesn't lower half life also mean faster decay and more radiation?
Yes, what you actually want for nuclear waste is something that either has a short half-life (a hundred years or less), or a very long half-life (millions or billions of years). The former won't remain waste for long and can easily be contained for the required time, and the latter produces so little radiation it's not terribly harmful if it is released. The big problem are the isotopes with half-lives in the thousands of years, because those require good containment that lasts for thousands of years.
To be fair, the average farmer would also spend probably 1/10th (or less) the time on that 20 acres growing corn: planting, spraying, irrigation, harvesting is all handled with heavy equipment in corn production. You can't do that with tomatoes. Well, the irrigation is probably automated, but if it's organic, you've gotta hand-examine plants for bugs and weeds. Not sure how they're raising sheep and everything else, you need probably 1/4-1/2 an acre per sheep (unless you grain feed them), which doesn't give you a lot of room for produce. I'm guessing the sheep are just for show.
The tablets aren't $300 and the children aren't toddlers. Next time you're baffled as to why a lawsuit exists, ask yourself if you have a problem with the actual lawsuit, or the one in your imagination.
Well, considering at least one Slashdot poster commented about his 3-year-old wracking up charges, I would say at least some of of the children are toddlers and they probably are using $300 dollar devices.
XP = DX9c. Vista = DX10. Vista SP1 = DX10.1. Vista SP2 = DX10.2. Win7 = DX11. WIn 7 SP1 = DX11.1. Win 8 = DX11.1. Win 8.1 = DX11.2. And now it looks like Win 8.1 SP1 = DX12. It really shouldn't be that difficult to grasp.
Perhaps it shouldn't, but considering that you got it wrong, as Microsoft added DX11 support to Vista, obviously it's slightly more difficult to grasp than you seem to think it is.
We know it works - the tricky bits are scaling it down and keeping it under control.
We know it works at large scales. We don't know if it works at small scales. Since the entire goal is small-scale fusion (i.e. something that doesn't require an entire solar mass of hydrogen to maintain), we really don't yet know if it works as a viable contained power source.
SDR is a thing, and it's not that expensive these days.
The expensive part would be the amplifiers and antennas, and those just spew the signal you feed to them. Generating the signal is cheap.
I suspect the issue is more "why?" Why would they bother spending even a few thousand dollars on a satellite that was supposed to have been shut down 15 years ago and for which they (quite clearly) have no more use? And it would cost money, if only the time they spend using the amplifiers/antennas. Considering that the DSN communications system already has to support multiple missions, adding one extra that serves no useful function is a complete waste of resources.
Except that's not really true. Our current Big Bang cosmological theory rose into the forefront (despite being derisively named the "Big Bang" by the proponents of the earlier reigning cosmological theory of the steady-state universe) when the cosmic microwave background was discovered. Quantum mechanics is the reigning theory for explaining particle behavior at very small scales, despite Einstein's well-known dislike for the theory. The fact is: you don't have to convince your opponents, you have to convince everyone else. It doesn't matter if you have a bunch of scientists unwilling to give up their "sacred cows", because you have a bunch of other scientists who have no stake in one theory or the other but are perfectly capable of judging between the evidence. Thats really the key: scientific progress is made by the community testing and accepting theories. Of course, some people (like Hawking) have a significant influence, but it's not like Hawking is never willing to admit he's wrong either: he has famously made several bets with John Preskill/Kip Thorne about singularities and black holes, which he has lost (and admitted to losing).
"if TFA's description is to be believable"
Why should this be a matter of speculation? You can look at the claims yourself.
Unfortunately, we can't. From TFA:
Because the filings are so old, they fall under a law that keeps them confidential, said Patrick Ross, a PTO spokesman. That means the office can't discuss them or even say how many pending patent applications predate a 1995 change in the law, Ross said.
Most science fiction sounds plausible, that is why we enjoy it. We have no proof dark matter or dark energy exists, so claiming side effects is pretty stupid. Sure, it is possible but it is equally not possie. A whole segment of theoretical physicists has been working on equations that don't require dark matter or energy with promising results so far.
And just as fast as those physicists have come up with those equations, they have been ruled out. Currently, none of the equations explain the phenomenon better than dark matter (and they're often much much worse). It's not equally as possible that dark matter exists as that it doesn't: the current evidence points to dark matter being more likely to exist than not. Tweaking equations and throwing in correction terms to force the model to fit the observations is usually a bad approach in physics (or science in general).
BTW, looking for side-effects that would result if dark matter does exist is, far from being stupid, a decent method of indirectly confirming the existence of dark matter in the first place (since observing dark matter directly is really, really hard, perhaps even impossible).
How much do you want to bet they end up like most "upgradeable" PCs -- never touched from day of purchase until they hit the landfill or the recycling company.
Most of them will. However, my current desktop has gone through a motherboard swap, CPU upgrade, 2 graphics cards swaps, several HDD upgrades, added RAM, PSU swap, and a new case (technically, the only original component is 2 of the current 4 sticks of RAM, the Wifi card, and one of the HDDs).
Most people probably won't use the modularity much, if at all. But some people will, and those people who do can benefit from it tremendously.
It love your extreme specificity. "Up", "plentiful", "an amazing rate", "almost certain".
My trip home from work will take "a few" minutes.
His precision is orders of magnitude greater than that of the Drake equation itself, so by comparison he was incredibly specific.
Not that that actually helps at all: the Drake "equation" is only useful as a thought exercise and is completely and utterly useless for any* kind of quantitative usage whatsoever (since several terms in it are completely and wholly unknown).
*Well, you can use it to find weak upper-bounds, but that's about it, and not much help, and you don't need the full equation for that.
Wouldn't it be better to make rioting illegal, rather than speaking?
Encouraging people to commit a crime is also, generally, a crime. Speaking with the intent to cause a riot? Criminal. Speech that happens incidentally to cause a riot? Not criminal.
Where do they claim that, exactly? As far as I can tell reading Wolfram's licensing page, your claim is 100% completely and utterly false. What they do claim is copyright on their presentation and assemblage of the facts (such as plots, graphs, tables, et alia), but not at all on the facts themselves.
Atlantis was solved over 2000 years ago: Plato made the story up. He says as much. It was never intended to be taken as an actual real place, it was just a story told by a fictional character in one of his dialogs (the Timaeus, to be specific) to make a point.
DOIs can take a few hours/days or so to start working in some cases, if the results were recently announced. While Slashdot covering recent news would be surprising, it's not totally unheard of.
I'm puzzled where you're seeing the confusion. TFA uses the term "precise" precisely (heh) as it is meant to be used: it tells you the uncertainty (known uncertainty, obviously, though you can throw in a "fudge factor" to account for unknown factors) in the measurement. It's not really possible to tell if the measurement is *accurate* except by comparing it to other measurements made by other teams, but given the higher level of precision in this experiment, that comparison is mostly useless (I'm assuming their data with error lies within the data with error of other measurements. If it didn't, that might end being much bigger news).
And if I take a tonne of gold and bury it in the ground, did I make a mine? Sure, I guess, but most people would call you crazy if you actually did that. It may be "farmland", but it's not good farmland (by and large, some areas of California are different, and some crops work very well in drier weather), especially when you're wasting massive amounts of water even on a good year.
That would be me choosing to enlist my private sensors in a service that is specific to the use of those sensors.
Except in the case of VAC you did choose to enlist the use of VAC to prevent cheats, specifically, when you connected to a VAC enabled multiplayer server. VAC isn't some generic thing Valve sticks on all Steam games, you know: it's only enabled when you connect to a server that is VAC enabled (which is in every game I've player very clearly marked as such). You don't want VAC poking around on your computer? Don't play on a VAC server.
And, if I'm using my cheat in a game I only play in single player?
Then, unless you have deliberately activated VAC on your private server while running the cheat (in which case, you're a moron), VAC won't do anything at all whatsoever, because VAC only turns on when you connect to a VAC enabled server in a multiplayer game..
Then don't connect to VAC enabled servers. It's that simple. If you connect to a VAC enabled server, you are implicitly giving Valve permission to rummage around in your computer for cheats, because that is how anti-cheat software works (all anti-cheat software. That's how they work: scanning the memory, running programs, etc.) It's quite simple, really: if you want to connect to someone else's server, and that person requires you to use VAC, then you use VAC or you don't connect.
Except for some of the CODs, you don't even have to connect to a VAC server to play multiplayer anyways.
That's all fine and well and I don't have any problems with that... provided that system is ONLY activated for multi-player games. If I - or anyone else - wants to cheat in a single-player game (even if the game itself has multi-player, but the cheating happens in a single-player campaign) that's my - or their - own business and nobody SHOULD be able to prevent anyone from doing that, let alone BAN based on that.
VAC is only activated in multiplayer games that support it, and usually only on VAC-enabled servers (in fact, you can find servers for many of those games that explicitly permit cheats). Some games only support VAC servers (specifically, some of the CODs), but those are exceptions.
Slashdot Mirror
I just checked, TLS 1.2 when supported, but they will fall back to 1.0 if the browser doesn't support newer 1.1/1.2. Didn't see if they'll fall back to SSL or not (or if it falls back to 1.1 at all).
hire unqualified people just because they are black or latino
If minority candidates aren't qualified then the problem is unfairly tough and racially biased requirements. Get your mind right.
Or minorities aren't following the education or career paths to become qualified even under reasonable requirements. This could be because of cultural bias among the minority group or bias against the minority group in the education system.
I'm not even sure what "unfairly tough and racially biased requirements" means (aside from the obvious "you must be white to apply", which seems... well, unlikely): if some people are qualified (no matter their race), than it doesn't seem to be unfairly tough... unless you're implying minorities are incapable of meeting those requirements.
4) Passwords are short, intended to be remembered and typed. Asymmetric keys are long, meant to be transported as files (or certificate blobs). The former is vastly easier to brute force (an extremely strong password might take weeks on typical commodity hardware but most would only take minutes)
This bit is false, an extremely strong password still cannot be brute forced (once you get over ~10 characters long, even an Amazon E3 instance starts taking unrealistic times to brute force it). Most password cracking, even GPU powered, relies on passwords being either short or sufficiently non-random.
Sure, we technically don't have to intervene. Unless we want the entire world to know that assurances of protection given in exchange for giving up their nuclear weapons are worth slightly less than the paper they're written on. Which means every country in the world will (and ought, if they intend to remain safe) seek nuclear weapons to prevent this kind of aggression in the future. You sure that humanity won't start using nuclear weapons if 90%+ of countries have them? Because I'm definitely not sure about that.
I'm certainly no nuclear physicist, but doesn't lower half life also mean faster decay and more radiation?
Yes, what you actually want for nuclear waste is something that either has a short half-life (a hundred years or less), or a very long half-life (millions or billions of years). The former won't remain waste for long and can easily be contained for the required time, and the latter produces so little radiation it's not terribly harmful if it is released. The big problem are the isotopes with half-lives in the thousands of years, because those require good containment that lasts for thousands of years.
To be fair, the average farmer would also spend probably 1/10th (or less) the time on that 20 acres growing corn: planting, spraying, irrigation, harvesting is all handled with heavy equipment in corn production. You can't do that with tomatoes. Well, the irrigation is probably automated, but if it's organic, you've gotta hand-examine plants for bugs and weeds. Not sure how they're raising sheep and everything else, you need probably 1/4-1/2 an acre per sheep (unless you grain feed them), which doesn't give you a lot of room for produce. I'm guessing the sheep are just for show.
The tablets aren't $300 and the children aren't toddlers. Next time you're baffled as to why a lawsuit exists, ask yourself if you have a problem with the actual lawsuit, or the one in your imagination.
Well, considering at least one Slashdot poster commented about his 3-year-old wracking up charges, I would say at least some of of the children are toddlers and they probably are using $300 dollar devices.
XP = DX9c. Vista = DX10. Vista SP1 = DX10.1. Vista SP2 = DX10.2. Win7 = DX11. WIn 7 SP1 = DX11.1. Win 8 = DX11.1. Win 8.1 = DX11.2. And now it looks like Win 8.1 SP1 = DX12. It really shouldn't be that difficult to grasp.
Perhaps it shouldn't, but considering that you got it wrong, as Microsoft added DX11 support to Vista, obviously it's slightly more difficult to grasp than you seem to think it is.
We know it works - the tricky bits are scaling it down and keeping it under control.
We know it works at large scales. We don't know if it works at small scales. Since the entire goal is small-scale fusion (i.e. something that doesn't require an entire solar mass of hydrogen to maintain), we really don't yet know if it works as a viable contained power source.
SDR is a thing, and it's not that expensive these days.
The expensive part would be the amplifiers and antennas, and those just spew the signal you feed to them. Generating the signal is cheap.
I suspect the issue is more "why?" Why would they bother spending even a few thousand dollars on a satellite that was supposed to have been shut down 15 years ago and for which they (quite clearly) have no more use? And it would cost money, if only the time they spend using the amplifiers/antennas. Considering that the DSN communications system already has to support multiple missions, adding one extra that serves no useful function is a complete waste of resources.
Except that's not really true. Our current Big Bang cosmological theory rose into the forefront (despite being derisively named the "Big Bang" by the proponents of the earlier reigning cosmological theory of the steady-state universe) when the cosmic microwave background was discovered. Quantum mechanics is the reigning theory for explaining particle behavior at very small scales, despite Einstein's well-known dislike for the theory. The fact is: you don't have to convince your opponents, you have to convince everyone else. It doesn't matter if you have a bunch of scientists unwilling to give up their "sacred cows", because you have a bunch of other scientists who have no stake in one theory or the other but are perfectly capable of judging between the evidence. Thats really the key: scientific progress is made by the community testing and accepting theories. Of course, some people (like Hawking) have a significant influence, but it's not like Hawking is never willing to admit he's wrong either: he has famously made several bets with John Preskill/Kip Thorne about singularities and black holes, which he has lost (and admitted to losing).
"if TFA's description is to be believable" Why should this be a matter of speculation? You can look at the claims yourself.
Unfortunately, we can't. From TFA:
Because the filings are so old, they fall under a law that keeps them confidential, said Patrick Ross, a PTO spokesman. That means the office can't discuss them or even say how many pending patent applications predate a 1995 change in the law, Ross said.
Most science fiction sounds plausible, that is why we enjoy it. We have no proof dark matter or dark energy exists, so claiming side effects is pretty stupid. Sure, it is possible but it is equally not possie. A whole segment of theoretical physicists has been working on equations that don't require dark matter or energy with promising results so far.
And just as fast as those physicists have come up with those equations, they have been ruled out. Currently, none of the equations explain the phenomenon better than dark matter (and they're often much much worse). It's not equally as possible that dark matter exists as that it doesn't: the current evidence points to dark matter being more likely to exist than not. Tweaking equations and throwing in correction terms to force the model to fit the observations is usually a bad approach in physics (or science in general).
BTW, looking for side-effects that would result if dark matter does exist is, far from being stupid, a decent method of indirectly confirming the existence of dark matter in the first place (since observing dark matter directly is really, really hard, perhaps even impossible).
How much do you want to bet they end up like most "upgradeable" PCs -- never touched from day of purchase until they hit the landfill or the recycling company.
Most of them will. However, my current desktop has gone through a motherboard swap, CPU upgrade, 2 graphics cards swaps, several HDD upgrades, added RAM, PSU swap, and a new case (technically, the only original component is 2 of the current 4 sticks of RAM, the Wifi card, and one of the HDDs).
Most people probably won't use the modularity much, if at all. But some people will, and those people who do can benefit from it tremendously.
It love your extreme specificity. "Up", "plentiful", "an amazing rate", "almost certain".
My trip home from work will take "a few" minutes.
His precision is orders of magnitude greater than that of the Drake equation itself, so by comparison he was incredibly specific.
Not that that actually helps at all: the Drake "equation" is only useful as a thought exercise and is completely and utterly useless for any* kind of quantitative usage whatsoever (since several terms in it are completely and wholly unknown).
*Well, you can use it to find weak upper-bounds, but that's about it, and not much help, and you don't need the full equation for that.
Inciting a riot, ill give you that one.
Wouldn't it be better to make rioting illegal, rather than speaking?
Encouraging people to commit a crime is also, generally, a crime. Speaking with the intent to cause a riot? Criminal. Speech that happens incidentally to cause a riot? Not criminal.
Where do they claim that, exactly? As far as I can tell reading Wolfram's licensing page, your claim is 100% completely and utterly false. What they do claim is copyright on their presentation and assemblage of the facts (such as plots, graphs, tables, et alia), but not at all on the facts themselves.
Atlantis was solved over 2000 years ago: Plato made the story up. He says as much. It was never intended to be taken as an actual real place, it was just a story told by a fictional character in one of his dialogs (the Timaeus, to be specific) to make a point.
DOIs can take a few hours/days or so to start working in some cases, if the results were recently announced. While Slashdot covering recent news would be surprising, it's not totally unheard of.
I'm puzzled where you're seeing the confusion. TFA uses the term "precise" precisely (heh) as it is meant to be used: it tells you the uncertainty (known uncertainty, obviously, though you can throw in a "fudge factor" to account for unknown factors) in the measurement. It's not really possible to tell if the measurement is *accurate* except by comparing it to other measurements made by other teams, but given the higher level of precision in this experiment, that comparison is mostly useless (I'm assuming their data with error lies within the data with error of other measurements. If it didn't, that might end being much bigger news).
And if I take a tonne of gold and bury it in the ground, did I make a mine? Sure, I guess, but most people would call you crazy if you actually did that. It may be "farmland", but it's not good farmland (by and large, some areas of California are different, and some crops work very well in drier weather), especially when you're wasting massive amounts of water even on a good year.
That would be me choosing to enlist my private sensors in a service that is specific to the use of those sensors.
Except in the case of VAC you did choose to enlist the use of VAC to prevent cheats, specifically, when you connected to a VAC enabled multiplayer server. VAC isn't some generic thing Valve sticks on all Steam games, you know: it's only enabled when you connect to a server that is VAC enabled (which is in every game I've player very clearly marked as such). You don't want VAC poking around on your computer? Don't play on a VAC server.
And, if I'm using my cheat in a game I only play in single player?
Then, unless you have deliberately activated VAC on your private server while running the cheat (in which case, you're a moron), VAC won't do anything at all whatsoever, because VAC only turns on when you connect to a VAC enabled server in a multiplayer game..
Then don't connect to VAC enabled servers. It's that simple. If you connect to a VAC enabled server, you are implicitly giving Valve permission to rummage around in your computer for cheats, because that is how anti-cheat software works (all anti-cheat software. That's how they work: scanning the memory, running programs, etc.) It's quite simple, really: if you want to connect to someone else's server, and that person requires you to use VAC, then you use VAC or you don't connect.
Except for some of the CODs, you don't even have to connect to a VAC server to play multiplayer anyways.
That's all fine and well and I don't have any problems with that... provided that system is ONLY activated for multi-player games. If I - or anyone else - wants to cheat in a single-player game (even if the game itself has multi-player, but the cheating happens in a single-player campaign) that's my - or their - own business and nobody SHOULD be able to prevent anyone from doing that, let alone BAN based on that.
VAC is only activated in multiplayer games that support it, and usually only on VAC-enabled servers (in fact, you can find servers for many of those games that explicitly permit cheats). Some games only support VAC servers (specifically, some of the CODs), but those are exceptions.