Certainly some of the employees of the newspaper, their relatives, and friends own registered firearms. I wonder if the paper removed any of those people from the list before they published it?
This does not bode well. You cannot just have a new computing form factor and throw stuff at it to see what sticks. I figured this far in development google would have a very clear direction for the platform. I hate to constantly make comparisons to apple, but if you look at their successful products, you'll see they had a clear focus and vision for it from the software standpoint. One of the main reasons the iPhone was a success (besides the capacitive touch breakthrough) was the software. That's how apple beat Microsoft's Windows Mobile, which even after a decade, never managed to provide a proper 100% touch only (aka no stylus) experience.
It looks to me like Google is treating google glass like a hardware web browser, for which they will have a bunch of "beta" projects and see what works and what doesn't. They'd better be careful, or software-wise a competitor will come along with a focused, unified, well rounded software experience and blow them out of the water.
I became aware of the impact of anonymity on a person's behavior back around 1991 when I operated a dial up BBS. Punk kids would get on and cause all kinds of problems, but when we politely showed up at their house and advised their parents that someone from that phone number had been dialing into our system and making all kinds of threats, well, the kids would typically practically wet themselves when their parents called them out on it. So for one thing, this is nothing new, and for another, it's an obvious fact of human nature that people will behave differently when they feel there isn't any direct accountability or ramifications for their actions in the "real world".
However, I'm still having trouble seeing where this all fits in to be anti "Web 2.0". If anything sites like Facebook have taken things in the opposite direction, making it more difficult to be anonymous (or at the very least, encourage the majority of people to simply use their actual identity online). At the end of the day there isn't any "real" ramification to these "poison seeds" of anonymity.
Perhaps a real-world example of what he's so concerned about would be more helpful. I skimmed through the rather large story at the Smithsonian site, and I just couldn't really pull any meat out of it. Lots of, um, words about disjointed stuff that I couldn't tie together. Maybe someone else can be so helpful as to sum it up in a way that makes sense?
There's a lot of irony to this. For starters, the actual change in regulation by the EPA won't require E15 gas. It simply allows individual states to require it if they want. So in other words this is the federal government giving the states more control, which normally is a good thing. However there are states that are so influenced by corn production that they will certainly make E15 the standard in their state, but for all the wrong reasons. So it might be a bad thing for the Feds to give up some control here, which I hate to have to say.
The second irony is this is the EPA making this decision, and this decision will harm the environment. If the valves and rings in older cars wear out faster from using higher ethanol fuel than they were designed for, then they will begin burning oil, vastly increasing harmful emissions. I thought the EPA was supposed to protect the environment?
I used to use VLC exclusively, but then it began to choke on newer codecs and more demanding resolutions. I upgraded and the latest build was far worse (no audio half the time, problems skipping, etc) so I had to revert back to an older version. I've switched to Media Player Classic (which I used to use over 5 years ago before VLC) and am very pleased because it "simply works". So IMO, MPC has leapfrogged VLC in their back and forth development surges. The fact that the latest releases of VLC were worse leads me to believe whatever developers are now active are not doing such a good job.
Until VLC can be made to halfway work on ANY platform, I'd be hesitant to try and push it out to Windows 8. There are fundamental problems with the low level decoding right now that need to be fixed first, before high level GUI / API / OS stuff is tweaked for a new OS.
I noticed in the pictures that the techs have to wear O2 backpacks with nasal cannulas because the air is so thin at that altitude. I wonder how that affects hardware cooling, since the air is less dense and thus cannot remove as much heat from the hardware.
Would you rather have double the detail at 30 FPS, or half the detail at 60 FPS? Considering most people can't perceive frame rates faster than 30, it makes a bit of sense to push more polygons instead.
That's a great description. Note that I didn't say anything about using the sun - I said "massive objects". Certainly spacecraft can be accelerated much faster than Voyager via the planets. It's a matter of determining the break even point between spending time zigzagging across the solar system, and when to finally head for the destination and let the ion thrust do its thing. At least at first the gains from using gravity assists would have to be greater than exclusively using ion drive directly after leaving Earth.
Yes, which is why the fastest ever spacecraft (AKA man-made object) was Helios II, which orbited close to the sun back in the 70s. That craft achieved speeds four times faster than that of Voyager 1 (70 km/s versus 17 km/s). Certainly it makes sense to quickly pick up as much speed as possible while you're in the neighborhood of massive objects before heading out into deep space, where the ion drive would have to be used exclusively.
And yet -- and yet! -- it is only 0.17 light-years away.
Voyager 1 is only 17 light-hours away from the sun. That is only around 0.002 light-years, not 0.17.
Also note that the Voyager craft only used standard chemical propellants during launch and slingshot affects around various planets to gain the momentum they currently have - they only needed enough thrust to visit the target planets within a reasonable amount of time. In fact, they didn't want them going too fast, otherwise they would have zipped past the planets even faster, reducing the amount of time available to gather data (which of course was the primary objective of the mission in the first place).
Imagine if they had an ion drive and had been accelerating continuously for those 37 years, which is certainly what any interstellar craft would be designed to do.
I don't believe this is a correct "interpretation" of the message, as it is too generic. Nothing contained in the message is of any use whatsoever. "Hit Jerry’s right or reserve battery here", "Troops, panzers, batteries, engineers, here", "Counter measures against panzers not working", "Go over field notes", "Found headquarters infantry right here"
What good is any of that? Where is "here"? There would have to be precise coordinates or grid numbers to indicate exactly what is where.
The other question is where would the pigeon be delivering this message to? All the way back to some headquarters in Britain is where. In that case the context of the message is even less useful, especially considering there would be a several hour delay before the message could be delivered all the way from France to Britain.
Perhaps that is a bad analogy on both parts. Firemen practice putting out controlled fires for three reasons: 1) It is an extremely dangerous occupation, so training in a controlled environment is necessary. Obviously there is no personal risk to those fighting malware, thus there is no need to create fake "mild" malware to cut their teeth with. They have all the isolated VMs, etc, they need to experiment risk-free with no negative ramifications from the malware. 2) Actual fires are a pretty rare thing, thus the only way for a lot of firefighters to get experience is to create a controlled fire. As Kaspersky said, new malware is being developed all the time, thus there is always a new "fire to fight" in the world of malware. 3) Firefighting is a real-time occupation. You can't rewind a previous fire and fight it again and again to let others gain experience from it. Kasperksy would have an absolutely immense database of malware that could be loaded into a VM and experimented with, or used to teach various techniques to new programmers, etc. They can "re-live" any malware they want as needed.
This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. If he gets elected make sure he ends up on the security council and plenty of committees that have top secret clearance. That way he can be hung as a traitor when he reveals all the state secrets to the detriment of the country he is supposed to be protecting.
Are 30% of FB users even active? How about the number of people with more than one account? What about people like my grandfather who only gets on FB to view updates and pictures from the dozen family that comprise his entire friend list?
I assert that it is not even possible to get a response from 30% of FB users, especially with a passive voting process like this that requires the user to actively seek out and find where to vote. Maybe, just maybe, if FB would have put it right in front of the user's faces, where it was a popup message that has to be dismissed, then maybe up to 15-20% would participate.
Neither the story, the summary, or even your comment, has what most people want to know: how much does their service cost? How much did your dice cost? Do they charge by the time it takes to print, or the amount of material used?
Novel, but let's hope there's no electrical failure or a single wire in that video system that comes loose, otherwise they are sitting in a dark metal box without a single port or window. Military tanks have multiple methods the driver can see outside in addition to any electronic systems - optical periscopes, a hatch directly above the driver that they can raise their seat and literally stick their head out while driving, etc.
This summary is slanted and biased: "proposals to take control over the Internet within their borders". The text "within their borders" has been added by the submitter - the word "border" isn't even in the document that text links to.
Countries already have control over the internet "within their borders", just like they have control over everything else within their borders. They were seeking control *outside* their borders, to force outside companies to have to pay them to deliver content. What these countries are wanting (among other things) is the ability to force content producers, like Google's YouTube, to have to pay their ISPs in order to be able to deliver content at a "quality" level to their citizens.
In other words, there are countries that want the US to have to pay them so their population can consume content created by the US. If Google deems it wise to invest in a country's infrastructure so that more people in that country can (for example) watch YouTube videos at a certain level of quality, then that's Google's prerogative. They shouldn't be forced.
Everything from clouds of dark matter, weird gravitational effects, alien tampering and exotic new physics have all been blamed for the 'Pioneer Anomaly' — the tiny, inexplicable sun-ward acceleration acting on the veteran Pioneer deep space probes. However, evidence is mounting for a more mundane explanation. Yes, it's the emission of heat from the spacecrafts' onboard radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), slowly nudging the Pioneers off course, that looks like the most likely culprit. It's unlikely that this new finding will completely silence advocates of more exotic explanations, however.
Err, no. * The panels themselves bear and handle the heat. It isn't as if you're instantly piping all the heat somewhere else, since the panels are bolted to the ground.
Err, yes. That is *exactly* what solar panels do. They convert some amount of the light energy to electricity which is piped somewhere else. So some of the heat from that surface area is ending up as heat somewhere else, transmitted in the form of electricity. Obviously solar panels are not 100% efficient, thus they still get hot. However they cannot be as hot as a simple surface with the same light absorption - the latter would convert all of the light it absorbs directly to heat. That difference in heat between a static surface and solar panel (with the same light absorption) is the electricity that the solar panels produce.
Additionally, the heat solar panels do emit doesn't travel into the ground. It convects into the air around it. Solar panels actually work best when cool. So it is important that air can flow under them to help keep them as cool as possible.
The point is any time you're bleeding energy away from one part of the earth and piping it to a different area you are going to have an effect. The larger the scale, the larger the effect. Nuclear doesn't move energy around - it literally creates it directly from matter. So the OPs points are valid. It's just a matter of how large an impact those forms of energy production will have when operating at global scale.
Anonymous Coward, whoever you may be: I don't hold your post against you. Jokes of this nature are simply obligatory. What would a three hour opera be like when missing the final note of the final crescendo? Or "Shave and a haircut" without "two bits"? Or "Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrreeess" without "Johnny!"? Certain things must be done, and certain words must be said. I thank you, as a fellow human being, for making this sacrifice, and providing one of the thousands of obligatory jokes that have been posted to Slashdot over the years.
Moderators: Thank you, for clicking the drop-list, selecting "Funny" (and not accidentally anything else, as your moderation takes affect immediately and cannot be corrected), and consuming one of your moderation points to bring the obligatory joke to our attention. The joining together of individuals, possibly from the far reaches of the globe, to orchestrate such humor, is truly humbling and brings a tear to my eye.
So in other words, their profits suddenly shot up by some "massive" amount? I mean that's really the only reason to go to the trouble (and cost) of shutting stuff like this down, is to recover some revenue, right? After all, that is the only kind of success that matters to the content producers, is making more money for their effort.
FTA:
Interestingly, recently published research suggests that shuttering Megaupload may have even had a negative impact on box office revenues. In a recent blog post MPAA’s head of research Julia Jenks said the short paper is “not clear or compelling,” but it’s an indication that the Megaupload shutdown might not be all that positive for the industry itself either.
Saudi Arabia operates that exact kind of drone as well, according to a news report I read today. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if Kuwait has some, and possibly even Iraq.
Slashdot Mirror
Certainly some of the employees of the newspaper, their relatives, and friends own registered firearms. I wonder if the paper removed any of those people from the list before they published it?
This does not bode well. You cannot just have a new computing form factor and throw stuff at it to see what sticks. I figured this far in development google would have a very clear direction for the platform. I hate to constantly make comparisons to apple, but if you look at their successful products, you'll see they had a clear focus and vision for it from the software standpoint. One of the main reasons the iPhone was a success (besides the capacitive touch breakthrough) was the software. That's how apple beat Microsoft's Windows Mobile, which even after a decade, never managed to provide a proper 100% touch only (aka no stylus) experience.
It looks to me like Google is treating google glass like a hardware web browser, for which they will have a bunch of "beta" projects and see what works and what doesn't. They'd better be careful, or software-wise a competitor will come along with a focused, unified, well rounded software experience and blow them out of the water.
I became aware of the impact of anonymity on a person's behavior back around 1991 when I operated a dial up BBS. Punk kids would get on and cause all kinds of problems, but when we politely showed up at their house and advised their parents that someone from that phone number had been dialing into our system and making all kinds of threats, well, the kids would typically practically wet themselves when their parents called them out on it. So for one thing, this is nothing new, and for another, it's an obvious fact of human nature that people will behave differently when they feel there isn't any direct accountability or ramifications for their actions in the "real world".
However, I'm still having trouble seeing where this all fits in to be anti "Web 2.0". If anything sites like Facebook have taken things in the opposite direction, making it more difficult to be anonymous (or at the very least, encourage the majority of people to simply use their actual identity online). At the end of the day there isn't any "real" ramification to these "poison seeds" of anonymity.
Perhaps a real-world example of what he's so concerned about would be more helpful. I skimmed through the rather large story at the Smithsonian site, and I just couldn't really pull any meat out of it. Lots of, um, words about disjointed stuff that I couldn't tie together. Maybe someone else can be so helpful as to sum it up in a way that makes sense?
There's a lot of irony to this. For starters, the actual change in regulation by the EPA won't require E15 gas. It simply allows individual states to require it if they want. So in other words this is the federal government giving the states more control, which normally is a good thing. However there are states that are so influenced by corn production that they will certainly make E15 the standard in their state, but for all the wrong reasons. So it might be a bad thing for the Feds to give up some control here, which I hate to have to say.
The second irony is this is the EPA making this decision, and this decision will harm the environment. If the valves and rings in older cars wear out faster from using higher ethanol fuel than they were designed for, then they will begin burning oil, vastly increasing harmful emissions. I thought the EPA was supposed to protect the environment?
I used to use VLC exclusively, but then it began to choke on newer codecs and more demanding resolutions. I upgraded and the latest build was far worse (no audio half the time, problems skipping, etc) so I had to revert back to an older version. I've switched to Media Player Classic (which I used to use over 5 years ago before VLC) and am very pleased because it "simply works". So IMO, MPC has leapfrogged VLC in their back and forth development surges. The fact that the latest releases of VLC were worse leads me to believe whatever developers are now active are not doing such a good job.
Until VLC can be made to halfway work on ANY platform, I'd be hesitant to try and push it out to Windows 8. There are fundamental problems with the low level decoding right now that need to be fixed first, before high level GUI / API / OS stuff is tweaked for a new OS.
I noticed in the pictures that the techs have to wear O2 backpacks with nasal cannulas because the air is so thin at that altitude. I wonder how that affects hardware cooling, since the air is less dense and thus cannot remove as much heat from the hardware.
Would you rather have double the detail at 30 FPS, or half the detail at 60 FPS? Considering most people can't perceive frame rates faster than 30, it makes a bit of sense to push more polygons instead.
That's a great description. Note that I didn't say anything about using the sun - I said "massive objects". Certainly spacecraft can be accelerated much faster than Voyager via the planets. It's a matter of determining the break even point between spending time zigzagging across the solar system, and when to finally head for the destination and let the ion thrust do its thing. At least at first the gains from using gravity assists would have to be greater than exclusively using ion drive directly after leaving Earth.
Yes, which is why the fastest ever spacecraft (AKA man-made object) was Helios II, which orbited close to the sun back in the 70s. That craft achieved speeds four times faster than that of Voyager 1 (70 km/s versus 17 km/s). Certainly it makes sense to quickly pick up as much speed as possible while you're in the neighborhood of massive objects before heading out into deep space, where the ion drive would have to be used exclusively.
And yet -- and yet! -- it is only 0.17 light-years away.
Voyager 1 is only 17 light-hours away from the sun. That is only around 0.002 light-years, not 0.17.
Also note that the Voyager craft only used standard chemical propellants during launch and slingshot affects around various planets to gain the momentum they currently have - they only needed enough thrust to visit the target planets within a reasonable amount of time. In fact, they didn't want them going too fast, otherwise they would have zipped past the planets even faster, reducing the amount of time available to gather data (which of course was the primary objective of the mission in the first place).
Imagine if they had an ion drive and had been accelerating continuously for those 37 years, which is certainly what any interstellar craft would be designed to do.
I don't believe this is a correct "interpretation" of the message, as it is too generic. Nothing contained in the message is of any use whatsoever. "Hit Jerry’s right or reserve battery here", "Troops, panzers, batteries, engineers, here", "Counter measures against panzers not working", "Go over field notes", "Found headquarters infantry right here"
What good is any of that? Where is "here"? There would have to be precise coordinates or grid numbers to indicate exactly what is where.
The other question is where would the pigeon be delivering this message to? All the way back to some headquarters in Britain is where. In that case the context of the message is even less useful, especially considering there would be a several hour delay before the message could be delivered all the way from France to Britain.
More information on these sites, includes the various "decoded" phrases.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/12/16/world-war-2-pigeon-code-cracked_n_2311364.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2248818/Hit-Jerrys-panzers--code-dead-wartime-pigeon-cracked.html
What does it need a "card slot" to make a sound when done? What's wrong with a good old fashioned piezoelectric buzzer to make a beep?
Perhaps that is a bad analogy on both parts. Firemen practice putting out controlled fires for three reasons:
1) It is an extremely dangerous occupation, so training in a controlled environment is necessary. Obviously there is no personal risk to those fighting malware, thus there is no need to create fake "mild" malware to cut their teeth with. They have all the isolated VMs, etc, they need to experiment risk-free with no negative ramifications from the malware.
2) Actual fires are a pretty rare thing, thus the only way for a lot of firefighters to get experience is to create a controlled fire. As Kaspersky said, new malware is being developed all the time, thus there is always a new "fire to fight" in the world of malware.
3) Firefighting is a real-time occupation. You can't rewind a previous fire and fight it again and again to let others gain experience from it. Kasperksy would have an absolutely immense database of malware that could be loaded into a VM and experimented with, or used to teach various techniques to new programmers, etc. They can "re-live" any malware they want as needed.
This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. If he gets elected make sure he ends up on the security council and plenty of committees that have top secret clearance. That way he can be hung as a traitor when he reveals all the state secrets to the detriment of the country he is supposed to be protecting.
Are 30% of FB users even active? How about the number of people with more than one account? What about people like my grandfather who only gets on FB to view updates and pictures from the dozen family that comprise his entire friend list?
I assert that it is not even possible to get a response from 30% of FB users, especially with a passive voting process like this that requires the user to actively seek out and find where to vote. Maybe, just maybe, if FB would have put it right in front of the user's faces, where it was a popup message that has to be dismissed, then maybe up to 15-20% would participate.
Neither the story, the summary, or even your comment, has what most people want to know: how much does their service cost?
How much did your dice cost? Do they charge by the time it takes to print, or the amount of material used?
Novel, but let's hope there's no electrical failure or a single wire in that video system that comes loose, otherwise they are sitting in a dark metal box without a single port or window. Military tanks have multiple methods the driver can see outside in addition to any electronic systems - optical periscopes, a hatch directly above the driver that they can raise their seat and literally stick their head out while driving, etc.
This summary is slanted and biased: "proposals to take control over the Internet within their borders". The text "within their borders" has been added by the submitter - the word "border" isn't even in the document that text links to.
Countries already have control over the internet "within their borders", just like they have control over everything else within their borders. They were seeking control *outside* their borders, to force outside companies to have to pay them to deliver content. What these countries are wanting (among other things) is the ability to force content producers, like Google's YouTube, to have to pay their ISPs in order to be able to deliver content at a "quality" level to their citizens.
In other words, there are countries that want the US to have to pay them so their population can consume content created by the US. If Google deems it wise to invest in a country's infrastructure so that more people in that country can (for example) watch YouTube videos at a certain level of quality, then that's Google's prerogative. They shouldn't be forced.
Not so new of a theory, and already discussed here at Slashdot:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/07/26/0135234/heat-most-likely-cause-of-pioneer-anomaly
Everything from clouds of dark matter, weird gravitational effects, alien tampering and exotic new physics have all been blamed for the 'Pioneer Anomaly' — the tiny, inexplicable sun-ward acceleration acting on the veteran Pioneer deep space probes. However, evidence is mounting for a more mundane explanation. Yes, it's the emission of heat from the spacecrafts' onboard radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), slowly nudging the Pioneers off course, that looks like the most likely culprit. It's unlikely that this new finding will completely silence advocates of more exotic explanations, however.
Err, no.
* The panels themselves bear and handle the heat. It isn't as if you're instantly piping all the heat somewhere else, since the panels are bolted to the ground.
Err, yes. That is *exactly* what solar panels do. They convert some amount of the light energy to electricity which is piped somewhere else. So some of the heat from that surface area is ending up as heat somewhere else, transmitted in the form of electricity. Obviously solar panels are not 100% efficient, thus they still get hot. However they cannot be as hot as a simple surface with the same light absorption - the latter would convert all of the light it absorbs directly to heat. That difference in heat between a static surface and solar panel (with the same light absorption) is the electricity that the solar panels produce.
Additionally, the heat solar panels do emit doesn't travel into the ground. It convects into the air around it. Solar panels actually work best when cool. So it is important that air can flow under them to help keep them as cool as possible.
The point is any time you're bleeding energy away from one part of the earth and piping it to a different area you are going to have an effect. The larger the scale, the larger the effect. Nuclear doesn't move energy around - it literally creates it directly from matter. So the OPs points are valid. It's just a matter of how large an impact those forms of energy production will have when operating at global scale.
USA Today said he was accompanied by his 20 year old girlfriend to the hospital. Perhaps the 2 minor heart attacks were after a conjugal visit?
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2012/12/05/guatemalan-police-arrest-mcafee/1749997/
Anonymous Coward, whoever you may be: I don't hold your post against you. Jokes of this nature are simply obligatory. What would a three hour opera be like when missing the final note of the final crescendo? Or "Shave and a haircut" without "two bits"? Or "Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrreeess" without "Johnny!"? Certain things must be done, and certain words must be said. I thank you, as a fellow human being, for making this sacrifice, and providing one of the thousands of obligatory jokes that have been posted to Slashdot over the years.
Moderators: Thank you, for clicking the drop-list, selecting "Funny" (and not accidentally anything else, as your moderation takes affect immediately and cannot be corrected), and consuming one of your moderation points to bring the obligatory joke to our attention. The joining together of individuals, possibly from the far reaches of the globe, to orchestrate such humor, is truly humbling and brings a tear to my eye.
According to USA Today he has requested asylum, claiming he is being persecuted in Belize.
So in other words, their profits suddenly shot up by some "massive" amount? I mean that's really the only reason to go to the trouble (and cost) of shutting stuff like this down, is to recover some revenue, right? After all, that is the only kind of success that matters to the content producers, is making more money for their effort.
FTA:
Interestingly, recently published research suggests that shuttering Megaupload may have even had a negative impact on box office revenues. In a recent blog post MPAA’s head of research Julia Jenks said the short paper is “not clear or compelling,” but it’s an indication that the Megaupload shutdown might not be all that positive for the industry itself either.
Oops. Spin it, Julia. Spin it round and round.
Saudi Arabia operates that exact kind of drone as well, according to a news report I read today. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if Kuwait has some, and possibly even Iraq.