Slashdot Mirror


User: whit3

whit3's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
279
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 279

  1. Re:I wonder...why not synthesize coal instead of h on Scientists Turn CO2 'Back Into Coal' In Breakthrough Experiment (independent.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    Why not manufacture coal rather than hydrogen then? Achieves the same end, but easier to handle and export and you don't need to re-tool the grid to take advantage of it (just burn it in the existing coal plants).

    Doesn't achieve the same end, because the fine particles don't return from the atmosphere+surface to the depths of the Earth. Not easier to 'handle and export' because it needs bins and load/unload instead of flowing in pipes. 'The grid' is in continuous re-tooling, either way. Burning H2 makes rain, burning C makes acid rain. Acidification of oceans is not a negligible problem. There aren't a lot of brand- new coal plants, the old 'uns can retire when it's time. Now, for instance. Very little sanity checking was done before Anonymous Coward hit his 'submit' button.

  2. Re:Why should we care? on Have Terabytes of Enron Data Quietly Gone Missing? (muckrock.com) · · Score: 1
    We should care because Enron didn't act alone, those records are all that remains after criminal transactions and a notorious shredding-of-documents episode. Whatever the crimes already prosecuted, OTHER crimes may come to light in future.

    Until the statute of limitations for corporate malfeasance times-out the info, it is of value to interested parties in civil and crimilnal actions, Since Enron no longer maintains/controls that trove, destroying it is... unuseful. It should be kept available for subpoena, either by a court or by Congress.

    And, if it was deliberately destroyed, there might be a cover-up to be investigated.

  3. Re: Pass a law : a federal statute on FCC Struggles To Convince Judge That Broadband Isn't 'Telecommunications' (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Telecom's classic definition is phone service.

    This is a young country, but it's not THAT young. The classic definition is long-distance communication.

    The Constitution of 1776 put all the known channels of telecommunication (post offices, post roads, and navigable waterways) firmly in federal control, so that states and local for-profit enterprises couldn't interfere.

    The office of Postmaster General pre-dates those of Chief Justice, President, Senator, and Representative. Communication was too important, back then, to be delayed; it still is.

  4. Re:So much venom on The Apple Mac Turns 35 Years Old (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    It included Appletalk, which let you connect computers into a network using a cheap cable. The speed wasn't that great (basically a fast serial port), but it worked for transferring data between Macs.

    The Appletalk/Localtalk adapters came later (1989?); it was over 200kbaud, and much cheaper than Ethernet, and similar length limits. Third-party cable and adapters were common (I even built some).

    It wasn't just 'between Macs', there was localtalk for PCs and printers. It was a hot way to network laser printers (Apple's big profit item, for a few years).

    Mazewars, an Appletalk networked multiplayer game, was a lot of fun.

  5. Re:Fudge factor needed! Help on Earth's Inner Core Is Solid, But Squishier Than Previously Thought (abc.net.au) · · Score: 1

    What does squishy mean? That the earths core is compressible or that it is less viscous than thought? The article seems to think compressible. Sounds like scientists have thought of a way to keep their theory alive and ...

    Young's modulus is the 'compressibility' that, in combination with density, determines the speed of (and the refraction and reflection of) P-type sound waves.

    Just as you can see the extra sparkle of a diamond next to a piece of glass, the refraction of seismic waves allows one to determine the elasticity and density of the medium through which the wave passes. It's hard, though, to figure out a full interior structure and composition of the planet, and this just means a new evaluation of that Young's modulus for a bit of solid thousands of kilometers underfoot, at pressures and temperatures that don't allow easy laboratory experiments.

    So, outside the laboratory, you just wait for random earthquakes to make a lot of not-ultrasound picture fragments seen by seismometers near the antipodal points.

    'Scientists have thought' isn't what happened here; the job of theorists to imagine a composition with mechanical properties to fit the new Young's modulus value is the thinking part, which happens next. The reported best-fit Young's modulus value is not thought, but observation. Ranting about 'thoughts' is just spin; it sounds less ridiculous than ranting against observations.

    The reason we should care about this work, is that most of the planet we're standing on is under pressures higher than any bit of matter we can get a close look at. So is most of the matter in the solar system.

  6. Re:What do you mean, "can't be fixed"? on Coding Error Sends 2019 Subaru Ascents To the Car Crusher (ieee.org) · · Score: 1
    The assembly sequence at the factory joins panel A to B, then welds AB to panel C.
    It was possible to get at both sides of the A and B parts at assembly time to spotweld, but
    not after you complete the joining to C, which occludes the places that electrodes had to touch.

    There's lots of processes (shrink fitting of steel parts, for example) that only operate forward in time, are not reversible.

  7. Re:Dumb Question on Internet Groups Urge US Court To Reinstate 'Net Neutrality' Rules (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    Are there any concrete examples of violations of net neutrality since the regulatory change?

    Maybe not, and there's several ways to take that. One, is that ISPs are furtive, concealing their deeds or biding their time. Another, is that anger and ridicule have more negative effect on the bottom line than the piddling pennies they'd make by fiddling the datastream.

    A third possibility is that shakedowns are happening in the Netflix-vs-Comcast style, where a service provider chokes access to a popular service for all their customers. How would we know what the problem is, if the principals are keeping the demand, and payoff, secret?

    Our best defense would be a functional regulatory agency exerting oversight and civil courts empowered to act on complaints. Wishful thinking (so far, so good) is not an acceptable substitute.

  8. Re: Millennial ... library offerings on 'Americans Own Less Stuff, and That's Reason To Be Nervous' (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    You can take books from the library for free. No need to own them.

    You can't take a dictionary from the library, or an encyclopedia, or even an almanac. It's relatively useless to try to check out cookbooks, unless it's only on a few special occasions when you cook.

    Lots of technology requires reference literature, and while some of it is available in digital form, ALL of it is available in dead trees. Very little of that is loaned by even a very good public library. Even a good university's research libraries will not have some critically important books. Thus, a prof consults colleagues, who have heavily laden shelves in their offices, or he/she needs to load down his own shelves.

    Non-ownership of books is borderline functional illiteracy. Survivable, yes; desirable, no.

  9. Congress hadn't envisioned such a massive chunk of the economy to be pulled under regulatory control ... That's all some ask, regardless of the proposed value of the control. Regulators should not do it without express Congressional instruction.

    Don't be silly. The purpose of an FCC is to make a variety of rules in a timely fashion for a public purpose, without the cumbersome (and often contentious) process of partisan lawmaking. The public purpose (improving communication) is why the Constitution put navigable waterways, post roads, and post offices, fully in the federal (not state or municipal) authority. It's as old a principle as the Constitution (indeed, older: the US Postmaster was established before the Constitution was written). The country has grown since we established a postmaster, and since the Constitution, and since we made the FCC. So what? There's no expiration time or size limit involved. The FCC ought not to ignore the 'proposed value of the control'; that's a statutory requirement,. And Congress, while it can unmake the FCC or modify its rules, is a poor tool for doing a fine adjustment: that's why regulation was outsourced to an expert group. Congress and the President already defined FCC regulatory scope, back when that commission was formed; reformalizing that scope is going to take the same two-houses-of-Congress and a Presidential signature as the original telecommunications act (and we haven't seen that happen recently).

  10. Re: Too early on Splitting Water For Fuel While Removing CO2 From the Air (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    ". While we still have most cars producing CO2 from fossil fuels, it makes no sense to start recapturing.

    That's silly. The dangers of pausing on ANY effective countermeasure reduce our time to act on the issue. Delay incurs extra dangers.

    Nobody should wait... Begone, prevaricator!

  11. Re:Intellectual secrets? on White House Considers Restricting Chinese Researchers Over Espionage Fears (nytimes.com) · · Score: 1
    Yes, the 'secret' thing is being abused here. That example, for instance, was of an individual who, a decade after being in country A, has a connection in country B with a military project.

    Basic research is the foundation for a lot of enterprise, and technology offshoots always have a broad foundation. No one can ever prevent knowledge from spreading, it's just impractical to control, even if one technology branch is military.

    The research behind a piece of tech, military or otherwise, derives from lots of people. Is there a good case that they should all be under some kind of control? Whose? Can technology be important, and kept secret? How? Imperial China did it, and was stagnant for centuries: let's NOT do it that way.

    No one in the White House knows enough to pick the people and tech that will militarize in a few years, The 'grey area' that is being discussed, is just a lot of hazy thinking; that area is white, well illuminated, and ought to remain so.

  12. Re:No. on Slashdot Asks: Should Android OEMs Adopt the iPhone's Notch? · · Score: 1
    Like it or not, the notch defines the discussion around this phone. Me, I don't like it: I want a lot of things from a smart carry-around accessory, but the notch is just a distraction.

    And, for the face of a personal product, it's BAD to have a distraction. Like Dali's drooping clock face, it just looks... wrong.

    Probably a rectangular screen is the mature form, and if you want to make room around the edges, or lop off one corner, that wouldn't be a distraction. A hole, or a notch, or a flipout accessory arm, might be functional, but it's also a sign of immature design, a glamor feature that can hog the spotlight, without improving the personal-interaction user experience.

  13. Re:Because physical security is a myth on Ask Slashdot: Why Are There No True Dual-System Laptops Or Tablet Computers? · · Score: 1

    So I have a beefy Intel Core i7 system in my laptop, and a 2nd little SOC that sit in the same casing, but have NO physical connection WHATSOEVER and are even switched on/off separately using a HARDWARE switch ... How does that NOT buy me any extra security when a hacker is trying to get into my system?

    That's way too elaborate and fault-prone. All you need, is a swappable hard drive, and (with flash drives being relatively robust and inexpensive) that only means a limited number of laptops are candidates. For a desktop machine, removable drive bays are useful. If your work/sensitive/secure hard drive is locked in the office desk, and your toy/play/personal drive is in the laptop when it gets compromised... you just go back to work Monday and all is well. If the work machine goes wonky, you hand it to IT for diagnosis, and they don't get a chance to wipe out all your saved-games. Virtual machines are not really the solution, if it has to be user-friendly. I, for one, DID brick a laptop once, doing a Linux install; still not sure where the original OS disk is for that one. Multiple OSes is never as simple as it sounds.

  14. The world isn't nearly that binary - all radiation is ionizing dependent upon the energy state of the atom which absorbs it.

    Oh, be realistic! The only way a low-energy (microwave) photon can create an ion, is if the absorbing atom is highly excited, i.e. at or near incndescent temperatures. In the 'long term study' the rats got up to 6W per kilogram of body weight of illumination, and that amounts (for a full-size human) to being inside a microwave oven. I'm suspicious that the real effect on the rats was just... overheating.

    That would account for the change in putting on weight, and could account, too, for other health problems, including cancer. Humans, however, have better cooling than rats in a cage (we can choose our own clothing, and aren't stuck with fulltime wearing of a fur coat)..

    To summarize: heat will certainly happen. Ionization is not supported by any experimental data, and is not predicted by any theory. Other effects (shifting a metabolic reaction rate or three) are possible, this data cannot make fine distinctions.

  15. Re: OSNAP is an excellent name... on Ocean-wide Sensor Array Provides New Look at Global Ocean Current (nature.com) · · Score: 1
    Nature doesn't select facts, it takes in ALL of 'em. You would do well to do the same.

    The presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere explains that temperature difference nicely

    No actually it doesn't. See the problem I have with this is that according to the makeup of the atmosphere Nitrogen â" 78 percent Oxygen â" 21 percent Argon â" 0.93 percent Carbon dioxide â" 0.04 percent

    So, there's a CO2 screen between ground level and high altitude, in the amount of a few grams per square inch, that blocks IR light. The percentage is NOT significant, only the amount.

    Where did you come up with "actually it doesn't"? Measurements? Theories? That doesn't follow from anything you've said, and your choice of measurements shows no intention to proceed with any calculations or observations. The idea that 0.04 percent means negligible, is TESTABLE, and you didn't test it. No scientist would miss that glaring omission, so... you're no scientist. And, the skeleton argument presented... is not viable, nor salvable. Bury it.

  16. Re:Have we finally reached peak hubris? on Ocean-wide Sensor Array Provides New Look at Global Ocean Current (nature.com) · · Score: 1

    things are much more complicated than scientists previously believed

    No doubt. And that will continue to be the case for the foreseeable future.

    Well, yeah, but only because it would be silly for a scientist to believe something more complicated than reality. There's really only a single side to the distribution.

    You start with the simple model, then add as observations show embellishments to be necessary.

    This isn't an error, it's normal progress, as disregarded minor items (like 0.04% of CO2 in the atmosphere) turn out to be nonnegligible. There's absolutely no significance to it, except that scientists aren't being silly. Does that surprise anyone?

  17. Re:You know what they say... on Ask Slashdot: What Kind of Societies Will the First Mars Colonies Be? · · Score: 1
    The Sky So Big and Black, by John Barnes, suggests that the colonists will be working largely as prospectors, seeking the scarce (water, oxygen) local resources that can make the Mars environment livable.

    This leads to wandering clans with a centralized bounty-for-claims governing agency.

  18. Outside fantasy and SF, too! on Fantasy Fiction Novelist Ursula K. Le Guin Dies At 88 (nytimes.com) · · Score: 2
    Having enjoyed her most mainstream works, I was delighted to pick up Orsinian Tales, and found a wealth of... well, Russian short stories. She was able to use elliptic descriptions, suggestive imagery, and that staple of 20th century Soviet-era writing, the pun (you'd need to have a Russian dictionary handy to know it, though).

    Poetry, song, gesture are ways to load extra impact into language, and Ursula leGuin shows us all the others.

  19. Re:Built-in error bars on Has the Decades-Old Floating Point Error Problem Been Solved? (insidehpc.com) · · Score: 2, Interesting

    instead of using one floating point value, they use two and say the real answer is between those two. If the two floats are consistent when rounded to the requested precision, it declares the value correct. If they differ, it gives an accuracy error.

    So, for only twice the work and a little ovehead on top, this process can tell you when to switch to a high precision fixed-point model ...

    There's flaws in the principle other than the obvious doubles-the-work feature, though. Error 'bars' only show a pair of worst-case values that is purported to represent the error, but careful measurement processes give a distribution of errors.

    One can analyze a voltage and temperature tolerance range for a CPU chip; it gives rise to 2^2 = 4 vertices for testing.

    That DOES fit the model proposed. Measured-accuracy is usually less precise than a floating point number, so LSB error isn't our accuracy limit.

    Taking four measured numbers, each with an associated thirty-samples selection of deviants, by calculating all the combinations: 30^4 (about a million) calculations later, you know not only the result, but a collection of deviants that can be distilled down to a new thirty samples, representing the error distribution of the result..

    While the LSB granularity of a computer number is a kind of 'error bar', and a calculation on that kind of error IS just two worst-case values, there's still the nagging problem that the worst cases are overestimates of the error to be expected. In a statistical sense, worst-case is always wrong for large-scale calculations (an overestimate). When the error distribution is a bell curve, there IS no defined worst-case that really represents the situation.

    By the central limit theorem, we always expect the result of a many-input calculation to have a bell-curve distribution, so the result of a large calculation is NEVER well-characterized if you propogate worst-cases.

  20. Finish this phrase: "all I need is" on Ask Slashdot: Are There Any Alternatives To Android Or iOS? · · Score: 1

    ...16k RAM 10MB hard disk 640k RAM for this computer to type a letter an e-mail terminal and so on. Trying to find a phone that's specialized to only a few functions is fruitless; the addition of apps to a smart device (or even the addition of smarts) is not an economic drain, so don't THINK about it so much. Think, rather, of whether those apps are useful, and ignore the ones that aren't. And, if the phone is open to new apps, it does't become a paperweight in three months when the next 'need' pops up from nowhere.

  21. Re: Honest Question on "The FCC Still Doesn't Know How the Internet Works" (eff.org) · · Score: 1

    My financial incentive? Not wanting to see my Internet service bill go up to subsidize those watching Amazon and Netflix ...

    That's a classic false dichotomy. The content of your neighbor's library choices might be called into question for any number of reasons, but 'it costs me' is certainly not one of them. The choices are his, AND yours. That's the nature of a public resource, like a library. Or an open internet. So, let the other guy read the foreign newspaper, or visit the reference section, or take out a romance novel. In turn, he'll let you get a picture book with goats, or biography of Hildegard of Bingen. He's subsidizing YOU, too, you know.

  22. Re: First Sale Doctrine? on Disney Sues Redbox, Hoping To Block Digital Movie Sales (marketwatch.com) · · Score: 1

    someone who owned a video rental store in Miami. He had lots of foreign films (not released on NTSC VHS in the US). ...rented both PAL/Secam original + NTSC transfer together as a single, inseparable unit... and STILL got sued by Sony or Disney

    Sounds like he made an illegal copy of the movie. And not for his own, personal backup either.

    There's 'copy', and there's 'transcribe' (new medium), and there's 'translate'.

    For hardware compatibility, ALL video tape is routinely transcribed to electrical signal streams, and parts are translated into your display device's color-map scheme. Simply adding another intermediate step in the process is not clearly an other-than-fair-use operation.

    Getting sued just means a court was asked to resolve a dispute, and sometimes the court decision doesn't clarify anything.

    Sony/Disney could conceivably claim that their 'foreign rights' distribution did not license for performance inside the US, but THAT anti-gray-market question has actually been settled. Gray market is NOT illegal in the US.

    The "sounds like he made an illegal..." puts excess significance on how the narrator slanted the report. He could make it sound creepy, or mysterious, or cheerful, or (if he's a really good narrator) somber, wistful, humorous, earnest, ethereal, arcane...

    I'll pull out my old recording of Boris Karloff reading 'Hunting of the Snark' now, . Should I transfer the vinyl to disk, or does the ancient turntable have to spin up every time I listen? Would an FDR fireside chat deserve a different answer?

  23. Re:Why on UCLA Researchers Use Solar To Create and Store Hydrogen (phys.org) · · Score: 1

    Storing energy as hydrogen and burning it in a car later is 3x less efficient than storing it in batteries. Hydrogen makes no sense. Get a battery electric vehicle instead.

    A fuel cell IS a battery. Hydrogen for a fuel cell is oxidized in the same oxidation/reduction manner as any other battery chemistry.

    The '3x' number comes from... where?

  24. Re: This probably won't help on FCC Approves Next-Gen ATSC 3.0 TV Standard (reuters.com) · · Score: 2

    The only way I can imagine that anyone could force you to watch commercials is if they treated you like Robot Chicken. That is, strapped you into a chair and held your eyelids open. Otherwise, you always have a choice.

    Shush! Ajit Pal has access to this feed, it is NOT A SECURE CHANNEL.

  25. Re:Now we just need one more thing on How Two Scientists Accurately Predicted Global Warming in 1967 (medium.com) · · Score: 1

    A way to distinguish the one prediction that's going to be right from the millions that aren't.

    A danger warning about safe crossing of the street doesn't have to identify the one car of millions that is gonna run you down.

    It's OK to dodge ALL the cars, and you get to the other side without getting flattened.

    The proposed 'need' is nonsense.

    The real need, is enough knowledge and understanding (i.e. science) to proceed with a degree of safety.