Don't worry about all the killer's emails and texts being encrypted--his washing machine is livecasting the blood-soaked t-shirt on agitate, and his toaster snapped a picture of him waking in with the knife.
The media is trying to spin this as no big deal, but the secret terms of the exchange required Isreal to release 2 convicted Hezbollah attack pigeons, a weapons-smuggling-tunnel canary, and an ill-tempered parrot that keeps saying either "Yasser Arafat" or "Yes sir, you're fat."
Yeah I found those terms in my searches. Maybe they sound natural to people who've grown up with them; they sound odd and contrived to my ears (but that's just me). "The global economy is projected to grow to over a trilliard EUR by 2250." "There are 7 milliard people in the world." Meh.
I don't see 10^6n [and a separate construction for 10^(6n+3)] as particularly more intuitive than 10^3(n+1). I get the rationale you put forth about exponents of a million. But I'm left wondering how useful it is to make it easy to discuss 10^30.
Using up good "-ion" terms on numbers >=10^18--that have almost no physical representation or relevance to most people--means you have to call in "-iard" to fill the gaps for numbers that get talked about like 10^9 and 10^15.
I dunno... to those for whom long billions are working, cheers and more power to you.
I've never understood the rationale for the non-US billion. Both 10^6 and 10^9 (and to a lesser extent 10^12) are numbers that come up all the time, why not have explicit names for them? SI has a prefix at every thousand mark. You gain very little by "stretching" the scale, since numbers 10^15 and up are exceedingly rare to encounter in a form that's not already SI-prefixed (e.g. petabytes).
So to bring home the story for the American audience:
Because of differences in comma/period conventions and the short/long billion scale, it turns out this guy didn't scam a few bucks worth of patio furniture; he defrauded Europe to the tune of twelve trillion euro, comparable to the entire Eurozone's GDP. Don't you think that warrants inclusion on the Most Wanted list?
I think I can figure out all the other ones... but what is the '+' supposed to represent?
I believe it's an inclusivity catch-all. One writer called it "and beyond." Going by my construction above, it appears not to include identifying as bovine.
It was a PITA when I owned an android phone as well. Maybe I should've said "mobile device."
The main issue isn't that Steve Jobs' ghost is guarding the gate to the walled garden. It's that using a touch interface for navigating and inputting symbol-heavy text (angle brackets, for starts) is noticeably slower. Not having to manually type in HTML tags would go a long way toward mobile usability, regardless of the OS.
Legit question: Aside from "Whatever each individual user personally decides is 'News for Nerds'", what criteria should they be applying here?
I mean, this isn't going to generate a ton of buzz, so the "News" part isn't super strong. But this concerns the guy who invented, i.a., one of the quintessential nerdy kids' toys, Fischer Technik.
I think is more/. than the day's fifth sorta-tangential-to-Uber post, or links to TMZ articles.
I have been forced to become somewhat of a ninja with , and forced autocorrect to recognize that there is no "be" tag**. However, it's still painful as hell on an iDevice. I'm in favor of bbcode or similar, with GUI buttons.
I'm also in favor of Unicode support. Are we really concerned with lookalike chars and Korean spam evading the "filters" when we have moocow, APK, etc. spam every day?
**Proposed feature for HTML6: <be>a tag for willing things into existence</be>... which, if it works the way I think it does, may have just willed the BE tag into existence. O_O
Actually, that sounds not too far off for *incompressible* cylinders h=3.6" r=2.2" (source for dimensions: the #1 answer on Yahoo Answers, which is also a trustworthy source for medical and legal advice).
I converted the oil barrel unit and Big Mac volume to cubic meters and divided. I think 178 was the round number, and at 563 calories per, that comes out to 100,214 calories. +1 Internet to anyone who actually determines this number experimentally.
Actually, no. This summary is, I think, better than the one posted yesterday for this identical topic. However, the answer to "I'm not quite happy with this summary" is to do it right the first time and fix it before posting it. Not to repost it the next day with different wording.
This isn't an update of breaking news, like yesterday we discovered the calorie was broken (ZOMG NOES!!1), and today President Obama held an emergency press conference to calm panic in the global markets about Big Macs falling below 100,000 calories a barrel*.
*For some reason, probably a disorder of some kind, I felt compelled to actually calculate how many calories would be in an (oil) barrel of Big Macs. The figure I came up with was 100,214, with caveats of course for variability in the caloric content, dimensions, and (un-accounted-for) compressibility of the Big Mac sandwich.
So I was talking about measuring today's foods today (which they of course do).
As for the "poop tables", even the Atwater stuff still in use today is not without controversy. There are a bunch of assumptions, generalizations, weightings, empirically derived coefficients, etc. that are subject to debate and may not reflect current dietary realities.
No knock to a pioneering food scientist. Just that the data, subjects, and methodology are probably not exactly the same as today.
Yeah. As long as we're using modern methods to determine the calorie (energy) content of food now (and not tables of burning poop data from the turn of last century), I see no issue with the calorie itself. Although the "raising the temperature of water" bit is kinda contrived, torching a cheeseburger is going to release energy measurable in 4.2 kilojoule increments. Complaining that bigger portion size messes with the amount of available energy is... not the calorie's fault?
Though I agree with the author that the most reasonable replacement for the calorie as a nutritional tool will be detailed, ongoing chemical analysis of each person's internal chemistry, customizable gut bacteria, and nanobots that zap fatty molecules with tiny pew pew lasers.
So, it's fine they're going after a big company for being robocall jerks.
I get a bunch of these calls every week and... it's never once been Dish. It's always these sleazy scam operations with "Stop what you're doing I can make you ten thousand bucks" or "The FBI says there's a break-in every 8 minutes." I know it's only anecdotal, but no one I know who complains about annoying robocalls has ever mentioned Dish, it's always scammers.
I don't doubt that Dish has abused their phone privileges. But while this (unrealistic) fine in the tens of billions of dollars is big headlines for these AGs, maybe before they tear a ligament patting themselves on the back, they could also do some (less glamorous but more impactful) work against these mom and pop scam outfits?
This, plus sibling AC's post about what is actually happening if something is seriously boning the entire southeast (or $region, generally).
If Google was building permanent nuclear waste storage facilities, or grand coliseums it wanted to last a hundred generations, they'd need to consider climate/disasters/Civil War 2.0/etc. over a much longer horizon.
I'm certain that their capital planning includes detailed lifecycle assessments for any new facility like a datacenter. While I'm not privy to such, I have to believe it's measured in decades not centuries.
If sea levels have risen to cover the American Southeast within that useful lifetime (or anything even close to that level of catastrophic), we have way bigger issues than longer ping time to the nearest Google servers.
Well if my (admittedly tongue-in-cheek) gambit idea is correct, then you'd not be a fool, but right on the money. They just want you to think you'd be a fool for thinking that. (So I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me!)
The NSA's motivations and meta-motivations aside, I suppose it boils down to a somewhat of a tautology--if they can't break properly done encryption, you're not a fool for believing they can't break properly done encryption.
I have no way of ascertaining whether the NSA has fundamentally compromised an encryption algorithm. Or, for that matter, whether they've slid in under the door and All Your Base'd the software that's supposed to be doing the encrypting. Which makes knowing with certainty that [the encrypting you just did] == [properly done encryption] an interesting challenge.
It's the triple back burner reverse reverse psychology gambit. It goes like this:
a) Only a fool will believe that anything about breaking encryption is "challenging" for the NSA. (That, and get involved in a land war in Asia.)
b) A savvy skeptic will take this whole "yeah you should use encryption but gee it makes things difficult" charade as a sign that NSA has encryption pwned six ways from Sunday, resigning themselves to using whatever's good enough to at least prevent parties != NSA from sniffing their bits.
c) The NSA doesn't actually have encryption pwned, but is counting on b)'s resignation and a)'s inexperience/disinterest to keep the status quo, which really is challenging but not as bad as it would be if encryption became both stronger and more widely adopted.
The phrase "death-proof" is a marketing department wet dream, and a legal department nightmare (if only there was a word stronger than nightmare). Your scenario and dozens of others--which, statistically speaking, *will* happen--are why they can't make claims like these.
They can't even caveat them or small-print around them. It doesn't matter that the fast talker guy at the end of the commercial says "Volvo cannot prevent your death in all circumstances, see dealer for details, tax tag and title extra." It doesn't matter that they whisper at the very bottom of their brochure "Only valid when driving in a 100% Autonomous Vehicle Zone in dry conditions at speeds lower than 12mph."
People are going to die in Volvo's cars and they will get the high holy shit sued out of them.
Hmmm. This "First Post" competition is a neat idea. Think I'll use your^H^H^H^H my awesome new idea that I thought of as the basis of a new tabletop fantasy game.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't worry about all the killer's emails and texts being encrypted--his washing machine is livecasting the blood-soaked t-shirt on agitate, and his toaster snapped a picture of him waking in with the knife.
The media is trying to spin this as no big deal, but the secret terms of the exchange required Isreal to release 2 convicted Hezbollah attack pigeons, a weapons-smuggling-tunnel canary, and an ill-tempered parrot that keeps saying either "Yasser Arafat" or "Yes sir, you're fat."
Yeah I found those terms in my searches. Maybe they sound natural to people who've grown up with them; they sound odd and contrived to my ears (but that's just me). "The global economy is projected to grow to over a trilliard EUR by 2250." "There are 7 milliard people in the world." Meh.
I don't see 10^6n [and a separate construction for 10^(6n+3)] as particularly more intuitive than 10^3(n+1). I get the rationale you put forth about exponents of a million. But I'm left wondering how useful it is to make it easy to discuss 10^30.
Using up good "-ion" terms on numbers >=10^18--that have almost no physical representation or relevance to most people--means you have to call in "-iard" to fill the gaps for numbers that get talked about like 10^9 and 10^15.
I dunno... to those for whom long billions are working, cheers and more power to you.
I've never understood the rationale for the non-US billion. Both 10^6 and 10^9 (and to a lesser extent 10^12) are numbers that come up all the time, why not have explicit names for them? SI has a prefix at every thousand mark. You gain very little by "stretching" the scale, since numbers 10^15 and up are exceedingly rare to encounter in a form that's not already SI-prefixed (e.g. petabytes).
So to bring home the story for the American audience:
Because of differences in comma/period conventions and the short/long billion scale, it turns out this guy didn't scam a few bucks worth of patio furniture; he defrauded Europe to the tune of twelve trillion euro, comparable to the entire Eurozone's GDP. Don't you think that warrants inclusion on the Most Wanted list?
I think I can figure out all the other ones... but what is the '+' supposed to represent?
I believe it's an inclusivity catch-all. One writer called it "and beyond." Going by my construction above, it appears not to include identifying as bovine.
It was a PITA when I owned an android phone as well. Maybe I should've said "mobile device."
The main issue isn't that Steve Jobs' ghost is guarding the gate to the walled garden. It's that using a touch interface for navigating and inputting symbol-heavy text (angle brackets, for starts) is noticeably slower. Not having to manually type in HTML tags would go a long way toward mobile usability, regardless of the OS.
it's why we have -1.
Well, that and ideological disagreement.
Legit question: Aside from "Whatever each individual user personally decides is 'News for Nerds'", what criteria should they be applying here?
/. than the day's fifth sorta-tangential-to-Uber post, or links to TMZ articles.
I mean, this isn't going to generate a ton of buzz, so the "News" part isn't super strong. But this concerns the guy who invented, i.a., one of the quintessential nerdy kids' toys, Fischer Technik.
I think is more
I have been forced to become somewhat of a ninja with
, and forced autocorrect to recognize that there is no "be" tag**. However, it's still painful as hell on an iDevice. I'm in favor of bbcode or similar, with GUI buttons.
I'm also in favor of Unicode support. Are we really concerned with lookalike chars and Korean spam evading the "filters" when we have moocow, APK, etc. spam every day?
**Proposed feature for HTML6: <be>a tag for willing things into existence</be>... which, if it works the way I think it does, may have just willed the BE tag into existence. O_O
Zing!!
Where's the cows guy when you really need him?
How can you be sure it's a guy? Are you saying that women can't be cows?
#cowsgate
Moo.
Brought to you by the "C" in LGBPTTQQIIAA+C.
Actually, that sounds not too far off for *incompressible* cylinders h=3.6" r=2.2" (source for dimensions: the #1 answer on Yahoo Answers, which is also a trustworthy source for medical and legal advice).
I converted the oil barrel unit and Big Mac volume to cubic meters and divided. I think 178 was the round number, and at 563 calories per, that comes out to 100,214 calories. +1 Internet to anyone who actually determines this number experimentally.
That is all.
Actually, no. This summary is, I think, better than the one posted yesterday for this identical topic. However, the answer to "I'm not quite happy with this summary" is to do it right the first time and fix it before posting it. Not to repost it the next day with different wording.
This isn't an update of breaking news, like yesterday we discovered the calorie was broken (ZOMG NOES!!1), and today President Obama held an emergency press conference to calm panic in the global markets about Big Macs falling below 100,000 calories a barrel*.
*For some reason, probably a disorder of some kind, I felt compelled to actually calculate how many calories would be in an (oil) barrel of Big Macs. The figure I came up with was 100,214, with caveats of course for variability in the caloric content, dimensions, and (un-accounted-for) compressibility of the Big Mac sandwich.
So I was talking about measuring today's foods today (which they of course do).
As for the "poop tables", even the Atwater stuff still in use today is not without controversy. There are a bunch of assumptions, generalizations, weightings, empirically derived coefficients, etc. that are subject to debate and may not reflect current dietary realities.
No knock to a pioneering food scientist. Just that the data, subjects, and methodology are probably not exactly the same as today.
This thread is dongs.
Another obligatory rap reference.
Yeah. As long as we're using modern methods to determine the calorie (energy) content of food now (and not tables of burning poop data from the turn of last century), I see no issue with the calorie itself. Although the "raising the temperature of water" bit is kinda contrived, torching a cheeseburger is going to release energy measurable in 4.2 kilojoule increments. Complaining that bigger portion size messes with the amount of available energy is... not the calorie's fault?
Though I agree with the author that the most reasonable replacement for the calorie as a nutritional tool will be detailed, ongoing chemical analysis of each person's internal chemistry, customizable gut bacteria, and nanobots that zap fatty molecules with tiny pew pew lasers.
This thread is dongs.
You heard it here first, folks! THE new "it" slashdot phrase and reclaimer of the empty throne once held by "idle is pants": This thread is dongs.
So, it's fine they're going after a big company for being robocall jerks.
I get a bunch of these calls every week and... it's never once been Dish. It's always these sleazy scam operations with "Stop what you're doing I can make you ten thousand bucks" or "The FBI says there's a break-in every 8 minutes." I know it's only anecdotal, but no one I know who complains about annoying robocalls has ever mentioned Dish, it's always scammers.
I don't doubt that Dish has abused their phone privileges. But while this (unrealistic) fine in the tens of billions of dollars is big headlines for these AGs, maybe before they tear a ligament patting themselves on the back, they could also do some (less glamorous but more impactful) work against these mom and pop scam outfits?
This, plus sibling AC's post about what is actually happening if something is seriously boning the entire southeast (or $region, generally).
If Google was building permanent nuclear waste storage facilities, or grand coliseums it wanted to last a hundred generations, they'd need to consider climate/disasters/Civil War 2.0/etc. over a much longer horizon.
I'm certain that their capital planning includes detailed lifecycle assessments for any new facility like a datacenter. While I'm not privy to such, I have to believe it's measured in decades not centuries.
If sea levels have risen to cover the American Southeast within that useful lifetime (or anything even close to that level of catastrophic), we have way bigger issues than longer ping time to the nearest Google servers.
Well if my (admittedly tongue-in-cheek) gambit idea is correct, then you'd not be a fool, but right on the money. They just want you to think you'd be a fool for thinking that. (So I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me!)
The NSA's motivations and meta-motivations aside, I suppose it boils down to a somewhat of a tautology--if they can't break properly done encryption, you're not a fool for believing they can't break properly done encryption.
I have no way of ascertaining whether the NSA has fundamentally compromised an encryption algorithm. Or, for that matter, whether they've slid in under the door and All Your Base'd the software that's supposed to be doing the encrypting. Which makes knowing with certainty that [the encrypting you just did] == [properly done encryption] an interesting challenge.
It's the triple back burner reverse reverse psychology gambit. It goes like this:
a) Only a fool will believe that anything about breaking encryption is "challenging" for the NSA. (That, and get involved in a land war in Asia.)
b) A savvy skeptic will take this whole "yeah you should use encryption but gee it makes things difficult" charade as a sign that NSA has encryption pwned six ways from Sunday, resigning themselves to using whatever's good enough to at least prevent parties != NSA from sniffing their bits.
c) The NSA doesn't actually have encryption pwned, but is counting on b)'s resignation and a)'s inexperience/disinterest to keep the status quo, which really is challenging but not as bad as it would be if encryption became both stronger and more widely adopted.
The phrase "death-proof" is a marketing department wet dream, and a legal department nightmare (if only there was a word stronger than nightmare). Your scenario and dozens of others--which, statistically speaking, *will* happen--are why they can't make claims like these.
They can't even caveat them or small-print around them. It doesn't matter that the fast talker guy at the end of the commercial says "Volvo cannot prevent your death in all circumstances, see dealer for details, tax tag and title extra." It doesn't matter that they whisper at the very bottom of their brochure "Only valid when driving in a 100% Autonomous Vehicle Zone in dry conditions at speeds lower than 12mph."
People are going to die in Volvo's cars and they will get the high holy shit sued out of them.
Hmmm. This "First Post" competition is a neat idea. Think I'll use your^H^H^H^H my awesome new idea that I thought of as the basis of a new tabletop fantasy game.
Yeah I figured it out halfway in, but I couldn't help myself.
Given the audience, I think the conference is probably the first thing that came to mind for everyone else who read your post.