The only newsworthy part of this story is that they landed the F-16 after putting it through its paces
That rather depends on whether you believe these are going to be used as 'target drones' or drones that take out 'targets'.
We literally have thousands of F-15 and F-16's either in mothballs now or scheduled to be decommissioned in the near future.
And if we've had the ability to fly these (or other similar obsolete fighters like F-4s and F-14s) on one way missions for decades, why haven't we turned them into attack drones already? We've used F-4s as target drones so the technology for remote control is there.
Simple answer: we don't need that capability any more than we need to bring back WWII era battleships.
What our current drones do that repurposed old fighter planes don't do is have fantastic, unrefueled loiter time. There are reasons why Predators and Reapers run on old prop technology: they don't have to fly fast to accomplish their mission and that little internal combustion engine sips fuel compared to guzzling it like an F-16 or F-15. I'd worry more about what the X-47B will evolve into (and I'd be surprised if the Air Force doesn't have a similar program). And the X-47B is the first drone capable of air-to-air refueling.
The U.S. military (Navy and Air Force, especially) has been repurposing obsolete aircraft as radio controlled target drones since not long after WWII. The only newsworthy part of this story is that they landed the F-16 after putting it through its paces. Previous target drones were intentionally one use only.
That's why I switched to XFCE when GNOME 3 was released. I know what I'm doing thank you!
Lowest common denominator design will lead to a low quality production.
I usually do one install of the latest Fedora release with whatever version of Gnome is bundled with it into a VM just to confirm that I still can't stand it. What I don't understand is all of the people who install Gnome and then the "classic shell". If it really worked it wouldn't be so bad but there's a lot of traffic on the Fedora mailing list from people who do this and then they can't get some application to work or some feature (like middle click paste) no longer works.
I am not a lawyer and, especially, not a patent lawyer. Even so, I could make a fairly strong argument that the sentence you quoted means ANY proposed patent that is strictly a "computer program" is no longer patentable. The intent may be what you are saying but the words CAN BE interpreted as meaning that no strictly software patents are allowed.
It wouldn't be the first time that the politicians got the wording of a law wrong.
...You can't patent division, you can patent the GIF method for image compression...
I think you are mistaken here under the New Zealand law. This change means that the GIF algorithm is no longer protected by a patent. You could build a dedicated device that compresses images using the GIF algoritm and get a patent for that device but your patent wouldn't stop someone else from writing a program that uses GIF compression for doing the same thing. It also wouldn't stop someone else from making a similar device but has a different form factor, controls, etc. Your patent now only stops people from actually copying your device or copying it and making only superficial changes.
Even more important, the New Zealand law means that the overly broad software patents that are common in the U.S. are not valid there. Extending the above example, the patent for GIF would probably be written as describing a method for compressing image data without loss. Some patent troll would then attempt to extort royalties from anyone using any lossless image compression algorithm (and even those using lossy algorithms if they thought they would win or get a settlement).
I work in Seattle. Here (at UW) our internet is pretty good, as you might expect - but the city as a whole is nothing to write home about. Of course there's a Starbucks on every corner, so perhaps the city scored well based on the availability of that AT&T free wi-fi...
I assumed when I saw Seattle as the only U.S. city on the top ten list that the survey was a proxy for Starbucks density.
One interesting side effect of this article and others like it is the spook job just got much harder. Lots of people will be looking into using encryption and some actually will becuase they simply don't want someone else reading their e-mail. Previously, the very use of encryption flagged an e-mail as being suspicious since the spooks could assume that peope with nothing to hide (e.g., no plots or plans for nefarious deeds) wouldn't bother with encrypting their data. Now lots of people with nothing to hide will encrypt their messages just becuase they don't like the idea that someone could read it.
Think about what happens if encrypted e-mail goes traffic from.1% to 1% of all e-mail (I have no idea how many people use something like GPG now).
As long as the self driving car only slavishly follows the ridiculously low speed limits in most of the northeast it will be more hazard to other drivers than benefit, and it will also be slower.
Lots of slower drivers now who do less than the posted limit. My work commute is about 50 miles of rural interstate in Colorado. Posted speed limit is 75 mph. Lots of cars in the slow lane doing less than that and the worst thing is when one of them isn't quite willing to go as slow as the others and gets in the fast lane and S-L-O-W-L-Y passes the other.
Average daily volume on the NASDAQ is a little over 400,000,000 shares for the last three months. Even with the outage, today's volume was 924,433,630 shares. Do you really think slowing that down to only trading on some specific interval would work? Plus, you have to remember that people decide to buy or sell on something other than your schedule and the whole point of a stock exchange is to price the security and execute the trade. All putting in some sort of fixed interval would do is force traders to manually price each trade and then somehow fix that price up to the next trade interval. It simply wouldn't work.
I think this is a terrible problem with education in America. People are afraid of the market, don't understand it, don't want to understand it, but that's due to simple lack of education. And it's important to know the basics, since it will likely affect your standard of living in retirement.
Just like there's a certain minimum amount you need to know about how cars work before you can drive safely - not all that much, but there are a several hours about it in most drivers ed classes - there's a certain minimum amount you need to know about how markets and investments work. Where's the public education for that? Are we so intent on class warfare that we'll cut off our nose to spite our face here?
I've already made more from my stock and mutual fund investments this year than I'll make in salary. Now I'm going to post a response to the guy who talked up how scary market investing is so I can scare more people away from the market.
Just kidding about scaring people away. Making money in the stock market isn't a zero sum game. The more players there are and the more money invested, the better it is for everyone except the people who sit on the side lines becaused they're scared/don't understand/don't want to learn. If you have any "spare money", you are absolutely stoooopid if you aren't investing it. If you don't want to expend too much effort; low cost, broad based index mutual funds (e.g., S&P 500) are an easy way to at least track the market.
Or you know, people could just go outside for a walk.
Also, there are "mental health" benefits to exercise that I'm pretty sure the pill won't provide. This pill is kind of scary since we could end up with a bunch of stress crazed, muscular people running around looking for a outlet for their stress.
I am the complete opposite of a "morning person" but I get up half an hour early to allow time to exercise before everything else. It's the only way I know how to make sure that (check all that apply) overbearing bosses, well-meaning friends, the spouse, kids, traffic, etc. don't somehow manage to come up with some reason for me to not exercise later in the day. Take your exercise time off the top at the beginning of the day and that way no one can take it away from you. It's not selfish. Being dead or ill doesn't help the people who think their stuff is more important than your exercise.
Oh yeah, my commute is more like an hour each way.
The "test site" is an area about the size of Begium or New Jersey depending on which geographic comparison works better for you. The primary reason for getting and keeping the Russians involved was because they knew where to look (from TFA). Yeah, it's kind of "security through obscurity" but it's a big area and part of the effort was to seal the nastier hot spots so it would take a significant effort to come in and dig them up. Finally, part of the continuing effort is to monitor the area with drones, seismic sensors, CCTV, etc. There's also a little bit of trying to scare off the metal scavangers by hinting that the copper cables and other metals that they might be able to recover are radioactive and could be VERY unhealthy to be around.
After getting a long lecture from one of my conspiracy theory believing friends about how some particular conspiracy was real, I summed up her explanation as, "The complete lack of evidence of the conspiracy is proof that the conspiracy is real." She liked her explanation better.
Possible correlation to people who drink a lot of coffee and people who work crazy hours/lots of stress/not much sleep/eat poorly/etc..
My excessive coffee drinking is a symptom of my shitty lifestyle.
There probably is a strong correlation between younger people who drink a lot of coffee and have an unhealthy lifestyle. Supposedly the researcher corrected for smoking but not for things like too little sleep, too much stress, etc. (Been there. Done that.) If that describes you and you survive into your 50s, chances are that your lifestyle gets healthier but you still have the coffee habit and then the health benefits of coffee consumption kick in. (There now. Doing that.)
I'm down to only about 5 mugs a day which is better than when I was an undergrad (mid 1970s) and drinking 10 to 15 mugs a day.
...That's why I list my employers, but my references are colleagues I've worked with.
If I like the people I work with and want them to give me a good reference then I let them know what's happening before I go to amanagement. Usually it's your soon to be ex-cowrkers who will be the ones impacted by you leaving. Treat them with respect even if you don't respect the company. If management decides to walk you out the moment you give notice, there's nothing you can do about it but at least the people you worked with have had a chance to prepare for your departure.
They also talk about the wobble changing the amount of solar radiation incident on higher latitudes which also implies that they were really talking about the inclination of the axis of rotation, not changes in the orbit. Never heard of orbit wobble but it's well known that the Earth "wobbles" somewhat in a way that changes the inclination of the axis of rotation.
Slashdot Mirror
That rather depends on whether you believe these are going to be used as 'target drones' or drones that take out 'targets'.
We literally have thousands of F-15 and F-16's either in mothballs now or scheduled to be decommissioned in the near future.
And if we've had the ability to fly these (or other similar obsolete fighters like F-4s and F-14s) on one way missions for decades, why haven't we turned them into attack drones already? We've used F-4s as target drones so the technology for remote control is there.
Simple answer: we don't need that capability any more than we need to bring back WWII era battleships.
What our current drones do that repurposed old fighter planes don't do is have fantastic, unrefueled loiter time. There are reasons why Predators and Reapers run on old prop technology: they don't have to fly fast to accomplish their mission and that little internal combustion engine sips fuel compared to guzzling it like an F-16 or F-15. I'd worry more about what the X-47B will evolve into (and I'd be surprised if the Air Force doesn't have a similar program). And the X-47B is the first drone capable of air-to-air refueling.
Cheers,
Dave
The U.S. military (Navy and Air Force, especially) has been repurposing obsolete aircraft as radio controlled target drones since not long after WWII. The only newsworthy part of this story is that they landed the F-16 after putting it through its paces. Previous target drones were intentionally one use only.
Cheers,
Dave
bash is the flagship Linux desktop.
Sssssshhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!! Don't say that or some idiot Gnome UX designer will try to take away the CLI "becauses it confuses new users."
Cheers,
Dave
That's why I switched to XFCE when GNOME 3 was released. I know what I'm doing thank you!
Lowest common denominator design will lead to a low quality production.
I usually do one install of the latest Fedora release with whatever version of Gnome is bundled with it into a VM just to confirm that I still can't stand it. What I don't understand is all of the people who install Gnome and then the "classic shell". If it really worked it wouldn't be so bad but there's a lot of traffic on the Fedora mailing list from people who do this and then they can't get some application to work or some feature (like middle click paste) no longer works.
Another vote for XFCE here.
Cheers,
Dave
Local news say, YES, it's so the drones will not interefere with helicopter rescue operations:
http://www.9news.com/news/article/355477/188/Colorado-Floods-Myths-debunked
(The segment also covers several other rumors so all you tin-foil-hat types need to go back to spotting Elvis interviewing aliens in Area 51)
Cheers,
Dave
Mention Nixon or anyone from his administration in a /. post and you're guaranteed to surface an anti-Nixon troll. How's life under the bridge?
Cheers,
Dave
"'Your excellency' will do."
Dr. K's response when asked how he should be addressed after becoming Secretary of State.
Cheers,
Dave
I am not a lawyer and, especially, not a patent lawyer. Even so, I could make a fairly strong argument that the sentence you quoted means ANY proposed patent that is strictly a "computer program" is no longer patentable. The intent may be what you are saying but the words CAN BE interpreted as meaning that no strictly software patents are allowed.
It wouldn't be the first time that the politicians got the wording of a law wrong.
Cheersx,
Dave
Does the ODO include "First Post" or FP?
Cheers,
Dave
...You can't patent division, you can patent the GIF method for image compression...
I think you are mistaken here under the New Zealand law. This change means that the GIF algorithm is no longer protected by a patent. You could build a dedicated device that compresses images using the GIF algoritm and get a patent for that device but your patent wouldn't stop someone else from writing a program that uses GIF compression for doing the same thing. It also wouldn't stop someone else from making a similar device but has a different form factor, controls, etc. Your patent now only stops people from actually copying your device or copying it and making only superficial changes.
Even more important, the New Zealand law means that the overly broad software patents that are common in the U.S. are not valid there. Extending the above example, the patent for GIF would probably be written as describing a method for compressing image data without loss. Some patent troll would then attempt to extort royalties from anyone using any lossless image compression algorithm (and even those using lossy algorithms if they thought they would win or get a settlement).
Cheers,
Dave
I work in Seattle. Here (at UW) our internet is pretty good, as you might expect - but the city as a whole is nothing to write home about. Of course there's a Starbucks on every corner, so perhaps the city scored well based on the availability of that AT&T free wi-fi...
I assumed when I saw Seattle as the only U.S. city on the top ten list that the survey was a proxy for Starbucks density.
Cheers,
Dave
One interesting side effect of this article and others like it is the spook job just got much harder. Lots of people will be looking into using encryption and some actually will becuase they simply don't want someone else reading their e-mail. Previously, the very use of encryption flagged an e-mail as being suspicious since the spooks could assume that peope with nothing to hide (e.g., no plots or plans for nefarious deeds) wouldn't bother with encrypting their data. Now lots of people with nothing to hide will encrypt their messages just becuase they don't like the idea that someone could read it.
Think about what happens if encrypted e-mail goes traffic from .1% to 1% of all e-mail (I have no idea how many people use something like GPG now).
Cheers,
Dave
As long as the self driving car only slavishly follows the ridiculously low speed limits in most of the northeast it will be more hazard to other drivers than benefit, and it will also be slower.
Lots of slower drivers now who do less than the posted limit. My work commute is about 50 miles of rural interstate in Colorado. Posted speed limit is 75 mph. Lots of cars in the slow lane doing less than that and the worst thing is when one of them isn't quite willing to go as slow as the others and gets in the fast lane and S-L-O-W-L-Y passes the other.
Cheers,
Dave
Average daily volume on the NASDAQ is a little over 400,000,000 shares for the last three months. Even with the outage, today's volume was 924,433,630 shares. Do you really think slowing that down to only trading on some specific interval would work? Plus, you have to remember that people decide to buy or sell on something other than your schedule and the whole point of a stock exchange is to price the security and execute the trade. All putting in some sort of fixed interval would do is force traders to manually price each trade and then somehow fix that price up to the next trade interval. It simply wouldn't work.
Cheers,
Dave
I think this is a terrible problem with education in America. People are afraid of the market, don't understand it, don't want to understand it, but that's due to simple lack of education. And it's important to know the basics, since it will likely affect your standard of living in retirement.
Just like there's a certain minimum amount you need to know about how cars work before you can drive safely - not all that much, but there are a several hours about it in most drivers ed classes - there's a certain minimum amount you need to know about how markets and investments work. Where's the public education for that? Are we so intent on class warfare that we'll cut off our nose to spite our face here?
I've already made more from my stock and mutual fund investments this year than I'll make in salary. Now I'm going to post a response to the guy who talked up how scary market investing is so I can scare more people away from the market.
Just kidding about scaring people away. Making money in the stock market isn't a zero sum game. The more players there are and the more money invested, the better it is for everyone except the people who sit on the side lines becaused they're scared/don't understand/don't want to learn. If you have any "spare money", you are absolutely stoooopid if you aren't investing it. If you don't want to expend too much effort; low cost, broad based index mutual funds (e.g., S&P 500) are an easy way to at least track the market.
Cheers,
Dave
Or you know, people could just go outside for a walk.
Also, there are "mental health" benefits to exercise that I'm pretty sure the pill won't provide. This pill is kind of scary since we could end up with a bunch of stress crazed, muscular people running around looking for a outlet for their stress.
Cheers,
Dave
I am the complete opposite of a "morning person" but I get up half an hour early to allow time to exercise before everything else. It's the only way I know how to make sure that (check all that apply) overbearing bosses, well-meaning friends, the spouse, kids, traffic, etc. don't somehow manage to come up with some reason for me to not exercise later in the day. Take your exercise time off the top at the beginning of the day and that way no one can take it away from you. It's not selfish. Being dead or ill doesn't help the people who think their stuff is more important than your exercise.
Oh yeah, my commute is more like an hour each way.
Cheers,
Dave
So that wasn't a squirrel being fried when my lights dimmed the other day?
Cheers,
Dave
The "test site" is an area about the size of Begium or New Jersey depending on which geographic comparison works better for you. The primary reason for getting and keeping the Russians involved was because they knew where to look (from TFA). Yeah, it's kind of "security through obscurity" but it's a big area and part of the effort was to seal the nastier hot spots so it would take a significant effort to come in and dig them up. Finally, part of the continuing effort is to monitor the area with drones, seismic sensors, CCTV, etc. There's also a little bit of trying to scare off the metal scavangers by hinting that the copper cables and other metals that they might be able to recover are radioactive and could be VERY unhealthy to be around.
Cheers,
Dave
Turn your preservation into a local tourist attraction and party: Frozen Dead Guy Days.
Cheers,
Dave
Or you'll like what you fine when you thaw out? Corpsicles in Sci Fi
I specifically remember reading Larry Niven's "Rammer."
Cheers,
Dave
After getting a long lecture from one of my conspiracy theory believing friends about how some particular conspiracy was real, I summed up her explanation as, "The complete lack of evidence of the conspiracy is proof that the conspiracy is real." She liked her explanation better.
Cheers,
Dave
Possible correlation to people who drink a lot of coffee and people who work crazy hours/lots of stress/not much sleep/eat poorly/etc..
My excessive coffee drinking is a symptom of my shitty lifestyle.
There probably is a strong correlation between younger people who drink a lot of coffee and have an unhealthy lifestyle. Supposedly the researcher corrected for smoking but not for things like too little sleep, too much stress, etc. (Been there. Done that.) If that describes you and you survive into your 50s, chances are that your lifestyle gets healthier but you still have the coffee habit and then the health benefits of coffee consumption kick in. (There now. Doing that.)
I'm down to only about 5 mugs a day which is better than when I was an undergrad (mid 1970s) and drinking 10 to 15 mugs a day.
Cheers,
Dave
...That's why I list my employers, but my references are colleagues I've worked with.
If I like the people I work with and want them to give me a good reference then I let them know what's happening before I go to amanagement. Usually it's your soon to be ex-cowrkers who will be the ones impacted by you leaving. Treat them with respect even if you don't respect the company. If management decides to walk you out the moment you give notice, there's nothing you can do about it but at least the people you worked with have had a chance to prepare for your departure.
Cheers,
Dave
They also talk about the wobble changing the amount of solar radiation incident on higher latitudes which also implies that they were really talking about the inclination of the axis of rotation, not changes in the orbit. Never heard of orbit wobble but it's well known that the Earth "wobbles" somewhat in a way that changes the inclination of the axis of rotation.
Cheers,
Dave