Also, a parabolic reflector a mile across made of mylar film would only weigh a few thousand tons instead of millions, would not rust or be blown apart, is much more easily steerable. As pointed out in other posts, efficiencies in excess of 80% can be expected for the beam down, and the system can quite easily be "de weaponised" so that it can only beam to something saying, effectively "hit me".
The problem with that is the cold end - it is actually rather difficult to dump heat in space, since you are rather well vacuum insulated. You need a very big radiator, shielded from the sun (presumably by your primary mirror). Which brings the mass required back up again.
A bit more subtle: The transmitter is using a phased array, and the locking phase is a reflection of the signal from the ground. This is a completely fail-safe system: It doesn't have a machine that says "reference signal gone": if the reference signal disappears, the beam turns into a glow by the laws of physics, not by any allegedly safe automation. And the beam can *only* be aimed at something with an appropriate reflector, so even a mad scientist cannot redirect the beam to a city.
A much nicer guy than the others - Yahoo and MSN. In my opinion, Google made the best of a bad job there. At least google.cn marks visibly when it is being censored. Yahoo, MSN and, of course, Baidu, censor silently. If they didn't censor, they wouldn't be allowed in - so they have actually forced the wall down a crack by revealing the censorship. And, for those who can bypass the Great Firewall, they can see google.com in Chinese, uncensored. The alternative would have been not to offer google.cn - which would not, in my opinion, have made the world any better.
Once you have checked your baggage, they more-or-less have to wait for you. The are not allowed to fly baggage without passenger, because that would be an easy way to get a bomb on board without risking yourself. So if a passenger disappears, they have to unload all the baggage and scan through to find the bags of the disappeared passenger by scanning the tags. Extremely laborious - probably take over an hour for a large plane, unless they are lucky. Which is why they get so energetic paging missing passengers over the PA, and have staff looking for drunks passed out in the toilets.
Please get me a monitor with the resolution, contrast ratio, portability and battery life of a magazine. Laptops are uncomfortable to read in bed, cannot be rolled up and shoved in a trouser pocket, and are harder on the eyes then newsprint in good light. When electronic distribution matches these advantages for print, I'll jump at it. But for the moment, for non-interactive, non-urgent, long-form information where you don't want search functions, print still rules. Which is still a large niche.
"... which was launched in March". That is not "getting on a bit" - it says that replacements are not fully-functioning copies of the originals, which is worrying.
The problem with robot warriers is that the appearance of intelligence allows the blame for unintended damage to be shuffled off onto the software , the system, the AI. "It wasn't me, it was the software". There is no moral difference between killing an innocent bystander with a dumb bullet or a hyper intelligent robot. If you released that killing machine and it did the wrong thing, you have moral responsibility. But in the case of the bullet, we are happy to track that responsibility back to the finger that pulled the trigger, whereas in the case of complex systems there is too much tendency to blame "the system" and let the people who launched that system off the hook.
This is not correct. The engines naturally take a finite time to spool up from low power to climb - about nine seconds. What the computer refused to do was allow the pilot to pull the nose up into what would, at the low speed the plane was at, have been a stalling attitude. It is arguable that, had it allowed it, the plane just might have been able to "bunny hop" the trees and recover as the engines spooled up. More likely, it would have lurched up, stalled, and crashed more violently than it actually did.
This was a classic case of computer-induced overconfidence. The pilot assumed that the computer would not let him make a mistake, and set the controls for to fly as slowly as the computers would let it. Which gave it no spare energy to climb out of trouble. But the computer could not "see" the trees at the end of the runway. As one commentator put it, the pilot flew the plane into a hole in the ground, trusting vainly in the computer to get him out of the impossible state he put the plane into.
And nobody has actually seen an electron, a nucleus, a photon outside the visible spectrum, the other side of the moon... We infer most of the things we have "seen" from instrument readings. Of course, the body of different measurements for the electron is much greater than it is for, say, dark matter, so we have a higher confidence level in the former. But there is no qualitative difference between the two, or the other quoted things, merely the size of the pile of evidence. And even some of those things are pretty well documented.
Many years ago there was a data storage sytem developed by, I think, ICL, which had a correlator built into the disk data path for each disk arm so that it could search every head of a multi-platter disk at the same. But indexing turned out to be a better method than brute force, so it died. But it was, nonetheless, a highly parallel database search.
But does it actually displace dogs trained for the blind? Is there a shortage of appropriate dogs or trainers that would stop both kinds of dogs being trained, if the money was available? Because otherwise, it is not displacing dogs for the blind any more than any other kind of spending would. In fact, there might be economies of scale in dog training establishments.
Since the stole information is being printed off on the bank's receipt printer, they presumably have an insider in the bank who installs the malware and collects the output, but would be very hard to trace back to the fraudulent use.
Actually, secretaries are reverting to their original function, except that the job title has changed to Personal Assistant. A secret-ary was an assistant who was entrusted with your secrets (hence Secretary of State, Foreign Secretary). The job title that typists and data-entry staff should have had was "clerk" (if not typist or data-entry clerk). But secretary was more prestigious, and a good job title always helps keeping people satisfied with low pay. The people who were unable to perform their function in this hospital when the computers died were data-entry clerks.
As a pure software geek working in a hardware environment, VHDL is prerferred. But equally - of it works, go with it. Verilog is accepted as valid as VHDL.
I find Eclipse (over GCC) a better C++ development environment than Visual Studio - I switch between the two frequently. It is, of course, a real resource hog and you need a powerful machine (quad core 2.8 GHz in my case) and plenty of ram (4GHz) and it still takes forever to start. But once started, it is very fluid and friendly.
There are well known methods for getting unskewed random numbers from skewed inputs - by discarding data appropriately. And, while it is not intuitive, there are methods for evaluating the randomness of a random stream to some level. And there are methods of generating non-deterministic randomness in computers with mechanical components such as disk drives. The timing of packets from a large LAN can also be used as an effective source of randomness.
The developer says that his users have complained that his software RNGs were not random enough. His aim in building this is to build a machine that is as random as if users were throwing their own dice. At the end, he promises (light-heartedly, I presume) to punish the dice if a user shows that they are not random.
The US and Russian governments will sometimes chuck a relatively short-lifed satellite in an orbit optimised to cove a particular trouble spot (e.g. Georgia during last year's invasion). I think they keep them in stock, and can launch at a couple of days notice. The multi-ton civil comsats are very different and take years of preparation.
No - it is still tiny compared to the profits Intel makes.
The chip business is dominated by design costs - the manufacturing cost of each chip is relatively small, even for bigh CPUs. So once you have done the design, the return on extra sales is huge. So you don't want to leave out any significant market.
Also, European companies view business in the US as risky because of tort law: if your component is used in something that causes harm, you can get sued to your underwear even if it is misused.
As already pointed out, this won't effect most people who already have a TV licence. Though, if I lived in Ireland, it would affect me because I don't have a TV.
But it also affects any business who have PCs on a reasonably fast link - which is a lot, and increasingly fast.
In the UK, hotels and other places with multiple accommodation have to have a TV licence per room. So how will businesses be assessed? Per office? And how is an open-plan office (like mine) or a cube farm assessed?
At E160 pa, for each office or office worker, this is suddenly a nice little revenue boost for government/extra burden on business.
I think that is so. I think the mechanism described in another followup by MichaelSmith applies. If anything is diving into and out of the halo of stars around the galactic centre, it loses energy because the gravitational field is no longer following the inverse square law. Basically, as it passes near stars from the galaxy it is hitting, it will drag them along behind it, but lose energy to them. Thus, either it zooms in once and then flies out, as TFA says is freshly discovered to be more likely than expected, or as it continues orbiting the other black hole, it is steadily losing energy to the stars that other black hole's galaxy. The stars within that galaxy are, however, "stirred up" by the passing black hole and, as has been known for some time, can be thrown right out of the galaxy into intergalactic space.
There are plenty of not-out-of business companies still running COBOL for good reason. Admittedly, many of them are banks who are now going out of business, but not because of their COBOL. Look how much money IBM's mainframe division is still quietly making: many of these are COBOL engines.
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Also, a parabolic reflector a mile across made of mylar film would only weigh a few thousand tons instead of millions, would not rust or be blown apart, is much more easily steerable. As pointed out in other posts, efficiencies in excess of 80% can be expected for the beam down, and the system can quite easily be "de weaponised" so that it can only beam to something saying, effectively "hit me".
The problem with that is the cold end - it is actually rather difficult to dump heat in space, since you are rather well vacuum insulated. You need a very big radiator, shielded from the sun (presumably by your primary mirror). Which brings the mass required back up again.
A bit more subtle: The transmitter is using a phased array, and the locking phase is a reflection of the signal from the ground. This is a completely fail-safe system: It doesn't have a machine that says "reference signal gone": if the reference signal disappears, the beam turns into a glow by the laws of physics, not by any allegedly safe automation. And the beam can *only* be aimed at something with an appropriate reflector, so even a mad scientist cannot redirect the beam to a city.
A much nicer guy than the others - Yahoo and MSN. In my opinion, Google made the best of a bad job there. At least google.cn marks visibly when it is being censored. Yahoo, MSN and, of course, Baidu, censor silently. If they didn't censor, they wouldn't be allowed in - so they have actually forced the wall down a crack by revealing the censorship. And, for those who can bypass the Great Firewall, they can see google.com in Chinese, uncensored. The alternative would have been not to offer google.cn - which would not, in my opinion, have made the world any better.
Once you have checked your baggage, they more-or-less have to wait for you. The are not allowed to fly baggage without passenger, because that would be an easy way to get a bomb on board without risking yourself. So if a passenger disappears, they have to unload all the baggage and scan through to find the bags of the disappeared passenger by scanning the tags. Extremely laborious - probably take over an hour for a large plane, unless they are lucky. Which is why they get so energetic paging missing passengers over the PA, and have staff looking for drunks passed out in the toilets.
Please get me a monitor with the resolution, contrast ratio, portability and battery life of a magazine. Laptops are uncomfortable to read in bed, cannot be rolled up and shoved in a trouser pocket, and are harder on the eyes then newsprint in good light. When electronic distribution matches these advantages for print, I'll jump at it. But for the moment, for non-interactive, non-urgent, long-form information where you don't want search functions, print still rules. Which is still a large niche.
"... which was launched in March". That is not "getting on a bit" - it says that replacements are not fully-functioning copies of the originals, which is worrying.
The problem with robot warriers is that the appearance of intelligence allows the blame for unintended damage to be shuffled off onto the software , the system, the AI. "It wasn't me, it was the software". There is no moral difference between killing an innocent bystander with a dumb bullet or a hyper intelligent robot. If you released that killing machine and it did the wrong thing, you have moral responsibility. But in the case of the bullet, we are happy to track that responsibility back to the finger that pulled the trigger, whereas in the case of complex systems there is too much tendency to blame "the system" and let the people who launched that system off the hook.
This is not correct. The engines naturally take a finite time to spool up from low power to climb - about nine seconds. What the computer refused to do was allow the pilot to pull the nose up into what would, at the low speed the plane was at, have been a stalling attitude. It is arguable that, had it allowed it, the plane just might have been able to "bunny hop" the trees and recover as the engines spooled up. More likely, it would have lurched up, stalled, and crashed more violently than it actually did.
This was a classic case of computer-induced overconfidence. The pilot assumed that the computer would not let him make a mistake, and set the controls for to fly as slowly as the computers would let it. Which gave it no spare energy to climb out of trouble. But the computer could not "see" the trees at the end of the runway. As one commentator put it, the pilot flew the plane into a hole in the ground, trusting vainly in the computer to get him out of the impossible state he put the plane into.
And nobody has actually seen an electron, a nucleus, a photon outside the visible spectrum, the other side of the moon... We infer most of the things we have "seen" from instrument readings. Of course, the body of different measurements for the electron is much greater than it is for, say, dark matter, so we have a higher confidence level in the former. But there is no qualitative difference between the two, or the other quoted things, merely the size of the pile of evidence. And even some of those things are pretty well documented.
Many years ago there was a data storage sytem developed by, I think, ICL, which had a correlator built into the disk data path for each disk arm so that it could search every head of a multi-platter disk at the same. But indexing turned out to be a better method than brute force, so it died. But it was, nonetheless, a highly parallel database search.
But does it actually displace dogs trained for the blind? Is there a shortage of appropriate dogs or trainers that would stop both kinds of dogs being trained, if the money was available? Because otherwise, it is not displacing dogs for the blind any more than any other kind of spending would. In fact, there might be economies of scale in dog training establishments.
Since the stole information is being printed off on the bank's receipt printer, they presumably have an insider in the bank who installs the malware and collects the output, but would be very hard to trace back to the fraudulent use.
Actually, secretaries are reverting to their original function, except that the job title has changed to Personal Assistant. A secret-ary was an assistant who was entrusted with your secrets (hence Secretary of State, Foreign Secretary). The job title that typists and data-entry staff should have had was "clerk" (if not typist or data-entry clerk). But secretary was more prestigious, and a good job title always helps keeping people satisfied with low pay. The people who were unable to perform their function in this hospital when the computers died were data-entry clerks.
As a pure software geek working in a hardware environment, VHDL is prerferred. But equally - of it works, go with it. Verilog is accepted as valid as VHDL.
I find Eclipse (over GCC) a better C++ development environment than Visual Studio - I switch between the two frequently. It is, of course, a real resource hog and you need a powerful machine (quad core 2.8 GHz in my case) and plenty of ram (4GHz) and it still takes forever to start. But once started, it is very fluid and friendly.
He did sat the software was using #NET, not Mono. Which is pretty MS-ish.
There are well known methods for getting unskewed random numbers from skewed inputs - by discarding data appropriately. And, while it is not intuitive, there are methods for evaluating the randomness of a random stream to some level. And there are methods of generating non-deterministic randomness in computers with mechanical components such as disk drives. The timing of packets from a large LAN can also be used as an effective source of randomness.
The developer says that his users have complained that his software RNGs were not random enough. His aim in building this is to build a machine that is as random as if users were throwing their own dice. At the end, he promises (light-heartedly, I presume) to punish the dice if a user shows that they are not random.
The US and Russian governments will sometimes chuck a relatively short-lifed satellite in an orbit optimised to cove a particular trouble spot (e.g. Georgia during last year's invasion). I think they keep them in stock, and can launch at a couple of days notice. The multi-ton civil comsats are very different and take years of preparation.
Because you are trying to describe his appearance so someone who knows his name but not his face will recognise him.
No - it is still tiny compared to the profits Intel makes.
The chip business is dominated by design costs - the manufacturing cost of each chip is relatively small, even for bigh CPUs. So once you have done the design, the return on extra sales is huge. So you don't want to leave out any significant market.
Also, European companies view business in the US as risky because of tort law: if your component is used in something that causes harm, you can get sued to your underwear even if it is misused.
As already pointed out, this won't effect most people who already have a TV licence. Though, if I lived in Ireland, it would affect me because I don't have a TV.
But it also affects any business who have PCs on a reasonably fast link - which is a lot, and increasingly fast.
In the UK, hotels and other places with multiple accommodation have to have a TV licence per room. So how will businesses be assessed? Per office? And how is an open-plan office (like mine) or a cube farm assessed?
At E160 pa, for each office or office worker, this is suddenly a nice little revenue boost for government/extra burden on business.
I think that is so. I think the mechanism described in another followup by MichaelSmith applies. If anything is diving into and out of the halo of stars around the galactic centre, it loses energy because the gravitational field is no longer following the inverse square law. Basically, as it passes near stars from the galaxy it is hitting, it will drag them along behind it, but lose energy to them. Thus, either it zooms in once and then flies out, as TFA says is freshly discovered to be more likely than expected, or as it continues orbiting the other black hole, it is steadily losing energy to the stars that other black hole's galaxy. The stars within that galaxy are, however, "stirred up" by the passing black hole and, as has been known for some time, can be thrown right out of the galaxy into intergalactic space.
There are plenty of not-out-of business companies still running COBOL for good reason. Admittedly, many of them are banks who are now going out of business, but not because of their COBOL. Look how much money IBM's mainframe division is still quietly making: many of these are COBOL engines.