QR Codes are 2-D barcodes. Each QR square can support 4k of (capitals-only) alphanumeric text, or nearly 3k of binary data. It has built-in support for error correction and spanning data across multiple QR Code blocks. And of course binary data can be encrypted.
True, but it's a really lousy way to write a news headline. "Study finds no reduction in prosocial behavior from playing violent videogames" would be a far less contorted headline. Heck, standard headline style would be to go with something more generalized and vastly clearer: "Study finds no harm from violent videogames".
Yeah we would be better off without fire. I grant its astonishing capabilities: the sharpening sticks, cooking food, keeping us warm, lighting the darkness, the convenience of GPS and much more. But the fire's benefits are relatively modest compared with the terrifying dangers it brings.
Yeah, this guy couldn't make it past the third sentence without tagging himself as technologically illiterate. I can't believe he tried to cite GPS as a benefit of the internet.
Any organization that does not want the risks that come from connecting systems to the net can disconnect theirs.
I fundamentally agree with you ten-million percent.... but to be fair critical systems connected to the internet is not a an easily solved technological problem.... and that's because it's not a technological problem at all. It's a people problem. If you can figure out a fix for people problems then there's about a half-dozen Nobel Prizes soon to arrive at your doorstep.
You didn't think something 4.5 billion years old would have a few wrinkles?
Dude, the universe is only 6,000 years old and all the stuff about evolution and stars millions of light years away are nothing but lies straight from the pit of hell. Voyager is going to be destroyed any day now as it crashes head-on into the firmament. Hopefully in the last few seconds it can send back the sound of the flood waters being held back by the firmament.
Reject DRM in total and you will see a gradual decrease in the number of new movies
The music industry spent around a decade refusing to sell music online unless it was wrapped in DRM, and they saw falling sales or stagnant growth. Recently the music industry gave up the DRM crusade and started allowing MP3 and other non-DRM music sales. And guess what? They started seeing better growth. Oh, some of them still pull out the bullshit line claiming "sales are declining", but the unstated details making that a bald LIE is that "physical disk sales are down" while digital sales are up resulting in total sales being up. Not to mention that concert revenue and other secondary revenue streams are up.
The claim that dropping DRM will result in fewer movies being made is ideological and based on a wildly simplistic view of the issue. It's impossible to predict any exact outcomes, but one thing is certain. Any change (in one direction or the other), will only be MARGINAL. Some percentage increase or decrease. And you know what? The number of movies and TV shows and other content being produced each year is already vastly more than any person can physically view. Hollywood alone shovels out just about one and a half movies per day. Plus of course domestic non-Hollywood production and the vast number of movies produced abroad. Hell, Bollywood puts out three movies per day. Obviously India must be utilizing far more DRM than we do (tag: sarcasm, for the sarcasm impaired).
*IF* you're right that abandoning DRM would result in fewer movies being made.... and that's a big if.... it merely means a marginal decrease, and that marginal decrease would strike movies that were only marginal to produce in the first place. Any dregs shaken out at the bottom would reduce the competition (and thereby shore up the profits) of all the better movies.
The demands for DRM are pig-shearing. Plenty of squealing, not much wool.
If they are widely adopted by browsers all of the existing streaming services/content that use Flash for DRM will ditch it in favor of HTML5.
True, but your vision is still far too short. If this sort of DRM starts getting broadly deployed in browsers then some ordinary websites that despise hate ad-blockers (aka "thieves") will go through whatever radical contortions are necessary to only present their content through this system. The results will be a vile ugly and only borderline-functional as a webpage, but they will do it. And once some websites start doing it, there will be enormous pressure to "fix" the system so that those broken websites work better... and enormous pressure to make it easier for other websites to be able to use it too without turning their sites into broken dysfunctional messes.
Once you become dedicated to the expectation that web browsers can and do implement this sort of DRM system, the only rational path is to keep fixing "problems" "limitations" and "flaws" in the system until it works easily cleanly and completely for all web content.
Either this system is going to die, or it's going to adapt to the point that any common website concerned about "content theft" or ad-blockers can easily DRM the entire pages and entire websites with little more than clicking a few standard server options.
They are obviously promoting PIRACY, because paying the copyright-holder's requested price (possibly zero) to converse in one region while you're in a different region is blatantly THEFT. Theft theft theft theft stealing theft theft theft burglary theft theft theft larceny theft theft rape theft.
Everybody who's concerned with the rate at which the current administration is eroding our rights has a horse in this race
Hell Yeah! The administration is eroding our rights!
I'd never buy one of those hippy treehugger electro-dud cars anyway, but it's the Last Damn Straw when Obama starts making state laws in four random states telling me I'd have to buy one from a dealership rather than the manufacturer!
Ship that commie muslim foreigner anti-christ Barack Hussein Obama back to hell where he belongs, before he can finish his agenda turning our children gay!
Warning for the mentally retarded: This post was packaged in a facility that processes satire and mockery.
It wouldn't be much different from the federal government telling states that they can't have their blue laws.
Of course the federal government can tell states they can't have their blue laws. Such are continuously being struck down by the courts. County courts, state courts, and of course federal courts. Although the outcome of any given case is pretty much a crap-shoot. An appalling number of courts concoct or approve laughable sham "secular purpose" excuses to keep them on the books. For example one such ruling declares "While Sunday was originally a day of religious observance, the passage of time has converted it into a secular day for many citizens and has freed it from its exclusively religious origins... The cities have valid secular reasons for prohibiting the sale of beer on Sunday, including enhancing the safety of the travelling public, promoting domestic tranquility, shielding children from the effects of drinking, and accommodating the reduced number of law enforcement officers working on weekends". The court is pretty well admitting that the law was flagrantly unconstitutional and invalid when the legislature established it, and is engaging in wildly creative post-hoc rationalizations trying to hang a token "current day" secular purpose on it in a highly motivated effort to avoid striking down a law that was never validly created in the first place. Note that NONE of the listed rationalizations is even remotely a reason to ban beer sales on any particular day of the week, except for the last one regarding "reduced number of law enforcement officers working on weekends". Any late night drinking rolls at midnight into drinking and early-morning drunkenness of the next day, and a substantial portion of any purchases are destined for next-day consumption. Approximately half of any effect of restricting sales will actually show up on the following day. The only way to take seriously a purpose of "accommodating the reduced number of law enforcement officers working on weekends" (i.e. Saturday and Sunday) would be a ban on Saturday sales.
I have a relatively high opinion of the courts in general, but the level of flagrant Judicial dishonesty that often flies about in defense of Blue Laws is quite appalling.
If you're worried about a NSA attack, a VM isn't going to save you. There have been several known exploits to break out of VM's. That will get them access to any harddrive if there's one connected at all. And if there isn't, there have been occasional exploits to flash a rootkit into BIOS. They could also activate Wifi or Bluetooth to infect any nearby computers or smartphones or any other smart devices, which could even bounce the infection back to the current computer after it's rebooted without the LiveCD and/or without the VM and/or with the harddrive reconnected.
Also I'm not sure what those cages around the fan blades are suppose to acheive since the cage gap is huge, anything could be sucked in there, needs to be a cage more like a desktop fan.
I presume the cages are sized to keep body parts out.
Unfortunately the laws of physics seriously don't like your suggestion of tighter cages. At low air speeds and with abundant power available you can use tight cages no problem. But when you're at high air velocities to get substantial thrust and where power efficiency is crucial, any obstruction in the air stream is a serious issue. Aerodynamic drag is proportional to velocity squared. When you multiply air speed by ten, the drag caused by each cage wire is multiplied by a hundred. This means thrust loss, as well as draining the batteries trying to compensate for lost thrust. Adding batteries to compensate for the extra power drain increases your weight. Increased weight means you need to compensate with that much more thrust, which in turn means more weight and more power drain. It is a problem that compounds upon itself. You need the cage wires to be as thin and sparse as as you can get away with, short of inviting serious accidental injury.
Pardon the nitpicking, but hovercraft are ground effect vehicles, generally with a skirt. A more appropriate label here would be "quadcopter strapped to a bike".
I had the same reaction, that strapping a bicycle to it seemed totally irrelevant. But I guess you can bike down to the river, fly across, and continue biking. And if you don't mind burning some of your flight time you can use the batteries to power the bike. That gives you a combination of long ground range with the ability to fly over terrain or traffic at will. Cute. Too bad you're stuck with those big bulky fans all around it in cycle mode. If those could fold down compactly it would actually be a pretty practical combo to place on an electric bike. Well, of course that's setting aside the suicide-machine factor.
350 pound flight capacity minus 187 pound vehicle weight seems to indicate a 163 pound (74 kilo) passenger limit. Not great, but that's certainly not "anorexic child-size styrofoam dummy" either. I'm an adult male, I could get there if I cut out the peanutbuttercups and switched to diet soda.
Oh well, I guess that means I'm never going to be able to ride it. Diet soda is vile. How about they work on inventing that? Soda that tastes like sugar-water without being sugar-water? Chuckle.
Well, that explains it - the little characters on the y-axis labels are 'h', not 'k', so I think you are reading it as three orders of magnitude too large
Doh! I know exactly what happened. That part was small and blurry, and in my initial scan over the graph, before I sorted out what the graph wa showing, it looked like "kp". A corner of my brain thought WTF is "kp", and I kept scanning elsewhere for information. I saw the speeds across the bottom and the thrusts on the left and I recognized the shape of the graph, then saw the HP vs MPH title at the top. I realized the different color lines had to be different engine inputs and I glanced back at that top-right box to confirm it.... that it was listing different HP engine inputs.... and that "k" from "kp" was still lingering in my brain. chuckle. So the blurry "h" was read twice, once as "k" and once as "h". The 250khp to 500khp power figures did strike me as unreasonably large, but I wasn't going to doubt the graph and my attention was absorbed on other issues. Sso without further consideration I just mentally filed it away as presumptively plausible values for a top end (?military?) engine.
the airflow through the propeller is slowed down... in this view the rotor is acting as a turbine, though a very unusual one in which the power is delivered through its thrust bearing, not by torquing the shaft.
Ohhhh noooooo! You didn't...... cry cry cry. LoL. I follow your reasoning, and it is a kinda cool point, but oh jezus I wish you didn't make that analogy. The prop is NOT spinning as a turbine, and I know that you know that it's not spinning as a turbine, but someone is going to read what you wrote and think that one or both of us said it's a turbine. Newbies already have a hard time wrapping their heads around the idea that the prop is a fan. Any whiff of describing it as a turbine feeds badly into the exact "contradictory explanations" that set off alarm bells for you.
[the math/science] It's still at high-school level
I wish. You and I went to significantly above average highschools. The majority of U.S. highschool graduates only have one year of science, and it's generally something very generic like "Earth science" or something. It's only in the last few years that most highschools have moved to a two year science requirement, and even then, what percentage are going to include force-energy physics? I think the most common is a year of Bio, and even there most schools avoid or actively deny Evolution in that class:/
with regard to the exam question explanation. It says, correctly, that their formula implies that a totally inefficient device (alpha = 0) would travel at the wind speed.
What happened there is an entirely arbitrary and semi-self-contradictory cornercase crawling out of the simplifying assumptions. They started with a model of an ideal (frictionless) cart, and then to model a "real" cart they lumped together all losses... including rolling friction.... into one term alpha. They then set alpha to total energy loss... and they were still modeling that alpha on an ideal frictionless cart. They also silently and arbitrarily assumed wind drag *wasn't* zero, despite the opposite parallel assumption of zero rolling resistance. chuckle.
They say the only computer that can't be hacked is one that unplugged... but when your adversary is (apparently) a U.S. or Israeli Intelligence Agency, even that's not going to save you.
In related news, an oil refinery did not explode today. Police and rescue workers report recovering zero dead bodies thus far from the fully intact structure. It is feared that the final death toll may rise as high as zero. We have no reporters live on the scene, so stay tuned for more breaking coverage as it doesn't happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Time flies when you're having fun.
Extra flies when you're fucking a horse.
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QR Codes are 2-D barcodes. Each QR square can support 4k of (capitals-only) alphanumeric text, or nearly 3k of binary data. It has built-in support for error correction and spanning data across multiple QR Code blocks. And of course binary data can be encrypted.
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True, but it's a really lousy way to write a news headline. "Study finds no reduction in prosocial behavior from playing violent videogames" would be a far less contorted headline. Heck, standard headline style would be to go with something more generalized and vastly clearer: "Study finds no harm from violent videogames".
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"New Study Fails To Show That Violent Video Games Diminish Prosocial Behavior"
Gee... the study failed?
In related news, New Study Fails To Show That Moon Is Made Of Green Cheese.
Researchers plan to conduct further studies in the hope that sooner or later one of then won't Fail.
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Yeah we would be better off without fire. I grant its astonishing capabilities: the sharpening sticks, cooking food, keeping us warm, lighting the darkness, the convenience of GPS and much more. But the fire's benefits are relatively modest compared with the terrifying dangers it brings.
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Yeah, this guy couldn't make it past the third sentence without tagging himself as technologically illiterate. I can't believe he tried to cite GPS as a benefit of the internet.
Any organization that does not want the risks that come from connecting systems to the net can disconnect theirs.
I fundamentally agree with you ten-million percent.... but to be fair critical systems connected to the internet is not a an easily solved technological problem.... and that's because it's not a technological problem at all. It's a people problem. If you can figure out a fix for people problems then there's about a half-dozen Nobel Prizes soon to arrive at your doorstep.
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No wonder Debian was insecure. Seven would have been a lot more random than four.
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You didn't think something 4.5 billion years old would have a few wrinkles?
Dude, the universe is only 6,000 years old and all the stuff about evolution and stars millions of light years away are nothing but lies straight from the pit of hell. Voyager is going to be destroyed any day now as it crashes head-on into the firmament. Hopefully in the last few seconds it can send back the sound of the flood waters being held back by the firmament.
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Reject DRM in total and you will see a gradual decrease in the number of new movies
The music industry spent around a decade refusing to sell music online unless it was wrapped in DRM, and they saw falling sales or stagnant growth. Recently the music industry gave up the DRM crusade and started allowing MP3 and other non-DRM music sales. And guess what? They started seeing better growth. Oh, some of them still pull out the bullshit line claiming "sales are declining", but the unstated details making that a bald LIE is that "physical disk sales are down" while digital sales are up resulting in total sales being up. Not to mention that concert revenue and other secondary revenue streams are up.
The claim that dropping DRM will result in fewer movies being made is ideological and based on a wildly simplistic view of the issue. It's impossible to predict any exact outcomes, but one thing is certain. Any change (in one direction or the other), will only be MARGINAL. Some percentage increase or decrease. And you know what? The number of movies and TV shows and other content being produced each year is already vastly more than any person can physically view. Hollywood alone shovels out just about one and a half movies per day. Plus of course domestic non-Hollywood production and the vast number of movies produced abroad. Hell, Bollywood puts out three movies per day. Obviously India must be utilizing far more DRM than we do (tag: sarcasm, for the sarcasm impaired).
*IF* you're right that abandoning DRM would result in fewer movies being made.... and that's a big if.... it merely means a marginal decrease, and that marginal decrease would strike movies that were only marginal to produce in the first place. Any dregs shaken out at the bottom would reduce the competition (and thereby shore up the profits) of all the better movies.
The demands for DRM are pig-shearing.
Plenty of squealing, not much wool.
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If they are widely adopted by browsers all of the existing streaming services/content that use Flash for DRM will ditch it in favor of HTML5.
True, but your vision is still far too short.
If this sort of DRM starts getting broadly deployed in browsers then some ordinary websites that despise hate ad-blockers (aka "thieves") will go through whatever radical contortions are necessary to only present their content through this system. The results will be a vile ugly and only borderline-functional as a webpage, but they will do it. And once some websites start doing it, there will be enormous pressure to "fix" the system so that those broken websites work better... and enormous pressure to make it easier for other websites to be able to use it too without turning their sites into broken dysfunctional messes.
Once you become dedicated to the expectation that web browsers can and do implement this sort of DRM system, the only rational path is to keep fixing "problems" "limitations" and "flaws" in the system until it works easily cleanly and completely for all web content.
Either this system is going to die, or it's going to adapt to the point that any common website concerned about "content theft" or ad-blockers can easily DRM the entire pages and entire websites with little more than clicking a few standard server options.
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They are obviously promoting PIRACY, because paying the copyright-holder's requested price (possibly zero) to converse in one region while you're in a different region is blatantly THEFT.
Theft theft theft theft stealing theft theft theft burglary theft theft theft larceny theft theft rape theft.
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Everybody who's concerned with the rate at which the current administration is eroding our rights has a horse in this race
Hell Yeah! The administration is eroding our rights!
I'd never buy one of those hippy treehugger electro-dud cars anyway, but it's the Last Damn Straw when Obama starts making state laws in four random states telling me I'd have to buy one from a dealership rather than the manufacturer!
Ship that commie muslim foreigner anti-christ Barack Hussein Obama back to hell where he belongs, before he can finish his agenda turning our children gay!
Warning for the mentally retarded: This post was packaged in a facility that processes satire and mockery.
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It wouldn't be much different from the federal government telling states that they can't have their blue laws.
Of course the federal government can tell states they can't have their blue laws. Such are continuously being struck down by the courts. County courts, state courts, and of course federal courts. Although the outcome of any given case is pretty much a crap-shoot. An appalling number of courts concoct or approve laughable sham "secular purpose" excuses to keep them on the books. For example one such ruling declares "While Sunday was originally a day of religious observance, the passage of time has converted it into a secular day for many citizens and has freed it from its exclusively religious origins... The cities have valid secular reasons for prohibiting the sale of beer on Sunday, including enhancing the safety of the travelling public, promoting domestic tranquility, shielding children from the effects of drinking, and accommodating the reduced number of law enforcement officers working on weekends". The court is pretty well admitting that the law was flagrantly unconstitutional and invalid when the legislature established it, and is engaging in wildly creative post-hoc rationalizations trying to hang a token "current day" secular purpose on it in a highly motivated effort to avoid striking down a law that was never validly created in the first place. Note that NONE of the listed rationalizations is even remotely a reason to ban beer sales on any particular day of the week, except for the last one regarding "reduced number of law enforcement officers working on weekends". Any late night drinking rolls at midnight into drinking and early-morning drunkenness of the next day, and a substantial portion of any purchases are destined for next-day consumption. Approximately half of any effect of restricting sales will actually show up on the following day. The only way to take seriously a purpose of "accommodating the reduced number of law enforcement officers working on weekends" (i.e. Saturday and Sunday) would be a ban on Saturday sales.
I have a relatively high opinion of the courts in general, but the level of flagrant Judicial dishonesty that often flies about in defense of Blue Laws is quite appalling.
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If you're worried about a NSA attack, a VM isn't going to save you. There have been several known exploits to break out of VM's. That will get them access to any harddrive if there's one connected at all. And if there isn't, there have been occasional exploits to flash a rootkit into BIOS. They could also activate Wifi or Bluetooth to infect any nearby computers or smartphones or any other smart devices, which could even bounce the infection back to the current computer after it's rebooted without the LiveCD and/or without the VM and/or with the harddrive reconnected.
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Also I'm not sure what those cages around the fan blades are suppose to acheive since the cage gap is huge, anything could be sucked in there, needs to be a cage more like a desktop fan.
I presume the cages are sized to keep body parts out.
Unfortunately the laws of physics seriously don't like your suggestion of tighter cages. At low air speeds and with abundant power available you can use tight cages no problem. But when you're at high air velocities to get substantial thrust and where power efficiency is crucial, any obstruction in the air stream is a serious issue. Aerodynamic drag is proportional to velocity squared. When you multiply air speed by ten, the drag caused by each cage wire is multiplied by a hundred. This means thrust loss, as well as draining the batteries trying to compensate for lost thrust. Adding batteries to compensate for the extra power drain increases your weight. Increased weight means you need to compensate with that much more thrust, which in turn means more weight and more power drain. It is a problem that compounds upon itself. You need the cage wires to be as thin and sparse as as you can get away with, short of inviting serious accidental injury.
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Pardon the nitpicking, but hovercraft are ground effect vehicles, generally with a skirt. A more appropriate label here would be "quadcopter strapped to a bike".
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I had the same reaction, that strapping a bicycle to it seemed totally irrelevant. But I guess you can bike down to the river, fly across, and continue biking. And if you don't mind burning some of your flight time you can use the batteries to power the bike. That gives you a combination of long ground range with the ability to fly over terrain or traffic at will. Cute. Too bad you're stuck with those big bulky fans all around it in cycle mode. If those could fold down compactly it would actually be a pretty practical combo to place on an electric bike. Well, of course that's setting aside the suicide-machine factor.
Final analysis: Darwin would approve.
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The hard part is not getting a bicycle to fly, but to get it to hover with human power.
Nah, hovering is easy. The hard part is keeping your dirigible-bike from floating away into the sky when you hop off.
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350 pound flight capacity minus 187 pound vehicle weight seems to indicate a 163 pound (74 kilo) passenger limit. Not great, but that's certainly not "anorexic child-size styrofoam dummy" either. I'm an adult male, I could get there if I cut out the peanutbuttercups and switched to diet soda.
Oh well, I guess that means I'm never going to be able to ride it. Diet soda is vile.
How about they work on inventing that? Soda that tastes like sugar-water without being sugar-water? Chuckle.
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Tommy! I told you to stop doing that at 500 RPM! You'll grind it off!
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Well, that explains it - the little characters on the y-axis labels are 'h', not 'k', so I think you are reading it as three orders of magnitude too large
Doh! I know exactly what happened. That part was small and blurry, and in my initial scan over the graph, before I sorted out what the graph wa showing, it looked like "kp". A corner of my brain thought WTF is "kp", and I kept scanning elsewhere for information. I saw the speeds across the bottom and the thrusts on the left and I recognized the shape of the graph, then saw the HP vs MPH title at the top. I realized the different color lines had to be different engine inputs and I glanced back at that top-right box to confirm it.... that it was listing different HP engine inputs.... and that "k" from "kp" was still lingering in my brain. chuckle. So the blurry "h" was read twice, once as "k" and once as "h". The 250khp to 500khp power figures did strike me as unreasonably large, but I wasn't going to doubt the graph and my attention was absorbed on other issues. Sso without further consideration I just mentally filed it away as presumptively plausible values for a top end (?military?) engine.
the airflow through the propeller is slowed down... in this view the rotor is acting as a turbine, though a very unusual one in which the power is delivered through its thrust bearing, not by torquing the shaft.
Ohhhh noooooo! You didn't...... cry cry cry. LoL.
I follow your reasoning, and it is a kinda cool point, but oh jezus I wish you didn't make that analogy. The prop is NOT spinning as a turbine, and I know that you know that it's not spinning as a turbine, but someone is going to read what you wrote and think that one or both of us said it's a turbine. Newbies already have a hard time wrapping their heads around the idea that the prop is a fan. Any whiff of describing it as a turbine feeds badly into the exact "contradictory explanations" that set off alarm bells for you.
[the math/science] It's still at high-school level
I wish. You and I went to significantly above average highschools. The majority of U.S. highschool graduates only have one year of science, and it's generally something very generic like "Earth science" or something. It's only in the last few years that most highschools have moved to a two year science requirement, and even then, what percentage are going to include force-energy physics? I think the most common is a year of Bio, and even there most schools avoid or actively deny Evolution in that class :/
with regard to the exam question explanation. It says, correctly, that their formula implies that a totally inefficient device (alpha = 0) would travel at the wind speed.
What happened there is an entirely arbitrary and semi-self-contradictory cornercase crawling out of the simplifying assumptions. They started with a model of an ideal (frictionless) cart, and then to model a "real" cart they lumped together all losses... including rolling friction.... into one term alpha. They then set alpha to total energy loss... and they were still modeling that alpha on an ideal frictionless cart. They also silently and arbitrarily assumed wind drag *wasn't* zero, despite the opposite parallel assumption of zero rolling resistance. chuckle.
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The Iranians had airgaps for their centrifuges
They say the only computer that can't be hacked is one that unplugged... but when your adversary is (apparently) a U.S. or Israeli Intelligence Agency, even that's not going to save you.
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the WORST WORST WORST idea ever. If I could make that any more caps locked I would.
The HTML code for extracapslock is <B>, like this:
"the <B>WORST WORST WORST</B> idea ever."
The HTML code for doubleextracapslock is <B><BLINK>, but most browsers don't support it because only fucktards use doubleextracapslock.
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In related news, an oil refinery did not explode today. Police and rescue workers report recovering zero dead bodies thus far from the fully intact structure. It is feared that the final death toll may rise as high as zero. We have no reporters live on the scene, so stay tuned for more breaking coverage as it doesn't happen.
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I'm a big fan of automation, and "pick the right tool for the job". (where "tool" refers to either evolved monkeys or computer programming)
That's great in theory, but evolved monkeys are generally in short supply. Companies usually have to hire the regular kind.
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