As to how it's different from "god made it so": this is testable, that isn't.
If it is that far away from us, I'd say both are equally "testable" in practice...
Not really. One of the reasons they are so excited to see it right now is that they can monitor it as it happens (from our frame of reference at least) and they can watch it through an entire cycle and take a look at the full spectrum of light coming from it. Neither of these were possible last time since it wasn't caught live but found in archived plates as they were planet hunting. By looking at the spectra they can determine quite a bit about the composition of whatever it is blocking the light coming from the star, and they can get more precise data about it by monitoring it more closely.
Yea but the star started dimming a few days ago. This is the first time it's done it since they discovered it in archived images so it's their first chance to observe it live and collect a bunch of spectra data on it.
I am not an astronomer — not even an amateur one — but is "giant alien structure" really the simplest explanation they could come up with?
And how is it different from the "God made it so"?
No, and none of the actual astronomers and other scientists involved with this think it's the most likely answer. In fact most believe it's the least likely answer. However, it is possible based on what has been observed and, of course, the media latched on to that for headlines.
As to how it's different from "god made it so": this is testable, that isn't.
The good news is that because of all the interest there are a ton of resources looking at it right now so even if it's not an alien superstructure, we will probably learn something new from it.
Oh, another side benefit: When it comes back to be some weird natural phenomenon the tinfoil hat crowd will have another conspiracy about the government suppressing knowledge of an advanced alien race to keep them happy. So win-win-win.
As do I. (I assume you were being sincerely wistful.)
I miss curated web site indexes. I miss the plethora of distinct search engines that used to exist. I miss pressing 'g' and typing in a URL in Lynx. I miss the burps and chirps of a dial-up modem. I miss having civil conversations with interesting people, free of trolls. I miss opening up Pine and seeing one or two letters from friends instead of a dozen from spamers. (Though I don't miss the chain letters. Sheesh!) I miss perusing the seemingly endless lists of newsgroup topics. It was glorious and awe inspiring, and while it was still largely a text experience, much was left to the imagination.
When did the Internet become overrun by corporations? When did it become fractured and politicized? For a brief moment we were all Netizens in an egalitarian society, united by our common interests. Truly, I miss the simplicity of the Internet that was.
Oh I was genuinely was being nostalgic. As for when it was overrun, I'd say around the mid 2000's when it became about user retention and not openness, and ad revenue became the driving force behind everything. Sure there were commercial sites and ads well before that, but that's when it seemed to have become the driving force behind anything and everything.
I mean, I get that but over 100mb? The source for the page is maybe 1/10th that, images and everything included. And testing just Edge the entire browser footprint only went up by about 40mb when loading the same page (it doesn't give a nice breakdown of per-tab memory like Chrome does).
The majority of people who have 10+ tabs open don't need all of them opened at once. Close out the tabs you don't need and use bookmarks if you need a handy reference back to something.
Or get more RAM. The sticks are dirt cheap.
On a side note: Opera's a great browser, however i'm skeptical of its Chinese ownership. If i'm going to have any intelligence agency know my private details in and out, I prefer it to be the NSA and CIA./sarcasm
The problem is it shouldn't take over 100MB of RAM to display a webpage. Opened this very/. page in a Chrome incognito window (so no browser extensions in the tab, clean as I can get it) and it settled in at around 140,000 KB of RAM. That is ridiculous.
Except there's no evidence that it improves survival rate at all.
That wasn't the goal of this study. The point was to find out if it could detect the condition.
97% accuracy is easy to achieve when the chances of this condition are so incredibly low. It's also not impressive when you consider there are devices that get much closer to 100% with almost no error. What do you want, the thing that maybe works, or the thing that virtually always works?
Yes, but they are expensive, Rx only in most cases, and somewhat inconvenient for people to wear all day every day. Having something that people already own that is capable of having close to the accuracy of those devices is valuable. No doctor will use it as a diagnostic, that's not the point. The point is to make the person wearing it aware that something might be wrong and that they should see a doctor to have it properly diagnosed.
Also, I think you are under-estimating the prevalence arrhythmias. They are not what I would consider to be "incredibly low". According to the CDC the prevalence of atrial fibrillation is about 2% of people under 65, and 9% over 65.
Only an idiot uses their $750 phone without a good case. I received my Otterbox Defender for the GS8+ two weeks before I got the phone. I've dropped it several times with no problems.
- Necron69
Otterbox? WEAK protection. I keep my phone in a roll behind Pelican case.
Social engineering hacks can compromise about any second factor you can come up with. Email is a definite bad choice. Google Authenticator pretty much requires a phone on you at all times (as does SMS, of course). And something like SecurID gets ridiculous when you have 20-30 web sites requiring 2FA.
The problem with SMS is that once you compromise the phone, you get access to ALL of the SMS based 2FA accounts and password reset schemes. Most social engineering will get you one login, this gets you many. Plus it is usually harder to social engineer your way around a token based system as there usually isn't a 3rd party that can be compromised to get the required 2FA info. With a phone it's been done (numerous times) with just the person's name and basic public info, and what carrier they use, and some dumbass at a carrier store in BFE letting "you" switch devices.
SMS isn't even one system. This is a problem with one specific transport.
This article is about one specific transport, but there are other issues with using SMS that makes it unsuitable as a 2FA method. One big issue is that cellular providers are often all to happy to move service to a new device with weak (if any) authentication that the person moving the service is the legitimate owner of the account. This has been used to breach SMS 2FA in the past. This is not, obviously, an SMS flaw but a provider one, but it happens enough that it's creating an insecure situation.
Its not surprising that the Millennials, who spend a lot of their time texting on their phones, like to be contacted by texts.
Not just millennials. I am very much not a millennial and I much prefer text over voice calls most of the time, especially for business. It forces people to be brief, and I can decide how urgent it is and respond appropriately.
How do you know I didn't mean x64 apps? Stop trying to tell people what they mean, you obviously understood. No one needs your help explaining what they mean.
charging more for the Ebook than you do for the paperback! I feel like I'm personally financing Blue Origin!
Talk to the publishers. They are the ones that forced the agency model on ebooks. So unlike physical books (which use the wholesale model), the publisher sets the price for ebooks, not Amazon.
I still use RSS feeds to get most of my headlines. After iGoogle bit the dust I moved over to ustart.org and it's been my homepage since. I have noticed that as sites go though upgrades RSS feeds are getting dropped more often than not these days. I've removed quite a few dead feeds for popular sites over the past 2 years due to this unfortunately. I imagine eventually it will disappear to the point it will become functionally extinct.
It's sad the about-face most big sites have taken over the past 15 years from open data to walled gardens. Killing RSS feeds, pulling back public APIs, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
If it is that far away from us, I'd say both are equally "testable" in practice...
Not really. One of the reasons they are so excited to see it right now is that they can monitor it as it happens (from our frame of reference at least) and they can watch it through an entire cycle and take a look at the full spectrum of light coming from it. Neither of these were possible last time since it wasn't caught live but found in archived plates as they were planet hunting. By looking at the spectra they can determine quite a bit about the composition of whatever it is blocking the light coming from the star, and they can get more precise data about it by monitoring it more closely.
Again. Seriously, this is over a year old.
Yea but the star started dimming a few days ago. This is the first time it's done it since they discovered it in archived images so it's their first chance to observe it live and collect a bunch of spectra data on it.
I am not an astronomer — not even an amateur one — but is "giant alien structure" really the simplest explanation they could come up with?
And how is it different from the "God made it so"?
No, and none of the actual astronomers and other scientists involved with this think it's the most likely answer. In fact most believe it's the least likely answer. However, it is possible based on what has been observed and, of course, the media latched on to that for headlines.
As to how it's different from "god made it so": this is testable, that isn't.
The good news is that because of all the interest there are a ton of resources looking at it right now so even if it's not an alien superstructure, we will probably learn something new from it.
Oh, another side benefit: When it comes back to be some weird natural phenomenon the tinfoil hat crowd will have another conspiracy about the government suppressing knowledge of an advanced alien race to keep them happy. So win-win-win.
It could also be an gigantic orbital doughnut maker using the star to heat the pig fat. We don't know but it's fun to make up some explanations.
We do know for sure that doughnuts are cooked in pig fat though.
I mean, technically, that would fall into giant alien structure so it's already covered by the article.
This explains all the people who died when my flashlight batteries died the other day.
I like turtles
I miss Archie, Veronica, and Jughead.
As do I. (I assume you were being sincerely wistful.)
I miss curated web site indexes. I miss the plethora of distinct search engines that used to exist. I miss pressing 'g' and typing in a URL in Lynx. I miss the burps and chirps of a dial-up modem. I miss having civil conversations with interesting people, free of trolls. I miss opening up Pine and seeing one or two letters from friends instead of a dozen from spamers. (Though I don't miss the chain letters. Sheesh!) I miss perusing the seemingly endless lists of newsgroup topics. It was glorious and awe inspiring, and while it was still largely a text experience, much was left to the imagination.
When did the Internet become overrun by corporations? When did it become fractured and politicized? For a brief moment we were all Netizens in an egalitarian society, united by our common interests. Truly, I miss the simplicity of the Internet that was.
Oh I was genuinely was being nostalgic. As for when it was overrun, I'd say around the mid 2000's when it became about user retention and not openness, and ad revenue became the driving force behind everything. Sure there were commercial sites and ads well before that, but that's when it seemed to have become the driving force behind anything and everything.
I mean, I get that but over 100mb? The source for the page is maybe 1/10th that, images and everything included. And testing just Edge the entire browser footprint only went up by about 40mb when loading the same page (it doesn't give a nice breakdown of per-tab memory like Chrome does).
No ads. No JS. Pure content, all the time. Open as many tabs as you want! The maximum you'll need to view every site is ~160.
I miss Archie, Veronica, and Jughead.
The majority of people who have 10+ tabs open don't need all of them opened at once. Close out the tabs you don't need and use bookmarks if you need a handy reference back to something.
Or get more RAM. The sticks are dirt cheap.
On a side note: Opera's a great browser, however i'm skeptical of its Chinese ownership. If i'm going to have any intelligence agency know my private details in and out, I prefer it to be the NSA and CIA. /sarcasm
The problem is it shouldn't take over 100MB of RAM to display a webpage. Opened this very /. page in a Chrome incognito window (so no browser extensions in the tab, clean as I can get it) and it settled in at around 140,000 KB of RAM. That is ridiculous.
Except there's no evidence that it improves survival rate at all.
That wasn't the goal of this study. The point was to find out if it could detect the condition.
97% accuracy is easy to achieve when the chances of this condition are so incredibly low. It's also not impressive when you consider there are devices that get much closer to 100% with almost no error. What do you want, the thing that maybe works, or the thing that virtually always works?
Yes, but they are expensive, Rx only in most cases, and somewhat inconvenient for people to wear all day every day. Having something that people already own that is capable of having close to the accuracy of those devices is valuable. No doctor will use it as a diagnostic, that's not the point. The point is to make the person wearing it aware that something might be wrong and that they should see a doctor to have it properly diagnosed.
Also, I think you are under-estimating the prevalence arrhythmias. They are not what I would consider to be "incredibly low". According to the CDC the prevalence of atrial fibrillation is about 2% of people under 65, and 9% over 65.
Cell tower installers have never heard of snowmobiles?
I was going to ask this as well. In central and northern Wisconsin snow mobiles are pretty common.
And people say they don't have choices!
Only an idiot uses their $750 phone without a good case. I received my Otterbox Defender for the GS8+ two weeks before I got the phone. I've dropped it several times with no problems.
- Necron69
Otterbox? WEAK protection. I keep my phone in a roll behind Pelican case.
even windows server won't let you do that with a simple AD configuration change
Just using "one" "two" "three" will usually be enough of a difference to get past most password uniqueness policies
When they fly in from orbit they cause a double sonic boom and double posting of articles.
Social engineering hacks can compromise about any second factor you can come up with. Email is a definite bad choice. Google Authenticator pretty much requires a phone on you at all times (as does SMS, of course). And something like SecurID gets ridiculous when you have 20-30 web sites requiring 2FA.
The problem with SMS is that once you compromise the phone, you get access to ALL of the SMS based 2FA accounts and password reset schemes. Most social engineering will get you one login, this gets you many. Plus it is usually harder to social engineer your way around a token based system as there usually isn't a 3rd party that can be compromised to get the required 2FA info. With a phone it's been done (numerous times) with just the person's name and basic public info, and what carrier they use, and some dumbass at a carrier store in BFE letting "you" switch devices.
SMS isn't even one system. This is a problem with one specific transport.
This article is about one specific transport, but there are other issues with using SMS that makes it unsuitable as a 2FA method. One big issue is that cellular providers are often all to happy to move service to a new device with weak (if any) authentication that the person moving the service is the legitimate owner of the account. This has been used to breach SMS 2FA in the past. This is not, obviously, an SMS flaw but a provider one, but it happens enough that it's creating an insecure situation.
Its not surprising that the Millennials, who spend a lot of their time texting on their phones, like to be contacted by texts.
Not just millennials. I am very much not a millennial and I much prefer text over voice calls most of the time, especially for business. It forces people to be brief, and I can decide how urgent it is and respond appropriately.
By 'regular' apps you mean x86.
How do you know I didn't mean x64 apps? Stop trying to tell people what they mean, you obviously understood. No one needs your help explaining what they mean.
charging more for the Ebook than you do for the paperback! I feel like I'm personally financing Blue Origin!
Talk to the publishers. They are the ones that forced the agency model on ebooks. So unlike physical books (which use the wholesale model), the publisher sets the price for ebooks, not Amazon.
....just like Windows RT was? I believe someone opened that up if I'm not mistaken.
Windows RT was Windows 8 for ARMv7 processors. So opening it up was a bit useless since it wouldn't run regular Windows apps anyway.
I still use RSS feeds to get most of my headlines. After iGoogle bit the dust I moved over to ustart.org and it's been my homepage since. I have noticed that as sites go though upgrades RSS feeds are getting dropped more often than not these days. I've removed quite a few dead feeds for popular sites over the past 2 years due to this unfortunately. I imagine eventually it will disappear to the point it will become functionally extinct.
It's sad the about-face most big sites have taken over the past 15 years from open data to walled gardens. Killing RSS feeds, pulling back public APIs, etc.
Here's the launch/landing video if anyone missed it live: https://youtu.be/EzQpkQ1etdA
So are Russia and China war town shithole or tiny island?