I know that skipping the article is in vogue on Slashdot as always, but did you not even read the blurb?
"which could force tourists from Britain and other countries visiting the U.S. to reveal their mobile phone contacts, social media passwords and financial data"
I'm hoping Mr. Anonymous Coward that you are just a troll, because i'd like to believe that the kind of jumping to conclusions triathlon you just completed doesn't actually represent the standard for intellectual rigor among people who might initially be inclined to support this bill. (I'm may be doomed to disappointment, but i can hope, right?)
Tourism is a $1.5 trillion industry in the US. I don't know what exactly the split is between domestic and foreign but foreign is definitely a significant chunk (one site claimed $21 billion from foreign tourists in April 2016) and if you're worried about trade deficits then that chunk is especially important.
There are already concerns that foreign tourism revenue is starting to dry up after Trump's election and the (attempted) Muslim bans. If it's actually put into effect this "extreme vetting" will only accelerate that process.
I am certainly not advocating that anyone do this, because it would be illegal! But in _theory_ could you use this hack to brick susceptible TVs or in some other way interfere with their normal functionality rather than secretly using it to spy on the owner or add it to a botnet?
And if you (in theory!) did that, would the manufacturer then have to "repair" the suddenly "malfunctioning" TV under the standard warranty since the issue wasn't due to anything the consumer did?
And if this happened (hypothetically!) to enough TVs, between the repair costs and the bad publicity wouldn't the TV manufacturers have to start taking security seriously instead of fobbing the risks of insecure devices off onto the commons as they currently do?
And here's one about the whole Brexit thing itself, though it's from just after the vote so is now somewhat out of date, though the speculation about what the results might be "if" it goes through are presumably still relevant.
Very true, and yet so few of us actually make it to stage 5. In particular the widespread dispersal of miniature chemical bombs part. He should be commended for his perseverance! And also appeased before he decides to active (any more of) the hidden remote triggers!
I prefer the episodic model, as I don't feel compelled to watch if I don't want to, and I don't worry if I miss an episode or if I watch them out of original order. Unfortunately this model is increasingly relegated to half-hour sitcoms, and anything with dramatic content is now serialized whether it needs to be or not.
Everything you say is a very valid concern for the old model. There are a number of shows i stopped watching because i missed enough episodes that i didn't feel like i'd know what was going on currently. Some of those i would try to catch up later on DVD, but that means you're now running at least a season behind, especially since back in the day it took forever for TV shows to come out on video.
However Netflix actually does away with a lot of the downsides of such serialized content. If it's on Netflix (or Hulu, or Crunchyroll) you start the show when you want, watch as much as you want, and wait as long as you want between episodes without worrying about missing anything. (Well, barring breakdowns in license negotiation, but that's not an issue with their in-house content.)
Just to be clear, only a small fringe of the scientific community thought global cooling was happening _quickly_, at least by human standards.
Many more will agree that we are in an inter-glacial period and that if things continue as they are (which seems increasingly unlikely) we will enter another ice age... in 25,000 - 50,000 years. Which is fairly soon on a geologic scale but not exactly an immediate concern on a human scale.
*sigh* Plancks length. Measuring things to the precision of a planks length was obviously mastered quite some time ago. That's what i get for trying to make a quick post just before running out of the office for the day =P
So are you saying you can accurately measure a point to a precision greater than that of Planks length? I'm not a physicist so I can't say with any certainty one way or the other, but that seems unlikely to me given what i know about it.
I had the same thought, and this is actually the rare case where it might apply!
In real life as far as movement goes you're never actually trying to get to an exact point. For one thing, because of uncertainty in measurements you can't ever get to an _exact_ point. You can't even tell _exactly_ where something is. On top of that (literally in this case) objects take up space, even individual atoms, so if you move an object to a point it won't be exactly at that point, it will be overlapping that point to some degree. So no matter how precise you're trying to be you're always overshooting at least a little bit. Which means that even ignoring the problem of calculus Xeno's paradox has a hole in it. You're never trying to get exactly to a point, you're actually trying to get to a little past the point and just stopping once you're close enough/sufficiently overlapping. It's effectively the same as starting out trying to run twice the distance, getting halfway, and declaring yourself done.
The difference in this case is twofold, one: there's no "past the point" you can aim for. The whole idea of absolute zero is that it's the lowest you can go. Two: they seem to be saying that there is no quanta of temperature. You can never remove the last bit, you can only remove a portion of what is there.
Assuming that the second part is correct (i'll leave the proof or disproof of that to actual scientists =) the first part makes it impossible to ever arrive at actual zero.
I skipped out on the upgrade to 5.0 on my old Android phone because i'd seen screen caps of the "new and improved" UI. After getting a new phone and being forcibly leapfrogged to 6.0 i'm glad i resisted as long as i did. It took a couple hours of fiddling around with options and installing a new launcher to get the phone _mostly_ looking the way i wanted. (Still stuck with the bright white backgrounds for the notifications and all the updated Google apps though. And those damn floating buttons everywhere getting in the way of stuff.)
And as others have noted updating apps can be a crapshoot as to whether it actually improves anything or just breaks stuff.
They wanted a "good" name for the ship when they put the poll up. They got a name they didn't like as the result and refused to use it for the ship. When there was a popular backlash about that decision they tried to mollify people by using the rejected name for one of submersibles that the ship would carry.
Now here's an article talking entirely about the submersible without mentioning the ship at all. I think there are reasonable odds that happened because the submersible ended up with the "cool" name, while the ship got the "good" name. In fact i think if they hadn't at least named the submersible Boaty McBoatface there's at least a 50% chance this article never would have gotten posted to Slashdot at all.
So they held a contest without foreseeing the possible consequences, and when they lucked out and got a name that might be considered silly but at least wasn't obscene they refused to use it and gave the ship a "proper" name that most people probably don't even remember. And now no one is talking about the ship itself, they're only talking about the other thing with the popular name. Sounds like a backfire to me.
So i read this article and a number of the comments yesterday afternoon, and yet this morning i find it presented as a new article in the feed. I still have the old post open in a tab so i can see that the old timestamp was "Wednesday March 01, 2017 @11:44AM" as compared to the current "Thursday March 02, 2017 @01:58AM". The fact that the timestamp on the article is incorrect becomes obvious as soon as you examine the timestamps of most of the comments.
Is this some kind of bug? Or is it a regular practice of Slashdot that i just haven't noticed until now to twiddle the timestamp of popular articles to get them to show up higher in the feed and try to get more hits?
"which isn't really a button but rather just a touch-sensitive surface. So far, so familiar," [...] "For Android purists, this may all seem like an unnecessary distraction. Give me my familiar Android trio, it might be said, and leave me in peace."
"familiar Android trio"? Give me back my separate hardware buttons, including the search button and get off my lawn you young whippersnapper!
A piece of rare meta poised to revolutionize modern technology and take humans into deep space has been lost in a laboratory mishap.
What kind of rare meta was it? Meta internet memes? Slashdot Meta-moderation? I just hope it wasn't the meta of leaving comments on Slashdot about the poor editing of content on Slashdot, or this post might disappear in a puff of logic!
Apparently the reason it's in the news is that LiquiGlide (a company Prof. Varanasi co-founded, though it's not mentioned in the newer article) just went through (or is in the middle of?) a new round of venture funding.
So they had working technology for sale two years ago but now they want it to be news again, because marketing.
But, from a common sense 30,000 foot perspective, if there is even the slightest effect among the majority of these apps of embarrassing you into getting off your ass a little more often, isn't that likely to be a net health positive?
Damn it! 10,000 steps a day was hard enough! Now you're saying 30,000 feet is the common sense amount? That's an extra 2000-3000 steps per day!
Slashdot Mirror
They weren't laid off! Canonical volunteered them to be re-accommodated with resignations!
No posts yet? Did everyone actually rush to the page to try and enter the code?
I know that skipping the article is in vogue on Slashdot as always, but did you not even read the blurb?
"which could force tourists from Britain and other countries visiting the U.S. to reveal their mobile phone contacts, social media passwords and financial data"
I'm hoping Mr. Anonymous Coward that you are just a troll, because i'd like to believe that the kind of jumping to conclusions triathlon you just completed doesn't actually represent the standard for intellectual rigor among people who might initially be inclined to support this bill. (I'm may be doomed to disappointment, but i can hope, right?)
Tourism is a $1.5 trillion industry in the US. I don't know what exactly the split is between domestic and foreign but foreign is definitely a significant chunk (one site claimed $21 billion from foreign tourists in April 2016) and if you're worried about trade deficits then that chunk is especially important.
There are already concerns that foreign tourism revenue is starting to dry up after Trump's election and the (attempted) Muslim bans. If it's actually put into effect this "extreme vetting" will only accelerate that process.
I am certainly not advocating that anyone do this, because it would be illegal! But in _theory_ could you use this hack to brick susceptible TVs or in some other way interfere with their normal functionality rather than secretly using it to spy on the owner or add it to a botnet?
And if you (in theory!) did that, would the manufacturer then have to "repair" the suddenly "malfunctioning" TV under the standard warranty since the issue wasn't due to anything the consumer did?
And if this happened (hypothetically!) to enough TVs, between the repair costs and the bad publicity wouldn't the TV manufacturers have to start taking security seriously instead of fobbing the risks of insecure devices off onto the commons as they currently do?
As long as you're going to tell people to get educated about the differences between the terms, here are some CGP Grey videos about the subject:
The Difference between the United Kingdom, Great Britain and England Explained
The (Secret) City of London, Part 1: History
The (Secret) City of London, Part 2: Government
And here's one about the whole Brexit thing itself, though it's from just after the vote so is now somewhat out of date, though the speculation about what the results might be "if" it goes through are presumably still relevant.
Brexit, Briefly
.
Very true, and yet so few of us actually make it to stage 5. In particular the widespread dispersal of miniature chemical bombs part. He should be commended for his perseverance! And also appeased before he decides to active (any more of) the hidden remote triggers!
How sick are you of all the puns and jokes about your name?
I prefer the episodic model, as I don't feel compelled to watch if I don't want to, and I don't worry if I miss an episode or if I watch them out of original order. Unfortunately this model is increasingly relegated to half-hour sitcoms, and anything with dramatic content is now serialized whether it needs to be or not.
Everything you say is a very valid concern for the old model. There are a number of shows i stopped watching because i missed enough episodes that i didn't feel like i'd know what was going on currently. Some of those i would try to catch up later on DVD, but that means you're now running at least a season behind, especially since back in the day it took forever for TV shows to come out on video.
However Netflix actually does away with a lot of the downsides of such serialized content. If it's on Netflix (or Hulu, or Crunchyroll) you start the show when you want, watch as much as you want, and wait as long as you want between episodes without worrying about missing anything. (Well, barring breakdowns in license negotiation, but that's not an issue with their in-house content.)
Just to be clear, only a small fringe of the scientific community thought global cooling was happening _quickly_, at least by human standards.
Many more will agree that we are in an inter-glacial period and that if things continue as they are (which seems increasingly unlikely) we will enter another ice age... in 25,000 - 50,000 years. Which is fairly soon on a geologic scale but not exactly an immediate concern on a human scale.
Source: "Is an Ice Age Coming?"
*sigh* Plancks length. Measuring things to the precision of a planks length was obviously mastered quite some time ago. That's what i get for trying to make a quick post just before running out of the office for the day =P
So are you saying you can accurately measure a point to a precision greater than that of Planks length? I'm not a physicist so I can't say with any certainty one way or the other, but that seems unlikely to me given what i know about it.
I had the same thought, and this is actually the rare case where it might apply!
In real life as far as movement goes you're never actually trying to get to an exact point. For one thing, because of uncertainty in measurements you can't ever get to an _exact_ point. You can't even tell _exactly_ where something is. On top of that (literally in this case) objects take up space, even individual atoms, so if you move an object to a point it won't be exactly at that point, it will be overlapping that point to some degree. So no matter how precise you're trying to be you're always overshooting at least a little bit. Which means that even ignoring the problem of calculus Xeno's paradox has a hole in it. You're never trying to get exactly to a point, you're actually trying to get to a little past the point and just stopping once you're close enough/sufficiently overlapping. It's effectively the same as starting out trying to run twice the distance, getting halfway, and declaring yourself done.
The difference in this case is twofold, one: there's no "past the point" you can aim for. The whole idea of absolute zero is that it's the lowest you can go. Two: they seem to be saying that there is no quanta of temperature. You can never remove the last bit, you can only remove a portion of what is there.
Assuming that the second part is correct (i'll leave the proof or disproof of that to actual scientists =) the first part makes it impossible to ever arrive at actual zero.
I skipped out on the upgrade to 5.0 on my old Android phone because i'd seen screen caps of the "new and improved" UI. After getting a new phone and being forcibly leapfrogged to 6.0 i'm glad i resisted as long as i did. It took a couple hours of fiddling around with options and installing a new launcher to get the phone _mostly_ looking the way i wanted. (Still stuck with the bright white backgrounds for the notifications and all the updated Google apps though. And those damn floating buttons everywhere getting in the way of stuff.)
And as others have noted updating apps can be a crapshoot as to whether it actually improves anything or just breaks stuff.
"Shut down all the garbage mashers on the detention level!"
"No! Shut them ALL down!"
How did the competition backfire?
They wanted a "good" name for the ship when they put the poll up. They got a name they didn't like as the result and refused to use it for the ship. When there was a popular backlash about that decision they tried to mollify people by using the rejected name for one of submersibles that the ship would carry.
Now here's an article talking entirely about the submersible without mentioning the ship at all. I think there are reasonable odds that happened because the submersible ended up with the "cool" name, while the ship got the "good" name. In fact i think if they hadn't at least named the submersible Boaty McBoatface there's at least a 50% chance this article never would have gotten posted to Slashdot at all.
So they held a contest without foreseeing the possible consequences, and when they lucked out and got a name that might be considered silly but at least wasn't obscene they refused to use it and gave the ship a "proper" name that most people probably don't even remember. And now no one is talking about the ship itself, they're only talking about the other thing with the popular name. Sounds like a backfire to me.
So i read this article and a number of the comments yesterday afternoon, and yet this morning i find it presented as a new article in the feed. I still have the old post open in a tab so i can see that the old timestamp was "Wednesday March 01, 2017 @11:44AM" as compared to the current "Thursday March 02, 2017 @01:58AM". The fact that the timestamp on the article is incorrect becomes obvious as soon as you examine the timestamps of most of the comments.
Is this some kind of bug? Or is it a regular practice of Slashdot that i just haven't noticed until now to twiddle the timestamp of popular articles to get them to show up higher in the feed and try to get more hits?
"which isn't really a button but rather just a touch-sensitive surface. So far, so familiar," [...] "For Android purists, this may all seem like an unnecessary distraction. Give me my familiar Android trio, it might be said, and leave me in peace."
"familiar Android trio"? Give me back my separate hardware buttons, including the search button and get off my lawn you young whippersnapper!
Are you sure it's down? I tried to check with IsItDownRightNow.com, but am having difficulties with the site for some reason...
A piece of rare meta poised to revolutionize modern technology and take humans into deep space has been lost in a laboratory mishap.
What kind of rare meta was it? Meta internet memes? Slashdot Meta-moderation? I just hope it wasn't the meta of leaving comments on Slashdot about the poor editing of content on Slashdot, or this post might disappear in a puff of logic!
See also this slashdot article from 2015 about the exact same technology:
https://science.slashdot.org/s...
Apparently the reason it's in the news is that LiquiGlide (a company Prof. Varanasi co-founded, though it's not mentioned in the newer article) just went through (or is in the middle of?) a new round of venture funding.
So they had working technology for sale two years ago but now they want it to be news again, because marketing.
How about "Unacceptable Behaviour"?
20,000 additional steps equates to an extra 2000 steps for you? How long are your legs that your stride length is 10 feet?
They said "from a common sense 30,000 foot perspective". Feet, not steps.
I said "10,000 steps a day was hard enough!" Steps, not feet.
The average stride length is about 2.2 feet for women and 2.5 feet for men.
The recommended 10,000 steps would then equal 22,000 feet for women or 25,000 feet for men (on average.)
Taking the difference between those numbers and the 30,000 feet means a difference of 8000 or 5000 feet.
5000 extra feet for the men divided by 2.5 feet per step would be 2000 additional steps.
8000 feet for the women divided by 2.2 feet per step would be 3,636 additional steps.
Arguably i should have rounded up to 2000-4000 steps instead of down to 2000-3000 steps, but aside from that my math checks out. Yours is... suspect.
But, from a common sense 30,000 foot perspective, if there is even the slightest effect among the majority of these apps of embarrassing you into getting off your ass a little more often, isn't that likely to be a net health positive?
Damn it! 10,000 steps a day was hard enough! Now you're saying 30,000 feet is the common sense amount? That's an extra 2000-3000 steps per day!
Wor never changes.