"We don't have redundant systems to get more data down, we have redundant systems for redundancy"
Which just goes to show that he's a retard.
If both channels had worked, we'd have twice as many pictures as we have now. If the same data had been sent on both channels, we'd have precisely the same amount of pictures as we have no.
So we're no worse off than we would have been with redundant channels, and if both channels had worked, we'd have had twice as many images. Equally, while half the pictures were lost, we still got probably 90% of the important data, since anything visible in the lost pictures is probably also visible (though probably with less detail) in the pictures we have... the odds of missing an important science find because of the lost images are small.
"Funny, that's what most people thought about Columbus and his wild ideas about a passage to Asia"
Of course Columbus was wrong (at least in where he thought India was), and if he hadn't been lucky enough to run into America on the way to India he'd have died. In an alternate world where America didn't exist, people are right now wondering what happened to that Columbus dude who went off on that wacky voyage trying to reach India the long way around.
"To this day, I never understood why Windows computers don't come pre-configured to run as a non-root user with limited file, execution and registry privileges?"
Because vast amounts of software simply will not run if you're not an Administrator, and Microsoft would be inundated with support calls from clueless users.
"If I remember correctly XP supports a feature called "run as" if a program needs to be run as root (ie. setup programs)."
Yep, Joe Sixpack would be real happy if they had to enable 'Run As' on every single setup program when they installed software.
Face it, Windows is a single-user, single-tasking operating system masquerading as a real OS.
The problem is, that setting does not work! I have it turned off, but Zonealarm still gets hit whenever I play a WMV file that wants a license... there's a reason why I don't let IE or WMP access the Internet without explicit permission every time.
"The fact there there are still vulnerabilities should come as a surprise to no one."
Of course not. But, unlike IE, these aren't 'You open a web page and your machine is taken over as a spam zombie' vulnerabilities. They should be fixed, but are less serious than the usual IE bugs... and they'll likely be fixed a lot faster.
"There seems to be a general feeling on Slashdot these days that we should mock people who try to innovate"
I'm not sure there was much innovative about Itanic: trying to eliminate hardware complexity by transferring it to the compiler has been done before with some of the early RISC chips, and it was a failure then, too. It's just way, way harder to figure out beforehand what the chip is going to do when running the program than it is for the chip to figure out what it's going to do while it's actually running the program.
Frankly, I think we should mock people who decide to spend billions trying to do something which failed before and, duh, it fails again.
"a typical memetic programming that took place in the 1950's in which everyone who was not a right-wing-christian-gun-loving-American was a communist."
Of course with hindisight, it turns out that most of them _were_ communists...
"However, those who worked on the years of clean up at three mile island know how bad these failure modes are."
Oh, and while we're on the subject, the new Chinese fission reactors are designed to be impossible to melt down, and are therefore extremely safe. The downside is that you still need to deal with the hot radioactive fuel afterwards.
Equally, plants powered by conventional fuels pump out a huge amount of radioactive crap into the atmosphere (e.g. coal often contains uranium which will be burnt and dispersed into the atmosphere) and if the 'global warming' nutters are correct then the consequences of continuing to burn conventional fuels would be far worse than those of a few fission reactor accidents.
"What will happen to the material that stops all those neutrons?"
Assuming you don't use aneutronic fusion, it will get mildly radioactive. So bury it in the middle of nowhere... who cares? We're not talking about 'hot' fission fuel here.
"What is the failure mode for a collapsed fusuion capable magnetic field?"
The confinement vessel warms up by about two degrees C, you fix the problem and restart it. You've been watching too many SF movies if you think that a confinement failure will cause a nuclear explosion.
"Fusuion power will NEVER be safe"
Fusion is extremely safe compared to fission: you appear to be just a typical ill-informed knee-jerk anti-nukleah.
"We fixed that particular problem with the data in the early 1990s."
Most of the differences between the surface and satellite measurements over land come from a few limited areas (other than the areas that are largely missing from the surface record but cooling in the satellite record), and are almost certainly due to urban warming in those areas, or systematic measurement errors. That means that most of the supposed warming since 1979 in the surface record is probably spurious.
Equally, John Daley pointed out a few years back that one of the most commonly used weather stations in Australia for proving 'global warming' had warmed not because the temperature had increased, but because a bush had grown up nearby which largely blocked out a cool wind which used to blow on it. How do you 'correct' for errors like that in the surface record?
Not to mention that many of the 'global warming' scarers are still using the seawater temperature measurement data which was proven to be pretty much garbage several years ago. Using garbage data for 75% of the planet's surface is not going to give you good results.
Re:But for the Grace of Gabe... there go ye?
on
Given Up to Spyware?
·
· Score: 1
"But we see Valve's solution as a cure that's worse than the disease of piracy."
Um, Steam allows me to buy PC games over the web without having to wait for a CD to arrive in the post, allows me to play those PC games on any PC with a fast Internet connection by just logging in and downloading them, and allows me to automatically download patches when they're released, rather than have to do so manually. As a game player, that's a good thing.
Unlike spyware, it works with Valve's games, and that's it. It also comes with a simple button allowing you to prevent it from starting at boot, so it only runs when you want to run a Valve game.
Now, there certainly are issues with having to be online in order to play a game that's already installed on your PC, and with the way that they can cancel an account just because they think you might have pirated a game. But comparing Steam to malignant spyware is just a joke.
Fortunately all the losers who think that living to 1000 would be worse than death will quickly die out, and the people who think it's fun will be the only ones left.
The new interface sucks: I really don't know what else to say. In particular, it wastes a huge amount of space with message previews that I don't want to see: rather than getting maybe 50 threads on a page, I now get maybe a dozen. Ugh.
Like most people, you totally miss the point: astronauts are ten a penny, losing a few is no big deal.
Shuttles, on the other hand, are politically irreplaceable: Endeavour was only built because we had most of the parts already, and the rest could be cobbled together for a couple of billion. Today there's no way to build a replacement shuttle cheaply, and with retirement announced in 2010 there's no point... it would get to fly a couple of times and then retire.
If a shuttle is lost servicing Hubble then you have only two left. One of those will usually be in maintenance, so that cuts your effective shuttle fleet by 50%. There's no way that ISS could be finished in that case.
Not that ISS should be finished, or should even have been started, in my opinion. But even a 1% chance of losing a shuttle and therefore losing a large portion of ISS upgrades is more than NASA want to risk.
They emigrated, most likely. One of the problems with incompetence is that it's self-reinforcing, the competent get more and more fed up with having to deal with incompetence all day and find something better to do with their time.
"So they still think people will sit through the commercials like zombies"
No, you're missing the point of TV advertising. TV advertising doesn't exist to sell products, it exists to allow advertising executives to pay for their coke and hookers... as such it doesn't matter whether it works, only that companies continue to believe that it works (and to a certain extent it does, at least in getting brand names established).
"A combination and loose interpretation of Article 1 section 1 and Article 1 section 8 clause 8."
So "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries", they're going to prevent people from skipping over commercials?
"So if y'all want to bitch about 2391, that's great, but at least bitch about the parts that are in fact bad."
I've got a better idea: maybe you could explain where in the Constitution the Federal government gets the power to tell people that they can or can't watch commercials?
Corporate health insurance came about because the government banned companies from increasing salaries during WWII, so they gave employees perks instead. This, of course, has been a disaster, creating the whole dysfunctional US healthcare system: since people don't pay directly for their healthcare, they have every incentive to screw their insurance company for as much as they can get, increasing the costs to everyone.
"A union is only gonna prop up the slackers, and anyhow the management'll just come in and bust heads anyway."
The difference is, a miner is pretty much a miner: their output won't vary very much... whereas the output of different programmers can easily differ by a factor of ten. Why would a really productive programmer want a union which represents them and someone who does a 1/10 as much productive work? They'll only lose out to the benefit of the slackers.
So if I pay to go to a cinema, rather than download a copy of the movie from the Web, they're going to mess up the picture and mess up the audio in order to make sure I don't tape it with a camcorder?
Can someone remind me why I'd want to go to one of these cinemas?
Exactly. For a lot of professional work I'm sure that Gimp doesn't have the tools you need, but it does everything I want for the uses I have... and it seems to get better all the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Same old bollocks from the idiot lefties desperate to maintain control of a world that's getting away from them.
Wake me up when disaster strikes, Chicken Little.
"We don't have redundant systems to get more data down, we have redundant systems for redundancy"
Which just goes to show that he's a retard.
If both channels had worked, we'd have twice as many pictures as we have now. If the same data had been sent on both channels, we'd have precisely the same amount of pictures as we have no.
So we're no worse off than we would have been with redundant channels, and if both channels had worked, we'd have had twice as many images. Equally, while half the pictures were lost, we still got probably 90% of the important data, since anything visible in the lost pictures is probably also visible (though probably with less detail) in the pictures we have... the odds of missing an important science find because of the lost images are small.
"Wasn't the key tenet that we all stood to gain most from free rein for the IT industry"
We would, if there was a free rein. Unfortunately we have crap like the DMCA which probably make breaking their region-coding scam illegal.
The fact that consumers always benefit from free trade is precisely why companies like HP want this crap: to _prevent_ free trade in their products.
"Funny, that's what most people thought about Columbus and his wild ideas about a passage to Asia"
Of course Columbus was wrong (at least in where he thought India was), and if he hadn't been lucky enough to run into America on the way to India he'd have died. In an alternate world where America didn't exist, people are right now wondering what happened to that Columbus dude who went off on that wacky voyage trying to reach India the long way around.
"To this day, I never understood why Windows computers don't come pre-configured to run as a non-root user with limited file, execution and registry privileges?"
Because vast amounts of software simply will not run if you're not an Administrator, and Microsoft would be inundated with support calls from clueless users.
"If I remember correctly XP supports a feature called "run as" if a program needs to be run as root (ie. setup programs)."
Yep, Joe Sixpack would be real happy if they had to enable 'Run As' on every single setup program when they installed software.
Face it, Windows is a single-user, single-tasking operating system masquerading as a real OS.
The problem is, that setting does not work! I have it turned off, but Zonealarm still gets hit whenever I play a WMV file that wants a license... there's a reason why I don't let IE or WMP access the Internet without explicit permission every time.
"The fact there there are still vulnerabilities should come as a surprise to no one."
Of course not. But, unlike IE, these aren't 'You open a web page and your machine is taken over as a spam zombie' vulnerabilities. They should be fixed, but are less serious than the usual IE bugs... and they'll likely be fixed a lot faster.
"There seems to be a general feeling on Slashdot these days that we should mock people who try to innovate"
I'm not sure there was much innovative about Itanic: trying to eliminate hardware complexity by transferring it to the compiler has been done before with some of the early RISC chips, and it was a failure then, too. It's just way, way harder to figure out beforehand what the chip is going to do when running the program than it is for the chip to figure out what it's going to do while it's actually running the program.
Frankly, I think we should mock people who decide to spend billions trying to do something which failed before and, duh, it fails again.
"a typical memetic programming that took place in the 1950's in which everyone who was not a right-wing-christian-gun-loving-American was a communist."
Of course with hindisight, it turns out that most of them _were_ communists...
"However, those who worked on the years of clean up at three mile island know how bad these failure modes are."
Oh, and while we're on the subject, the new Chinese fission reactors are designed to be impossible to melt down, and are therefore extremely safe. The downside is that you still need to deal with the hot radioactive fuel afterwards.
Equally, plants powered by conventional fuels pump out a huge amount of radioactive crap into the atmosphere (e.g. coal often contains uranium which will be burnt and dispersed into the atmosphere) and if the 'global warming' nutters are correct then the consequences of continuing to burn conventional fuels would be far worse than those of a few fission reactor accidents.
"What will happen to the material that stops all those neutrons?"
Assuming you don't use aneutronic fusion, it will get mildly radioactive. So bury it in the middle of nowhere... who cares? We're not talking about 'hot' fission fuel here.
"What is the failure mode for a collapsed fusuion capable magnetic field?"
The confinement vessel warms up by about two degrees C, you fix the problem and restart it. You've been watching too many SF movies if you think that a confinement failure will cause a nuclear explosion.
"Fusuion power will NEVER be safe"
Fusion is extremely safe compared to fission: you appear to be just a typical ill-informed knee-jerk anti-nukleah.
"We fixed that particular problem with the data in the early 1990s."
Most of the differences between the surface and satellite measurements over land come from a few limited areas (other than the areas that are largely missing from the surface record but cooling in the satellite record), and are almost certainly due to urban warming in those areas, or systematic measurement errors. That means that most of the supposed warming since 1979 in the surface record is probably spurious.
Equally, John Daley pointed out a few years back that one of the most commonly used weather stations in Australia for proving 'global warming' had warmed not because the temperature had increased, but because a bush had grown up nearby which largely blocked out a cool wind which used to blow on it. How do you 'correct' for errors like that in the surface record?
Not to mention that many of the 'global warming' scarers are still using the seawater temperature measurement data which was proven to be pretty much garbage several years ago. Using garbage data for 75% of the planet's surface is not going to give you good results.
"But we see Valve's solution as a cure that's worse than the disease of piracy."
Um, Steam allows me to buy PC games over the web without having to wait for a CD to arrive in the post, allows me to play those PC games on any PC with a fast Internet connection by just logging in and downloading them, and allows me to automatically download patches when they're released, rather than have to do so manually. As a game player, that's a good thing.
Unlike spyware, it works with Valve's games, and that's it. It also comes with a simple button allowing you to prevent it from starting at boot, so it only runs when you want to run a Valve game.
Now, there certainly are issues with having to be online in order to play a game that's already installed on your PC, and with the way that they can cancel an account just because they think you might have pirated a game. But comparing Steam to malignant spyware is just a joke.
Fortunately all the losers who think that living to 1000 would be worse than death will quickly die out, and the people who think it's fun will be the only ones left.
"So you live to be 1000 or whatever but surely after a couple of hunderd years you would get bored and would feel that you've seen everything"
Maybe you would. Personally I could easily find things to keep me occupied for 10,000 years, let alone 1000.
Heck, just posting on Slashdot could probably fill up a couple of thousand...
The new interface sucks: I really don't know what else to say. In particular, it wastes a huge amount of space with message previews that I don't want to see: rather than getting maybe 50 threads on a page, I now get maybe a dozen. Ugh.
Like most people, you totally miss the point: astronauts are ten a penny, losing a few is no big deal.
Shuttles, on the other hand, are politically irreplaceable: Endeavour was only built because we had most of the parts already, and the rest could be cobbled together for a couple of billion. Today there's no way to build a replacement shuttle cheaply, and with retirement announced in 2010 there's no point... it would get to fly a couple of times and then retire.
If a shuttle is lost servicing Hubble then you have only two left. One of those will usually be in maintenance, so that cuts your effective shuttle fleet by 50%. There's no way that ISS could be finished in that case.
Not that ISS should be finished, or should even have been started, in my opinion. But even a 1% chance of losing a shuttle and therefore losing a large portion of ISS upgrades is more than NASA want to risk.
"What happened to all the competent people??"
They emigrated, most likely. One of the problems with incompetence is that it's self-reinforcing, the competent get more and more fed up with having to deal with incompetence all day and find something better to do with their time.
"So they still think people will sit through the commercials like zombies"
No, you're missing the point of TV advertising. TV advertising doesn't exist to sell products, it exists to allow advertising executives to pay for their coke and hookers... as such it doesn't matter whether it works, only that companies continue to believe that it works (and to a certain extent it does, at least in getting brand names established).
"A combination and loose interpretation of Article 1 section 1 and Article 1 section 8 clause 8."
So "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries", they're going to prevent people from skipping over commercials?
"So if y'all want to bitch about 2391, that's great, but at least bitch about the parts that are in fact bad."
I've got a better idea: maybe you could explain where in the Constitution the Federal government gets the power to tell people that they can or can't watch commercials?
"health insurance"
Corporate health insurance came about because the government banned companies from increasing salaries during WWII, so they gave employees perks instead. This, of course, has been a disaster, creating the whole dysfunctional US healthcare system: since people don't pay directly for their healthcare, they have every incentive to screw their insurance company for as much as they can get, increasing the costs to everyone.
"A union is only gonna prop up the slackers, and anyhow the management'll just come in and bust heads anyway."
The difference is, a miner is pretty much a miner: their output won't vary very much... whereas the output of different programmers can easily differ by a factor of ten. Why would a really productive programmer want a union which represents them and someone who does a 1/10 as much productive work? They'll only lose out to the benefit of the slackers.
"I don't hear actors complaining very often about their long hours."
It's hard to complain when you're getting paid $20 million for six weeks work with all the free beer, coke and hookers you can handle...
So if I pay to go to a cinema, rather than download a copy of the movie from the Web, they're going to mess up the picture and mess up the audio in order to make sure I don't tape it with a camcorder?
Can someone remind me why I'd want to go to one of these cinemas?
Exactly. For a lot of professional work I'm sure that Gimp doesn't have the tools you need, but it does everything I want for the uses I have... and it seems to get better all the time.