I was agreeing with you. The bit about data is from some papers I read in the early days about the motivations for portable compilers and operating systems. But since the data is the reason for everything, I guess it's been implied for so long we don't talk about that any more.
He wasn't complaining about the GPL. GNU just has different goals than BSD, and different licensing. Building a complete OS requires a matching compiler, so one that's under the BSD license is a desirable effort for the BSD licensed variants. That's not the same thing as saying "GPL bad". It's just making your system feature complete and organically portable - as BSD was always intended to be.
For as long as I've been here slashdot has been a proving ground for bots of various types. Goatse guy is actually a key Debian developer doing counter captcha research. This one's developer just has a different sense of humor.
But wait... this RangeCheck code is really critical. Apparently Android does RangeCheck 2600 times on boot. And Windows does it 40 times. So obviously RangeCheck is some sort of OCD that is unnecessary. Also, please buy antivirus because we're not sure how Windows apps get exploited.
I do believe that the current research is that the qbits can be entangled and separated at subluminal speeds. But operations that can impact the state of the qbit like observation, at what speed does that propagate to the entangled qbit? We don't know. It might be instantaneous no matter how far apart the qbits are, irrespective of general relativity's lightspeed limit. To discover the speed of propagation of this information we must separate the entangled qbits by enough distance to measure the propagation of the change with certainty within the confidence level of our measuring equipment. So this research is important, and increasing the distance is important. It may be that changes to one entangled qbit propagate to the other at subluminal speeds, but maybe not.
The potential that is proposed isn't instantaneous communication with anywhere, but the potential that - if we can store unmanipulated entangled qbits - instantaneous communication with the qbits we've stored and separated at subluminal speed can be achieved. It's a big deal. If this is possible we'll find a way to store nigh-infinite entangled qbits and send them far.
The prior distance was 9 miles. They beat that distance by 51 miles. Besting the competition by 6x is grand, but that's not the big deal. 60 miles is far enough distance to measure whether the communication is "instantaneous" within or without the frame of general relativity. Properly refined this may be the Star Trek "subspace communication" and further refinements might open up a whole new understanding of physics. The prior distance was not enough for proofs of this nature because of the difficulty of measuring such fine increments of time against the uncertainties of the method.
Is that a big enough deal for you to accept it's a worthy post for "news for nerds"?
As Solandri said various theories for organization of planets around a star - terrestrial and gas giant - are plentiful. None of them have much weight given recent extrasolar observations. Ceres would never have formed a gas giant unless it was present so early in the presolar cloud that its gravity attracted a huge fraction of the gases present, and obviously some other mass did that first, and that mass was too late to participate in most of the free gas mass - but early enough to gather up quite a bit. Most likely the core of 1 Ceres is a relic of some cosmic collision that occurred so early that there were still volatiles to be swept up. Perhaps the core of 1 Ceres is a fraction of the remains of a collision between an early body and the seed of a mass that became a gas giant. We have a bias to expect that these terrestrial masses came first, but there's no evidence for that - quite the contrary, we might expect that the gas giants came first and ate the terrestrial materials only as snacks while their real diet was mere molecules of gas in vast quantity.
For all we know when the expanding shell of mass thrown off by the supernova of a Population II star (middling early) collides with leftover gases or the expanding and much-dissipated shell of a population III star (very early) or another population II star, a population I star system like ours is born with lots of flying chunks of iron and vast masses of hydrogen and helium. Perhaps some of this flying iron was born in that catastrophe, or the remnant of some earlier super-earth, but it seems unlikely since large dense masses would likely continue through the cloud with their inertia little dampened. It would be fun to do the models, but I have neither the skill nor the gear. The nature of the question does explain the globular shape of the local stellar formation for population I stars, for obvious reasons.
We think now of supernovas as an uncommon and horrible thing, ephemeral and fragile creatures that we are. But some five or ten billion years ago in our galactic neighborhood they were considerably more common. Without them we'd not have the materials to be what we are.
Of course there is the possibility that some of the super-earths we see around other stars were just gas giants like Jupiter that collected these metal bits with their gravity, only with the lighter gases burned and blasted away by a ferocious star. Perhaps Earth was once covered by a minor gas giant shell only to have it blasted away with Sol's ignition. Certainly in our atmosphere raw hydrogen and helium are swept away every day. We're not likely to learn about that without exploring other nearby stars.
Of the protoplanets 1 Ceres is the most interesting. Its core may have many answers to the nature and evolution of the solar system. NASA's Dawn mission will be there soon, but it's not likely to probe deep enough to find enough of those answers. It is armed though to discover the rich bounty of 1 Ceres that will motivate us to explore it more.
I don't know if it's a planet or not and I don't care. I do know that it's a rather valuable hunk of useful stuff, in a useful place and condition. More than enough metals there to be a near-zero-G spacedock.
Vesta's worth nowhere near as much as Ceres. When Dawn gets to 1 Ceres, that's when the gold rush begins. Ceres has more water on it than all the fresh water on Earth, and other volatiles as well. It's a grand fuel depot for exploitation of the asteroid belt.
Considered together they're wealth beyond the dreams of Midas.
As for clearing the orbit it seems to me a relative thing. Aren't there thousands, maybe millions, of Earth-crossing asteroids still - some of them on very similar orbits? I recall reading of one very large one with a "horseshoe" orbit around the sun centered on Earth's exact orbit. Sometimes it's on a slightly inner orbit and races ahead until when it catches up to the Earth from behind. Influenced there by Earth's gravity it shifts to a higher orbit around the sun until it begins gradually falling back. And when in its travels it falls under the Earth's sway again from the fore, it does so just enough to fall into that orbit closer to the sun and race ahead again. Who knows how long this has gone on? If there's one like that, how swept could Earth's orbit be?
Reviewing I find that there are possibly several such for Earth's orbit around the sun that we know of. Other planets large and small have them too. The one I was thinking of, 3753 Cruithne, shouldn't count for various reasons but at 5km wide it's a beast.
Asteroids usually orbit the sun. Sometimes for a little while they'll set up unstable orbits around some other body, like the Earth or the Moon on a brief vacation - and then continue on their voyage..
Much of the time Assembler isn't any better than C or C++. Humans just aren't as good at hitting every optimization, and those hand-tuned optimizations take time that's not available in the current fast-to-market environment. Plus, the more optimized Assembler you have in the codebase the harder it is to port. What are the Java libraries written in?
The Google innovation isn't the services they provide. It's the business model. Their competitors want to sell these services, withholding them from whoever cannot or will not pay. Google instead gets other people (advertisers) to pay them to provide the services to everyone in the world for free. That is disruptive, and to the point, profitable. It also tends to make them popular.
My Transformer TF101 at $400 is really nice. It has ICS, and you can buy them now for $350 even though there's a new model out that has quad core. The iPad2 can be had for $350 as an Apple refurb. But those are 10" tablets, and the one we're talking about is half that size.
They don't need to make a ton of money on each one. India was looking to buy a half-billion of these tablets. And the maker would get to have the brand recognition as provider of tablets to all the students in India - and so sell their retail tablets at more of a markup.
I know it seems unlikely, but it does appear they were going to make it happen.
At $45 they were basically looking at an ereader with wifi and the ability to run some limited programs. DataWind did deliver a design that could be made and delivered at that cost, and the second generation was even better. This could have been awesome. The price point is important because India needs about a half-billion of these tablets to provide one to each student over the next decade. They have devised a k-12 curriculum to put on it.
I'm confident they will find a way, but it doesn't look like DataWind is going to be able to pull it off unless some angel investor swoops in and rescues them.
They've tapped the Geysers until the aquifer was nearly out of water. Now that they put water back in, it's stabilizing. Newer methods don't even take the water out. The article is about Japan, which has some of the richest geothermal resources of all the world. But even in the US we have the Yellowstone Caldera, which is hundreds of square miles of very hot rock. Boiling water bubbles up out of the ground all over the place, as oil once did. We are not exploiting these resources, and there is no good reason for it. It's clean renewable baseload power, it's cheaper than nuclear. It's local.
They work the same way. Heat flashes a media, which turns a turbine. Just like coal or nuclear, but without the toxic side effects.
Slashdot Mirror
Man am I ever going to be glad when silly season is over.
I was agreeing with you. The bit about data is from some papers I read in the early days about the motivations for portable compilers and operating systems. But since the data is the reason for everything, I guess it's been implied for so long we don't talk about that any more.
Yes. End user capacity for cross-platform migration for preservation of data was quite the point.
He wasn't complaining about the GPL. GNU just has different goals than BSD, and different licensing. Building a complete OS requires a matching compiler, so one that's under the BSD license is a desirable effort for the BSD licensed variants. That's not the same thing as saying "GPL bad". It's just making your system feature complete and organically portable - as BSD was always intended to be.
If you work in Windows most of the time virtual desktops are a habit best avoided because going back to not having them is frustrating.
For as long as I've been here slashdot has been a proving ground for bots of various types. Goatse guy is actually a key Debian developer doing counter captcha research. This one's developer just has a different sense of humor.
You do know you can download Windows directly from Microsoft, right?
Used Linux in the '90s, technically proficient. Goes years without backups. Posts AC. I'm afraid I have to call shenanigans.
This was my idea. I'm glad it bore fruit.
But wait... this RangeCheck code is really critical. Apparently Android does RangeCheck 2600 times on boot. And Windows does it 40 times. So obviously RangeCheck is some sort of OCD that is unnecessary. Also, please buy antivirus because we're not sure how Windows apps get exploited.
I do believe that the current research is that the qbits can be entangled and separated at subluminal speeds. But operations that can impact the state of the qbit like observation, at what speed does that propagate to the entangled qbit? We don't know. It might be instantaneous no matter how far apart the qbits are, irrespective of general relativity's lightspeed limit. To discover the speed of propagation of this information we must separate the entangled qbits by enough distance to measure the propagation of the change with certainty within the confidence level of our measuring equipment. So this research is important, and increasing the distance is important. It may be that changes to one entangled qbit propagate to the other at subluminal speeds, but maybe not.
The potential that is proposed isn't instantaneous communication with anywhere, but the potential that - if we can store unmanipulated entangled qbits - instantaneous communication with the qbits we've stored and separated at subluminal speed can be achieved. It's a big deal. If this is possible we'll find a way to store nigh-infinite entangled qbits and send them far.
The prior distance was 9 miles. They beat that distance by 51 miles. Besting the competition by 6x is grand, but that's not the big deal. 60 miles is far enough distance to measure whether the communication is "instantaneous" within or without the frame of general relativity. Properly refined this may be the Star Trek "subspace communication" and further refinements might open up a whole new understanding of physics. The prior distance was not enough for proofs of this nature because of the difficulty of measuring such fine increments of time against the uncertainties of the method.
Is that a big enough deal for you to accept it's a worthy post for "news for nerds"?
As Solandri said various theories for organization of planets around a star - terrestrial and gas giant - are plentiful. None of them have much weight given recent extrasolar observations. Ceres would never have formed a gas giant unless it was present so early in the presolar cloud that its gravity attracted a huge fraction of the gases present, and obviously some other mass did that first, and that mass was too late to participate in most of the free gas mass - but early enough to gather up quite a bit. Most likely the core of 1 Ceres is a relic of some cosmic collision that occurred so early that there were still volatiles to be swept up. Perhaps the core of 1 Ceres is a fraction of the remains of a collision between an early body and the seed of a mass that became a gas giant. We have a bias to expect that these terrestrial masses came first, but there's no evidence for that - quite the contrary, we might expect that the gas giants came first and ate the terrestrial materials only as snacks while their real diet was mere molecules of gas in vast quantity.
For all we know when the expanding shell of mass thrown off by the supernova of a Population II star (middling early) collides with leftover gases or the expanding and much-dissipated shell of a population III star (very early) or another population II star, a population I star system like ours is born with lots of flying chunks of iron and vast masses of hydrogen and helium. Perhaps some of this flying iron was born in that catastrophe, or the remnant of some earlier super-earth, but it seems unlikely since large dense masses would likely continue through the cloud with their inertia little dampened. It would be fun to do the models, but I have neither the skill nor the gear. The nature of the question does explain the globular shape of the local stellar formation for population I stars, for obvious reasons.
We think now of supernovas as an uncommon and horrible thing, ephemeral and fragile creatures that we are. But some five or ten billion years ago in our galactic neighborhood they were considerably more common. Without them we'd not have the materials to be what we are.
Of course there is the possibility that some of the super-earths we see around other stars were just gas giants like Jupiter that collected these metal bits with their gravity, only with the lighter gases burned and blasted away by a ferocious star. Perhaps Earth was once covered by a minor gas giant shell only to have it blasted away with Sol's ignition. Certainly in our atmosphere raw hydrogen and helium are swept away every day. We're not likely to learn about that without exploring other nearby stars.
Of the protoplanets 1 Ceres is the most interesting. Its core may have many answers to the nature and evolution of the solar system. NASA's Dawn mission will be there soon, but it's not likely to probe deep enough to find enough of those answers. It is armed though to discover the rich bounty of 1 Ceres that will motivate us to explore it more.
I don't know if it's a planet or not and I don't care. I do know that it's a rather valuable hunk of useful stuff, in a useful place and condition. More than enough metals there to be a near-zero-G spacedock.
Vesta's worth nowhere near as much as Ceres. When Dawn gets to 1 Ceres, that's when the gold rush begins. Ceres has more water on it than all the fresh water on Earth, and other volatiles as well. It's a grand fuel depot for exploitation of the asteroid belt.
Considered together they're wealth beyond the dreams of Midas.
As for clearing the orbit it seems to me a relative thing. Aren't there thousands, maybe millions, of Earth-crossing asteroids still - some of them on very similar orbits? I recall reading of one very large one with a "horseshoe" orbit around the sun centered on Earth's exact orbit. Sometimes it's on a slightly inner orbit and races ahead until when it catches up to the Earth from behind. Influenced there by Earth's gravity it shifts to a higher orbit around the sun until it begins gradually falling back. And when in its travels it falls under the Earth's sway again from the fore, it does so just enough to fall into that orbit closer to the sun and race ahead again. Who knows how long this has gone on? If there's one like that, how swept could Earth's orbit be?
Reviewing I find that there are possibly several such for Earth's orbit around the sun that we know of. Other planets large and small have them too. The one I was thinking of, 3753 Cruithne, shouldn't count for various reasons but at 5km wide it's a beast.
Asteroids usually orbit the sun. Sometimes for a little while they'll set up unstable orbits around some other body, like the Earth or the Moon on a brief vacation - and then continue on their voyage..
Much of the time Assembler isn't any better than C or C++. Humans just aren't as good at hitting every optimization, and those hand-tuned optimizations take time that's not available in the current fast-to-market environment. Plus, the more optimized Assembler you have in the codebase the harder it is to port. What are the Java libraries written in?
Astroturfer proving his botware. It's all over the net.
The Google innovation isn't the services they provide. It's the business model. Their competitors want to sell these services, withholding them from whoever cannot or will not pay. Google instead gets other people (advertisers) to pay them to provide the services to everyone in the world for free. That is disruptive, and to the point, profitable. It also tends to make them popular.
My Transformer TF101 at $400 is really nice. It has ICS, and you can buy them now for $350 even though there's a new model out that has quad core. The iPad2 can be had for $350 as an Apple refurb. But those are 10" tablets, and the one we're talking about is half that size.
They don't need to make a ton of money on each one. India was looking to buy a half-billion of these tablets. And the maker would get to have the brand recognition as provider of tablets to all the students in India - and so sell their retail tablets at more of a markup.
I know it seems unlikely, but it does appear they were going to make it happen.
At $45 they were basically looking at an ereader with wifi and the ability to run some limited programs. DataWind did deliver a design that could be made and delivered at that cost, and the second generation was even better. This could have been awesome. The price point is important because India needs about a half-billion of these tablets to provide one to each student over the next decade. They have devised a k-12 curriculum to put on it.
I'm confident they will find a way, but it doesn't look like DataWind is going to be able to pull it off unless some angel investor swoops in and rescues them.
It was long ago, but I remember it.
They've tapped the Geysers until the aquifer was nearly out of water. Now that they put water back in, it's stabilizing. Newer methods don't even take the water out. The article is about Japan, which has some of the richest geothermal resources of all the world. But even in the US we have the Yellowstone Caldera, which is hundreds of square miles of very hot rock. Boiling water bubbles up out of the ground all over the place, as oil once did. We are not exploiting these resources, and there is no good reason for it. It's clean renewable baseload power, it's cheaper than nuclear. It's local.
They work the same way. Heat flashes a media, which turns a turbine. Just like coal or nuclear, but without the toxic side effects.
If only that giant volcano had some source of power they could harness...
There is not an electric grid on the planet that uses wind or geothermal as base loads,
This statement is not true.
Geothermal plants have killed how many people again?