Atmospheric humidity is cited by TFA as one of the things the algorithms had to filter out. I'm going to guess that the presence of clouds in the sky would cause a disturbance orders of magnitude greater than the humidity of a clear sky and would therefore be too difficult to filter.
Your question basically assumed that weather has no effect on radio waves, but this is not true. Perhaps the interruption to, say satellite TV is minimal but the imaging process described here required utmost precision.
I traveled with my family for a week in Paris last October. The forecast basically said it will be rainy all week and changed to sunny all week (which turned out to be correct) just one day ahead of our arrival. Not exactly what I'd call "stunningly accurate".
Why do you refer to the far side of the moon to be "dark, cold" as opposed to the near side being "bright, warm"? I don't believe the earth warms the moon by any significant degree.
Not sure how many batteries you'd need to stack up to get 40,000 volts, but I have a hunch the result will be quite a bit heavier than the voltage converter used here.
Could this technology also be used as an alternative to the rotating blades currently used in fans? Fans are everywhere, and if this system can scale down effectively and run quieter and more efficient it can have uses in air conditioning, ventilation systems, refrigerators, cars, desktop/laptop computer cooling, basically anywhere we need air to move.
So Californians will enact year-round DST, which is fun and good, until they realize they're going to spend a couple of months of every year getting to work and school before sunrise, often in cold rainy weather. This is the sort of thing that people living in Seattle or Canada or Norway (and, oddly enough, Spain) may be familiar with, but for most Californians will come as a nasty surprise. I'd love to see the backlash when these voters realize what they've gotten themselves into.
Webster's defines biodegradable as "capable of being broken down especially into innocuous products by the action of living things (such as microorganisms)". The product of plastics decomposing in the sea is definitely not innocuous (harmless), and the National Geographic article says nothing about how the plastics decompose in the ocean (bacteria? corrosion by the salt water?) so neither of us can be sure that it fits either the Webster's or the Wikipedia definition. In any case calling this breakdown of plastics into poisonous chemicals "biodegradation" is quite a stretch.
There are no specific requirements on the output of biodegredation.
Actually there are. The Wikipedia article you linked quotes the EU definition of biodegradation, which requires "the conversion of >90% of the original material into CO2, water and minerals by biological processes within 6 months". Bisphenol-A ain't no mineral.
“What we are hoping to do is use this enzyme to turn this plastic back into its original components, so we can literally recycle it back to plastic,” said McGeehan. “It means we won’t need to dig up any more oil and, fundamentally, it should reduce the amount of plastic in the environment.”
The linked article says nothing about biodegradation. Biodegradation means that a material breaks down into things like CO2, water and minerals. In this case the plastics decompose into styrene trimer and bisphenol-A, these are nasty pollutants known to harm reproduction and cause cancer. So no, plastics do not biodegrade in the sea, and yes, I'd definitely prefer using these enzymes to recycle these plastics rather than dumping them in landfills and oceans.
But what may occur if, perchance, the manure strikes the ventilation equipment? Has anyone considered this possibility? It even sounds like an almost catchy catch phrase.
The web browser: the glorified terminal emulator of the 21st century. Where every kilobyte of input takes a megabyte of RAM. Or fifty. How can it be considered remotely plausible that maintaining the state of 15 tabs (mostly text, some images, no video) requires 5 GB? Surely it must be one of the great mysteries of modern computing.
You seem to have missed the most important part of my comment: these things happened to me as a Firefox user. That is, using Firefox did not protect me from retargeted ads, and clearly it would not prevent anyone from selling my browsing history to the highest bidder. You've made it clear that you dislike retargeted advertising. You've also made it clear that you believe Firefox is better at protecting one's privacy online than Brand X Browser. You have raised compelling arguments regarding neither of these points.
So you concede that in a default installation there is no difference in this respect between the two browsers, and that what separates the Savior of the Web from the Great Evil is that one would require a third party extension to change something that the other allows changing via a menu that 99% of users don't even know exists? I'm not impressed.
Is there a difference between Firefox and other browsers in this respect? Can I block unwanted content under FF which I wouldn't be able to block under Chrome?
The word 'borrow' was in quotes. I was quoting the TechRepublic article, not citing my own opinion on privacy, which is irrelevant here. You too are waving your hands and not answering the question: in what way does Firefox protect my privacy any better than other web browsers?
Sure, "retargeting" and unwanted video ads have happened to me. As a Firefox user. I don't really care about the former and there are blocker plugins for the latter. As for selling my browsing history to my health insurer, that sounds like a something for law enforcement to handle, not my browser. In any case, you're still just waving your hands really hard and not answering my question.
This whole argument looks like a lot of hand waving and FUD. The only rational argument I can see is that we need to Save the Web from the oh so horrible fate of being controlled by corporations whose "top incentive is to borrow our privacy just long enough to target an ad at us". Just what is wrong with targeted advertising? How would resurrecting Firefox prevent it in any way?
Slashdot comments taking up only about 60% of the screen width, with nothing but a very wide blank white space on the right hand side of my monitor.
(Windows 7 specific from here on, not sure what's been fixed since:)
Windows Explorer expands folders inappropriately, jumping the folder you expand to the bottom of the navigation pane. This one has been driving me crazy for years. Not just the bug itself, but MS's unwillingness to fix it.
How the system generally thrashes and grinds to a halt when simply copying a large file.
The amount of time and painful sequence of events when switching some graphical application or game between windowed and full screen mode. The screen turns blank, then off, then on but blank again (there was also a nasty click back in the Trinitron monitor days), then off again, then on and blank, and finally the desired image is displayed. Why this takes 5 seconds and not 5 milliseconds is a mystery to me.
"It doesn't add up to deliver a two kilogram package in a two-ton vehicle"... yes, that's why the rest of the world uses motor scooters for pizza deliveries.
I often see Linux kernel announcements that contain updates to support a particular hardware device. This doesn't seem to make sense to me; that's what drivers are for. It might make sense when supporting a new class of device, but I'm pretty sure this isn't the first touch screen Linux has supported. Can someone care to explain? Thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
Atmospheric humidity is cited by TFA as one of the things the algorithms had to filter out. I'm going to guess that the presence of clouds in the sky would cause a disturbance orders of magnitude greater than the humidity of a clear sky and would therefore be too difficult to filter.
Your question basically assumed that weather has no effect on radio waves, but this is not true. Perhaps the interruption to, say satellite TV is minimal but the imaging process described here required utmost precision.
I traveled with my family for a week in Paris last October. The forecast basically said it will be rainy all week and changed to sunny all week (which turned out to be correct) just one day ahead of our arrival. Not exactly what I'd call "stunningly accurate".
Why do you refer to the far side of the moon to be "dark, cold" as opposed to the near side being "bright, warm"? I don't believe the earth warms the moon by any significant degree.
Not sure how many batteries you'd need to stack up to get 40,000 volts, but I have a hunch the result will be quite a bit heavier than the voltage converter used here.
Could this technology also be used as an alternative to the rotating blades currently used in fans? Fans are everywhere, and if this system can scale down effectively and run quieter and more efficient it can have uses in air conditioning, ventilation systems, refrigerators, cars, desktop/laptop computer cooling, basically anywhere we need air to move.
So Californians will enact year-round DST, which is fun and good, until they realize they're going to spend a couple of months of every year getting to work and school before sunrise, often in cold rainy weather. This is the sort of thing that people living in Seattle or Canada or Norway (and, oddly enough, Spain) may be familiar with, but for most Californians will come as a nasty surprise. I'd love to see the backlash when these voters realize what they've gotten themselves into.
Webster's defines biodegradable as "capable of being broken down especially into innocuous products by the action of living things (such as microorganisms)". The product of plastics decomposing in the sea is definitely not innocuous (harmless), and the National Geographic article says nothing about how the plastics decompose in the ocean (bacteria? corrosion by the salt water?) so neither of us can be sure that it fits either the Webster's or the Wikipedia definition. In any case calling this breakdown of plastics into poisonous chemicals "biodegradation" is quite a stretch.
There are no specific requirements on the output of biodegredation.
Actually there are. The Wikipedia article you linked quotes the EU definition of biodegradation, which requires "the conversion of >90% of the original material into CO2, water and minerals by biological processes within 6 months". Bisphenol-A ain't no mineral.
“What we are hoping to do is use this enzyme to turn this plastic back into its original components, so we can literally recycle it back to plastic,” said McGeehan. “It means we won’t need to dig up any more oil and, fundamentally, it should reduce the amount of plastic in the environment.”
The linked article says nothing about biodegradation. Biodegradation means that a material breaks down into things like CO2, water and minerals. In this case the plastics decompose into styrene trimer and bisphenol-A, these are nasty pollutants known to harm reproduction and cause cancer. So no, plastics do not biodegrade in the sea, and yes, I'd definitely prefer using these enzymes to recycle these plastics rather than dumping them in landfills and oceans.
But what may occur if, perchance, the manure strikes the ventilation equipment? Has anyone considered this possibility? It even sounds like an almost catchy catch phrase.
The web browser: the glorified terminal emulator of the 21st century. Where every kilobyte of input takes a megabyte of RAM. Or fifty. How can it be considered remotely plausible that maintaining the state of 15 tabs (mostly text, some images, no video) requires 5 GB? Surely it must be one of the great mysteries of modern computing.
You seem to have missed the most important part of my comment: these things happened to me as a Firefox user. That is, using Firefox did not protect me from retargeted ads, and clearly it would not prevent anyone from selling my browsing history to the highest bidder.
You've made it clear that you dislike retargeted advertising. You've also made it clear that you believe Firefox is better at protecting one's privacy online than Brand X Browser. You have raised compelling arguments regarding neither of these points.
So you concede that in a default installation there is no difference in this respect between the two browsers, and that what separates the Savior of the Web from the Great Evil is that one would require a third party extension to change something that the other allows changing via a menu that 99% of users don't even know exists? I'm not impressed.
Is there a difference between Firefox and other browsers in this respect? Can I block unwanted content under FF which I wouldn't be able to block under Chrome?
The word 'borrow' was in quotes. I was quoting the TechRepublic article, not citing my own opinion on privacy, which is irrelevant here. You too are waving your hands and not answering the question: in what way does Firefox protect my privacy any better than other web browsers?
Sure, "retargeting" and unwanted video ads have happened to me. As a Firefox user. I don't really care about the former and there are blocker plugins for the latter. As for selling my browsing history to my health insurer, that sounds like a something for law enforcement to handle, not my browser. In any case, you're still just waving your hands really hard and not answering my question.
This whole argument looks like a lot of hand waving and FUD. The only rational argument I can see is that we need to Save the Web from the oh so horrible fate of being controlled by corporations whose "top incentive is to borrow our privacy just long enough to target an ad at us". Just what is wrong with targeted advertising? How would resurrecting Firefox prevent it in any way?
Slashdot comments taking up only about 60% of the screen width, with nothing but a very wide blank white space on the right hand side of my monitor.
(Windows 7 specific from here on, not sure what's been fixed since:)
Windows Explorer expands folders inappropriately, jumping the folder you expand to the bottom of the navigation pane. This one has been driving me crazy for years. Not just the bug itself, but MS's unwillingness to fix it.
How the system generally thrashes and grinds to a halt when simply copying a large file.
The amount of time and painful sequence of events when switching some graphical application or game between windowed and full screen mode. The screen turns blank, then off, then on but blank again (there was also a nasty click back in the Trinitron monitor days), then off again, then on and blank, and finally the desired image is displayed. Why this takes 5 seconds and not 5 milliseconds is a mystery to me.
it could allow doctors to produce x-ray medical images on the nanoscale
However, researchers are still trying to overcome the slight technical difficulty of the patient being vaporized in the process.
Wow, even the comments are indistinguishable from today's.
this... what could possibly go wong?
FTFY.
If you think American roads are dangerous, all I can say is it's clear you don't travel much.
"It doesn't add up to deliver a two kilogram package in a two-ton vehicle"... yes, that's why the rest of the world uses motor scooters for pizza deliveries.
Thanks :)
I often see Linux kernel announcements that contain updates to support a particular hardware device. This doesn't seem to make sense to me; that's what drivers are for. It might make sense when supporting a new class of device, but I'm pretty sure this isn't the first touch screen Linux has supported. Can someone care to explain? Thanks.