Why is the rationale for getting rid of the $100 bill explained by making an example with a different currency worth significantly more?
There's a perfectly good rationale: spin. It makes the contrast in numbers look bigger, it makes the figures harder to check, and lazy readers will mis-remember it as if it were comparing like with like. (I didn't say it was an honest rationale, did I?)
While I prefer to assume cock-up before reaching for conspiracy, the "unit soup" gambit is so common in journalism that I do wonder...
the Error 53 thing has been disabled, and now, as long as you have an electronic copy of someone's fingerprint, you can pretty much unlock their device.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but:
If Touch ID on your device didn't work before you saw error 53, the feature still won't work after you update or restore your device. Contact Apple Support to ask about service options for Touch ID.
TL:DNR: Disabling Touch ID when an unauthorised repair is made was intentional and hasn't changed. Bricking the entire phone so you couldn't even unlock it with your passcode was a bug, which is what has been fixed.
So, in England...they only had 3 channels...and are now down to 2 on TV?
Pre-digital, there weren't many. We only hit 4 in 1982 and were up to 5 by the nouglties: 2 BBC (public), 1 ITV (commercial), Channel 4 (public-owned-commercial) and the unimaginatively named Channel 5.
Now, on terrestrial digital, The BBC (public, no ads) had 8 channels (BBC1,2,3,4, BBC News, BBC Parliament & 2 kids channels) although 3, 4 only run from 7pm, before that the kid's channels use the same bandwidth. Then there's a shedload of non-BBC channels: ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 now each have 3-4 digital channels, not counting '+1's and HD versions, plus numerous others (I've lost track of who owns what). Of course, the advent of digital also created a 5-fold increase in the available license fee and advertising revenue, to fill this plethora of new channels with premium content:->
Sadly, we also have shopping channels. Prize for the biggest waste of bandwidth (savour this blow by blow):
QVC (a shopping channel, if you need a stretchy fat-dissolving bra with integrated pressure washer )
QVC HD (See the stretchy fat-dissolving bra with integrated pressure washer in glorious 1080i)
QVC HD +1 (time shifted by an hour in case you'd missed out on that stretchy fat-dissolving bra with integrated pressure washer on regular QVC).
I don't want to live on this planet any more.
After accidentally hitting return partway through typing 'rm -rf/something/you/actually/wanted/to/delete'; running a shell script with 'rm -rf $MYPATH' where $MYPATH had got set to '/'; by installing malware and giving it the admin password or some other equally stupid screw up.
If you are omnipotent and infallible and never have, or never will, make a stupid screw-up like that (or run IT support in a perfect world where none of your lusers can pull rank and demand admin rights on their PCs) then all well and good. Otherwise, the consequences just got raised from restoring the hard drive to replacing the motherboard.
Of all the things you could run that you might expect to 'brick' your system surely 'rm -rf' as root would be the one.
No, you'd expect 'rm -rf/' to hose your linux installation, maybe your data too and require re-installation or restore from backup. That doesn't qualify as bricking.
"Bricking" means corrupting the firmware held in non-volatile memory on your device so it can't be revived without specialist reprogramming equipment - this usually only happens if you botch an attempt to re-flash the firmware.
The term has been watered down and abused as click-bait in the past, but this sounds like the real deal: the claim is that 'rm -rf/' can now permanently erase part of the firmware and make it non-trivial to restore your system. I guess YMMV depending on your motherboard's BIOS-flashing facilities.
I could believe it if it was a SpaceX press release: I get so many emails from PayPal saying "Dear Mr spamtrap49 your accounting was using for suspicious transaction, and has be suspended. Please clicking here to conform your detail" that its clear Elon Musk can't spell. Yet the emails from Amazon telling me that I might be interested in books similar to the one I bought for my mum's birthday 5 years ago all seemed to be written in perfect English...
That depends on what you consider to be the hard bit.
I think you'll find that the "hard bit" is putting a payload into orbit and, for extra points, not needing twice as much fuel as a disposable rocket (which is why SpaceX are trying to land on a barge in the middle of the sea rather than flying all the way back to the launchpad).
Otherwise you're just complaining that this was a feat performed with a blue rocket rather than a green one.
That would *take* entire planets worth of material.
Of course - but you don't have to transmute that material into scrith (a.k.a. unobtanium) to withstand the stresses in a rigid, non-orbiting, 1au shell, and if you're sentimentally attached to gravity you can easily spin parts of the individual satellites, whereas with a big sphere or ring you have to to plate it with neutronium, invent artificial gravity, or spin the whole shell up to ludicrous speed (ISTR when Larry Niven re-did the math for Ringworld Engineers it turned out that it would need a gas-giant's worth of hydrogen just to spin up). Plus, you can build them one by one over an aeon or two - the more you build, the more energy you have. Nobody is saying it has to capture every last photon...
Not saying its easy - just easier than a big solid shell...
This is not a case of profiling, no matter how much the Muslim Council of Britain tries, without actually saying so, that it was targeted at a Muslim.
I don't see anything in TFA to suggest that anybody is claiming it was anything to do with "profiling". Just that it was an over-reaction. Just in case this needs a UK-to-US translation: "terraced house" is British English for "townhouse" (but usually smaller). I'm not sure "terrorist house" makes sense - but it seems like a highly plausible Autocorrupt* or speech recognition goof for something like "terrised hosue".
Of course, we are relying on the clickbait media, so maybe it will emerge in a few days (after the kid has met the Queen and been given a scholarship to Eton) that he didn't really write an essay but just re-used bits from an old Radio Shack one but, on the face of it, this seems to be a clear cut case of teachers interpreting the law ad absurdium. Which, of course, will lead to a backlash and a "cry wolf" effect. Plus, essays don't explode, catch fire or electrocute people.
(*I recently sent my colleagues an email saying that I was "having problems sorting out the wife" - mark my words, one of these days, Autocorrect
is going to bring about the Acropolis!)
If you're willing to believe in a civilization capable of building a Dyson sphere, how much more of a stretch is it to believe they could do it in a few centuries?
You're all wrong - the star is clearly orbited by a huge swarm of teapots. After all, we can't hope to understand the thinking of a race capable of building such a "Lipton Sphere" so you can't prove its not teapots.
I'm not sure I can envision a process that would digest entire planets worth of material and cast it into a shell at any pace.
PS: I thought the original Dyson Sphere concept was a huge cloud of satellites that eventually grew to capture most of the star's energy.
PPS: The satellites could still be teapot-shaped.
PPPS: The tea-cosies are blocking the infra-red. Nothing worse than cold tea.
Welcome to the good old USA where it's perfectly OK to fake people out of their money so long as you slither between the rules just right. It's called progress didn't you know;)
Well, the UK has a more sensible system with an industry regulator who's usual sanction is to just ban the ad rather than enrich lawyers with huge settlements, and the criteria is whether it is likely to mislead the target audience. The ad for this app would get banned pretty quickly (provided someone complained) without the need for a lawsuit.
In the UK ads, energy drinks still cause biologically and aerodynamically unfeasible mutations, deodorants still cause you to be mobbed by attractive members of the opposite (invariably) sex and 50-quid-a-bottle wrinkle cream still (despite the research) outperforms cheap, generic moisturiser. However, the first two are usually played for laughs and rely on the "would not mislead" rule, while the wrinkle cream ads are always very carefully worded and cite some (highly unscientific and subjective) survey for which the results could presumably be produced on demand.
(I'm guessing that people who buy expensive wrinkle cream are good at convincing themselves that it works)
You let your brat play unchecked with a credit card-enabled tablet, you deserve every bill you get.
Two wrongs don't make a right. Just because a parent makes a misjudgement like this doesn't give anybody else the right to take advantage. The summary says that the kid didn't realise he was spending real money and I can easily believe that they'd confuse an otherwise trustworthy 7 year old.
"Free-to-pay" games aimed at children (or even naive adults) are a menace - particularly the ones with both an "in-game" currency and the ability to buy things with real money. The entire business model is based on getting a minority of people to spend more than they intended.
In this case - as with other high-profile cases where the sums involved are huge - Apple have done the right thing and refunded the money. We don't get to hear about the cases where the sum is a mere $50 or so - still more than a sensible person would have spent. Even where parents do the sensible thing and set the kid up with a modest limit and a warning that "when its gone its gone" some people must be earning an awful lot of money by teaching the kids a lesson.
Apart from anything else we get shit games that are designed to maximise income from IAP (and be frustrating to anybody not prepared to waste money) rather than provide good gameplay. Anybody here not want to go back to the days when you paid a fair price for a game and got the whole game?
To quote Greg Egan: That's what bacteria would do if they had spaceships
The "Fermi Paradox" assumes that a race with that level of technology and the inclination to make long-term plans that won't come to fruition until the instigators had crumbled to dust would be stupid and short-sighted enough to set of an uncontrolled exponential growth (with the capacity to mutate and backfire on its creators). NB: its not the technology that's the issue (the human race would certainly be stupid enough) - its the maturity needed for the long-term view.
As far as we know FTL is impossible. If you can make generation ships, you can also build permanent space habitats and park them around nice stable stars. If you can compress a whole ecosystem to a seed, you could probably build custom ecosystems that we could not even recognise. If you just want to spread your DNA to the stars (out of vanity, I suppose) then all you need to do is send some carefully designed viruses/bacteria to a planet with the right sort of primordial soup - heck, we could turn out to be Fermi's missing aliens (AFAIK there's no compelling evidence for panspermia/exogenesis/whatever, but the Fermi paradox ain't exactly hard science either!)
They're just a way to make slower chips look better when they really aren't. If it gets the job done faster, what's the real issue?
Not every task needs huge computing power. If the Pi gets the job done fast enough while burning less power than the cooling fans in your P4 system, taking up a fraction of the space and only costing ~$60 (by the time you've added a case, PSU and SD card), what's your issue?
I've got an original Pi running DNS, DHCP for my home network, and a Pi2 hooked to my lounge TV as a media center frontend served by a PC in the spare room (I suspect the Pi chipset was made for set-top-box use - it can decode 1080p mp4 without breaking a sweat) - the Pi 1 struggled a bit with the i/o throughput but the Pi2 handles the necessary with ease. Dedicating a P4 to either of those tasks - or making your toy robot twice as big so it could take the weight of a P4 heatsink - would be ridiculous unless you also needed to supplement your central heating system.
Doomed to fail. The people who aren't deploying SSL are also the ones who can't install Git.
Give it a chance - its only just been released as beta. Since Its Open Source, packaged versions for all the major Linux distros will undoubtedly follow (there are already a couple). Also, people are missing the point that, apart from the client tool, there's a ton of infrastructure behind this that greatly simplifies the process of obtaining a certificate. There's now no technical excuse why, in a years time, the control panel for your web hosting service, or even your CMS, shouldn't sport a big friendly "Secure with Let's Encrypt" button (with an 'auto-renew' checkbox alongside).
Bear in mind that current free certificates from the likes of StartSSL expire after 1 year anyway - and are at least 4 times more hassle to obtain and install than Lets Encrypt is shaping up to be.
I understand that the target audience is admins, and that this is beta, but really?
Have you ever had to generate a certificate request, get it signed by a CA and install it in your web server? Its not rocket science but its certainly tedious with a dense jargon thicket to battle through. ./letsencrypt-auto certonly --webroot -w/var/www/example -d example.com -d www.example.com -w/var/www/thing -d thing.is -d m.thing.is ...is improvement beyond recognition.
Anyway, there's a lot of infrastructure behind that command line that should make it easy for the likes of CPanel, Plesk or maybe even Wordpress to wrap it in a nice point-and-drool dialog.
The key being that they have a standard hdmi along with the composite video. Also they have 4 standard USB plugs.
The Pi Zero was a limited edition mainly designed to be 'given away' stuck to a magazine cover. Hence the low-profile ports and lack of a header socket on the IO. If it goes into full production it will probably be targeted at robotics/control projects where the lack of bulk is a plus.
But there is no scrounging the strange little mini-hdmi. I have never seen one of those in my life or career.
UK Pi resellers are selling kits with mini-hdmi and mini-usb adapters, and a few other odds and ends, for £6. In any case, they're all widely used on phones
So I don't see this new Pi as something for the kid who has nothing, but ideal for people like me with money and giant parts' bins who are building IoT and robots.
Ding!!! Reality: if the "kid who has nothing" can't scrounge a 10-year-old PC from somewhere then lack of access to computing is the least of their problems. The people really buying these are the ones that want a cheap, disposable computer to tinker with or dedicate to lowly tasks (I have one Pi doing DNS/DHCP for my network and another as a 'set top box').
Surely, someone could sell a fully functional version including case, os-loaded sd card, hdmi, usb and wi-fi for ~$30 and still make money, right?
Sure - there are plenty of such bundles for the "full-size" Raspberry Pi (usually still as parts but we're talking 30 second assembly time here, unless you get one of those PiBow cases where it takes forever to peel the protective film off all of the slices...). Nobody has done it for the Pi Zero yet because its a one-off stunt to put a "computer" on a magazine cover, which they may or may not decide to put into full production. In any case, many of the applications for the Pi (especially the ultra-stripped-down Pi Zero) are for robotics, modelling etc. where they're going to be put in custom cases or - at the very least - you'll want to plug wires into them.
Despite lofty goals of teaching schoolkids to program, most of these are being bought by the sort of nerd who can already lay their hands on phone chargers, SD cards, USB hubs, HDMI cables etc. The basic Pi 2 case is about £6 and snaps together in seconds.
But it turns out the $5 Raspberry Pi Zero costs significantly more to operate than the Next Thing Co. C.H.I.P. [my bold]
Well, yes - if you add the cost of the mini-HDMI-to-HDMI dongle to the Pi and conveniently ignore the fact that the CHIP needs a $15 daughterboard for HDMI. I gave up on fuzzy composite video connections sometime in the 80s. The CHIPs main advantage seems to be bluetooth & wifi - but many applications of the Pi Zero won't need it: just load up the SD card on a PC or another Pi, plug it in and go. Its all swings and roundabouts, and which is best is going to depend on your application. If you actually want a general-purpose computer you'd probably do better to push the boat out on something like a Pi 2 model B.
The USP of all of these devices is that they are sufficiently cheap that (a) if you make something you want to keep, you just buy another one and (b) if, in your tinkering, you let the magic smoke out, there's no great drama.
Lets get real here, though, the Pi Zero is a single-run "special edition" mainly created for the publicity stunt of giving one away 'free' on a magazine cover and is already pretty much sold out (reference here) and the CHIP is only available by pledging to the kickstarter campaign (3rd FAQ here). While its quite likely that either or both of them will be popular enough to go into full production, who knows what the actual prices and specs will be?
there will always be something that someone has which someone else wants, but can't get on their own
Star Trek and Iain Banks' Culture books would be really boring if that wasn't the case:-) - both are mainly based on the adventures of the minority of society who were not content to sit at home and enjoy their free bread and circuses.
For as long as communities have existed, there has been evidence of bartering. Unless you have infinite resources...
Yet one of the "wonders" of modern society is that we have a "fiat" monetary system that has dropped any pretence of a link between the value of money and essential resources. In the past, people could have starved because a crop failure made food unaffordable. These days, its just as likely for the problem to be that nobody has grown any food because the markets have gone chaotic and dropped the price of food below the cost of production. At times in the recent past, farmers in the West are being paid not to produce food to create artificial scarcity. Oil-producing countries will deliberately reduce their output to prop up the oil price.
For many people, most of their salary goes, not on food, but on paying back the artificially-inflated price of the roof over your head (and much of the other money you spend goes to pay other people's wages so they can pay their rents and mortgages). The only reason housing costs so much is that the prices have been severed from 'what people are willing or able to pay' to 'how much phoney money banks are prepared to lend'.
The other area to look at is software, music and film: in the 21st century the cost of physical production and distribution has become trivial, the only significant, necessary, expense is the human talent - and that work is sufficiently enjoyable that people are prepared to do it for nothing. The open-source software scene is the closest we come to 'post-scarcity' economics, and it doesn't seem to be a total bust. The internet was largely created by government-funded science, education and military establishments (i.e. by people who had food, clothing and housing provided by society so they could work on interesting things) who gave away the software. Early websites were made by volunteers - capitalism's main contribution since then has been continual efforts add artificial scarcity to the internet by introducing proprietary standards and abusing the patent system. Music and film, again: the whole digital rights mess is caused by the old industries trying to create artificial scarcity - film and TV are being pushed 'upmarket' because the low end of the market are happy to watch their peers' cat videos on Youtube.
The problem is always how we could get from here to there, not whether "there" would work. If everybody is provided with food and a place to live so they don't need wages, all your resources are harvested by machines and your machines are made by other machines then it won't cost you anything to build the infrastructure to give everybody food and a place to live etc. Oops. serious bootstrap problem.
Plus, human nature - one problem with Socialism/Communism etc. is that, in the past, if the wealth had really been shared out evenly, it would have been spread rather thinly and the majority of people (at least in the 'first world') would have to put up with a simpler lifestyle, so huge numbers of people have an incentive to game the system and be a bit more equal. Post-scarcity needs to improve the life of the majority, and to provide plenty of opportunities for the remaining psychopaths to become starship captains, order people around and shoot Romulans or join Special Circumstances and go rogue on some primitive planet...
Of course, in the Culture it kind helped that humans were basically being kept as pets by all-powerful AIs, and in Star Trek every citizen of the Federation seemed to be such an absolute paragon of virtue that you wanted to slap them...
No, but they can make a baby a month for 9 consecutive months. Increase the number of women a little and you can have a baby a month indefinitely.
Yes, but that involves waiting 9 months for the first baby. Our competitor already has a baby, so we need a baby now and I'm a manager which entitles me to behave like a spoilt 2 year old so don't give me any of that "I know biology" bullshit and get me a baby by the end of next week or I'll fire you and give the job to my nephew who says that we can have a baby in 7 days if we use Agile Procreation techniques.
9 months later: still no baby, but sprint 0.53.2 did produce a shaved rat embryo in a blue romper suit.
More seriously, producing one baby a month is routine production, and production lines work well for that. Producing software is almost always design and development, which is much harder to scale (of course, there must be a lot of creationists in management because even when they grudgingly accept that it takes 9 months to produce a baby, they still seem to think that the design and development should only take 7 days).
It's called "Doctor Who." It's never been called Dr Who.
Hang on. If you looking carefully at the end credits for 'An Unearthly Child' (which is widely available on the interwebs) you'll see that - all the nerdy NOOO!!! he is called THE DOCTOR!!! notwithstanding - the character is actually credited as "Dr. Who".
If I'm found dead in a ditch with my head smashed in by a thermos flask (traces of Bovril detected) and fibres of imitation rabbit-fur under my nails (consistent with an anorak or parka) then we'll know that I should never have spoken of this...
Slashdot Mirror
Why is the rationale for getting rid of the $100 bill explained by making an example with a different currency worth significantly more?
There's a perfectly good rationale: spin. It makes the contrast in numbers look bigger, it makes the figures harder to check, and lazy readers will mis-remember it as if it were comparing like with like. (I didn't say it was an honest rationale, did I?)
While I prefer to assume cock-up before reaching for conspiracy, the "unit soup" gambit is so common in journalism that I do wonder...
the Error 53 thing has been disabled, and now, as long as you have an electronic copy of someone's fingerprint, you can pretty much unlock their device.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but:
If Touch ID on your device didn't work before you saw error 53, the feature still won't work after you update or restore your device. Contact Apple Support to ask about service options for Touch ID.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205628
Also see virtually every other site that reported the error 53 fix.
TL:DNR: Disabling Touch ID when an unauthorised repair is made was intentional and hasn't changed. Bricking the entire phone so you couldn't even unlock it with your passcode was a bug, which is what has been fixed.
So, in England...they only had 3 channels...and are now down to 2 on TV?
Pre-digital, there weren't many. We only hit 4 in 1982 and were up to 5 by the nouglties: 2 BBC (public), 1 ITV (commercial), Channel 4 (public-owned-commercial) and the unimaginatively named Channel 5.
Now, on terrestrial digital, The BBC (public, no ads) had 8 channels (BBC1,2,3,4, BBC News, BBC Parliament & 2 kids channels) although 3, 4 only run from 7pm, before that the kid's channels use the same bandwidth. Then there's a shedload of non-BBC channels: ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 now each have 3-4 digital channels, not counting '+1's and HD versions, plus numerous others (I've lost track of who owns what). Of course, the advent of digital also created a 5-fold increase in the available license fee and advertising revenue, to fill this plethora of new channels with premium content :->
Sadly, we also have shopping channels. Prize for the biggest waste of bandwidth (savour this blow by blow):
QVC (a shopping channel, if you need a stretchy fat-dissolving bra with integrated pressure washer )
QVC HD (See the stretchy fat-dissolving bra with integrated pressure washer in glorious 1080i)
QVC HD +1 (time shifted by an hour in case you'd missed out on that stretchy fat-dissolving bra with integrated pressure washer on regular QVC).
I don't want to live on this planet any more.
At what time would I ever use 'rm -rf /'
Addendum: see the first example here!
At what time would I ever use 'rm -rf /'
After accidentally hitting return partway through typing 'rm -rf /something/you/actually/wanted/to/delete'; running a shell script with 'rm -rf $MYPATH' where $MYPATH had got set to '/'; by installing malware and giving it the admin password or some other equally stupid screw up.
If you are omnipotent and infallible and never have, or never will, make a stupid screw-up like that (or run IT support in a perfect world where none of your lusers can pull rank and demand admin rights on their PCs) then all well and good. Otherwise, the consequences just got raised from restoring the hard drive to replacing the motherboard.
Of all the things you could run that you might expect to 'brick' your system surely 'rm -rf' as root would be the one.
No, you'd expect 'rm -rf /' to hose your linux installation, maybe your data too and require re-installation or restore from backup. That doesn't qualify as bricking.
"Bricking" means corrupting the firmware held in non-volatile memory on your device so it can't be revived without specialist reprogramming equipment - this usually only happens if you botch an attempt to re-flash the firmware.
The term has been watered down and abused as click-bait in the past, but this sounds like the real deal: the claim is that 'rm -rf /' can now permanently erase part of the firmware and make it non-trivial to restore your system. I guess YMMV depending on your motherboard's BIOS-flashing facilities.
I could believe it if it was a SpaceX press release: I get so many emails from PayPal saying "Dear Mr spamtrap49 your accounting was using for suspicious transaction, and has be suspended. Please clicking here to conform your detail" that its clear Elon Musk can't spell. Yet the emails from Amazon telling me that I might be interested in books similar to the one I bought for my mum's birthday 5 years ago all seemed to be written in perfect English...
That depends on what you consider to be the hard bit.
I think you'll find that the "hard bit" is putting a payload into orbit and, for extra points, not needing twice as much fuel as a disposable rocket (which is why SpaceX are trying to land on a barge in the middle of the sea rather than flying all the way back to the launchpad).
Otherwise you're just complaining that this was a feat performed with a blue rocket rather than a green one.
Actually more like comparing a silver, red and blue rocket with an orange one.
That would *take* entire planets worth of material.
Of course - but you don't have to transmute that material into scrith (a.k.a. unobtanium) to withstand the stresses in a rigid, non-orbiting, 1au shell, and if you're sentimentally attached to gravity you can easily spin parts of the individual satellites, whereas with a big sphere or ring you have to to plate it with neutronium, invent artificial gravity, or spin the whole shell up to ludicrous speed (ISTR when Larry Niven re-did the math for Ringworld Engineers it turned out that it would need a gas-giant's worth of hydrogen just to spin up). Plus, you can build them one by one over an aeon or two - the more you build, the more energy you have. Nobody is saying it has to capture every last photon...
Not saying its easy - just easier than a big solid shell...
This is not a case of profiling, no matter how much the Muslim Council of Britain tries, without actually saying so, that it was targeted at a Muslim.
I don't see anything in TFA to suggest that anybody is claiming it was anything to do with "profiling". Just that it was an over-reaction. Just in case this needs a UK-to-US translation: "terraced house" is British English for "townhouse" (but usually smaller). I'm not sure "terrorist house" makes sense - but it seems like a highly plausible Autocorrupt* or speech recognition goof for something like "terrised hosue".
Of course, we are relying on the clickbait media, so maybe it will emerge in a few days (after the kid has met the Queen and been given a scholarship to Eton) that he didn't really write an essay but just re-used bits from an old Radio Shack one but, on the face of it, this seems to be a clear cut case of teachers interpreting the law ad absurdium. Which, of course, will lead to a backlash and a "cry wolf" effect. Plus, essays don't explode, catch fire or electrocute people.
(*I recently sent my colleagues an email saying that I was "having problems sorting out the wife" - mark my words, one of these days, Autocorrect is going to bring about the Acropolis!)
If you're willing to believe in a civilization capable of building a Dyson sphere, how much more of a stretch is it to believe they could do it in a few centuries?
You're all wrong - the star is clearly orbited by a huge swarm of teapots. After all, we can't hope to understand the thinking of a race capable of building such a "Lipton Sphere" so you can't prove its not teapots.
I'm not sure I can envision a process that would digest entire planets worth of material and cast it into a shell at any pace.
PS: I thought the original Dyson Sphere concept was a huge cloud of satellites that eventually grew to capture most of the star's energy.
PPS: The satellites could still be teapot-shaped.
PPPS: The tea-cosies are blocking the infra-red. Nothing worse than cold tea.
Welcome to the good old USA where it's perfectly OK to fake people out of their money so long as you slither between the rules just right. It's called progress didn't you know ;)
Well, the UK has a more sensible system with an industry regulator who's usual sanction is to just ban the ad rather than enrich lawyers with huge settlements, and the criteria is whether it is likely to mislead the target audience. The ad for this app would get banned pretty quickly (provided someone complained) without the need for a lawsuit.
In the UK ads, energy drinks still cause biologically and aerodynamically unfeasible mutations, deodorants still cause you to be mobbed by attractive members of the opposite (invariably) sex and 50-quid-a-bottle wrinkle cream still (despite the research) outperforms cheap, generic moisturiser. However, the first two are usually played for laughs and rely on the "would not mislead" rule, while the wrinkle cream ads are always very carefully worded and cite some (highly unscientific and subjective) survey for which the results could presumably be produced on demand.
(I'm guessing that people who buy expensive wrinkle cream are good at convincing themselves that it works)
You let your brat play unchecked with a credit card-enabled tablet, you deserve every bill you get.
Two wrongs don't make a right. Just because a parent makes a misjudgement like this doesn't give anybody else the right to take advantage. The summary says that the kid didn't realise he was spending real money and I can easily believe that they'd confuse an otherwise trustworthy 7 year old.
"Free-to-pay" games aimed at children (or even naive adults) are a menace - particularly the ones with both an "in-game" currency and the ability to buy things with real money. The entire business model is based on getting a minority of people to spend more than they intended.
In this case - as with other high-profile cases where the sums involved are huge - Apple have done the right thing and refunded the money. We don't get to hear about the cases where the sum is a mere $50 or so - still more than a sensible person would have spent. Even where parents do the sensible thing and set the kid up with a modest limit and a warning that "when its gone its gone" some people must be earning an awful lot of money by teaching the kids a lesson.
Apart from anything else we get shit games that are designed to maximise income from IAP (and be frustrating to anybody not prepared to waste money) rather than provide good gameplay. Anybody here not want to go back to the days when you paid a fair price for a game and got the whole game?
Why has this not already been done?.
To quote Greg Egan: That's what bacteria would do if they had spaceships
The "Fermi Paradox" assumes that a race with that level of technology and the inclination to make long-term plans that won't come to fruition until the instigators had crumbled to dust would be stupid and short-sighted enough to set of an uncontrolled exponential growth (with the capacity to mutate and backfire on its creators). NB: its not the technology that's the issue (the human race would certainly be stupid enough) - its the maturity needed for the long-term view.
As far as we know FTL is impossible. If you can make generation ships, you can also build permanent space habitats and park them around nice stable stars. If you can compress a whole ecosystem to a seed, you could probably build custom ecosystems that we could not even recognise. If you just want to spread your DNA to the stars (out of vanity, I suppose) then all you need to do is send some carefully designed viruses/bacteria to a planet with the right sort of primordial soup - heck, we could turn out to be Fermi's missing aliens (AFAIK there's no compelling evidence for panspermia/exogenesis/whatever, but the Fermi paradox ain't exactly hard science either!)
They're just a way to make slower chips look better when they really aren't. If it gets the job done faster, what's the real issue?
Not every task needs huge computing power. If the Pi gets the job done fast enough while burning less power than the cooling fans in your P4 system, taking up a fraction of the space and only costing ~$60 (by the time you've added a case, PSU and SD card), what's your issue?
I've got an original Pi running DNS, DHCP for my home network, and a Pi2 hooked to my lounge TV as a media center frontend served by a PC in the spare room (I suspect the Pi chipset was made for set-top-box use - it can decode 1080p mp4 without breaking a sweat) - the Pi 1 struggled a bit with the i/o throughput but the Pi2 handles the necessary with ease. Dedicating a P4 to either of those tasks - or making your toy robot twice as big so it could take the weight of a P4 heatsink - would be ridiculous unless you also needed to supplement your central heating system.
Doomed to fail. The people who aren't deploying SSL are also the ones who can't install Git.
Give it a chance - its only just been released as beta. Since Its Open Source, packaged versions for all the major Linux distros will undoubtedly follow (there are already a couple). Also, people are missing the point that, apart from the client tool, there's a ton of infrastructure behind this that greatly simplifies the process of obtaining a certificate. There's now no technical excuse why, in a years time, the control panel for your web hosting service, or even your CMS, shouldn't sport a big friendly "Secure with Let's Encrypt" button (with an 'auto-renew' checkbox alongside).
Bear in mind that current free certificates from the likes of StartSSL expire after 1 year anyway - and are at least 4 times more hassle to obtain and install than Lets Encrypt is shaping up to be.
I understand that the target audience is admins, and that this is beta, but really?
Have you ever had to generate a certificate request, get it signed by a CA and install it in your web server? Its not rocket science but its certainly tedious with a dense jargon thicket to battle through.
./letsencrypt-auto certonly --webroot -w /var/www/example -d example.com -d www.example.com -w /var/www/thing -d thing.is -d m.thing.is
...is improvement beyond recognition.
Anyway, there's a lot of infrastructure behind that command line that should make it easy for the likes of CPanel, Plesk or maybe even Wordpress to wrap it in a nice point-and-drool dialog.
// Contrived, but this kind of thing can happen in duck-typed languages like Javascript
// if you're reading user input and forget explicit casts.
function duckTypingIsGood() {
return Math.random()<=0.06;
return 0;
}
var votes = '';
for ( var i=0; i<100; i++ ) {
if ( duckTypingIsGood() ) votes = votes + 1;
}
console.log("In a survey of 100 programmers, "+votes+" thought duck-typing was a good idea")
// Output: In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought duck-typing was a good idea
The key being that they have a standard hdmi along with the composite video. Also they have 4 standard USB plugs.
The Pi Zero was a limited edition mainly designed to be 'given away' stuck to a magazine cover. Hence the low-profile ports and lack of a header socket on the IO. If it goes into full production it will probably be targeted at robotics/control projects where the lack of bulk is a plus.
But there is no scrounging the strange little mini-hdmi. I have never seen one of those in my life or career.
UK Pi resellers are selling kits with mini-hdmi and mini-usb adapters, and a few other odds and ends, for £6. In any case, they're all widely used on phones
So I don't see this new Pi as something for the kid who has nothing, but ideal for people like me with money and giant parts' bins who are building IoT and robots.
Ding!!! Reality: if the "kid who has nothing" can't scrounge a 10-year-old PC from somewhere then lack of access to computing is the least of their problems. The people really buying these are the ones that want a cheap, disposable computer to tinker with or dedicate to lowly tasks (I have one Pi doing DNS/DHCP for my network and another as a 'set top box').
Surely, someone could sell a fully functional version including case, os-loaded sd card, hdmi, usb and wi-fi for ~$30 and still make money, right?
Sure - there are plenty of such bundles for the "full-size" Raspberry Pi (usually still as parts but we're talking 30 second assembly time here, unless you get one of those PiBow cases where it takes forever to peel the protective film off all of the slices...). Nobody has done it for the Pi Zero yet because its a one-off stunt to put a "computer" on a magazine cover, which they may or may not decide to put into full production. In any case, many of the applications for the Pi (especially the ultra-stripped-down Pi Zero) are for robotics, modelling etc. where they're going to be put in custom cases or - at the very least - you'll want to plug wires into them.
Despite lofty goals of teaching schoolkids to program, most of these are being bought by the sort of nerd who can already lay their hands on phone chargers, SD cards, USB hubs, HDMI cables etc. The basic Pi 2 case is about £6 and snaps together in seconds.
But it turns out the $5 Raspberry Pi Zero costs significantly more to operate than the Next Thing Co. C.H.I.P. [my bold]
Well, yes - if you add the cost of the mini-HDMI-to-HDMI dongle to the Pi and conveniently ignore the fact that the CHIP needs a $15 daughterboard for HDMI. I gave up on fuzzy composite video connections sometime in the 80s. The CHIPs main advantage seems to be bluetooth & wifi - but many applications of the Pi Zero won't need it: just load up the SD card on a PC or another Pi, plug it in and go. Its all swings and roundabouts, and which is best is going to depend on your application. If you actually want a general-purpose computer you'd probably do better to push the boat out on something like a Pi 2 model B.
The USP of all of these devices is that they are sufficiently cheap that (a) if you make something you want to keep, you just buy another one and (b) if, in your tinkering, you let the magic smoke out, there's no great drama.
Lets get real here, though, the Pi Zero is a single-run "special edition" mainly created for the publicity stunt of giving one away 'free' on a magazine cover and is already pretty much sold out (reference here) and the CHIP is only available by pledging to the kickstarter campaign (3rd FAQ here). While its quite likely that either or both of them will be popular enough to go into full production, who knows what the actual prices and specs will be?
there will always be something that someone has which someone else wants, but can't get on their own
Star Trek and Iain Banks' Culture books would be really boring if that wasn't the case :-) - both are mainly based on the adventures of the minority of society who were not content to sit at home and enjoy their free bread and circuses.
For as long as communities have existed, there has been evidence of bartering. Unless you have infinite resources...
Yet one of the "wonders" of modern society is that we have a "fiat" monetary system that has dropped any pretence of a link between the value of money and essential resources. In the past, people could have starved because a crop failure made food unaffordable. These days, its just as likely for the problem to be that nobody has grown any food because the markets have gone chaotic and dropped the price of food below the cost of production. At times in the recent past, farmers in the West are being paid not to produce food to create artificial scarcity. Oil-producing countries will deliberately reduce their output to prop up the oil price.
For many people, most of their salary goes, not on food, but on paying back the artificially-inflated price of the roof over your head (and much of the other money you spend goes to pay other people's wages so they can pay their rents and mortgages). The only reason housing costs so much is that the prices have been severed from 'what people are willing or able to pay' to 'how much phoney money banks are prepared to lend'.
The other area to look at is software, music and film: in the 21st century the cost of physical production and distribution has become trivial, the only significant, necessary, expense is the human talent - and that work is sufficiently enjoyable that people are prepared to do it for nothing. The open-source software scene is the closest we come to 'post-scarcity' economics, and it doesn't seem to be a total bust. The internet was largely created by government-funded science, education and military establishments (i.e. by people who had food, clothing and housing provided by society so they could work on interesting things) who gave away the software. Early websites were made by volunteers - capitalism's main contribution since then has been continual efforts add artificial scarcity to the internet by introducing proprietary standards and abusing the patent system. Music and film, again: the whole digital rights mess is caused by the old industries trying to create artificial scarcity - film and TV are being pushed 'upmarket' because the low end of the market are happy to watch their peers' cat videos on Youtube.
The problem is always how we could get from here to there, not whether "there" would work. If everybody is provided with food and a place to live so they don't need wages, all your resources are harvested by machines and your machines are made by other machines then it won't cost you anything to build the infrastructure to give everybody food and a place to live etc. Oops. serious bootstrap problem.
Plus, human nature - one problem with Socialism/Communism etc. is that, in the past, if the wealth had really been shared out evenly, it would have been spread rather thinly and the majority of people (at least in the 'first world') would have to put up with a simpler lifestyle, so huge numbers of people have an incentive to game the system and be a bit more equal. Post-scarcity needs to improve the life of the majority, and to provide plenty of opportunities for the remaining psychopaths to become starship captains, order people around and shoot Romulans or join Special Circumstances and go rogue on some primitive planet...
Of course, in the Culture it kind helped that humans were basically being kept as pets by all-powerful AIs, and in Star Trek every citizen of the Federation seemed to be such an absolute paragon of virtue that you wanted to slap them...
No, but they can make a baby a month for 9 consecutive months. Increase the number of women a little and you can have a baby a month indefinitely.
Yes, but that involves waiting 9 months for the first baby. Our competitor already has a baby, so we need a baby now and I'm a manager which entitles me to behave like a spoilt 2 year old so don't give me any of that "I know biology" bullshit and get me a baby by the end of next week or I'll fire you and give the job to my nephew who says that we can have a baby in 7 days if we use Agile Procreation techniques.
9 months later: still no baby, but sprint 0.53.2 did produce a shaved rat embryo in a blue romper suit.
More seriously, producing one baby a month is routine production, and production lines work well for that. Producing software is almost always design and development, which is much harder to scale (of course, there must be a lot of creationists in management because even when they grudgingly accept that it takes 9 months to produce a baby, they still seem to think that the design and development should only take 7 days).
It's called "Doctor Who." It's never been called Dr Who.
Hang on. If you looking carefully at the end credits for 'An Unearthly Child' (which is widely available on the interwebs) you'll see that - all the nerdy NOOO!!! he is called THE DOCTOR!!! notwithstanding - the character is actually credited as "Dr. Who".
If I'm found dead in a ditch with my head smashed in by a thermos flask (traces of Bovril detected) and fibres of imitation rabbit-fur under my nails (consistent with an anorak or parka) then we'll know that I should never have spoken of this...