Slashdot Mirror


User: amorsen

amorsen's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
4,590
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 4,590

  1. Re:How convenient! on Lepton Universality In Question, a Standard Model Assumption · · Score: 1

    I could not find the 109-150GeV range in the original article, but the Higgs that has been found already has a mass around 126GeV. It seems like an additional Higgs in that range should already have been found by the LHC.

  2. Re:Foolish on The Disappearing Universe · · Score: 1

    Whether math is a product of the physical world or exists independently is a topic for another time. Either way, math cannot stop you from doing anything, you can just pick appropriate axioms which allow you to do what you want. Physics is less forgiving.

    Admittedly, the acceleration required to get to the Milky Way centre and back in a day is somewhere beyond 100 billion g, and the power required is more than the output of the Sun, under the assumption that fuel does not have to be carried on the trip. It is a bit optimistic.

  3. Re:Foolish on The Disappearing Universe · · Score: 1

    60000ly/day, or 0.7ly/s. That is the speed you're measuring inside the spaceship of course. On Earth it will be difficult to measure that you are not actually going at lightspeed.

    If you only care about your own reference frame you can pretty much throw relativity out the window, everything works the way it would in Newtonian physics.

  4. Re:Foolish on The Disappearing Universe · · Score: 1

    There are no limits to how fast you can travel. Physics allows you to go to the centre of the Milky Way and back in a day (well, as long as you avoid the black hole that is probably there). Of course the Earth will be somewhat older when you return, but for you only a day has passed.

  5. 4G hotspot with batteries on Ask Slashdot: Do 4G World Phones Exist? · · Score: 1

    Yes it sucks to lug two devices around. Alternatively, use a cheap 4G phone as the 4G hotspot.

    Alas, electronics have not yet advanced to the point where it is reasonable to have one phone with support for all combinations of bands and technologies.

  6. Re:I'm so excited on Huawei Successfully Tests New 802.11ax WiFi Standard At 10.53Gbps · · Score: 1

    I have not claimed it is difficult. You did not correct my reading.

  7. Re:Huh? on Huawei Successfully Tests New 802.11ax WiFi Standard At 10.53Gbps · · Score: 5, Informative

    Nothing limits you to one bit-per-second per baud. 9600 bps modems were, IIRC, 2400 baud with 4 bits per Hz. (Higher than that it got a bit shady because they started optimizing for being encoded in a digital phone line).

    VDSL2 goes up to 32768-QAM, which is 15 bits per symbol. I do not know whether any actual phone lines exist with a sufficient signal-to-noise-ratio to make that coding useful.

  8. Re:I'm so excited on Huawei Successfully Tests New 802.11ax WiFi Standard At 10.53Gbps · · Score: 1

    So you know that Huawei devices are back-doored because they are knock-offs of back-doored devices from Western manufacturers?

    I must have read that wrong somehow.

  9. Re:Avoided moon impact as well on ISEE-3 Satellite Is Back Under Control · · Score: 1

    I would like to congratulate the ISEE-3 team on helping avoid a man-made impact with our moon.

    I am glad that the satellite was saved. However, why is it good to avoid man-made impacts with our moon?

  10. Re:Doctorow on 'Curiosity' Lead Engineer Suggests Printing Humans On Other Planets · · Score: 2

    The Star Trek transporters are clearly murder factories. However, a proper quantum state teleporter would not allow duplication, and it is possible that the consciousness would travel too. Then again, it might not, and there is no way to tell.

  11. Re:Yeah, no... on 'Curiosity' Lead Engineer Suggests Printing Humans On Other Planets · · Score: 1

    What good does it do me that there is a copy of me with my memories on a different planet? If my consciousness does not go to the copy (and how would it?), it is rather pointless as well as creepy.

  12. Re:Compact Disc error correction on US Wireless Carriers Shifting To Voice Over LTE · · Score: 1

    The point you miss is that humans also won't notice the loss of a 20 or 40 milliseconds of data as long as the receiving end does something reasonable (e.g. replicating last received packet).

    This is not true. Packet loss of less than 1% is detectable by actual customers with typical VoIP phones and the Alaw (or ulaw) codecs. It would be very handy to handle links with 0.3% packet loss, but that requires switching to codecs with built-in PLC, and transcoding is expensive.

  13. Re:Real-world conditions on Official MPG Figures Unrealistic, Says UK Auto Magazine · · Score: 1

    In several markets you can buy petrol which is supposed to reduce losses in the engine. It has the same octane rating as regular petrol.

    Whether it actually works I do not know. I like that fuel is a commodity, I resent the recent attempts at changing that. I wonder if I will be able to go to charging stations with special long-running electrons in ten years...

  14. Re:Which is why sometimes small engines ... on Official MPG Figures Unrealistic, Says UK Auto Magazine · · Score: 1

    It really isn't that hard to get very close to the ideal fuel consumption figures, you just have to relearn how to drive instead of going full-throttle/full-brake all the time.

    You are driving a car with non-faked figures. Of course you can get close to the official figures.

    Relearning does not help you with most modern cars. They cannot physically achieve the numbers listed.

  15. Re:Raise the Price on Fiat Chrysler CEO: Please Don't Buy Our Electric Car · · Score: 1

    I don't want your car ruining my air.

  16. Re:Will it count against the data? on US Wireless Carriers Shifting To Voice Over LTE · · Score: 1

    4500 minutes at 3G quality is on the order of 500MB. Surely upping your bandwidth cap by 500MB is insignificant when you pay for 4500 minutes.

  17. Re:Compact Disc error correction on US Wireless Carriers Shifting To Voice Over LTE · · Score: 1

    Error correction does not introduce anything like 400ms latency. 20ms lets you conceal the loss of one packet perfectly. 40ms allows you to lose two in a row. No humans will be able to detect 40ms latency.

  18. Re:ISDN flashback on US Wireless Carriers Shifting To Voice Over LTE · · Score: 1

    Modern wide-band codecs use on the order of 50kbps for really high quality voice. If you use 50kbps continuously, you have added 16GB to your data cap each month (or 32GB is you transfer full duplex). Useful perhaps, but your phone would be constantly busy and battery life would suck. What are you going to transfer at 6kBps per second anyway?

  19. Re:Compact Disc error correction on US Wireless Carriers Shifting To Voice Over LTE · · Score: 1

    100 ms latency is perfectly fine for voice. VoIP from Europe to China with 400ms is surprisingly usable, most users do not notice the walkie-talkie effect. Anyway, it is trivial to do error correction for VoIP with far less than 100ms latency. The easiest solution is to include a digest of the previous packet in the following packet -- if the previous packet arrives later than the following packet or not at all, use the lower-quality data in the following packet. Spread the information across multiple packets and you will be able to handle multiple packet drops of course.

    I wish Asterisk would come with a simple-stupid PLC codec mode where it simply appended the previous packet contents in their entirety to the following packet. It would double bandwidth, but packets-per-second would be unchanged, and 128kbps is nothing on most modern lines. The added 20ms latency would be unnoticeable.

  20. Re:Will it count against the data? on US Wireless Carriers Shifting To Voice Over LTE · · Score: 1

    Voice traffic is not worth measuring. It just does not take up bandwidth at all.

  21. Re:I support metering, with caveats on Google Fiber: No Charge For Peering, No Fast Lanes · · Score: 1

    Fair enough. I have nothing further to add to this discussion then.

  22. Re:I support metering, with caveats on Google Fiber: No Charge For Peering, No Fast Lanes · · Score: 1

    I do not care for notifications. It is simply something that I do not want to worry about, and I will pay to not have to worry about it. ISPs are free to take my money or not, but it is there for the taking.

    "Excess usage" only makes sense if there is a scarcity. Internet capacity is enormous. I know how to keep my connection free from abuse and I support holding people accountable for allowing harmful traffic.

    Wasting water harms other people. That is an entirely different situation.

  23. Re:One person a bottleneck doesn't create... on Google Fiber: No Charge For Peering, No Fast Lanes · · Score: 1

    That is sophistry. There is no way for the packets to get into Comcast. They are dropping the traffic.

    Just like Spain is doing to people from Gibraltar trying to enter Spain. Luckily people just get turned back in that case, rather than dropped.

  24. Re:One person a bottleneck doesn't create... on Google Fiber: No Charge For Peering, No Fast Lanes · · Score: 1

    No provider has 1Tbps of bandwidth to other providers. No one puts in upstream capacity of terabit for a few thousand customers. They are lucky to get 10Gbps, and they will never fill that. Yes, those customers can talk uncongested between each other, but Netflix is not served by the other customers.

    And 1Pbps? That is 10,000 100Gbps ports. No, you cannot buy a petabit router. You can perhaps optically switch 10,000 colours, but you cannot actually look at the packets inside the colours.

  25. Re:a ballsy prediction. 256k of RAM? on Google Fiber: No Charge For Peering, No Fast Lanes · · Score: 2

    Fibre optic technology will change in 50 years. However, I stand by my prediction that single mode fibre will be useful for the home connections of most people in 50 years. I am very certain of that.

    High end connections will probably be better types of fibre or something else entirely, but tens of terabit really ought to be enough for a lot of people -- and the Shannon limit of single mode fibre is somewhere on the order of 1Pbps.