This near-automatic re-posting of Ethan's blog postings is becoming annoying. For sure, it popularizes science and may hence be argued to be stuff that matters. It can, however, certainly be proved to not be news for nerds.
...after thousands of years of getting out of the trees, getting away from the savanna, getting out of the caves, civlization, tool-making, science and culture ? Disappointing, to say the least.
... if you raise the operating temperature a couple of hundred Kelvin, then quantum docoherence and environmental scattering are going to play a role, meaning that information held in any one of the cells may simply vanish by "leaking" into a coupled environment. A little bit of thermal background radiation is enough to set such processes into motion.
is not scientific news, nor does the link point to any academic results. "Ask Ethan" is simply a popular-scientific discussion of results already known. So no News for Nerds, and hardly any Stuff that Matters, IMHO.
Today, in today's navies and naval thinking, "frigate" and "destroyer" are different answers upon the question: "We can build a warship of a certain size, as we have the resources to do that. Now how are we going to use that hull ?" If the answer is "frigate"; then you dedicate a large portion of that hull to propulsion systems and fuel. What space remains is for weapons systems, electronics, and crew quarters. What you get: a relatively fast, maybe very fast, ship - with a limited choice of weapons systems. This is the choice the Dutch Royal Navy has been making for decades: they want to possess the ability to arrive on the spot soon, and to act far away from home ( e.g. in order to fulfill the Dutch NATO-assigned duty of participating in keeping the North Atlantic trade routes free and open ).
If the answer is "we want to deploy as much firepower as possible from that hull", then a destroyer is what you get. You have less space for propulsion systems and fuel, hence you can be on the spot less soon and operate not so far away from home - but each and every ship present makes a relatively large impact upon the scene. This is the current choice of the German Navy, which has to patrol the East and North Seas, relatively close to naval bases.
is a Seiko with solar cells as the dial background. The manual explicitly tells the owner to expose it, once every half year. to direct sunlight for about 8 hours. Which I didn't. The watch runs fine, within very small deviations from "official" time.
If my dead body falls in a place where the watch can receive some light from the sun, it will probably run on for a century or so, before some of its components ( capacitor ? ) fails in such a way as to keep the entire watch from working.
The only annoyance: it will display an entirely wrong date, as after each non-31-day-month the date needs to be adjusted manually.
I am a ( small ) contributor to the future IEEE 1622 standard. We chose not to deal with the security problem, and to tackle only the electronic interchange format. Security, in electronic voting, seems too hard a problem to solve right now.
In summer, a typical worker bee lives for about 6 weeks. 8 weeks, maybe 10, if she has one of the rare posts of guardians at the bee colony's entry, or is one of the even fewer bees that feed the queen. Bees literally work themselves to death. The replenishment rate is, during summer, 100%; this is taken care of by the queen. A typical bee colony has between 10,000 and 40,000 bees in high summer, then goes into winter with about 1,000 bees, clumped around the queen to keep her warm, and comes out of winter with 400 to 600 bees. We are talking about apis mellifera carnica here, the so-called Italian bee, which is the variety most commonly used by beekeepers.
An entire colony dying in spring or early summer is, normally, an extremely rare event, and indicates either an epidemy, or severe poisoning. Varroa mites are a known cause, but are a largely contained phenomenon now, at least in professional bee-keeping circles. What remains, is... poisoning. Neonicotinoids or something else.
This is the reverse of progress because Uber has the potential to push traditional taxis out of the market. It will then be impossible to wave down a cab, or to jump into a waiting one. You'll need an app for getting a taxi - and you'll be dependent upon one single commercial venture, operating worldwide. That is not progress. That is an ingredient for sheer misery.
Before Uber: person needs a ride. So they get a car that's available. It has "Taxi" written on it, and stands in line waiting at the kerb, or can be waved down. Person gets a ride, and pays in cash.
With Uber: person needs a ride. So they get a car that's available. It can be found by an app - without the app you're helpless. Person gets a ride, and pays in cash.
Am I missing something here, or is this ssergorp, the reverse of progress ?
I said nothing about coming doomsday. Further down on this page, I am explicitly stating as much, and am proposing a solution. For a problem that, yes, we do have.
Develop and industrialize at large scale a clean way ( solar ! ) to produce massive amounts of hydrogen, and a safe way to store it. Convert from fossil fuels to hydrogen. Now. Convert from coal to solar for electrical power generation, with hydrogen buffers and arrays of fuel cells as storage and back-up. Now. I am not a "help, the world is going to end" - screamer. I am simply stating the obvious.
I develop on a Lenovo laptop, which ( only ) has an SSD. Anytime I get something done I consider of "historic importance" ( which may simply be simply be a file added to a project, a new method added to a class, an enum having gotten a new value, an interface's signature changed ) I do a commit to version control, with a relevant comment. Version control lives on a server with spinning disks ( RAID-5 ). That server "backs up" to another server - with spinning disks - by rsync, once per hour. THAT server gets backed up once a week.
The build server uses two SSDs in RAID-0, and gets its input from the version control server.
So my single point of failure is the VC server's RAID controller.... Yes, it would be better to have that RAID-5 array mirrored, by RAID-1. to another RAID-5 array. It would take an entirely new server to realize that, sadly enough. I still have to come up with a better idea, though. Not being dependent, in any way, on SSDs for business continuity is already an achievement in and by itself. Or so I believe.
It boils down to
1) not being dependent upon SSDs
2)Moving dependency upon SSDs away to dependency upon other hardware, namely RAID controllers....
No, it isn't. I like flat- or small-chested women. The only US-American girlfriend I ever had, was as flat-chested as Kansas' plains, and she was smokin' hot. Morale of this tale: flat is beautiful; the universe being flat, it is beautiful.
You seem to be the victim of a rather common confusion. Only within spacetime, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. But there is no known law of nature prohibiting the expansion of spacetime itself at any imaginable speed. To such expansions of spacetime, the speed of light is meaningless. This is even the basic principle behind the Alcubierre Drive.
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This near-automatic re-posting of Ethan's blog postings is becoming annoying. For sure, it popularizes science and may hence be argued to be stuff that matters. It can, however, certainly be proved to not be news for nerds.
...after thousands of years of getting out of the trees, getting away from the savanna, getting out of the caves, civlization, tool-making, science and culture ? Disappointing, to say the least.
One of both in each room. Without them, it's not a home.
... if you raise the operating temperature a couple of hundred Kelvin, then quantum docoherence and environmental scattering are going to play a role, meaning that information held in any one of the cells may simply vanish by "leaking" into a coupled environment. A little bit of thermal background radiation is enough to set such processes into motion.
is not scientific news, nor does the link point to any academic results. "Ask Ethan" is simply a popular-scientific discussion of results already known. So no News for Nerds, and hardly any Stuff that Matters, IMHO.
in search of a problem. Seriously - which problem does this sort of stuff solve ??
...that will be the first useful thing done by Arabs-as-a-collective ever since the end of the Middle Ages.
If the answer is "we want to deploy as much firepower as possible from that hull", then a destroyer is what you get. You have less space for propulsion systems and fuel, hence you can be on the spot less soon and operate not so far away from home - but each and every ship present makes a relatively large impact upon the scene. This is the current choice of the German Navy, which has to patrol the East and North Seas, relatively close to naval bases.
If my dead body falls in a place where the watch can receive some light from the sun, it will probably run on for a century or so, before some of its components ( capacitor ? ) fails in such a way as to keep the entire watch from working.
The only annoyance: it will display an entirely wrong date, as after each non-31-day-month the date needs to be adjusted manually.
We are always getting 70-80% voter turnout in where vote-by-mail is being used now for a decade.
Could you elaborate on that ? Where exactly is vote-by-mail being used ? Just curious.
I am a ( small ) contributor to the future IEEE 1622 standard. We chose not to deal with the security problem, and to tackle only the electronic interchange format. Security, in electronic voting, seems too hard a problem to solve right now.
In summer, a typical worker bee lives for about 6 weeks. 8 weeks, maybe 10, if she has one of the rare posts of guardians at the bee colony's entry, or is one of the even fewer bees that feed the queen. Bees literally work themselves to death. The replenishment rate is, during summer, 100%; this is taken care of by the queen. A typical bee colony has between 10,000 and 40,000 bees in high summer, then goes into winter with about 1,000 bees, clumped around the queen to keep her warm, and comes out of winter with 400 to 600 bees. We are talking about apis mellifera carnica here, the so-called Italian bee, which is the variety most commonly used by beekeepers.
An entire colony dying in spring or early summer is, normally, an extremely rare event, and indicates either an epidemy, or severe poisoning. Varroa mites are a known cause, but are a largely contained phenomenon now, at least in professional bee-keeping circles. What remains, is ... poisoning. Neonicotinoids or something else.
This is the reverse of progress because Uber has the potential to push traditional taxis out of the market. It will then be impossible to wave down a cab, or to jump into a waiting one. You'll need an app for getting a taxi - and you'll be dependent upon one single commercial venture, operating worldwide. That is not progress. That is an ingredient for sheer misery.
With Uber: person needs a ride. So they get a car that's available. It can be found by an app - without the app you're helpless. Person gets a ride, and pays in cash.
Am I missing something here, or is this ssergorp, the reverse of progress ?
Where does the shit go ? Do they have a place for two more months' worth of crap ? I mean - seriously...
Does AOL still exist ?? WTF ?
There sure are. Just read the /. comments on anything climate-related. You ain't gonna believe your eyes.
Ceci n'est pas un password.
I said nothing about coming doomsday. Further down on this page, I am explicitly stating as much, and am proposing a solution. For a problem that, yes, we do have.
Develop and industrialize at large scale a clean way ( solar ! ) to produce massive amounts of hydrogen, and a safe way to store it. Convert from fossil fuels to hydrogen. Now. Convert from coal to solar for electrical power generation, with hydrogen buffers and arrays of fuel cells as storage and back-up. Now. I am not a "help, the world is going to end" - screamer. I am simply stating the obvious.
Of course, we're not going to do anything about the problem. Of course not.
The build server uses two SSDs in RAID-0, and gets its input from the version control server.
So my single point of failure is the VC server's RAID controller.... Yes, it would be better to have that RAID-5 array mirrored, by RAID-1. to another RAID-5 array. It would take an entirely new server to realize that, sadly enough. I still have to come up with a better idea, though. Not being dependent, in any way, on SSDs for business continuity is already an achievement in and by itself. Or so I believe.
It boils down to
1) not being dependent upon SSDs
2)Moving dependency upon SSDs away to dependency upon other hardware, namely RAID controllers....
No, it isn't. I like flat- or small-chested women. The only US-American girlfriend I ever had, was as flat-chested as Kansas' plains, and she was smokin' hot. Morale of this tale: flat is beautiful; the universe being flat, it is beautiful.
You seem to be the victim of a rather common confusion. Only within spacetime, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. But there is no known law of nature prohibiting the expansion of spacetime itself at any imaginable speed. To such expansions of spacetime, the speed of light is meaningless. This is even the basic principle behind the Alcubierre Drive.
Let us build dykes in the void outside the universe, and polder in some more vacuum !