Exchanges are a weak point, I'll grant you. They are all new companies who have not built up much trust. But they are a necessary evil at present. At some time the bitcoin economy will grow to the point that anyone with bitcoins can use them to purchase products, and anyone who needs them can get paid for services with them, and the exchanges importance will shrink. And with bitcoin's deflationary tendency, those who have them will have an incentive to keep them in bitcoin, and not sell to a fiat. Bitcoin itself: Its future is fixed by the whim of the internet, and its wish for a open e-cash. Even if bitcoin itself has a limited life, I don't see cryto-currencies ever disappearing, and I do see any replacement growing out of the bitcoin ecosystem, not from outside it.
Perfectly reasonable. After all, you can get USD12 for a bitcoin at a number of places today. Although not all funds lost were in bitcoins, however, some were in fiat balances in their accounts; and forcing any loosing defendants to buy bitcoins to pay plaintiffs who might prefer USD anyway seems silly to me.
And ice floats, so no frozen deep-water fish. And we desperately need to make the oceans a little cooler - and get the CO2 out of them.
Don't get me wrong: the only good solution is to stop pouring CO2 into the air. But, given that humanity is too dumb to do that, this seems like the nearest thing to a workable solution I have heard. Do enough of it, and we might get ourselves some oil, but we might have to wait until the 20,000th century.
In many places of the world, nutrient-rich deep-ocean water rising to the surface causes natural algal blooms. Algae eating fish like sardines flock to them and breed up in huge numbers, and form the basis for many of the world's fisheries. Indeed, practically all fish either eat algae, or eat marine life that eats algae. So fertilising the oceans is just as likely to produce schools of fish and new rich fisheries to harvest as fish kills. In reality, it would probably cause both: overpopulation of fish that then die as food or oxygen dries up. But that is part of the solution: Algae feeding a massive bloom that collapses, and the bodies of all that marine life gets all the way to the bottom because they are not consumed by other life, as the water is oxygen-deprived.
Even if you include Pluto among the detritus in Neptune's orbit, it still doesn't add up to anything significant. Take a look at the sugestion of a 'planitary descriminator', a ratio of mass of the object and the mass or other things in it's orbit, and, depending on which one, other factors like orbital radius. Regardless of which formula you choose, The planets are all huge numbers, and dwarf planets less than one. The gap is huge. Many even rank Pluto below the asteroids. And you could argue that it is Neptune's gravity that is holding Pluto in it's 3:2 stable orbit, and that in that manner Neptune has Pluto 'captured'; although that argument ignores the fact that most of the major planets orbits have settled into integer ratios as well.
If, in 1930, we knew that Pluto was that small, and there was that many other kuiper belt objects out there, we would never have named a 9th planet. Just like we would never have named the first asteroids the 9th, 10th and 11th planets if we knew the situation when we found them.
But we miscalculated Pluto's mass based on a theory that was found to be based on incorrect math, and didn't know that Kuiper belt existed, so made a mistake. Opps, our bad, fixed now.
You could argue that Sun-Jupiter is some kind of Binary, based on that definition. You need something that enforces a near-equal mass - and by near-equal, maybe order of magnitude mass. Whether you write that as it, or abstract it - like having the barycentre greater that ?.2*orbital radii(or semi-major axis) from either planet.
The truth is, we don't have any closely-studyable examples of something we would really describe as a binary planet. Some asteroids are in binary systems, I think, but nothing substantial. When we are clear that we have a binary planet somewhere - or better still, several examples, so we know what is typical - we can make that the 'reference specimen', to borrow from biology. Until then, happity guessing.
Getting reports on explosions in marketplaces (Side note: It's horrible how blase we are about such things!) isn't the thing we will be missing. It's the hidden stories that take time to get at. A TV station can put a report on a blast together from social media sources and footage bought from local media cheaply. So they always will - it bleeds, it leads. But telling you the story on why it is happening, how your government is involved, and how it is going to affect you requires reporters on the ground, who have worked for years understanding the culture and cultivating relationships that allow them to get the information. Expensive stuff. That is going to apply to local stuff too. There are reports that can't be delivered by a part-time blogger. If cash strapped media has no more resources than them, what happens? How do we find out about this century's Watergates? In 'free' countries, you have independent state-funded media outlets to take up the slack - ABC in Australia, BBC in UK, and other examples in other countries. Most of them doing a decent job. But is that something to rely on? You are always going to be told about terrorists in Syria. What you are not going to get is the important stories. And knowledge if the important stories has been an important part of society. And, no, I don't have a solution to offer.
Considering the current state of search, I don't want regulation getting in Google's way of cleaning the results from agregators and other 'search' services. If I am searching for something, I do not want any results that point me to another search engine! So all other search sites should be dropped from Google's results as irrelevant. Unless the search query is "search engine". Have you tried to use Google to get details about a.dll you didn't recognise? You find yourself wading through pages of "registry checkers" and other near-malware. Same thing if you are doing the standard trick of "type the error message into Google". All sorts of squatters have gamed the system to push their useless sites to the top. You also get dozens of results from lowlifes that scrape mailing lists and display parts of the conversations surrounded by whatever ads pay the most.
All of this needs constant attention from Google (or any other legitimate search engine) to squash these illegitimate 'business models'. And the do not need regulation preventing them.
The problem with the duelling experts has been nicely illustrated in this case: One expert calmly and clearly stating the truth, and another being wildly misleading. Duelling experts only decides which expert is the best speaker. In this case, the Oracle expert couldn't keep the truth out of his testimony, allowing the jury to discern that who was full of it.
Sort of: It was pretty much taken as a given at the start of the case. The case was about whether Connectix's copying of Sony code in order to determine that the ABI was was fair use. No body tried to argue that there was any copyright issue in using the ABI itself.
Google has already made all the changes they need to: Delete the 9 files that were never used anyway, and rewrite rangecheck. It would have taken them all afternoon, if they took a long coffee break and left early.
People don't seem to follow that this means there will be NO prosecution for wardriving and unauthorized data mining. It beggars belief that anyone on/. doesn't get how serious that is, especially for a company in the business of profiling users.
What? How could intercepting data transmitted into a public space in the clear be liable to prosecution? And how could that be 'unauthorized data mining'? I have metal in my car keys, and they intercept that data all the time. Mind you, all it does with it is convert it into a couple of microjoules of heat, but my notebook's and phone's wifi hardware goes further. I 'get' exactly how serious it is. I have no idea why it ever became the subject for a single slashdot article.
I mean, what is the point? They were investigating using WIFI networks as a way of providing location services for devices without GPS, so they collected data, either in a "just slurp the lot and we'll analyse it later", or a "keep the raw data, we might find it useful" manner. The only question is why, when they realised it contained private information, they didn't just delete it. Instead, they announced that they had inadvertently intercepted private data. Then all these government agencies started to make a fuss, and we all got something to natter about for a couple of years. Well, that's a small positive, I guess. So, I'm happy that someone has not bothered to investigate this nothing, again. Let's hope the rest of the someones make the same decision.
That is just (not-so-)simple math. You can perfectly represent any signal with a frequency less than half of your sampling frequency. Audiophiles don't like this, but it doesn't change the fact. The greatest reason for confusion is the 'stepped waveform' graphic often used to explain sampling, which is badly misleading.
40Hz is ample. Anything more is overkill. All you get from 96kHz sampling is ultrasonics that need to be filtered out to prevent distortion from your speakers.
The main problem with UEFI is that it is so complex and bug-ridden that the only use for it is going to be preventing the removal of malware. If ever there was a system that needed to be "so simple there are obviously no errors" it is this one, but instead we have an implementation that is larger than the Linux megalithic kernel. Oh, and the future is not going to be X86, and Microsoft blatantly attempting to lock out all other OSes on other hardware.
I'm just trying to work out what a kw per hour might be. A Watt being a Joule per second, so a 1000 watts per second per 3600 seconds-hold on, I need a price of paper - Ah!.28 joules/s/s. Hmmm. That must be... The rate at which the solar cells, decay, accelerates! Yes! So, if they started out at 550 odd square meters, -but is that per cell, per panel, of for the whole array? let's just say it's a god thing they finished when they did!
Google has never denied that that code was there. It was testing code, not code that shipped as part of Android. Once they found out, when Oracle told them it was there, they removed it. That's how the system is supposed to work, apart from the lawsuit and judges part. They have agreed to it, and have included it in the 'facts already agreed' lists for this case. Get it out of the way quickly, give it all the importance it deserves. PAP,HTSH.
No, this is not about patents. The arguments on patents come later. The patent arguments, when they start, have been trimmed down to one patent that has been ruled invalid, but the time period to appeal that rejection has not yet expired; and another that has had its scope trimmed back, which, together with some admissions made by Oracle, Google argues, clears Android of infringement.
At the moment, this is only about copyrights. Oracle claims that, when they Sun released documentation about the APIs used in Java, the copyright on them prevents anyone else making a clean-room alternate implementation of them. Oh, and that GPLing it all, congratulating Google for implementing those APIs, and publicly assisting Harmony and GNU Classpath( both alternate clean-room implementations ) doesn't affect that at all. The rest of us are just shaking our heads and wondering if they will ever reveal the directions to the universe where this might be the case.
And so it is that we see the moral of the story: Make sure all your patent are for wiggling your fingers when in contact with a screen displaying a picture, or for a shape first popularised in 300 BC. Actually do expensive research and get patents that mean something, and they will label them "standards essential" and prosecute you when the wiggly fingers and rounded corners bunch try to shut you down.
The Australian courts have answered this many times: It does not. Fine print does not even trump customers logical expectations.
The only thing that may save Apple is that the boxes have quite a large sticker on the back that states that the 4G capability is not compatible with any Australian network. Assuming that Apple has not advertised 4G in any Australian-targeted advertising, they should be OK.
If they have, then fines and forced offers of refunds will be in their future.
Slashdot Mirror
Exchanges are a weak point, I'll grant you. They are all new companies who have not built up much trust. But they are a necessary evil at present. At some time the bitcoin economy will grow to the point that anyone with bitcoins can use them to purchase products, and anyone who needs them can get paid for services with them, and the exchanges importance will shrink. And with bitcoin's deflationary tendency, those who have them will have an incentive to keep them in bitcoin, and not sell to a fiat.
Bitcoin itself: Its future is fixed by the whim of the internet, and its wish for a open e-cash. Even if bitcoin itself has a limited life, I don't see cryto-currencies ever disappearing, and I do see any replacement growing out of the bitcoin ecosystem, not from outside it.
Perfectly reasonable. After all, you can get USD12 for a bitcoin at a number of places today. Although not all funds lost were in bitcoins, however, some were in fiat balances in their accounts; and forcing any loosing defendants to buy bitcoins to pay plaintiffs who might prefer USD anyway seems silly to me.
Nemo is a shallow water fish.
And ice floats, so no frozen deep-water fish. And we desperately need to make the oceans a little cooler - and get the CO2 out of them.
Don't get me wrong: the only good solution is to stop pouring CO2 into the air. But, given that humanity is too dumb to do that, this seems like the nearest thing to a workable solution I have heard. Do enough of it, and we might get ourselves some oil, but we might have to wait until the 20,000th century.
See those mountains of coal that get shovelled into our power stations every day? Can you use that much carbon nanotubes and graphine?
In many places of the world, nutrient-rich deep-ocean water rising to the surface causes natural algal blooms. Algae eating fish like sardines flock to them and breed up in huge numbers, and form the basis for many of the world's fisheries.
Indeed, practically all fish either eat algae, or eat marine life that eats algae.
So fertilising the oceans is just as likely to produce schools of fish and new rich fisheries to harvest as fish kills. In reality, it would probably cause both: overpopulation of fish that then die as food or oxygen dries up. But that is part of the solution: Algae feeding a massive bloom that collapses, and the bodies of all that marine life gets all the way to the bottom because they are not consumed by other life, as the water is oxygen-deprived.
Even if you include Pluto among the detritus in Neptune's orbit, it still doesn't add up to anything significant. Take a look at the sugestion of a 'planitary descriminator', a ratio of mass of the object and the mass or other things in it's orbit, and, depending on which one, other factors like orbital radius. Regardless of which formula you choose, The planets are all huge numbers, and dwarf planets less than one. The gap is huge. Many even rank Pluto below the asteroids.
And you could argue that it is Neptune's gravity that is holding Pluto in it's 3:2 stable orbit, and that in that manner Neptune has Pluto 'captured'; although that argument ignores the fact that most of the major planets orbits have settled into integer ratios as well.
Seems Useless Now?
If, in 1930, we knew that Pluto was that small, and there was that many other kuiper belt objects out there, we would never have named a 9th planet. Just like we would never have named the first asteroids the 9th, 10th and 11th planets if we knew the situation when we found them.
But we miscalculated Pluto's mass based on a theory that was found to be based on incorrect math, and didn't know that Kuiper belt existed, so made a mistake. Opps, our bad, fixed now.
You could argue that Sun-Jupiter is some kind of Binary, based on that definition. You need something that enforces a near-equal mass - and by near-equal, maybe order of magnitude mass. Whether you write that as it, or abstract it - like having the barycentre greater that ?.2*orbital radii(or semi-major axis) from either planet.
The truth is, we don't have any closely-studyable examples of something we would really describe as a binary planet. Some asteroids are in binary systems, I think, but nothing substantial. When we are clear that we have a binary planet somewhere - or better still, several examples, so we know what is typical - we can make that the 'reference specimen', to borrow from biology. Until then, happity guessing.
Read: 424 of 9000 were interested enough in the 'controversy' that they felt the need to be present.
That Ceres, Makemake, Pluto, Charon et an-awful-lot-of al are not planets is so obvious that I'm not surprised hardly anyone bothered.
Getting reports on explosions in marketplaces (Side note: It's horrible how blase we are about such things!) isn't the thing we will be missing. It's the hidden stories that take time to get at. A TV station can put a report on a blast together from social media sources and footage bought from local media cheaply. So they always will - it bleeds, it leads.
But telling you the story on why it is happening, how your government is involved, and how it is going to affect you requires reporters on the ground, who have worked for years understanding the culture and cultivating relationships that allow them to get the information. Expensive stuff.
That is going to apply to local stuff too. There are reports that can't be delivered by a part-time blogger. If cash strapped media has no more resources than them, what happens? How do we find out about this century's Watergates?
In 'free' countries, you have independent state-funded media outlets to take up the slack - ABC in Australia, BBC in UK, and other examples in other countries. Most of them doing a decent job. But is that something to rely on?
You are always going to be told about terrorists in Syria. What you are not going to get is the important stories. And knowledge if the important stories has been an important part of society. And, no, I don't have a solution to offer.
Considering the current state of search, I don't want regulation getting in Google's way of cleaning the results from agregators and other 'search' services. If I am searching for something, I do not want any results that point me to another search engine! .dll you didn't recognise? You find yourself wading through pages of "registry checkers" and other near-malware. Same thing if you are doing the standard trick of "type the error message into Google". All sorts of squatters have gamed the system to push their useless sites to the top. You also get dozens of results from lowlifes that scrape mailing lists and display parts of the conversations surrounded by whatever ads pay the most.
So all other search sites should be dropped from Google's results as irrelevant. Unless the search query is "search engine".
Have you tried to use Google to get details about a
All of this needs constant attention from Google (or any other legitimate search engine) to squash these illegitimate 'business models'. And the do not need regulation preventing them.
The problem with the duelling experts has been nicely illustrated in this case: One expert calmly and clearly stating the truth, and another being wildly misleading. Duelling experts only decides which expert is the best speaker. In this case, the Oracle expert couldn't keep the truth out of his testimony, allowing the jury to discern that who was full of it.
Sort of: It was pretty much taken as a given at the start of the case. The case was about whether Connectix's copying of Sony code in order to determine that the ABI was was fair use. No body tried to argue that there was any copyright issue in using the ABI itself.
Google has already made all the changes they need to: Delete the 9 files that were never used anyway, and rewrite rangecheck. It would have taken them all afternoon, if they took a long coffee break and left early.
People don't seem to follow that this means there will be NO prosecution for wardriving and unauthorized data mining. It beggars belief that anyone on /. doesn't get how serious that is, especially for a company in the business of profiling users.
What? How could intercepting data transmitted into a public space in the clear be liable to prosecution? And how could that be 'unauthorized data mining'? I have metal in my car keys, and they intercept that data all the time. Mind you, all it does with it is convert it into a couple of microjoules of heat, but my notebook's and phone's wifi hardware goes further.
I 'get' exactly how serious it is. I have no idea why it ever became the subject for a single slashdot article.
I mean, what is the point? They were investigating using WIFI networks as a way of providing location services for devices without GPS, so they collected data, either in a "just slurp the lot and we'll analyse it later", or a "keep the raw data, we might find it useful" manner.
The only question is why, when they realised it contained private information, they didn't just delete it. Instead, they announced that they had inadvertently intercepted private data. Then all these government agencies started to make a fuss, and we all got something to natter about for a couple of years. Well, that's a small positive, I guess.
So, I'm happy that someone has not bothered to investigate this nothing, again. Let's hope the rest of the someones make the same decision.
That is just (not-so-)simple math. You can perfectly represent any signal with a frequency less than half of your sampling frequency. Audiophiles don't like this, but it doesn't change the fact. The greatest reason for confusion is the 'stepped waveform' graphic often used to explain sampling, which is badly misleading.
40Hz is ample. Anything more is overkill. All you get from 96kHz sampling is ultrasonics that need to be filtered out to prevent distortion from your speakers.
The main problem with UEFI is that it is so complex and bug-ridden that the only use for it is going to be preventing the removal of malware. If ever there was a system that needed to be "so simple there are obviously no errors" it is this one, but instead we have an implementation that is larger than the Linux megalithic kernel.
Oh, and the future is not going to be X86, and Microsoft blatantly attempting to lock out all other OSes on other hardware.
I'm just trying to work out what a kw per hour might be. A Watt being a Joule per second, so a 1000 watts per second per 3600 seconds-hold on, I need a price of paper - Ah! .28 joules/s/s. Hmmm. That must be ... The rate at which the solar cells, decay, accelerates! Yes! So, if they started out at 550 odd square meters, -but is that per cell, per panel, of for the whole array? let's just say it's a god thing they finished when they did!
Google has never denied that that code was there. It was testing code, not code that shipped as part of Android. Once they found out, when Oracle told them it was there, they removed it. That's how the system is supposed to work, apart from the lawsuit and judges part.
They have agreed to it, and have included it in the 'facts already agreed' lists for this case. Get it out of the way quickly, give it all the importance it deserves. PAP,HTSH.
No, this is not about patents. The arguments on patents come later. The patent arguments, when they start, have been trimmed down to one patent that has been ruled invalid, but the time period to appeal that rejection has not yet expired; and another that has had its scope trimmed back, which, together with some admissions made by Oracle, Google argues, clears Android of infringement.
At the moment, this is only about copyrights. Oracle claims that, when they Sun released documentation about the APIs used in Java, the copyright on them prevents anyone else making a clean-room alternate implementation of them. Oh, and that GPLing it all, congratulating Google for implementing those APIs, and publicly assisting Harmony and GNU Classpath( both alternate clean-room implementations ) doesn't affect that at all. The rest of us are just shaking our heads and wondering if they will ever reveal the directions to the universe where this might be the case.
And so it is that we see the moral of the story:
Make sure all your patent are for wiggling your fingers when in contact with a screen displaying a picture, or for a shape first popularised in 300 BC.
Actually do expensive research and get patents that mean something, and they will label them "standards essential" and prosecute you when the wiggly fingers and rounded corners bunch try to shut you down.
... then, maybe. The target of the advertisement matters in cases such as these.
The Australian courts have answered this many times: It does not. Fine print does not even trump customers logical expectations.
The only thing that may save Apple is that the boxes have quite a large sticker on the back that states that the 4G capability is not compatible with any Australian network. Assuming that Apple has not advertised 4G in any Australian-targeted advertising, they should be OK.
If they have, then fines and forced offers of refunds will be in their future.