You seriously think that surface conditions have an effect on "the global geodynamo" (the Earth's core)? The wandering of the magnetic poles isn't the result of mysterious changes thousands of miles below the surface; in general it's caused by variations in the Earth's wobbling as it spins on its axis. According to this, the relatively recent acceleration of pole movement is the result of a water deficit in India and the Caspian Sea region.
The magnetic poles have reversed many times in Earth's history. According to this, over the last 20 million years a pole reversal happens every 300,000 years or so. It's been 780,000 years since the last one, so maybe we're overdue.
If someone wants to live in an unchanging climate, go to a tropical island along the equator.
The people of Dominica, Barbuda and Puerto Rico would like to have some words with you. Angry, 4-letter words about what you can do to yourself, and if you'd like to trade places with them, I'd bet.
I guess he should have boldfaced the "along the equator" part. Or used "astride" instead of "along"
Dominica: 925 miles north of the Equator
Barbuda: 1058 miles north of the Equator
Puerto Rico: 1093 miles north of the Equator
So is the title flamebait, as is usual for our new Slashdot overlords?
Not just Slashdot. From TFA, on Bleeping Computer: Microsoft has resumed the rollout of security updates for AMD devices. The updates patch the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities.
Then, later in TFA: The Meltdown flaw does not affect AMD devices, but these updates include an OS-level patch for the Spectre flaw.
Proofreading is apparently becoming, or already has become, a lost art.
The $1000 bonuses only go to workers with 20 years' service. Look it up -- MULTIPLE sources say the same thing.
OK, I looked it up. The retail giant said the pay raises would take effect Feb. 17 and the bonuses paid sometime after this month. It also plans to give one-time cash bonuses to some part-time and full-time workers, ranging from $200 (for workers who have been at Walmart for less than two years) to $1,000 (for those who have been working there for 20 or more years).
"Don't be a dick" is a good strategy for getting along, certainly. It doesn't really eliminate the need for having powerful armed forces, though, because your decision not to be a dick doesn't mean others won't be dicks. Having a powerful military is a good way to ensure they don't decide to be a dick to you, and being willing to use your military to stop them from being dicks to others is a good way to reduce global dickishness (actions, at least, not attitudes), which increases global stability and aids global economic development.
Obligatory Team America: Pussies don't like dicks, because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes - assholes who just want to shit on everything. Pussies may think they can deal with assholes their way, but the only thing that can fuck an asshole is a dick, with some balls. The problem with dicks is that sometimes they fuck too much, or fuck when it isn't appropriate - and it takes a pussy to show 'em that. But sometimes pussies get so full of shit that they become assholes themselves, because pussies are only an inch-and-a-half away from assholes. I don't know much in this crazy, crazy world, but I do know that if you don't let us fuck this asshole, we are going to have our dicks and our pussies all covered in shit.
Apple would be charging $2000 for a goddamned iphone if they had to pay for U.S. wages and working conditions
I'm hearing echos of "Lettuce would be $10/head if farmers had to pay decent wages." Of course, that isn't true; neither, apparently, is the assertion that the price of an iPhone would double if Apple had to pay for U.S. wages and working conditions. In both cases, the fraction of labor cost in production just isn't that large.
According to this, the cost of labor for an iPhone 7 is $5.00 and material is $219.80, for a total manufacturing cost of $224.80. Selling price is $649 for the lowest version. You could increase the labor cost by an order of magnitude and maintain the same price to cost margin by increasing the price by less than 8%.
If a cart is blocking the hall, he can't push it out of the way.
...and the remote operator, sitting in a cubicle hundreds of miles away, somehow moves the cart out of the way? Maybe the robot should just call the front desk and ask for help.
There may be a couple million people in the world who speak some Klingon, but I'd bet the number who can sustain a conversation fluently in Klingon for, say, half an hour, is probably less than 5000.
Probably much less than 5000. This article estimates the number of fluent speakers of Klingon at a few dozen.
So then, if all these adults making minimum wage should apply themselves and get better jobs, then where exactly are all these unfilled better jobs searching for employees?
Workers with wages at or below the federal minimum made up 2.7 percent of all hourly paid workers.
Although workers under age 25 represented only about one-fifth of hourly paid workers, they made up about half of those paid the federal minimum wage or less. Among employed teenagers (ages 16 to 19) paid by the hour, about 10 percent earned the minimum wage or less, compared with about 2 percent of workers age 25 and older.
Of those paid an hourly wage, never-married workers, who tend to be young, were more likely (5 percent) than married workers (1 percent) to earn the federal minimum wage or less.
I'm not a parent, and when I was growing up things such as iphones didn't exist, so I have to ask..
Why seek a technical solution to the problem? Why not simply take the device away from the child after x time elapses?
These two snippets from TFA jumped out at me:
94% of parents have taken some action to manage their child’s technology use.
According to an American Psychological Association (APA) survey of over 3,500 U.S. parents, 58% say they worry about the influence of social media on their child’s physical and mental health, 48% say that regulating their child’s screen time is a “constant battle,” and 58% say they feel like their child is “attached” to their phone or tablet.
In other words, the overwhelming majority of parents are trying (or think they're trying) to manage their kids' phone use, but roughly half of them are failing.
The Obama administration changed it to 25Mbps. There was a lot of complaints from ISPs when they did, complaining that anything over the previous broadband figure (10Mbps, IIRC) wasn't really needed by anyone. Of course, people playing online games or watching videos online might disagree
I understand and sympathize with folks who want to watch videos and play games, but there seems to be some confusion about the distinction between "need" and "want".
Can you do your banking online with a 10Mbps connection? Submit your taxes? Search for a job? Access news sites? Receive notifications from local government entities regarding impending disasters? Contact emergency services? Send your Congressman an email message? These are the sorts of things people usually cite when decrying poor or no internet access.
The problem with GoPro is once you've bought one, you don't really need another. Mine is a 3rd gen model and I have no intention of upgrading. Neither does anyone else I know. and I know a lot of people who regularly use their GoPro. Whatever is the current model is bought and then used for years.
Absolutely. This is why they tried to get into the drone business, because their market was pretty much saturated.
analysis of 2,000 communities by a market research company, in 147 out of 150 of the biggest cities in the U.S., the median full-time salaries of young women are 8% higher
You forgot to mentioned a rather interesting piece of that Time article:
The holdout cities — those where the earnings of single, college-educated young women still lag men's — tended to be built around industries that are heavily male-dominated, such as software development or military-technology contracting. In other words, Silicon Valley could also be called Gender Gap Gully.
Part of the repeal, was that they forbade states from making their own rules.
But are they really legally allowed to do that? This wording sounds like only congress could put into law. Just on this wording alone I can see states suing the FCC.
The principal of Federal law taking precedence over State law applies to, well, laws. Does it apply to Federal regulations as well? Should make for some interesting litigation.
That's Spectre, not Meltdown. Meltdown is far more egregious, and carries the huge performance penalty.
If you say so. I'm no expert on this stuff. The writeup on Hacker News certainly makes Spectre appear to be serious and difficult to mitigate:
The second problem, Spectre (paper), is not easy to patch and will haunt people for quite some time since this issue requires changes to processor architecture in order to fully mitigate.
Spectre attack breaks the isolation between different applications, allowing the attacker-controlled program to trick error-free programs into leaking their secrets by forcing them into accessing arbitrary portions of its memory, which can then be read through a side channel.
Spectre attacks can be used to leak information from the kernel to user programs, as well as from virtualization hypervisors to guest systems.
“In addition to violating process isolation boundaries using native code, Spectre attacks can also be used to violate browser sandboxing, by mounting them via portable JavaScript code. We wrote a JavaScript program that successfully reads data from the address space of the browser process running it.” the paper explains.
“KAISER patch, which has been widely applied as a mitigation to the Meltdown attack, does not protect against Spectre.”
The paper they reference is an interesting read (particularly section 8, "Conclusions and Future Work"), available as PDF here.
TFA says, "the level of oxygen in all ocean waters is falling, with 2% – 77bn tonnes – being lost since 1950."
A 2% world-wide decrease in ocean oxygen driven by temperature rise would require an average temperature rise somewhere around 1.5C - 2C. According to this, ocean temperature has risen 0.1C in the past century.
TFA has a map showing areas of open ocean with oxygen content lower than 2 mg/liter. According to this, heating seawater to 50C reduces oxygen content to about 5 mg/liter. I'm not sure you could heat it enough to get it down to 2 mg/liter before it started to boil.
I agree. I bought a second-hand S6 edge about 6 months ago for around £200 from Amazon. It was unlocked and I found a 128GB internal model as not all apps will install to an external SD card
Interesting, but irrelevant. None of the S6 models can accommodate an SD card.
The true version is that vast numbers of parents haven't got a clue, and are stupid. Sad but true. By definition Slashdot readers are wildly atypical.
Considering the number of commenters who accuse anyone disagreeing with them of being a Russian troll, your assessment of Slashdot readers may be a bit optimistic.
Slashdot Mirror
You seriously think that surface conditions have an effect on "the global geodynamo" (the Earth's core)? The wandering of the magnetic poles isn't the result of mysterious changes thousands of miles below the surface; in general it's caused by variations in the Earth's wobbling as it spins on its axis. According to this, the relatively recent acceleration of pole movement is the result of a water deficit in India and the Caspian Sea region.
The magnetic poles have reversed many times in Earth's history. According to this, over the last 20 million years a pole reversal happens every 300,000 years or so. It's been 780,000 years since the last one, so maybe we're overdue.
If someone wants to live in an unchanging climate, go to a tropical island along the equator.
The people of Dominica, Barbuda and Puerto Rico would like to have some words with you. Angry, 4-letter words about what you can do to yourself, and if you'd like to trade places with them, I'd bet.
I guess he should have boldfaced the "along the equator" part. Or used "astride" instead of "along"
Dominica: 925 miles north of the Equator
Barbuda: 1058 miles north of the Equator
Puerto Rico: 1093 miles north of the Equator
So is the title flamebait, as is usual for our new Slashdot overlords?
Not just Slashdot. From TFA, on Bleeping Computer: Microsoft has resumed the rollout of security updates for AMD devices. The updates patch the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities.
Then, later in TFA: The Meltdown flaw does not affect AMD devices, but these updates include an OS-level patch for the Spectre flaw.
Proofreading is apparently becoming, or already has become, a lost art.
The $1000 bonuses only go to workers with 20 years' service. Look it up -- MULTIPLE sources say the same thing.
OK, I looked it up. The retail giant said the pay raises would take effect Feb. 17 and the bonuses paid sometime after this month. It also plans to give one-time cash bonuses to some part-time and full-time workers, ranging from $200 (for workers who have been at Walmart for less than two years) to $1,000 (for those who have been working there for 20 or more years).
"Don't be a dick" is a good strategy for getting along, certainly. It doesn't really eliminate the need for having powerful armed forces, though, because your decision not to be a dick doesn't mean others won't be dicks. Having a powerful military is a good way to ensure they don't decide to be a dick to you, and being willing to use your military to stop them from being dicks to others is a good way to reduce global dickishness (actions, at least, not attitudes), which increases global stability and aids global economic development.
Obligatory Team America: Pussies don't like dicks, because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes - assholes who just want to shit on everything. Pussies may think they can deal with assholes their way, but the only thing that can fuck an asshole is a dick, with some balls. The problem with dicks is that sometimes they fuck too much, or fuck when it isn't appropriate - and it takes a pussy to show 'em that. But sometimes pussies get so full of shit that they become assholes themselves, because pussies are only an inch-and-a-half away from assholes. I don't know much in this crazy, crazy world, but I do know that if you don't let us fuck this asshole, we are going to have our dicks and our pussies all covered in shit.
Apple would be charging $2000 for a goddamned iphone if they had to pay for U.S. wages and working conditions
I'm hearing echos of "Lettuce would be $10/head if farmers had to pay decent wages." Of course, that isn't true; neither, apparently, is the assertion that the price of an iPhone would double if Apple had to pay for U.S. wages and working conditions. In both cases, the fraction of labor cost in production just isn't that large.
According to this, the cost of labor for an iPhone 7 is $5.00 and material is $219.80, for a total manufacturing cost of $224.80. Selling price is $649 for the lowest version. You could increase the labor cost by an order of magnitude and maintain the same price to cost margin by increasing the price by less than 8%.
If a cart is blocking the hall, he can't push it out of the way.
...and the remote operator, sitting in a cubicle hundreds of miles away, somehow moves the cart out of the way? Maybe the robot should just call the front desk and ask for help.
Based upon the knee-jerk quality of many comments posted on /. this should not be a surprise to anyone.
There may be a couple million people in the world who speak some Klingon, but I'd bet the number who can sustain a conversation fluently in Klingon for, say, half an hour, is probably less than 5000.
Probably much less than 5000. This article estimates the number of fluent speakers of Klingon at a few dozen.
So then, if all these adults making minimum wage should apply themselves and get better jobs, then where exactly are all these unfilled better jobs searching for employees?
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
I'm not a parent, and when I was growing up things such as iphones didn't exist, so I have to ask..
Why seek a technical solution to the problem? Why not simply take the device away from the child after x time elapses?
These two snippets from TFA jumped out at me:
94% of parents have taken some action to manage their child’s technology use.
According to an American Psychological Association (APA) survey of over 3,500 U.S. parents, 58% say they worry about the influence of social media on their child’s physical and mental health, 48% say that regulating their child’s screen time is a “constant battle,” and 58% say they feel like their child is “attached” to their phone or tablet.
In other words, the overwhelming majority of parents are trying (or think they're trying) to manage their kids' phone use, but roughly half of them are failing.
The Obama administration changed it to 25Mbps. There was a lot of complaints from ISPs when they did, complaining that anything over the previous broadband figure (10Mbps, IIRC) wasn't really needed by anyone. Of course, people playing online games or watching videos online might disagree
I understand and sympathize with folks who want to watch videos and play games, but there seems to be some confusion about the distinction between "need" and "want".
Can you do your banking online with a 10Mbps connection? Submit your taxes? Search for a job? Access news sites? Receive notifications from local government entities regarding impending disasters? Contact emergency services? Send your Congressman an email message? These are the sorts of things people usually cite when decrying poor or no internet access.
The problem with GoPro is once you've bought one, you don't really need another. Mine is a 3rd gen model and I have no intention of upgrading. Neither does anyone else I know. and I know a lot of people who regularly use their GoPro. Whatever is the current model is bought and then used for years.
Absolutely. This is why they tried to get into the drone business, because their market was pretty much saturated.
It isn't even a real problem [time.com].
analysis of 2,000 communities by a market research company, in 147 out of 150 of the biggest cities in the U.S., the median full-time salaries of young women are 8% higher
You forgot to mentioned a rather interesting piece of that Time article:
The holdout cities — those where the earnings of single, college-educated young women still lag men's — tended to be built around industries that are heavily male-dominated, such as software development or military-technology contracting. In other words, Silicon Valley could also be called Gender Gap Gully.
Well, they are addressing it, the same way the Mexican drug cartels are addressing cocaine addiction: by assuring a steady supply.
Then it was automatically flagged for posting copywritten material
Seriously? Whose writes were you accused of violating (or was it really copyreading you were accused of)?
Part of the repeal, was that they forbade states from making their own rules.
But are they really legally allowed to do that? This wording sounds like only congress could put into law. Just on this wording alone I can see states suing the FCC.
The principal of Federal law taking precedence over State law applies to, well, laws. Does it apply to Federal regulations as well? Should make for some interesting litigation.
That's Spectre, not Meltdown. Meltdown is far more egregious, and carries the huge performance penalty.
If you say so. I'm no expert on this stuff. The writeup on Hacker News certainly makes Spectre appear to be serious and difficult to mitigate:
The second problem, Spectre (paper), is not easy to patch and will haunt people for quite some time since this issue requires changes to processor architecture in order to fully mitigate.
Spectre attack breaks the isolation between different applications, allowing the attacker-controlled program to trick error-free programs into leaking their secrets by forcing them into accessing arbitrary portions of its memory, which can then be read through a side channel.
Spectre attacks can be used to leak information from the kernel to user programs, as well as from virtualization hypervisors to guest systems.
“In addition to violating process isolation boundaries using native code, Spectre attacks can also be used to violate browser sandboxing, by mounting them via portable JavaScript code. We wrote a JavaScript program that successfully reads data from the address space of the browser process running it.” the paper explains.
“KAISER patch, which has been widely applied as a mitigation to the Meltdown attack, does not protect against Spectre.”
The paper they reference is an interesting read (particularly section 8, "Conclusions and Future Work"), available as PDF here.
It's true that AMD isn't affected by Meltdown
According to the AC. AMD, on the other hand, says they are indeed affected.
TFA says, "the level of oxygen in all ocean waters is falling, with 2% – 77bn tonnes – being lost since 1950."
A 2% world-wide decrease in ocean oxygen driven by temperature rise would require an average temperature rise somewhere around 1.5C - 2C. According to this, ocean temperature has risen 0.1C in the past century.
TFA has a map showing areas of open ocean with oxygen content lower than 2 mg/liter. According to this, heating seawater to 50C reduces oxygen content to about 5 mg/liter. I'm not sure you could heat it enough to get it down to 2 mg/liter before it started to boil.
Thursday is Wednesday. Thursday has always been Wednesday. Thursday will always be Wednesday.
Odd. I must have missed that when I read 1984.
Intel will soon be announcing a $29 CPU replacement program for qualifying customers.
I agree. I bought a second-hand S6 edge about 6 months ago for around £200 from Amazon. It was unlocked and I found a 128GB internal model as not all apps will install to an external SD card
Interesting, but irrelevant. None of the S6 models can accommodate an SD card.
The true version is that vast numbers of parents haven't got a clue, and are stupid. Sad but true. By definition Slashdot readers are wildly atypical.
Considering the number of commenters who accuse anyone disagreeing with them of being a Russian troll, your assessment of Slashdot readers may be a bit optimistic.
There appear to be at least 4 million Slashdot accounts
There may be that many accounts, but there are no where near that many active users. Slashdot readership is way down from the peak.
The law applies to social networks with "at least 2 million members". Note the absence of any qualifier such as "active".