Humanity will be LONG dead and 100% forgotten by that point.
Probably. But I like the sci-fi idea that we'll get off this planet, spread our seed 'round the galaxy, and evolve. So that by the time the Sun consumes the Earth, our two-headed five-eyed descendants can drop by the solar system and watch the fireworks for fun.
Back on topic: people _did_ get a 'wake up call' about the (v. small) threat asteroids pose about 10 years ago when there were two summer blockbusters on that theme. There was a lot of discussion in the media about how little asteroid-tracking work we were doing and how much we should do. Then, by the time summer was over, people had forgotten again. I think the only effective wake-up call would be another event like the one that happened in Siberia, perhaps happening in populated place.
So they're increasing the field of view: that's equivalent to installing a new eyepiece in a amateur telescope, correct?
Anyway, if the HST is going to be 90% more powerful and 60% more capable, by my calculation that means it'll be 304% more awesome. Three w00ts for NASA!
- Florida did not simply use paper ballots; it used mechanical voting machines to punch those ballots. - Paper-punching machines are needlessly complicated, opening them up to unique kinds of disruption. Their performance in Florida may have been deliberately degraded: there are allegations that substandard paper was sent to that state by a voting-machine company for use in the machines (read more here) - In voting, the simplest is the best: paper + pencil for the voter; trustworthy citizens for the counting. This is what we use in Canada; a country of 30m people, and we are able to announce election results the night of the election. There is universal trust in the voting process - though not, I am sad to say, in politics in general:)
Emacs and Vim are both great programs, but you have to admit they have a steep learning curve.
Also, they can't be made to run full-screen on a mac without booting into a command line (afaik).
The advantage of WriteRoom (which I've just tried out for a couple of minutes) is that it has no learning curve. Also, it's a true full-screen app - all you see is a black background and green text. No menus or windows to bother you.
Much of what you say flies in the face of what I've heard from reputable sources. Can you back up your claims please? (Preferably without referring to a right-wing blog)
You say that the IPCC report draws 'rather wild and rash conclusions from the data': is that your opinion, or the opinion of someone with qualifications? Because I've read the exact opposite: that the IPCC was deliberately cautious in their conclusions.
You say that 'a bunch of scientists who collaboration the IPCC report did not stand behind it when they read the conclusion'. How many is 'a bunch'? Keep in mind that thousands of scientists were involved with the project, ranging from reviewers to authors. You say that some did not stand behind the conclusion: do all dissenters think the report blamed human CO2 emissions too strongly, or do some feel it did not go far enough?
The dispute is not over the basic science, but over the degree of effect we are having. No one disputes that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, or that we are adding CO2 to the atmosphere: the only dispute is over how much of an effect that is having on the atmosphere. Given that there is no way to give an exact answer to that question (due to the uncertainty inherent in computer models), at some point we have to agree on a best guess and go with that. That's what the IPCC represents to me: a consensus (so far as one can be reached) on our best guess.
Keep in mind that copyright laws are an infringement on free speech; they only exist because, historically, the costs (in terms of lost freedom) were outweighed by the benefits (in terms of artistic production &tc).
Filesharing have increased the costs of copyright law: historically, copyright infringement could only be done in a factory setting by profit-seeking groups. Today, it is done by regular citizens. Where before copyright law effectively limited the freedoms of factory owners, today it limits the freedoms of everybody.
I've always felt that copyright law should be retained; however, it should only be applied against profitmaking infringement. That would restore individual freedoms while protecting artistic production:
When it comes to music, live performance means that musicians can still make money while being artistically productive. Movies will always have the theater: its ambiance is an attractor, and some movies simply work better on the big screen. Books have a physical form that remains far superior to digital reproduction.
You don't think the allies kept their gear on the bleeding edge? Ever hear of Radar? Ever compare 1939 RAF plane tech with 1945 RAF plane tech?
Wikipedia and the web in general are full of people like you - always spouting off about 'if only Hitler hadn't done this' or 'if they hadn't made this mistake they'd have won'. Fact of the matter is that both sides made mistakes, and we won.
If Britain out produced the Nazis, have the decency to give them credit for it, FFS.
The Maritimes economy is to government subsidies as the BC economy is to pot: yes, it's an important source of income, but a minor part of the whole picture. I, for one, am glad to see people leveraging this region's natural benefits rather than simply giving up and moving away. The spaceport proposal is indeed risky, but if it works it'll be a nice addition to the area; coupled with other efforts (most notably the Atlantica proposal), there is reason enough for people to say and make this region as wealthy as it deserves to be.
Please be aware that not all errors reported by Memtest86 are due to bad memory. The test implicitly tests the CPU, L1 and L2 caches as well as the motherboard. It is impossible for the test to determine what causes the failure to occur. However, most failures will be due to a problem with memory module. When it is not, the only option is to replace parts until the failure is corrected.
Once a memory error has been detected, determining the failing SIMM/DIMM module is not a clear cut procedure. With the large number of motherboard vendors and possible combinations of memory slots it would be difficult if not impossible to assemble complete information about how a particular error would map to a failing memory module. However, there are steps that may be taken to determine the failing module. Here are four techniques that you may wish to use:...
Sometimes memory errors show up due to component incompatibility. A memory module may work fine in one system and not in another. This is not uncommon and is a source of confusion. In these situations the components are not necessarily bad but have marginal conditions that when combined with other components will cause errors.
There have been numerous reports of errors with only tests 5 and 8 on Athlon systems. Often the memory works in a different system or the vendor insists that it is good. In these cases the memory is not necessarily bad but is not able to operate reliably at Athlon speeds. Sometimes more conservative memory timings on the motherboard will correct these errors. In other cases the only option is to replace the memory with better quality, higher speed memory. Don't buy cheap memory and expect it to work with an Athlon! On occasion test 5/8 errors will occur even with name brand memory and a quality motherboard. These errors are legitimate and should be corrected.
I am often asked about the reliability of errors reported by Mestest86. In the vast majority of cases errors reported by the test are valid. There are some systems that cause Memtest86 to be confused about the size of memory and it will try to test non-existent memory. This will cause a large number of consecutive addresses to be reported as bad and generally there will be many bits in error. If you have a relatively small number of failing addresses and only one or two bits in error you can be certain that the errors are valid. Also intermittent errors are without exception valid. Frequently memory vendors question if Memtest86 supports their particular memory type or a chipset. Memtest86 is designed to work with all memory types and all chipsets. Only support for ECC requires knowledge of the chipset.
In general, random behavior is a good indication of HW problems (incl. RAM problems). EG various programs crashing with no apparent pattern or timing; being able to boot sometimes but not other times; the OS crashing at, again, random times.
OTOH, if there is a clear pattern to the crashes - windows always failing to boot with the same error code, the same program or set of programs always going down, while others work - then you should look into SW issues.
If you've got time, then you should run memtest for at least one pass, DFT on advanced, and chkdsk (for windows boxes) before other troubleshooting. The tests themselves take several hours, but it only takes minutes of your time, and will either rule out or confirm HW problems.
I prefer football fields of Hiroshima bombs as a unit of energy:
Little Boy was 3m x 0.7m for an area of 2.1m^2. It released 12kt of energy (1kt = 4.184E12 Joules) A football field is 109.7 x 48.8m for an area of roughly 5353m^2
Thus, a football field could contain 2549 Hiroshima bombs; at 12kt each, that equals 30588 kt.
30588 x 4.18E12 J = 1.27857E17 J
Thus, 1 football field of Hiroshima bombs is about 1E17 Joules.
So, this event produced 1E33J, which is 1E16 football fields of Hiroshima bombs. Now that's a big 'splosion!
If the Father of all Bombs is only 44t, it's dwarfed by the Halifax Explosion. Admittadly, the Halifax Explosion was an explosion of a munitions ship, not a single bomb, but it's far closer to a nuclear explosion than that firecracker the Russkies set off. If you trust Wikipedia, the explosion set off 2.9kt of explosives, and consisted of:
223,188 kilograms benzol
56,301 kilograms of nitrocellulose (guncotton)
1,602,519 kilograms of wet picric acid
544,311 kilograms of dry picric acid (highly explosive, and extremely sensitive to shock, heat and friction), and
226,797 kilograms of TNT
The Explosion leveled Halifax, and caused over 10,000 casualties.
finds fair use exceptions add more than $4.5 trillion in revenue to the U.S. economy... The value added to the U.S. economy by the fair use amounts to $2.2 trillion.
Is $4.5t a different number than $2.2t, or am I stupid?
You'd have to do a diff between the sever and laptop versions of particular files, and the user would have to choose what edits to save or erase.
Or, you could use a versioning system, making a new point-series branch whenever there was a difference between laptop and server versions. But you would still be left with the problem of choosing which edits to save and which to dismiss.
In the end, you need humans to discuss the changes made and assimilate them into a new master document whenever there is a difference between client and sever versions.
How would you do this? I'm imagining a scheme were the phone speaks to a VOIP server using encrypted data, and there server relays that data unencrypted to the PSTN, or encrypted to another VOIP server.
In both cases, the US Government is looking out for the interests of the US - as it should. It's good for the US if it can steal others' technology; it's bad for the US if others steal its technology. Any successful country will do the same; unsuccessful ones will end up like Russia in the 90s - making others richer while it gets poorer.
From the same post on the blog:
One bright side is that at least I was busted by the Times and not Valleywag. I really, really enjoyed seeing those guys keep guessing wrong. For six months Dr. Evil and Mr. Bigglesworth put their big brains together and couldn't come up with the answer. Guy from the Times did it in a week. So much for the trope about smarty-pants bloggers disrupting old media. Brilliant. File under "It's funny, laugh"
From the article it sounds like the main technical thing going on here is that the suprnova site will be relaunched as a torrent index, using the same design scheme as the original site. Ho-hum; there is no lack of options for torrent sites at the moment...
... but the symbolic meaning is, IMHO, actually important. From TFA:
We also talked to Brokep, one of The Pirate Bay administrators and asked him why they decided to revive Suprnova. He told us: "We talked it over and decided it was something people would have use for, it would help the torrent community and it would also signal that if you shut one down it will get back up again."
Not to be overly dramatic, but things like this show that injustices to the filesharing community (if you see them that way:) ) will, eventually, be overcome.
- It's a nitpick, but when you talk numbers of people killed, it looks less callous if you take the effort to write the number out, or spell it out. Using shorthand makes it look like you value a human life as much as you do a unit of currency.
- I think the GP's point is that, in the long term, this won't make war any better/safer. Once both sides have kill-bots (eg in the next war, or the war after that), there will be more robo-suicide missions and more human casualties. Just like with the Gatling gun - once both sides have it, more people are killed faster.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably. But I like the sci-fi idea that we'll get off this planet, spread our seed 'round the galaxy, and evolve. So that by the time the Sun consumes the Earth, our two-headed five-eyed descendants can drop by the solar system and watch the fireworks for fun.
Back on topic: people _did_ get a 'wake up call' about the (v. small) threat asteroids pose about 10 years ago when there were two summer blockbusters on that theme. There was a lot of discussion in the media about how little asteroid-tracking work we were doing and how much we should do. Then, by the time summer was over, people had forgotten again. I think the only effective wake-up call would be another event like the one that happened in Siberia, perhaps happening in populated place.
So they're increasing the field of view: that's equivalent to installing a new eyepiece in a amateur telescope, correct?
Anyway, if the HST is going to be 90% more powerful and 60% more capable, by my calculation that means it'll be 304% more awesome. Three w00ts for NASA!
A few points:
:)
- Florida did not simply use paper ballots; it used mechanical voting machines to punch those ballots.
- Paper-punching machines are needlessly complicated, opening them up to unique kinds of disruption. Their performance in Florida may have been deliberately degraded: there are allegations that substandard paper was sent to that state by a voting-machine company for use in the machines (read more here)
- In voting, the simplest is the best: paper + pencil for the voter; trustworthy citizens for the counting. This is what we use in Canada; a country of 30m people, and we are able to announce election results the night of the election. There is universal trust in the voting process - though not, I am sad to say, in politics in general
Emacs and Vim are both great programs, but you have to admit they have a steep learning curve.
Also, they can't be made to run full-screen on a mac without booting into a command line (afaik).
The advantage of WriteRoom (which I've just tried out for a couple of minutes) is that it has no learning curve. Also, it's a true full-screen app - all you see is a black background and green text. No menus or windows to bother you.
Much of what you say flies in the face of what I've heard from reputable sources. Can you back up your claims please? (Preferably without referring to a right-wing blog)
You say that the IPCC report draws 'rather wild and rash conclusions from the data': is that your opinion, or the opinion of someone with qualifications? Because I've read the exact opposite: that the IPCC was deliberately cautious in their conclusions.
You say that 'a bunch of scientists who collaboration the IPCC report did not stand behind it when they read the conclusion'. How many is 'a bunch'? Keep in mind that thousands of scientists were involved with the project, ranging from reviewers to authors. You say that some did not stand behind the conclusion: do all dissenters think the report blamed human CO2 emissions too strongly, or do some feel it did not go far enough?
The dispute is not over the basic science, but over the degree of effect we are having. No one disputes that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, or that we are adding CO2 to the atmosphere: the only dispute is over how much of an effect that is having on the atmosphere. Given that there is no way to give an exact answer to that question (due to the uncertainty inherent in computer models), at some point we have to agree on a best guess and go with that. That's what the IPCC represents to me: a consensus (so far as one can be reached) on our best guess.
You don't know what I was referring to, do you?
RESULTS OF STUDY MAKE OOG ANGRY! MP3 PATENT-ENCUMBERED! PEOPLE NOT REALIZE IMPORTANCE OF FREE-AS-IN-FREEDOM AUDIO CODECS!
----
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Keep in mind that copyright laws are an infringement on free speech; they only exist because, historically, the costs (in terms of lost freedom) were outweighed by the benefits (in terms of artistic production &tc).
Filesharing have increased the costs of copyright law: historically, copyright infringement could only be done in a factory setting by profit-seeking groups. Today, it is done by regular citizens. Where before copyright law effectively limited the freedoms of factory owners, today it limits the freedoms of everybody.
I've always felt that copyright law should be retained; however, it should only be applied against profitmaking infringement. That would restore individual freedoms while protecting artistic production:
When it comes to music, live performance means that musicians can still make money while being artistically productive. Movies will always have the theater: its ambiance is an attractor, and some movies simply work better on the big screen. Books have a physical form that remains far superior to digital reproduction.
You're being a Nazi apologist.
You don't think the allies kept their gear on the bleeding edge? Ever hear of Radar? Ever compare 1939 RAF plane tech with 1945 RAF plane tech?
Wikipedia and the web in general are full of people like you - always spouting off about 'if only Hitler hadn't done this' or 'if they hadn't made this mistake they'd have won'. Fact of the matter is that both sides made mistakes, and we won.
If Britain out produced the Nazis, have the decency to give them credit for it, FFS.
Cape Breton's latitude is roughly the same as Baiknour's, which was the main reason why it was chosen.
The Maritimes economy is to government subsidies as the BC economy is to pot: yes, it's an important source of income, but a minor part of the whole picture. I, for one, am glad to see people leveraging this region's natural benefits rather than simply giving up and moving away. The spaceport proposal is indeed risky, but if it works it'll be a nice addition to the area; coupled with other efforts (most notably the Atlantica proposal), there is reason enough for people to say and make this region as wealthy as it deserves to be.
Yep, memory problems have about as many causes as yaks do fleas. From the memtest troubleshooting section:
...
http://www.memtest86.com/tech.html#trouble
Please be aware that not all errors reported by Memtest86 are due to bad memory. The test implicitly tests the CPU, L1 and L2 caches as well as the motherboard. It is impossible for the test to determine what causes the failure to occur. However, most failures will be due to a problem with memory module. When it is not, the only option is to replace parts until the failure is corrected.
Once a memory error has been detected, determining the failing SIMM/DIMM module is not a clear cut procedure. With the large number of motherboard vendors and possible combinations of memory slots it would be difficult if not impossible to assemble complete information about how a particular error would map to a failing memory module. However, there are steps that may be taken to determine the failing module. Here are four techniques that you may wish to use:
Sometimes memory errors show up due to component incompatibility. A memory module may work fine in one system and not in another. This is not uncommon and is a source of confusion. In these situations the components are not necessarily bad but have marginal conditions that when combined with other components will cause errors.
There have been numerous reports of errors with only tests 5 and 8 on Athlon systems. Often the memory works in a different system or the vendor insists that it is good. In these cases the memory is not necessarily bad but is not able to operate reliably at Athlon speeds. Sometimes more conservative memory timings on the motherboard will correct these errors. In other cases the only option is to replace the memory with better quality, higher speed memory. Don't buy cheap memory and expect it to work with an Athlon! On occasion test 5/8 errors will occur even with name brand memory and a quality motherboard. These errors are legitimate and should be corrected.
I am often asked about the reliability of errors reported by Mestest86. In the vast majority of cases errors reported by the test are valid. There are some systems that cause Memtest86 to be confused about the size of memory and it will try to test non-existent memory. This will cause a large number of consecutive addresses to be reported as bad and generally there will be many bits in error. If you have a relatively small number of failing addresses and only one or two bits in error you can be certain that the errors are valid. Also intermittent errors are without exception valid. Frequently memory vendors question if Memtest86 supports their particular memory type or a chipset. Memtest86 is designed to work with all memory types and all chipsets. Only support for ECC requires knowledge of the chipset.
In general, random behavior is a good indication of HW problems (incl. RAM problems). EG various programs crashing with no apparent pattern or timing; being able to boot sometimes but not other times; the OS crashing at, again, random times.
OTOH, if there is a clear pattern to the crashes - windows always failing to boot with the same error code, the same program or set of programs always going down, while others work - then you should look into SW issues.
If you've got time, then you should run memtest for at least one pass, DFT on advanced, and chkdsk (for windows boxes) before other troubleshooting. The tests themselves take several hours, but it only takes minutes of your time, and will either rule out or confirm HW problems.
I prefer football fields of Hiroshima bombs as a unit of energy:
Little Boy was 3m x 0.7m for an area of 2.1m^2. It released 12kt of energy (1kt = 4.184E12 Joules)
A football field is 109.7 x 48.8m for an area of roughly 5353m^2
Thus, a football field could contain 2549 Hiroshima bombs; at 12kt each, that equals 30588 kt.
30588 x 4.18E12 J = 1.27857E17 J
Thus, 1 football field of Hiroshima bombs is about 1E17 Joules.
So, this event produced 1E33J, which is 1E16 football fields of Hiroshima bombs. Now that's a big 'splosion!
- 223,188 kilograms benzol
- 56,301 kilograms of nitrocellulose (guncotton)
- 1,602,519 kilograms of wet picric acid
- 544,311 kilograms of dry picric acid (highly explosive, and extremely sensitive to shock, heat and friction), and
- 226,797 kilograms of TNT
The Explosion leveled Halifax, and caused over 10,000 casualties.revenue isn't the same thing as value added... sorry for the spurious post
You'd have to do a diff between the sever and laptop versions of particular files, and the user would have to choose what edits to save or erase.
Or, you could use a versioning system, making a new point-series branch whenever there was a difference between laptop and server versions. But you would still be left with the problem of choosing which edits to save and which to dismiss.
In the end, you need humans to discuss the changes made and assimilate them into a new master document whenever there is a difference between client and sever versions.
How would you do this? I'm imagining a scheme were the phone speaks to a VOIP server using encrypted data, and there server relays that data unencrypted to the PSTN, or encrypted to another VOIP server.
In both cases, the US Government is looking out for the interests of the US - as it should. It's good for the US if it can steal others' technology; it's bad for the US if others steal its technology. Any successful country will do the same; unsuccessful ones will end up like Russia in the 90s - making others richer while it gets poorer.
As a matter of style, I think avoiding shorthand in matters like this works to underscore the serious nature of the topic being discussed.
That said, I was a little callous myself in the way I worded my nitpick. Sorry about that.
A comment system to discuss individual torrents would be nice; it would make avoiding bad/poor-quality torrents easier.
Other than that, though, I agree with you. isohunt is by far the most effective torrent search site on the net at present.
... but the symbolic meaning is, IMHO, actually important. From TFA:
We also talked to Brokep, one of The Pirate Bay administrators and asked him why they decided to revive Suprnova. He told us: "We talked it over and decided it was something people would have use for, it would help the torrent community and it would also signal that if you shut one down it will get back up again."Not to be overly dramatic, but things like this show that injustices to the filesharing community (if you see them that way :) ) will, eventually, be overcome.
- I think the GP's point is that, in the long term, this won't make war any better/safer. Once both sides have kill-bots (eg in the next war, or the war after that), there will be more robo-suicide missions and more human casualties. Just like with the Gatling gun - once both sides have it, more people are killed faster.