That's it, I've had enough. It's easy enough to filter this kind of crap out, but/. just don't seem to bother. Yes, I could simply browse at a higher level, but I've usually got mod points and browse at -1 as suggested for very good reasons. But if/. aren't prepared to deal with the most basic levels of spamming then I can't be bothered helping them out any more. Email address deleted, password changed to a long random string that I don't know, sig changed to indicate account has been deleted. Bye everyone, most of the last decade or so has been fun, but frankly, I quit.
The pressures are generally quite the opposite under the NHS. It's generally a brilliant service, considering it's free to us (you could argue the tax angle, but frankly we'd still be paying the same taxes if the NHS was abolished, which the current government is trying to do in England and Wales).
The main pressure on doctors is getting through their long daily list of patients as quickly as they can, and they get their fair share of people who have self-limiting conditions - it's very common for somebody to turn up with a cold (eg a virus) demanding antibiotics, and a rushed doctor may simply find it easier to give them what they're asking for and send them on their way, rather than spend an hour trying to educate the patient, another hour calling in a colleague to give a second (identical) opinion, then dealing with calls from the local MP and patient pressure groups because they "tried to fob off a genuinely sick patient".
Which is why we now have massive problems with multi-resistant bacteria. It's a shoddy state of affairs, and the British public are just as much to blame as the doctors who gave in to their whinging because it was the only way to get them out of the surgery so they could see the child with suspected meningitis.
I've seen traffic lights in the UK fall back on flashing yellows - this was at around 2am in Edinburgh city centre, so traffic was moderate and it was mostly taxis (pubs and clubs kick out between midnight and 3am), it didn't seem to cause any problems at all. The driver commented that it actually seemed to be an improvement.
To cause a real gridlock doing this you have to assume everybody is using the same source of data, and only that one. Most traffic control systems also use mechanical detectors, car-spotting cameras and the like, you'd need to hack all of these systems to guarantee a gridlock.
How can they tell? Because you're winning - and also because of your betting patterns. The original MIT Bringing Down The House guys got rumbled fairly quickly because of their betting patterns, so they switched to using a low-stakes gambler to do the counting who would continue to lose when the odds were in his/her favour, and they would discretely signal an accomplice to come in and bet big when this happened.
These days casinos combat it by using multiple decks of cards in a shoe which are changed before they've run through enough of them to give a good statistical idea of the remaining contents.
Casinos operate within things called laws. Yes, they have a mathematical edge in the long run, but this is a known factor (and in the UK at least, the long term odds have to be published). What these people did is illegal, meaning it breaks those laws (specifically, the ones about using a "device" to assist you - eg you can count cards if you want, that's perfectly OK, but you can't use a smartphone app to do it).
Nobody is forced to go to casinos, and if anybody is seriously surprised that the odds favour the house then they probably shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a table on the grounds that they don't have sufficient mental faculties to understand what they're doing.
Yes, but in a different way. Nothing with positive mass can travel at-or-faster-than c. Things without mass (photons, basically) must travel at exactly c. There's also wriggle room for things with negative mass, tachyons, which must travel faster than c.
OK, I'll be slightly clearer: Assuming that the equations of relativity are an accurate reflection of how our universe works, nothing with positive mass can travel at c or faster. That's a pretty unambiguous version.
No - you'd need to decrease the mass of the spaceship to zero to do that, relativity and the speed of light limit applies to any object with mass, no matter how small. What you might be able to do is reduce the mass to get closer to the speed of light, but you still can't break it.
The Higgs field is what give particles mass (in part anyway), the Higgs Boson is an excitation in this field, so the actual discovery is the Higgs field via finding the associated particle. If we are able to manipulate the Higgs field (which is currently all in the realms of SF speculation) then yes, we might be able to change the mass of particles in one way or another, but I don't expect to see inertial dampeners or anything similar in the next few decades. I'd be quite happy to be proven wrong, but it's unlikely.
Frankly, yes. He won't particularly care. North Korea, including "reservists" has the biggest standing army on the planet, three times bigger than the US military if you measure it in the number of soldiers.
Lack of access to guns isn't what's keeping the North Korean people in check, proof positive that a right to bear arms isn't a utopian solution to a dictatorial government.
Exactly. That's the point. I'm not. Algorithms can believe whatever they want, but they're still based on naive, broad-ranging stereotypes. It gets worse - to take an example from the article, I'm also a fan of musical theatre, but somehow not gay....wonder how that works?
Thanks to somebody signing up using the wrong email address (mine) internet advertising seems convinced that I'm looking for a long term relationship with a woman between 50 and 65 in the English midlands. Suits me, it saves a whole lot of suspicious looks from my 30ish girlfriend in the Scottish Highlands. I never even hit the confirm registration button. Honestly.
I also regularly search for terms on terms in Qu'ranic Islam (I'm an atheist but find it interesting) and nuclear technology (I'm a physics geek and that's one of my "things".)
The solution as far as I can see is to have really wide ranging interests.
This is why I want to see Google Hat. Google Glass, but with 19th Century rules on when to remove your hat. (Forget the bit about doffing your hat to ladies though, that could be seen as a cheap cleavage shot).
No, I sent them a pro forma letter requesting the information and asking them to send it, or to get back to me if there was an associated fee. I had to chase them a month later, but I got it, without any fee.
This is why I've simply decided not to buy another EA game. Battlefield 3 was the final straw for me - 3 downloads of around 2Gb each in the first three months? Any you have to download them to continue to play online? And the patches required are only a few Mb and the rest is DLC which you have to download whether you want to pay to have it activated or not?
To top it all, when I tried to contact them to see if patch-only downloads were available (I'm on a slow connection that 6Gb of downloads would swamp) I was told I didn't have the right date of birth. I ended up having to use the UK Data Protection Act to get hold of my account details, and sure enough my DOB was correct. The data also included "customer offered 15% discount" - which was news to me.
I give up , I'm simply not going to buy another £40 coaster from them, I have enough of those.
Because demand for oil will drop as we switch to non-fossil fuels like fission, fusion or (heaven forbid) wind/wave/tidal/solar? Because they have to keep the shareholders happy, which isn't necessarily correlated with any kind of foresight or long-term common sense? Because it's all about money, rather than preserving the environment which makes the concept of money possible? I don't know, I'm as mystified as you.
These studies only show what they do because most of the world's scientists are funded by the anti-oil lobby, who have so much money that the oil industry find it difficult to compete. Imagine if you were on an environmental archaeologist's research salary - that's got to be in the tens of thousands of dollars a year, why on earth would you accept the measly hundreds of thousands of dollars that the oil industry can afford to pay their researchers?
1. As you accelerate toward the speed of light (so-called "relativistic" speed), your mass approaches infinity. You reach a point where you can't generate enough reaction to "push" the ship any faster.
Incorrect. You can always push the ship faster because the relativistic mass never reaches infinity, it just asymptotically approaches is. Yes, it gets harder to accelerate the ship, but at no point does it become theoretically impossible.
Time passes more slowly for *you* on that ship, but that's not much help to the people back on Earth who are waiting to hear from you.
Indeed. As I pointed out. Just because I won't be able to tell people about it doesn't mean I wouldn't want to go!
2. Bussard ramjets, which theoretically scoop up interstellar hydrogen for a fusion drive have another problem. First, no rocket can accelerate faster than its exhaust. Second, physicists have worked out the math and even if you could make the "scoop" as perfect as possible, the drag of collecting interstellar hydrogen itself places a top limit on your speed (about 1/2C, as I recall, but I could be wrong).
3. At higher speeds, minor things like cosmic rays and solar wind become lethal particles. (This is being discussed right now as a real problem for a simple Mars mission -- spending a year in space could result in the astronauts glowing in the dark before they get back to Earth!) Ergo, you'll need better shielding.
I never suggested Bussard ramjets, but you're right, they're certainly not the great solution that some SF paints them as. What I had in mind was some variation on a particle accelerator as a drive, that way you can pump relativistic energy into, for example, single protons and use those to give the ship an arbitrarily large push (using Orion Project style shock absorbers to smooth the ride out), this way you get the maximum thrust for a given amount of fuel, you just need a silly amount of energy to do it. With current or near future technology this energy source is likely to be fusion reactors, and as we'd be using a form of water as the fuel for the reactor and possibly as a source of reaction material this becomes a realistic material to use as radiation/high energy particle shielding.
If I had to design a starship I'd start with an asteroid.
Nope, it's far more simple than that, thanks to Einstein's discoveries. All we need is a ship that can produce a 1g thrust over a long time. This is still a big technological jump from where we are now, but it's well within the realms of known physics. With a 1g thrust we could be on the other side of the galaxy, 100,000 light years away, in just over 22 years of ship time. That's relatively easy, no pun intended, and doesn't require any fancy new physics. The Earth time for the journey will be around 100,071 years, so there's no coming back or sending lots of emails home, but if we simply want to get humans out there it's not a problem.
The bonus is a 1g acceleration solves a lot of the medical problems like muscle (inc heart) wastage and mineral leaching.
We need to allow app makers to do the things and offer the services we can't, the really intrusive stuff that we need plausible deniability over, and by monetizing our data via licensed app services which perform tasks which we find morally ambiguous we can keep our new and desperate shareholders happy in both ways.
Yes, IF that planet really is lifeless. A single tiny non-terrestrial colony of bacteria would answer some of the biggest questions in biology and xenobiology, you have to know you've not infected the planet to use that data.
Genesis is a wonderful power, but you've got to make sure you don't overwrite an existing matrix for the science to be any good, even if it's only a Ceti-Alphan earslug.
Slashdot Mirror
That's it, I've had enough. It's easy enough to filter this kind of crap out, but /. just don't seem to bother. Yes, I could simply browse at a higher level, but I've usually got mod points and browse at -1 as suggested for very good reasons. But if /. aren't prepared to deal with the most basic levels of spamming then I can't be bothered helping them out any more. Email address deleted, password changed to a long random string that I don't know, sig changed to indicate account has been deleted. Bye everyone, most of the last decade or so has been fun, but frankly, I quit.
The pressures are generally quite the opposite under the NHS. It's generally a brilliant service, considering it's free to us (you could argue the tax angle, but frankly we'd still be paying the same taxes if the NHS was abolished, which the current government is trying to do in England and Wales).
The main pressure on doctors is getting through their long daily list of patients as quickly as they can, and they get their fair share of people who have self-limiting conditions - it's very common for somebody to turn up with a cold (eg a virus) demanding antibiotics, and a rushed doctor may simply find it easier to give them what they're asking for and send them on their way, rather than spend an hour trying to educate the patient, another hour calling in a colleague to give a second (identical) opinion, then dealing with calls from the local MP and patient pressure groups because they "tried to fob off a genuinely sick patient".
Which is why we now have massive problems with multi-resistant bacteria. It's a shoddy state of affairs, and the British public are just as much to blame as the doctors who gave in to their whinging because it was the only way to get them out of the surgery so they could see the child with suspected meningitis.
If this was company X (Windows) and company Y (Linux) we'd be laughing at X and saying they should be following company Y's example.
I've seen traffic lights in the UK fall back on flashing yellows - this was at around 2am in Edinburgh city centre, so traffic was moderate and it was mostly taxis (pubs and clubs kick out between midnight and 3am), it didn't seem to cause any problems at all. The driver commented that it actually seemed to be an improvement.
To cause a real gridlock doing this you have to assume everybody is using the same source of data, and only that one. Most traffic control systems also use mechanical detectors, car-spotting cameras and the like, you'd need to hack all of these systems to guarantee a gridlock.
How can they tell? Because you're winning - and also because of your betting patterns. The original MIT Bringing Down The House guys got rumbled fairly quickly because of their betting patterns, so they switched to using a low-stakes gambler to do the counting who would continue to lose when the odds were in his/her favour, and they would discretely signal an accomplice to come in and bet big when this happened.
These days casinos combat it by using multiple decks of cards in a shoe which are changed before they've run through enough of them to give a good statistical idea of the remaining contents.
Casinos operate within things called laws. Yes, they have a mathematical edge in the long run, but this is a known factor (and in the UK at least, the long term odds have to be published). What these people did is illegal, meaning it breaks those laws (specifically, the ones about using a "device" to assist you - eg you can count cards if you want, that's perfectly OK, but you can't use a smartphone app to do it). Nobody is forced to go to casinos, and if anybody is seriously surprised that the odds favour the house then they probably shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a table on the grounds that they don't have sufficient mental faculties to understand what they're doing.
Yes, but in a different way. Nothing with positive mass can travel at-or-faster-than c. Things without mass (photons, basically) must travel at exactly c. There's also wriggle room for things with negative mass, tachyons, which must travel faster than c.
OK, I'll be slightly clearer: Assuming that the equations of relativity are an accurate reflection of how our universe works, nothing with positive mass can travel at c or faster. That's a pretty unambiguous version.
No - you'd need to decrease the mass of the spaceship to zero to do that, relativity and the speed of light limit applies to any object with mass, no matter how small. What you might be able to do is reduce the mass to get closer to the speed of light, but you still can't break it.
The Higgs field is what give particles mass (in part anyway), the Higgs Boson is an excitation in this field, so the actual discovery is the Higgs field via finding the associated particle. If we are able to manipulate the Higgs field (which is currently all in the realms of SF speculation) then yes, we might be able to change the mass of particles in one way or another, but I don't expect to see inertial dampeners or anything similar in the next few decades. I'd be quite happy to be proven wrong, but it's unlikely.
Frankly, yes. He won't particularly care. North Korea, including "reservists" has the biggest standing army on the planet, three times bigger than the US military if you measure it in the number of soldiers.
Lack of access to guns isn't what's keeping the North Korean people in check, proof positive that a right to bear arms isn't a utopian solution to a dictatorial government.
Exactly. That's the point. I'm not. Algorithms can believe whatever they want, but they're still based on naive, broad-ranging stereotypes. It gets worse - to take an example from the article, I'm also a fan of musical theatre, but somehow not gay....wonder how that works?
Thanks to somebody signing up using the wrong email address (mine) internet advertising seems convinced that I'm looking for a long term relationship with a woman between 50 and 65 in the English midlands. Suits me, it saves a whole lot of suspicious looks from my 30ish girlfriend in the Scottish Highlands. I never even hit the confirm registration button. Honestly.
I also regularly search for terms on terms in Qu'ranic Islam (I'm an atheist but find it interesting) and nuclear technology (I'm a physics geek and that's one of my "things".)
The solution as far as I can see is to have really wide ranging interests.
This is why I want to see Google Hat. Google Glass, but with 19th Century rules on when to remove your hat. (Forget the bit about doffing your hat to ladies though, that could be seen as a cheap cleavage shot).
No, I sent them a pro forma letter requesting the information and asking them to send it, or to get back to me if there was an associated fee. I had to chase them a month later, but I got it, without any fee.
Nice to know the employees are treated well. Any chance of asking them to do the same for their customers?
This is why I've simply decided not to buy another EA game. Battlefield 3 was the final straw for me - 3 downloads of around 2Gb each in the first three months? Any you have to download them to continue to play online? And the patches required are only a few Mb and the rest is DLC which you have to download whether you want to pay to have it activated or not?
To top it all, when I tried to contact them to see if patch-only downloads were available (I'm on a slow connection that 6Gb of downloads would swamp) I was told I didn't have the right date of birth. I ended up having to use the UK Data Protection Act to get hold of my account details, and sure enough my DOB was correct. The data also included "customer offered 15% discount" - which was news to me.
I give up , I'm simply not going to buy another £40 coaster from them, I have enough of those.
Whilst I agree with your comment in general, you're about a week behind the times on that one.
Because demand for oil will drop as we switch to non-fossil fuels like fission, fusion or (heaven forbid) wind/wave/tidal/solar? Because they have to keep the shareholders happy, which isn't necessarily correlated with any kind of foresight or long-term common sense? Because it's all about money, rather than preserving the environment which makes the concept of money possible? I don't know, I'm as mystified as you.
These studies only show what they do because most of the world's scientists are funded by the anti-oil lobby, who have so much money that the oil industry find it difficult to compete. Imagine if you were on an environmental archaeologist's research salary - that's got to be in the tens of thousands of dollars a year, why on earth would you accept the measly hundreds of thousands of dollars that the oil industry can afford to pay their researchers?
(That's sarcasm, by the way.)
Incorrect. You can always push the ship faster because the relativistic mass never reaches infinity, it just asymptotically approaches is. Yes, it gets harder to accelerate the ship, but at no point does it become theoretically impossible.
Indeed. As I pointed out. Just because I won't be able to tell people about it doesn't mean I wouldn't want to go!
I never suggested Bussard ramjets, but you're right, they're certainly not the great solution that some SF paints them as. What I had in mind was some variation on a particle accelerator as a drive, that way you can pump relativistic energy into, for example, single protons and use those to give the ship an arbitrarily large push (using Orion Project style shock absorbers to smooth the ride out), this way you get the maximum thrust for a given amount of fuel, you just need a silly amount of energy to do it. With current or near future technology this energy source is likely to be fusion reactors, and as we'd be using a form of water as the fuel for the reactor and possibly as a source of reaction material this becomes a realistic material to use as radiation/high energy particle shielding.
If I had to design a starship I'd start with an asteroid.
Obligatory (and extraordinarily apt) xkcd
Nope, it's far more simple than that, thanks to Einstein's discoveries. All we need is a ship that can produce a 1g thrust over a long time. This is still a big technological jump from where we are now, but it's well within the realms of known physics. With a 1g thrust we could be on the other side of the galaxy, 100,000 light years away, in just over 22 years of ship time. That's relatively easy, no pun intended, and doesn't require any fancy new physics. The Earth time for the journey will be around 100,071 years, so there's no coming back or sending lots of emails home, but if we simply want to get humans out there it's not a problem.
The bonus is a 1g acceleration solves a lot of the medical problems like muscle (inc heart) wastage and mineral leaching.
We need to allow app makers to do the things and offer the services we can't, the really intrusive stuff that we need plausible deniability over, and by monetizing our data via licensed app services which perform tasks which we find morally ambiguous we can keep our new and desperate shareholders happy in both ways.
Yes, IF that planet really is lifeless. A single tiny non-terrestrial colony of bacteria would answer some of the biggest questions in biology and xenobiology, you have to know you've not infected the planet to use that data.
Genesis is a wonderful power, but you've got to make sure you don't overwrite an existing matrix for the science to be any good, even if it's only a Ceti-Alphan earslug.