Comment "shower" thought (Score 3, Funny) 46
Crypto currencies are just NFTs for money.
Comment Re: Curiously? (Score 1) 205
It seems that state-to-state (or even city-to-city) variations in law pretty much just requires that a lawyer and an engineer sit down and code up the statutes, right? Then do simulator testing? Then the car can download them as needed. I'd bet that autonomous (or semi-autonomous, as I think better describes this one) cars will do a better job at that than out-of-state drivers.
Comment Re:Reference to... (Score 4, Insightful) 255
4xx means that the requester is invited to try again (ie, to circumvent.)
Comment 503 (Score 1) 763
I guess slashdot got slashdotted?
Comment Make lots of copies (Score 1) 499
None of the originals -- or even 2nd or 3rd generation copies -- of any ancient or classical era literature have survived to the present day. What kept the works from being lost is that there were lots of scribes making lots of copies, and spreading them around. People did this because they thought they were good, so they went to the expense of having a copy made.
For your pictures and videos, even if you're not thinking of keeping them around for thousands of years, do the same thing: Make copies and spread them around to people who want copies. Convert them to different formats, too (Try to keep some high-quality, non-DRM copies for the next format as well). Don't just think in terms of having a monolithic collection (like the Library at Alexandria) either. You want each grandparent, aunt and cousin to be helping you to curate a distributed cloud of record.
The "obvious" tool here would be The Cloud -- but be careful. None of Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, or Facebook really cares about your pictures; they care about the revenue they can make by keeping a relationship with you. They're kindof like ancient scribes. Let them help you with the making of the copies, but don't let any of them (or any subset of them) keep your only copy for very long.
Comment Re:The Internet in anti-government actions (Score 1) 615
Really?
I think that turning off the Internet is pretty much an admission that regime change is inevitable. A legitimate sovereign power can enforce its laws without completely blocking everything.
You might as well suggest that ballot boxes are dead tools because they haven't been used in Egypt in a few decades... but they aren't, and they'll probably be used again very soon.
Submission + - IANA allocates 2 /8s to APNIC, exausts freepool (apnic.net)
davburns writes: The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority has allocated two /8s of IPv4 address space to APNIC. This also triggers the IANA to allocate the final five /8s — one to each of the RIRs. APNIC suggests that this will hold them for three to six months. After that, sites without IPv6 have something less than full Internet connectivity. Potaroo has a slightly longer estimate of September when RIR Unallocated space is exausted.
Comment potaroo is a little more optimistic (Score 1) 1
The IPv4 Address Report is still predicting RIR exhaustion in late September. It'll be interesting to see if it's closer to that, or to APNIC's April-July prediction.
If APNIC is right, then there will probably be IPv6-only sites on the internet before 8 June, 2011.
Comment I don't know? (Score 1) 559
Do any of us know?
Sure, we can name a few (or some of us a few dozen...) but aren't there a hundred or so we didn't think of?
Comment Re:Eeep! (Score 1) 187
It seems appropriate to make a joke about the Mall in Edmonton, but I haven't had enough caffeine today.
New Estimates Say Earth's Oceans Smaller Than Once Believed 263
Velcroman1 writes with this snippet from Fox News: "Using lead weights and depth sounders, scientists have made surprisingly accurate estimates of the ocean's depths in the past. Now, with satellites and radar, researchers have pinned down a more accurate answer to that age-old query: How deep is the ocean? And how big? As long ago as 1888, John Murray dangled lead weights from a rope off a ship to calculate the ocean's volume — the product of area and mean ocean depth. Using satellite data, researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute set out to more accurately answer that question — and found out that it's 320 million cubic miles. And despite miles-deep abysses like the Mariana Trench, the ocean's mean depth is just 2.29 miles, thanks to the varied and bumpy ocean floor."
Supermassive Black Hole Is Thrown Out of Galaxy 167
DarkKnightRadick writes "An undergrad student at the University of Utrecht, Marianne Heida, has found evidence of a supermassive black hole being tossed out of its galaxy. According to the article, the black hole — which has a mass equivalent to one billion suns — is possibly the culmination of two galaxies merging (or colliding, depending on how you like to look at it) and their black holes merging, creating one supermassive beast. The black hole was found using the Chandra Source Catalog (from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory). The direction of the expulsion is also possibly indicative of the direction of rotation of the two black holes as they circled each other before merging."
xkcd, Devotion To Duty 167
xkcd really hit the nail on the head today.
Astronomers Discover 33 Pairs of Waltzing Black Holes 101
Astronomers from UC Berkeley have identified 33 pairs of waltzing black holes, closing the gap somewhat between the observed population of super-massive black hole pairs and what had been predicted by theory. "Astronomical observations have shown that 1) nearly every galaxy has a central super-massive black hole (with a mass of a million to a billion times the mass of the Sun), and 2) galaxies commonly collide and merge to form new, more massive galaxies. As a consequence of these two observations, a merger between two galaxies should bring two super-massive black holes to the new, more massive galaxy formed from the merger. The two black holes gradually in-spiral toward the center of this galaxy, engaging in a gravitational tug-of-war with the surrounding stars. The result is a black hole dance, choreographed by Newton himself. Such a dance is expected to occur in our own Milky Way Galaxy in about 3 billion years, when it collides with the Andromeda Galaxy."
Proton Beams Sent Around the LHC 115
feldhaus writes "The BBC reports that the first beams for over one year have been successfully sent around the complete circumference of the Large Hadron Collider. Engineers do not yet have a stable circulating beam but they hope to by 0600 GMT on Saturday."
