Comment Re:Dark Matter? (Score 1) 142
Dark matter, as observed, seems to hang around galaxies. This suggests that it travels fairly slowly, and can't normally easily escape a galactic gravitational well, suggesting that it isn't tachyons.
Dark matter, as observed, seems to hang around galaxies. This suggests that it travels fairly slowly, and can't normally easily escape a galactic gravitational well, suggesting that it isn't tachyons.
That's one idea, sure, but whenever we start talking about modern physics I really distrust "it makes more sense". There's plenty in modern physics that doesn't actually make sense that I can see.
Got any evidence for monotonic time? There are legitimate scientific theories that mean some forms of time travel are consistent with the laws of physics as we understand them.
Special relativity (a very well-tested theory) also shows that faster-than-light travel or information transfer allows travel or information transfer back in time. (The converse is obviously true: if you take five years to go to Alpha Centauri, and then go back four years, you've traveled FTL.)
Lots of people are rather attached to the idea of one-way time and having non-paradoxical causality, which means they don't want it to be possible to send information faster than light.
The wording in TFS implies that adults don't matter at all. If it had said something like "5 crew and 116 passengers, including sixteen children and a baby", that'd be cool. It would acknowledge all lives lost, with some additional description for human interest.
I haven't looked at news reports, so I don't know if TFS is unusually egregious here (not unusual for
There are children starving in Africa.
There are still forced marriages around the globe.
There are female circumcisions taking place this isn't.
Unless you want to be a "ANY NEWS!" site, this isn't the place for those stories. It doesn't mean they aren't important, or don't matter. It means that it's not appropriate for a tech-news site unless, specifically, there is tech involved in a non-trivial way.
The tech side of this story is "a plane". That's about it.
You want the non-tech stories, go elsewhere, or tell us where a PURELY tech news site is.
Try watching it on the news.
In Italy: "There were no Italians on board" x 5 within the space of a 2 minute news article.
In England: Even BBC News has a headline "Only one Brit onboard".
The crash isn't news if they're foreign or old. Same as everything else they portray on the news. War in the Middle East that involves no European/American countries? Barely mentioned. The US says something about a war in the Middle East? News article. The US is IN the Middle East, can't move for "news" of it, down to deaths of individual soldiers (an unprecedented coverage of a war).
TV News doesn't care about the news. They care about making you go "Oh my God!" when you see it, so you keep watching through the adverts.
I actually dug out my old Model M last year. Aside from the fact that the rubber.insulation had flaked off the keyboard cord, it still worked perfectly. And it was every bit as good as I remembered it being for typing, and if I replace the cord it will last forever.
There's only one problem with the thing: it's so damn loud. Every damn keypress is accompanied by a loud "POK!" Forget about annoying other people, *I* was annoyed. Years of typing on pretty good Thinkpad "scissor switch" keyboards had accustomed me to a low, pleasant sussuration.
Cherry makes a "brown" switch that is not quite as loud as the classic buckling spring. I have a cheap nixeus keyboard that uses "brown" knock-offs. They're pretty good and not so loud as to be annoying. I wouldn't use this keyboard in public, at a Starbucks or in the library, but it's fine in my home office.
Mechanical switches are just like analog vinyl. Because the action is analog it isn't just on or off but has a slight curve between the states.
This. Exactly this. Inexperienced typists just don't get it.
To convey proper nuance in text, I don't always want exactly 1 letter "A" when I press the "A" key. Using uniform whole letters can seem jarring and mechanical, particularly when writing personal email. Sometimes a message composer only wants, say, 0.95 "A", just to soften the letter out. Other times, it's nice to smooth the letter out a bit, letting it fade out genty across the length of the word instead of being uncomfortably square.
These mechanical keyboards are usually tuned to be "warmer", as well--when you press that "A" key, it has overtones and harmonics from other vowels. A little bit of "E" goes a long way, but true "golden fingers" agree that plenty of "O" adds mellowness and roundness.
The adoption of these digital, non-mechanical keyboards is also one of the major reasons why emotion and subtext - especially related to humor - are so often lost in text-based messaging.
http://www.planecrashinfo.com/...
Commercial aircraft go down anything up to 20 times a year, even in modern times. Back when you were a kid, likely 30 times a year or more.
Already we have this lot:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
That's one every two weeks. One of the ones you hint at was, what, July and over an entirely different continent anyway.
Learn some statistics. You soon find that people have selection-bias on what they see in the news, what they perceive as a "close fact" (being a plane heading TO Malaysia crashing in another continent, instead of one heading from Malaysia that crashes near Malaysia... very different things), and what they want to lump together to form some kind of extraordinary circumstance.
Hopefully the A350 can make up for the anemic A380 sales
The A380 is really huge. A lot of the long-haul flights that I've been on in the last couple of years haven't been full, even when they're the one flight of the day between two points and are on a plane with half of the capacity of the A380. It's a very economical plane to fly if you can fill it up, but if it's likely to be under half full then it's very expensive.
This has more to do with the way the US hub and spoke model is designed. If you travel between Europe and Asia or Asia and America the A380 is quite popular. Its taking over a lot of the routes that 747's were used for. QANTAS is replacing it's custom 747-ER aircraft with stock A380's for it's pacific routes.
The A380 has a bigger issue that gates at older airports need to be upgraded to accommodate the A380. Despite this, Airbus have delivered 147 airframes since release. Its really the 747-8 that is floundering.
So what you're suggesting is get a DUI, and we'll ruin your life. I mean, I hate people drink driving, but ruining their life is not a good way of turning them into a functioning member of society, it's a good way of turning them into an alcoholic criminal.
The thought is that if they knew getting caught would ruin their lives, they might stop. Today, there's no reason to not drive drunk. The expected cost of driving drunk is less than the cost of a cab. So it's rational to drive drunk. So long as the cheapest/easiest option is driving drunk, people will still do it.
And what some people are going to hate is, this approach works in the UK and Australia.
DUI in Australia carries a mandatory license suspension in most cases. The only way you get away with just a fine is if you're just over the limit and it's your first drink driving infraction in 3 years...
The UK is nowhere near as lenient, so much as 0.00001 over and you're off the road for a month or more.
Drink driving incidents have decreased significantly.
We also use Alcohol Interlock Devices here in Oz, but this is only for people who have recorded multiple DUI convictions.
can someone explain to me why it's so important to have a Facebook account?
Parsing through translation computer...
I've got an axe to grind against Facebook for whatever reason, can someone validate my beliefs... Pleeeeeease validate what I believe.
But to answer your question, a lot of people use it to share thoughts, experiences, photographs and information with friends and family.
Its convenient and most people also don't give a shit about metadata mining.
I didn't complain but I found some of the pictures it unearthed to be painful reminders,
Facebook decided my best "year in review" photo was one of my car accident. Sure I took a screenshot and used it as a joke but I can imagine how people being show pictures of their dead child would upset them. Facebook at least acknowledged that have removed it for now, as of a few hours ago Facebook is no longer showing me the mangled back end of a DC5S.
Also, I'm pretty sure more than one person complained. Its only one getting media attention.
Point of information - this wasn't Malaysia Airlines, it was AirAsia.
More precisely it was Indonesian AirAsia, which is a separate company to AirAsia BHD as Indonesia prohibits majority foreign ownership on airlines. Indonesian AirAsia has its own staff, management and maintenance.
It should also be noted that AirAsia BHD practically owns Indonesia AirAsia as they completely funded the holding company that owns the other 51% of the stock.
For large values of one, one equals two, for small values of two.
