Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Are emails copyrighted ? (Score 2) 138

No that is not true. If I create some software I can license it or effectively give it away...

The fact that you - automatically - hold the copyright for the works you create doesn't prevent you from doing either of those things. Indeed, copyright is necessary for you to be able to license the work.

Comment Not "ballistic" weapons (Score 1) 290

Hypersonic weapons — or ballistic weapons that can hit a target flying many times faster than the speed of sound...

The summary is flat wrong in its terminology. A key point about hypersonic weapons, from a tactical and strategic standpoint, is that they aren't ballistic. They're potentially faster and sneakier.

Aside from acceleration during boost and (generally limited) manoeuvering during descent, ballistic weapons are - by definition - coasting unpowered for most of their flight time. Ballistic missiles put their warheads into an elliptical orbit that happens to intersect the surface of the earth (typically somewhere around Moscow) and let gravity do most of the work.

Hypersonic weapons, in stark contrast, are in powered flight for most or all of their journey. Instead of being lobbed up and coming back down, they can go straight to their target (modulo the curvature of the earth). They can travel a path and a velocity that is limited by their own engineering rather than by orbital mechanics. From a strategic standpoint, they would allow delivery of warheads (particularly nuclear warheads) in shorter times by less-detectable and less-interceptable courses, with all the attendant consequences for the calculus of nuclear war, first strikes, and mutually assured destruction.

Comment Re:What the fuck is this pretentious bullshit? (Score 5, Funny) 190

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.

Comment Re:Move to a gated community (Score 1) 611

...all of these can be achieved by adding enough lanes to your freeways. Enough many be quite high number, butt hat's fine: building robust infrastructure to make life better is what my taxes are for.

"Robust infrastructure" is good. "Adding lanes to freeways" isn't the only way to reach that goal--and it isn't necessarily the most cost-effective use of those tax dollars. Just laying down roadbed and asphalt isn't terribly costly; call it $10 million or so per mile of 4-lane interstate. Building wider bridges, digging supplementary tunnels, constructing complex interchanges, realigning adjacent utility conduits and ramps--well, that costs quite a bit more. Expropriating massive amounts of land adjacent to existing interstates in dense urban areas - or adding parallel routes, or building stacked or buried lanes - is extraordinarily, sometimes ruinously, costly. (Boston's Big Dig cost something like $200 million per lane-mile.)

And each lane gets you about 2,000 cars per hour, at best. If you have a million people in the suburbs who want to get to work between 8 and 9am, and they're all driving their own vehicles, your system grinds to a halt unless there are 500 live Interstate lanes into the city. Worse, each additional car you add to the city means more traffic on the roads in town, and demand for parking, and production of local air pollution, and so forth. "Build more lanes" is a solution that ultimately just doesn't scale.

In contrast, bus rapid transit systems can achieve at least 10,000 passengers per hour and sometimes as high as 30,000 per hour depending on configuration. Light rail achieves similar passenger numbers. Metro (subway) systems typically top out north of 30,000 passengers per hour, per line; Hong Kong's metro system clears 80,000 per hour on its highest-traffic lines. (For those keeping score, that's enough to offset 40 Interstate lanes.)

Comment Re:Sensors can't monitor climate change (Score 5, Insightful) 116

Sensors can monitor only weather. They can monitor neither climate nor change. Both must be calculated from series of data points.

That's sort of like saying you can't measure the area of a room using a tape measure,. After all, you have to perform a calculation based on the measurements you collect; the tape measure doesn't have an "area" reading. By one sufficiently pedantic, narrow, arrogant, obnoxious measure, you could argue that you were correct--and you probably would get punched by a lot of tradespeople who recognized you were just being an insufferable prick instead of making a useful contribution.

The sensors - or the tape measure - are necessary tools for the process, even though they don't directly output the final processed result.

Comment Re:No (Score 4, Informative) 545

No, that is how (one metric for) UNemployment is measured. The FRED data I referenced is the comprehensive employment (_not_ UNemployment) of all persons aged 25 - 54 in France and in the US. No issues about measuring who's looking for a job and who isn't. You should actually look at the data source I posted instead of making these inaccurate statements.

Comment Re:No (Score 5, Informative) 545

I am getting my data from the Federal Reserve's domestic and foreign data: http://research.stlouisfed.org...

Tons of data you can view there. Pull up France's 25 - 54 employment, and the US's. My statement is true.

You, and Business Insider, are pushing a narrative that relies on apples-to-oranges. You and BI are relying on unemployment data covering all 18+ year olds. But that's a ridiculous metric for a country with strong educational social programs for the younger generation and strong retirement social programs for the older generation. The young take the time to learn more skills, the old are able to retire at a much younger age than the wage slaves in the US.

But of course the free market fundamentalists are going to seize on faulty reasoning if it can be used as an argument to dismantle social programs and worker protections.

Comment Re:No (Score 5, Informative) 545

Just prior to the 2008 economic collapse, France's employment for those aged 25 - 54 was around 83%, compared to 80% in the US. Lately, after the collapse and some recovery, the rate in France is 81%, compared to 76% in the US.

France has good educational opportunities, skewing comparisons for those under 25, and good retirement benefits, skewing comparisons for those over 54. But apples-to-apples for the core years of productivity show France has the right idea.

Comment So ends a fad (Score 1) 238

And thus the beginning of the end of the RESTful fad. Not that there's anything wrong with RESTful architecture per se, but as a fad it has been shoe-horned by ideologues into so many inappropriate domains lately: embedded P2P, M2M spaces, etc. Sure, it makes sense for one-to-many patterns involving human-readable, human-discoverable resources, particularly of semi-static resources that can be cached and proxied by middle agents. But of course that later part only works for unsecured transactions. So now the exemplar of RESTful design itself, the WWW, is abandoning one of the key supposed benefits of being RESTful.

Comment Re:Only 25% positive? (Score 2) 342

So the cops blood tested all of these people with what I assume is probably cause and only 25% were actually under the influence? Or do they just randomly blood test everyone and 25% of all Washington drivers are high?

Could be neither. In many jurisdictions, the roadside breath test (or field sobriety test) merely provides probable cause for law enforcement to obtain a warrant, with which they can compel a blood sample. I wouldn't be surprised if they are allowed to test for a range of intoxicating substances - including THC - and not just ethanol with these tests.

Note, as well, that "25% tested positive" is not the same as "25% were 'high' or intoxicated". Detectable amounts of THC or metabolites don't mean, necessarily, dangerous or intoxicating quantities. (Depending on exactly what was being tested, and the sensitivity of their instruments, they could have been seeing very low levels associated with marijuana use days or even weeks previously, or even with secondhand exposure.)

Comment Another /. story that doesn't link to the paper (Score 2) 112

Sigh. Another Slashdot story about a new article published in a scientific journal, another Slashdot story that fails to link to the original published paper. I just noticed that the "News for nerds. Stuff that matters" tagline no longer appears on the Slashdot front page; this sort of omission is probably one of the reasons why.

For people who are interested in the actual data:

Sanghavi, P. et al. "Outcomes After Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest Treated by Basic vs Advanced Life Support." JAMA Intern Med Published online November 24, 2014. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2014.5420.

And here's the JAMA press release.

Comment parked in public stalls... (Score 1) 454

Why would the autos be "parked in public stalls?"

I own a garage. I live near lots of other people. If I didn't own a car, why wouldn't I lease this space to the owner of a self-driving car? After all, it's near lots of people, and I could use the dough.

It's true, the number of self-driving cars will certainly be fewer than the number of cars now, but you'll still need capacity for commuting, for Thanksgiving family trips, etc.

Why would a company spend money to build auto storage in public spaces when they could spend less renting the now less-valued garage spaces from people, so that the cars are closer to where those people are?

Comment Re:Link to PNAS article (Score 1) 114

Because the "actual papers" are behind paywalls...

1. Not always the case. Some journals (or articles) are open access.

2. Many Slashdot readers have access to paywalled journal articles through our schools or employers.

3. Abstracts are virtually always free to access, and often still provide better information than news coverage.

4. Links are cheap, and there's no reason to avoid providing links to both the lay summary and the actual paper.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love." -- Albert Einstein

Working...