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

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:cause and/or those responsible (Score 0) 667

Nothing is objectively known about the airliner. Everything, from Ukrainian air traffic control ordering the plane to descend to a dangerous altitude to who detected what, is all supposition and hearsay at this point.

It is my personal suspicion that the Ukrainian authorities were hoping for an accident of this sort and were intent on placing a civilian airliner in as dangerous a position as possible. Whether that was the case for this specific airliner on this specific flight is unclear.

And I'd argue that Korean Airlines 007 is a better example for this reason. The US had been using civilian airliners for spying on Russia for some time and doctored the evidence to remove Russian pilots radioing warnings to the aircraft in order to make the incident more incriminating than it was. Whether that flight was used for spying, was shadowed by such an aircraft, or merely happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, all becomes incidental. The accident was inevitable and the US government of the time was guilty of ensuring civilians would someday die for the benefit of military intelligence. It was merely a matter of which plane would be blown out of the sky and when.

In this case, the Ukranian authorities deliberately downplayed the risk of missile attacks on overflying aircraft and deliberately worked to place aircraft in the most dangerous air corridors that the airlines would permit. That is indisputable. Their opponents were known to be firing on aircraft and had shot several down. When your time to respond is measured in milliseconds, the nearest aircraft identification guide is mere hours away, to paraphrase what Americans often say about cops.

An accident was inevitable. The separatists weren't interested in avoiding one, the Ukrainian authorities certainly weren't. It was merely who would die for someone else's ideals. Whether or not this aircraft was deliberately placed in the path of a SAM battery is unimportant.

Both sides are therefore guilty. Both sides deserve blame.

Comment Re:String theory is not science (Score 5, Insightful) 147

It's testable, it's measurable, it's repeatable, it's capable of prediction. it's either the simplest model that meets these requirements AND produces correct predictions, OR it is not.

Therefore it is science.

Maths is a science, for the reasons given in the first line. Science is a mathematical system, because ultimately there is nothing there, just numbers. (See: Spinons and other quasiparticles.)

Comment Multiverse theory (Score 4, Informative) 147

There are many multiverse theories and they can all be tested.

Many Worlds: The theory that there are no real "probability waves" in QM, merely overlapping realities that diverge at the time the "waveform" collapses.

This is an easy one. Entangled particles operate using the same physics as wormholes. If one of the entangled pair is accelerated to relativistic velocities, say in a particle accelerator, they will not exist in the same relative timeframe. It would seem to follow that if Many Worlds is correct, one of the particles will be entangled with multiple instances of the other particle, which would imply that every state would be seen at the same time. If the options are left spin and right spin, you'd see an aggregate state of no spin even if no spin isn't a physical possibility. And seeing something that doesn't exist either means you're in a Phineas and Ferb cartoon or Many Worlds is correct.

Foam Universe: This is the sort described in the article.

Yes, impact studies are possible, but they're only meaningful if you have enough data and you can't possibly know if you do. You're better off trying to make a universe, preferably a very small one with a quantum black hole at the throat of the bridge linking this universe to that one. What you will observe is energy apparently vanishing, not existing in any form - mass included, then reappearing as the bridge completely collapses.

Orange Slice Universe: This conjectures that multiple, semi-independent, universes formed out of the same big bang and will eventually converge in a big crunch.

It doesn't matter that this universe would expand forever, left to its own devices, because the total mass is the total mass of all the slices. Although they are semi-independent, they interact at the universe-to-universe level. In this scheme, because there's a single entity (albeit partitioned), leptons cannot have just any of the theoretical states. The state space must also be partitioned. Ergo, if you can't create a state for an electron (for example) that it should be able to take, this type of multiverse must exist.

Membrane-based Universe: This postulates that universes are at an interface between a membrane and something else, such as another membrane.

However, membranes intersecting with the universe are supposed to be how leptons are formed, in this theory. The intersection will be governed by the topology of the membranes involved (including the one the universe resides on), which means that lepton behaviour must vary from locality to locality, since the nature of the intersections cannot vary such as to perfectly mirror variations in the shape of the membrane the universe is on. Therefore, all you need to do is demonstrate a result that is perfectly repeatable anywhere on Earth but not, say, at the edge of the solar system.

Comment Faulty assumption (Score 2) 418

Not everyone "gets" that advertising is needed. In fact, click-through revenue is so miniscule that it would be more cost-effective to not saturate the Internet with ads, or indeed have ads on the Internet at all. The Internet had no advertising at all until two Utah lawyers invented spam and made a fortune promoting their book on Internet advertising. That was around 5 years after the Internet was privatized.

Almost no site I give a damn about relies on advertising. As advertising on a site goes up, the time I spend there goes down. When in England, I watch BBC almost exclusively, ITV stuff is relegated to whenever it comes out on DVD. That has been the case for much of my life. When moving to the US, I abandoned television entirely simply because of the adverts.

Linux is one of the top Operating Systems and gained almost all of that reputation and awesomeness before IBM started their TV ads.

So if products don't need advertising, the Internet doesn't need advertising and users hate advertising, then who the hell is this "everyone" who "understands" the need?

Comment Re:Leaks or spying? (Score 1) 244

Not really. The eye mixes colours in order to see them, it's full-spectrum. Digital cameras are not.

The obvious enhancement would be to develop ink and paper that create the visual illusion of RGB on some solid background but which show up on CCD devices as dots of random colours everywhere. Ideally, saying something rude when examined as a stereogram.

Comment Maybe interesting (Score 1) 71

How does the native support look on the official IPv6 compliance tests at TAHI?

Not everyone wants DHCP at home, when router advertisements and automatic addressing are as good or better. How does this look?

Does the router support Mobile IP?

Are there any disabled kernel options relating to the protocol?

How does it fare on IPv6 NAT?

Comment Re:Reminds me of The Wonderful Burt Wonderstone (Score 4, Insightful) 96

Humans nearly died out entirely from hunger and thirst, it was visionaries that led them out of a dying region of Africa into Asia, by a route that appeared to defy reason to any non-visionary of the time.

Pre-humans nearly had their brains the size of a grapefruit and wired backwards. It was visionaries who developed fire, 2.5 million years ago, providing the much-needed nutrition that allowed us to avoid the same fate as every other lineage of hominid.

Visionaries allowed the Norse to split quartz in a way that permitted them to track the sun even in cloudy skies and well into twilight, giving them greater access to the seas, trade and food than any other society of that time.

Visionaries developed cities to handle the logistics of the brewing and baking industries, again counter to any "obvious" logic that farming and hunting were how you got food.

Visionaries are the reason you can post stuff on the Internet, and why persecuted minorities around the world can have a voice and education.

So don't tell a visionary that he is defying your common sense. His work may have implications for society that you cannot imagine simply because he has the imagination and you don't. That does not mean that it will have such an implication or that he does have that extra imagination. It simply means that visionaries have a track record of saving people from starvation.

What about normal people? Those are usually the ones who manufacture conditions suitable for mass starvation. They're the ones who create nothing but buy the rights to sue to oblivion those who do. They're the ones who have allowed security holes to develop in critical infrastructure, like nuclear power stations, and then place said infrastructure on the public Internet where anybody can play with it. They're the ones who deny Global Warming and have endangered all life on this planet.

At this point in history, we'd be better off if the normal people were rounded up, put on some nowhere continent, and left to rot at their own hands. This would also solve much of the operpopulation crisis, as they're also the ones that breed morons like rabbits. If they choose to become civilized, they're free to do so. That would be helpful, in fact. But as long as they remain normal (read: proto-human), their fate is their lookout but they've no business making it everyone else's fate too.

Slashdot Top Deals

A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson

Working...