Comment Re:born in paris, living in columbus OH (Score 2) 332
I'm more surprised that there are currently 68 people berthed on the ISS who read slashdot. It must be cosy up there.
But I've always wondered how we know that the speed of light is the same regardless
This comes from the electromagnetic nature of light. When considered as a wave, light is composed of an oscillating electric field. As the electric field changes it induces an oscillating magnetic field. As the magentic field changes it induces an electric field again, and so on, such that the electric and magnetic fields regenerate each other. According to Maxwells laws, such a wave can only sustain itself at a specific speed: the speed of light. This speed is determined by the permeability and permitivity of the medium it travels in, hence the speed of light varies in different materials.
(I also am not a physicist, but I remember this from school
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As I understand it, it would take an eternity from our point of view for the star to fall in the black hole completely due to the time dilation in the vicinity of the black hole. However, I believe what they're seeing is just the start of the event. A star is effectively a huge nuclear explosion kept in equilibrium by a massive gravitational field. As the star approached the black hole, the gravitational field from the black hole would gradually reduce that of the star on the near side until at some point it would no longer be enough to contain the nuclear reaction. At this point the matter in the star would be explode in the direction of the black hole. This would probably accelerate as the star itself lost mass and hence gravitational field strength. It's the rapidity of this reaction which causes the gamma ray burst, not the process of the matter actually falling into the black hole, which would probably look like a regular accretion disc. I'd guess the whole process would be over fairly quickly.
I'm not an astrophysicist, but this is my hand-wavey explanation of what happened. Hopefully someone better qualified will elaborate, or tell me
I'm writing bollocks
How is it diffferent from a regular ATM, apart from the loot being less liquid?
Gold is untraceable and you can convert it to hard currency anywhere in the world. Large quantities of cash are very hard to spend unless you have a money laundering scheme.
Why wasn't this treated as a criminal (or even civil property) matter? Aren't the new owners guilty of receiving stolen property? I mean, even if they didn't know it before (assuming they bought the dog from the thief and didn't realize it was stolen), they obviously do now. I've never seen a case where stolen property was found and the cops just let the holders keep it. Maybe fences should start chipping *all* their stolen goods before reselling them ("All these items chipped for your protection. Safe as buying from a reputable store!").
And even if the dog wasn't stolen, it's still the original owner's property, no? Did the UK abolish property rights for pets or something?
I'm not sure about the law in England, but under Scottish law, as long as the new owners were unaware that the dog was stolen they would legally own it and be innocent of purchasing stolen property. The former owner would have to sue the thief for damages in order to be compensated.
Sadly even though the tablets in TFA will probably have nicer hardware, more features, and be cheaper to boot, they will most likely all bomb hard. As we saw with MSFT and first tablets, then HTPCs, then Vista and Zune, what you are selling doesn't matter as much as how you sell it and that seems to be something these companies don't get, while Steve has built an empire on it.
What you seem to be missing is that nicer hardware, more features and lower price don't necessarily imply a better product.
You're the second one to suggest "age". When humans die of age, that's some failure in the human body that's common when people grow old. That's when we say someone died of old age. However when human made devices die, there is always a component that has failed. When you have a 5 year old mobile telephone that dies, you say it died of old age, and replace it. That's because you don't care and replacing it costs less than finding out the root cause for the failure.
When a properly designed computer flips a bit, SOMETHING happened. We may never know, it might have been a cosmic ray. But don't you think that they would use space-certified RAM chips for such a project?
Semiconductor devices deteriorate over time due to dopant diffusion in the substrate. It's entirely possible for that memory bit to flip because the threshold voltages have drifted too far out of specification over the years.
they have basically ensured that only someone else with equally deep pockets has the time and money to engineer something so clearly better that they can recoup the time investment by surpassing VP8.
They could always recoup their money by making a codec so good that Google will just buy the company and release it as open source. If anything, it would be easier to bring such a product to market, because the market is just Google, and Google have deep pockets.
Factorials were someone's attempt to make math LOOK exciting.
