My phone is so cheap it doesn't have a flash, you insensitive clod!

Might help.

This could mean that D-Wave isn't quantum. Or it could mean that quantum computing in general isn't faster than normal computing. I seem to recall some physicist making a bet that quantum computing would be proved equivalent to classical computing.

IIRC, I calculated once that a carbon tax raising the same revenue as the gas tax would result in a 5c/gallon gas tax. (And taxes on other things.) So raising the desired amount of revenue with a carbon tax would still lower the gas tax to about 9c/gallon.

Well, that's the question, isn't it? I don't think this completely invalidates "business method" patents.

This is an extension of the argument that "$process on a computer" is not patentable separately from $process. A previous ruling said that if $process was already patented, "$process on a computer" did not constitute a new patent. This ruling says that if $process is not defined specifically enough to be patented, then "$process on a computer" does not add enough specifics to make the whole process patentable.

So, I think that leaves something like 1-Click subject to patent claims as a "business method", because it is sufficiently specific: The business identifies you, stores your payment info and address, and both charges you and ships stuff to you with one action. To invalidate it would require a similar process in use before the patent, whether or not it used a computer.

In discussion about potentially cloning passenger pigeons, there were concerns that the species needed huge flocks. As a result, there were concerns that cloning just a few wouldn't be enough to bring back the species.

Since this study showed that passenger pigeons had population crashes before and came back, this should alleviate the flock size concerns.

Huh, I either didn't read that or discounted it. Something similar happens in our own solar system. A planet either needs a thick atmosphere (Venus) or a strong magnetic field (Earth) or it loses most of its atmosphere (Mercury, Mars). And I think tidal locking could be an advantage, preventing wild climate swings.

I'm a Liberal, and I accept GMO food. But I'm also a Slashdotter, so what I can't accept is patented GMO food.

I currently subscribe to a variant of this climate change theory. (Natural, not anthropogenic.)

My variant is that all, or almost all the civilizations the aliens know about formed around red dwarf stars. It's nice and stable there for very long periods of time. We're only stable here by luck - and our big moon helps some.

Another fun thing to think about: If you look at our system as a whole, from a very long distance, we look like we're still a pre-multicellular world. Sure, there's free oxygen and water (Earth), but there's lots of iron still to be oxidized (Mars), and lots of free CO2 (Mars and Venus). I imagine there are a lot of pre-multicellular worlds (like Mars IMHO) orbiting yellow stars, so we don't stand out. (But for our radio transmissions.)

Why does the transition to IPV6 have to happen immediately after all IPV4 addresses are allocated? Why can't someone set up a market for IPV4 addresses that can then be bought and sold? At that point, the transition to IPV6 wouldn't happen very quickly, until the cost for IPV4 addresses exceeded the cost for IPV6 equipment. Then it would happen very quickly.

Ads? What ads?

-- Happy AdBlock Plus user.

Did they try putting an ad within an ad on this article about a star within a star?

Actually it could be both. TFA doesn't say "warrant canary"; it says "duress canary". Duress could be anything from NSA to Russian Mob to simply getting sick of working on the project.

Furthermore, if the "duress canary" was set up right, inaction would cause it to appear. So it would be the default result of a "rage quit". And maybe they were too sick of the project to bother with anything better.

I don't know about Mercurial, but have you ever used Bazaar? While Git is written in C, Bazaar is apparently written in Python, and it's even slower than that implies.

Well...yes, and no. I'll start with the no: The idea is that if the planet and moon are both in front of the star at the same time, no matter how they're aligned, the spectrum will look like it's being filtered through their combined atmospheres. They're just so far away that everything blurs together.

But it does seem like there should be ways to tease them apart. If the planet and moon are widely separated, there should be a brief period when only one atmosphere is filtered at the beginning of the transit and again at the end. This may be too brief for current technology to detect. It could also be mistaken if the planet is really a single planet that is somehow highly asymmetrical. (Perhaps something evaporates by day and condenses by night?)

The other thing that comes to mind is that a moon orbiting a planet will likely have to move fast. Astronomers are good at calculating speeds, especially relative speeds, with redshifts. They've measured the very slow motion of stars as large planets orbit them. So if they detect that the signatures of the two gases have significantly different redshifts, they can conclude that one gas is on a planet while another is on a moon. This doesn't eliminate all false positives - the planet and moon could be close together, and thus not moving much toward or away from Earth, when the transit happens. But multiple transits are likely to have different alignments, unless either the moon's orbital period is synchronized to the planet's, or the planet and moon orbit in a plane perpendicular to our line of sight. Both of these are not impossible, but are unlikely. An asymmetrical planet with a high rotational velocity could also produce a false negative, but this is also unlikely.

The current leading petition about net neutrality is this one:

https://petitions.whitehouse.g...