I got a big fat BLOCKED screen today trying to post a comment. It had no links, no profanity, and I didn't even use the b!zx word or the Naz! word. Pack your shit, folks

Continued on from here.

I agree it may not be by much depending on mass.

No disagreement here. I was discounting it due to the low acceleration in this case (e.g. 1e-8) being essentially immaterial to the calculations. But in this case, yes, it does accelerate. We could at the moment the filament is pinched also fire up a 1N rocket motor to counter the force, killing the tiny acceleration. We could also make the mass arbitrarily large, but then it would have non negligible gravity and the calculations for how far the mass moves in any given time and it's energy become somewhat trickier.

Yea sure will.

OK, so we have our 20,000,000 J each second.

Let's swap it round. The filament is fixed to the very large mass, and you (a tiny you of negligible mass) are riding on the 1Kg mass as it accelerates. The you pinch your fingers to exert 1N of drag and you and the mass's acceleration stops (or close enough!) as the 1N of rocket engine is countered by the 1N of drag.

As before, the 20,000,000J each second is going into your fingers.

Agreed?

You can tell this place has really gone to shit because the people trolling me keep coming up with dumber and dumber arguments.

It's slow as fuck and it doesn't work worth one.

Normally I'd post an article like this to my own blog, but since I've not bothered to bring it back up since my web host died this is, sadly, the most reasonable place for me to post. In the past I've done detailed howtos and this will not be that, because all I really need it to be is just a record of more or less what I did. To wit, I got Ubuntu installed and working correctly on my antique potatoe, an FX-8350, 990FX-based system with nvidia graphics, NVMe storage, and UEFI with BIOS compat.

I installed from vmware on Windows. Created my VM with 3 out of my 8 cores and 8GB RAM. I added the physical NVMe disk to the VM config as an NVMe disk specifically. Install went off smoothly. But after updating my Firefox snap was already broken, so I decided to blow away snap and install normal firefox. I also installed kde-plasma-desktop and kde-full in order to get away from Unity, and because gnome is in a snap too. I could have just installed kubuntu, but I wanted to see what the process would be like with the normal Ubuntu CD.

Unfortunately, after the install, the USB3 doesn't work. This turns out to be a problem with IOMMU settings. It also causes the boot to be extended while things fail. Short form, in /etc/default/grub: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash amd_iommu=on iommu=pt"

On boot I was using Nouveau and needed to install nvidia drivers (sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall). Sadly these driver versions only support "Mosaic" "SLI", which is where your display spans monitors. I may try an older driver to get SLI working again. Getting nvidia-settings working required running nvidia-xconfig (as root) in order to produce a working xorg.conf, and also fixing a polkit permissions issue (sudo chmod u+x /usr/share/screen-resolution-extra/nvidia-polkit). Even worse, the screen stays dark after resume from suspend. This is of course because of systemd.

sudo systemctl stop nvidia-suspend.service
sudo systemctl stop nvidia-hibernate.service
sudo systemctl stop nvidia-resume.service
sudo systemctl disable nvidia-suspend.service
sudo systemctl disable nvidia-hibernate.service
sudo systemctl disable nvidia-resume.service
sudo rm /lib/systemd/system-sleep/nvidia

Finally, part of the use case is being able to boot Windows from Linux and Linux from Windows, both in vmware player. The Windows stuff is trivial, clicky clicky. The Linux stuff isn't because vmware doesn't bother to keep their vmnet and vmmon modules updated for modern kernels. After installing vmware but before launching vmplayer, install the right version from the above repo for your vmware and kernel versions. You have to be root in order to use physical devices on Linux (or maybe you can solve it with group perms? Haven't tried this yet.) Windows is on SATA on my system so I added the SATA full disk as a SATA disk and it works fine.

Song of the South movie? Banned.
To Kill a Mockingbird? Banned in various states.
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut? Banned
Kite runner? Banned.
Homegoing? Sought be banned.
Various Dr. Seuss books? Banned.
Between the far left (i.e. goon squad) and the far right (i.e. fascists) we will soon not have any books, movies, songs,etc available to read, view, listen to.
The amazing thing is that the far left kills off various books/movies for possible racist issues, while at the same time, ignoring songs like WAP. If WAP is good enough for stallion, then it should be good enough for Katy, Taylor, Gaga, Adele, Selena, etc to sing.
If they are not allowed to sing it, then it kind of indicates that there is a REAL ISSUE with it.
Then we have the far right screaming about books with sexual passages, while at the same time, we find them with hookers, in men's room with other guys, etc.
America is being destroyed by BOTH far right and left Extremists.
Time to kill off the Goon Squad/BLM, along with Trumpers/Fascists/KKK/Neo-nazis from having ANYTHING to do with politics.

In order to install a modern Linux on my PC I have to write out TWO pieces of installer media because neither latest Ubuntu or Pop! OS will successfully boot the installer otherwise. Once installed, Pop! OS can't resume from suspend on my desktop, not even a laptop. Had to install a bunch of patch crap to get vmware player to run on a modern kernel. As long as all these basic things are gotchas, Linux can never reasonably even have a year of the desktop. Not enough time and effort are spent on actually making things work, it's always the new and shiny that gets the attention. I've been using Linux for decades now and the quality has decreased even as the functionality has increased. What a shit show. Just a couple years ago I could write out an installer from Windows and expect it to work, things are actually going backwards. WTF?

As Lithium-Ion batteries, isolated "islands" of lithium form in the battery, inhibiting its ability to carry a charge, and decreasing its capacity. Researchers have discovered a means of restoring that lost capacity (paper) by rapidly discharging batteries after fully charging them. This causes migration of the isolated Lithium, and in experiments with cells designed with such islands they saw increases in voltage as the cells were rapidly discharged.

Time to focus on National Security issues, since CONgress will not.
We have many, many Nat Sec issues that CONgress COULD solve but refuses to do so.
For today, I want to talk about University R&D and Student numbers.

America has for decades brought in foreign students to study and do research here. We have even hired a number of these within our universities. However, for the last 20+ years, we have been heavily targeted by just a few nations with focus on various science degrees/research. This is more of issue for foreign-born professors. With a number of these professors, they take in mostly students from their own nations and not America or other foreign nations. For all intents and purposes, these professors are training students to take various research back to their nation and ONLY their nation. Add to that, universities are focused more on foreign students for degrees that all nations want/need.
CONgress needs to do several things to fix this:
1) require that the results of the R&D that is paid by America, remain in America. IOW, if we funded more than 50% of the R&D, then any patents AND manufacturing/usage, needs to remain here.
2) For all research grants/labs, > 50% of the students on the grants MUST be American. Not Green Cards, but American citizen, who is likely to remain here. In addition, the other 100% support for next semester.
b) 3.0-3.5 => 75%.
c) 2.5-3.0 => 50%.
d) a free application to McDonalds.

We need to make this grade based to encourage students to work at it. Note that even if they pay for the next semester, but pull their grades up, they get back on track. I further suggest that if the student comes from a poorly rated high school/school district, then for the first 2 semesters, the above scale is dropped by .5, while the student must also take remedial courses to address their short coming (i.e. math, reading, how to study, etc).
4) Ok, so what fields/trades does America need? Well, at this time, we are limited, but in the future, the needs will shift. In the mean time, the core fields will likely be hard sciences (physics, chem, bio-chem, etc), Most bio science, Math, Computer Science, Robotics, engineering, medicine (nursing, Paramedic, EMT, etc), teaching, with trades like Construction, plumbing, electrician, Police, etc. What do we NOT need? How about nearly all business, most liberal arts, Beautician, and esp. Political science.

Note that by society paying for these needed AS/BS, it will drive many more of our students into these fields, and still have relatively high paying jobs when they get out. And this is without incurring large amounts of debt.
From National Security POV, it keeps the research here, while also increasing the number of Americans in needed fields, without the severe debt that we have had in recent times.

I need a new webhost because my old hosting service deleted my database for being over quota. I have backups, of course, but they're slightly old, so this is irritating. The quota was very small.

MARTIN ESPINOZA
2277 GLENROSE AVE
ALTADENA , CA , 91001
(480) 516-7385

This person has given my email address to Jiffy Lube so that I would get spammed. Obviously it would be inappropriate to call them and tell them they're an ass. "Please" "don't" DO THAT.

When "you" (or your OS) upgrade[s] Firefox it opens a new welcome screen. This one says "Your privacy respected, automatically". Yeah, no. I configured my home page to be my most visited sites, not some page you decided I should visit so that you could collect statistics. Gaslighting much?

When I submit a comment, the resulting page usually doesn't load. It just spins for ages. Now it works. If you can see this, the journal is also fixed — I haven't been able to post to mine for months. Is this a nginx fail or something?

I wrote some user scripts for /., you can find them (with some other people's) on GreasyFork. The scripts remove hostnames from Slashdot links, so you're not being bounced to multiple hostnames, and to send you straight to the domain if you do get sent to a hostname by mistake.

I got interested in actually doing this because I couldn't leave comments on *.slashdot.org a few days back, only on slashdot.org. But it's annoying all the time, IMO.

My scripts probably have no elegance whatsoever, but they work.

Last time I tried to post to my journal I got an error, so I'm trying again now.