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Comment Re:let's play global thermonuclear war! (Score 1) 131

Its success rate in Israel stands at somewhere between 1% and 0.1%.

One gun can shoot at one target at any one time. If your AI-guided robot army is shooting up chicken farmers and goat herders, it's ergo not shooting at the army that's flanked it which threatens to overrun the opposing side's now largely undefended turf.

A robot army can also be taken out by EMP weapons - basically tax nukes. Since robots can't distinguish between soldiers, civilians, and cake stands (AI is pretty dumb), the defending side already faces complete genocide. You can't get any deader than that, so there's no incentive to not flatten the enemy with nukes and a very slim chance they won't fire back, because it's hard to maintain an expensive nuclear defence and an extremely expensive robot army at the same time.

(Basically, same reason the US is now outgunned on fighters, the new ones are so expensive they can't afford that many. The US relies utterly on them being more destructive faster, but again, what's the point in NOT invoking MAD when your enemy has demonstrated they're genocidal and no respectors of the norms and laws of war?)

Comment Re:A Walkable City? (Score 1) 199

You want a pre-WW2 suburb.

I was visiting Oxford UK on business and I stayed at a colleague's house which dated from the1800s. I was shocked that the front door of her house was right at the sidewalk, you could look right into her front room. But it turned out that by giving up privacy in that front room, she got an enormous and very private back yard. The arrangement was something like this. That's just a street in the area I randomly picked off of Google Maps satellite view, but I checked it for walkability: it's less than one minute's walk from the local boozer, and on the way back you can get a takeaway curry.

Comment Re:A Walkable City? (Score 2) 199

I'll quote from the Wikipedia Article: "In urban planning, walkability is the accessibility of amenities by foot." It is important to contrast this with the practices it was intended to counter (again from the same article): "... urban spaces should be more than just transport corridors designed for maximum vehicle throughput."

Transit is an integral part of walkable planning simply because it gets people *into* neighborhoods so they can do things on foot. But cars are a way to get people into an area too, so cars can and should be part of *walkability* planning. For example there's a main street area near me with maybe 50-70 stores. When I visit I contribute to congestion by driving around looking for a parking spot. A carefully placed parking lot could reduce car congestion on the street while increasing foot traffic and boosting both business and town tax revenues.

Comment Re:New Horizons? (Score 1) 58

It's not what it lacks. It's because it uses newer components. As you make the transistors smaller and reduce the voltages, you increase the damage a cosmic ray strike will do. Yes, the chips are rad-hardened, but anything that gets through will have greater impact and have a greater risk of frying a component versus flipping the bit. The rad hardening will also have improved, but the risks will have increased faster than the protections.

However, there will undoubtedly be better error-correction in NH at circuit level, Voyager only error corrected the communications not the processor or memory. So I fully expect bit flips to be fixed silently, so I expect data to be of greater robustness. So in terms of quality of output, I expect NH to beat Voyager by a long way.

(I'm ignoring the efforts by the anti-science lobby to shut down NASA and the Deep Space Network. If they succeed, all communication will be permanently lost. But that won't be a technological fault, that will be a massive social fault on a scale comparable with Crusaders destroying the Imperial Library in Constantinople.)

Comment Re:I can feel it (Score 1) 148

Linux won't capture the desktop market unless Microsoft is broken up due to them repeating antitrust activity they have been repeatedly convicted of. But that won't happen because the US is too dependent on its supply of what's basically electronic heroin.

Comment Re:one of my old bosses said (Score 1) 148

Sun tried to go the Networked Computing route and bankrupted themselves.

Internet connectivity is far too slow and far too unreliable for most tasks. Worse, most apps still use TCP and UDP, despite better transport protocols existing. And IPv4 is still mainstream, despite IPv6's benefits.

The Internet is also not secure, due to NSA demanding the IETF withdraw IPSec as a mandatory requirement for IPv6.

No, thin clients with overpowered central servers (the mainframe architecture) was abandoned for good reasons and every attempt to return to centralised computing has failed for good reasons. Companies are now even starting to abandon the cloud.

Comment Re:Making this about race, really?? (Score 1) 67

What I SAID was 'why should the administrative state be able to make regulations that have the force of law?'

Because a law passed by Congress actually *requires* what you are calling "the administrative state" to draft those regulations. The executive branch can't regulate something just because it thinks doing that would be a good idea. There has to be a law directing the executive branch to draft such a regulation.

Now if you actually look in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), you will see that each and every regulation in the CFR cites a *statutory authority* -- that is to say a law passed by Congress which compels the executive branch to draft a regulation about such an such a thing. For example 40 CFR Part 50, a regulation written by the "administrative state", cites 42 USC 7401 a statute passed by Congress.

Note that I say the statutes "require" and "compel", not "empower" and "enable". That's bcause the executive branch has no choice in the matter. It *must* issue a regulation if so directed by statute, even if it disagrees with that statute. This is why regulations don't just disappear when an anti-regulation president gets elected. An administration can tweak regulations to be more favorable to business, but if they go too far in undermining the intent of the statute they'll get sued for non-enforcement of the law (e.g., this).

So if you think an adminsitration has overstepped its statutory authority with a regulation, and you have standing, you can sue to have the regulation amended. But if you fail in your suit, you won't be able to fix it by electing a President who agrees with you. You need a Congress which will repeal the statory authority for the regulation.

If your information on this stuff from political news channels, you can be forgiven for thinking government bureaucrats just make up regulations on their own initiative, but it just doesn't work that way.

Comment Re:Making this about race, really?? (Score 1) 67

The idea that poor folks are the backbone of Trump's base is a myth. In 2016 Clinton won the under $50k income vote by 12% and tied with Trump in the over $100k income group. Trump notched a modest 3% margin of victory in the $50k-$100k group.

The actual backbone of Trump's base is white people without a college degree who are nonetheless doing fairly well for themselves. This is particularly influential demographic in rural states, which have outsize representation in the Electoral College.

Submission + - Peter Higgs, physicist, dead. (theguardian.com)

jd writes: Peter Higgs, the Nobel prize-winning physicist who discovered a new particle known as the Higgs boson, has died.

Higgs, 94, who was awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 2013 for his work in 1964 showing how the boson helped bind the universe together by giving particles their mass, died at home in Edinburgh on Monday.

After a series of experiments, which began in earnest in 2008, his theory was proven by physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Switzerland in 2012; the Nobel prize was shared with François Englert, a Belgian theoretical physicist whose work in 1964 also contributed directly to the discovery.

A member of the Royal Society and a Companion of Honour, Higgs spent the bulk of his professional life at Edinburgh University, which set up the Higgs centre for theoretical physics in his honour in 2012.

Prof Peter Mathieson, the university’s principal, said: “Peter Higgs was a remarkable individual – a truly gifted scientist whose vision and imagination have enriched our knowledge of the world that surrounds us.

“His pioneering work has motivated thousands of scientists, and his legacy will continue to inspire many more for generations to come.”

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