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Comment Re:Bullshit. This is just malware propaganda (Score 1) 55

Yes inherently its just running on the customers computer anyway, so they don't actually have control.

Not sending other players locations when not necessary etc would be cooler.

And you can cheat by off-device means anyway, you can do an aimbot that doesn't run any code on the computer now.

Comment you don't need massive amounts though (Score 1) 70

To teach you don't need massive amounts of content, lessons don't need to be superfacially unique at all, they're scalable on their own.

The need to make new books for schools etc every year is based just on the need to sell them too, basics of languages do not change every year, a student doesn't benefit from unlimited amounts of basic class learning material.

Submission + - Another large Black hole in "our" Galaxy (arxiv.org)

RockDoctor writes: A recent paper on ArXiv reports a novel idea about the central regions of "our" galaxy.

Remember the hoopla a few years ago about radio-astronomical observations producing an "image" of our central black hole — or rather, an image of the accretion disc around the black hole — long designated by astronomers as "Sagittarius A*" (or SGR-A*)? If you remember the image published then, one thing should be striking — it's not very symmetrical. If you think about viewing a spinning object, then you'd expect to see something with a "mirror" symmetry plane where we would see the rotation axis (if someone had marked it). If anything, that published image has three bright spots on a fainter ring. And the spots are not even approximately the same brightness.

This paper suggests that the image we see is the result of the light (radio waves) from SGR-A* being "lensed" by another black hole, near (but not quite on) the line of sight between SGR-A* and us. By various modelling approaches, they then refine this idea to a "best-fit" of a black hole with mass around 1000 times the Sun, orbiting between the distance of the closest-observed star to SGR-A* ("S2" — most imaginative name, ever!), and around 10 times that distance. That's far enough to make a strong interaction with "S2" unlikely within the lifetime of S2 before it's accretion onto SGR-A*.)

The region around SGR-A* is crowded. Within 25 parsecs (~80 light years, the distance to Regulus [in the constellation Leo] or Merak [in the Great Bear]) there is around 4 times more mass in several millions of "normal" stars than in the SGR-A* black hole. Finding a large (not "super massive") black hole in such a concentration of matter shouldn't surprise anyone.

This proposed black hole is larger than anything which has been detected by gravitational waves (yet) ; but not immensely larger — only a factor of 15 or so. (The authors also anticipate the "what about these big black holes spiralling together?" question : quote "and the amplitude of gravitational waves generated by the binary black holes is negligible.")

Being so close to SGR-A*, the proposed black hole is likely to be moving rapidly across our line of sight. At the distance of "S2" it's orbital period would be around 26 years (but the "new" black hole is probably further out than than that). Which might be an explanation for some of the variability and "flickering" reported for SGR-A* ever since it's discovery.

As always, more observations are needed. Which, for SGR-A* are frequently being taken, so improving (or ruling out) this explanation should happen fairly quickly. But it's a very interesting, and fun, idea.

Submission + - Surado, formerly Slashdot Japan, is closing at the end of the month. (srad.jp) 1

AmiMoJo writes: Slashdot Japan was launched on May 28, 2001. On 2025/03/31, it will finally close. Since starting the site separated from the main Slashdot one, and eventually rebranded as "Surado", which was it's Japanese nickname.

Last year the site stopped posting new stories, and was subsequently unable to find a buyer. In a final story announcing the end, many users expressed their sadness and gratitude for all the years of service.

Comment Re:Yay! (Score 1) 37

Thats not entirely true. To update an old ios app to be uploadable into the store is significant amount of work due to apple themselves deprecating stuff and requiring you use a newer xcode. You can't just "update the api call" and expect it to be publishable.

Comment Re:This will just encourage more hacking (Score 5, Insightful) 73

You can only download, put it on the device and read it as long as they decide that they and by extension you have the right to read the book.

You're just renting an access to the book with the drm. Under terms that aren't clear to you since you don't know these dates and contracts that they have with the creator and publisher.

Comment it's just new software. (Score 3, Interesting) 82

Rolling out a new version for "reasons" is way too common nowadays without the new version having feature parity with the old version.

Often just for a design refresh that could have been done on the old one just as well! And the new versions supposed to then be easier to maintain, but has some architecture that actually makes it hard to do the missing features due to choosing an architecture thats in fashion rather than an architecture for the codebase that suits the application being made, a non-architecture if you will.

Would you consider that a rendering engine, a git client, a bank app and a drawing app all should have the same structure and philosophy in regards of data and interface code? Probably not but thats the world we're living in. I'm sure they got tests for checking that the network codes middle classes though so it has yk be working correctly (that parse the data into an object that gets converted with a converter class to an object that gets used for the data for the ui).

So it's not that it feels like legacy software, it feels like new software!

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