Comment We have a cautionary tale about this (Score 1) 153
Marshall Brain wrote Manna (https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 ) in 2003. Sadly, we may not even have twenty years between the warning of dystopia and its arrival.
Submission + - Slashdot Alum Samzenpus's Fractured Veil Hits Kickstarter
CmdrTaco writes: Long time Slashdot readers remember Samzenpus,who posted over 17,000 stories here, sadly crushing my record in the process! What you might NOT know is that he was frequently the Dungeon Master for D&D campaigns played by the original Slashdot crew, and for the last few years he has been applying these skills with fellow Slashdot editorial alum Chris DiBona to a Survival game called Fractured Veil. It's set in a post apocalyptic Hawaii with a huge world based on real map data to explore, as well as careful balance between PVP & PVE. I figured a lot of our old friends would love to help them meet their kickstarter goal and then help us build bases and murder monsters! The game is turning into something pretty great and I'm excited to see it in the wild!
Comment Is Waymo for real? (Score 1) 185
There isn't really any proof that Waymo vehicles are driverless, only that the driver isn't in the vehicle. If you compare a dozen dubiously driverless vehicles to a million collecting data every moment and already doing a pretty good job at autonomy, which do you think will succeed?
Comment Remote driver != "no driver" (Score 1) 185
The fact that the driver is not in the vehicle does not mean that there is no driver.
Comment Came from Amateur Observers first. (Score 3, Insightful) 31
I believe that this was figured out in the amateur observer community before NASA confirmed it. I saw it go by in my twitter feed. Not sure I can find it now...
Comment Re:So that the rest of the world... (Score 1) 290
Bush changing the date on which Americans does it confuses the rest of the world.
DST dates are determined by Congress. The prime mover for the DST date change was Rep. Pelosi.
Comment Re: Radioactive soil (Score 4, Informative) 180
Comment Re:Radioactive soil (Score 2, Informative) 180
It's not radioactive. When high-energy particles strike it, they break apart into lower-energy particles that are more harmful. So, you need enough shielding to catch the particles that break apart in the top layer of your shielding.
Comment Re:Radiation? (Score 2) 71
While radiation mostly results in transient errors, it can also cause latch-ups that blow a gate off of the die. For rad-hard equipment in space this is mitigated by silicon-on-insulator fabrication, so that you can't have a latch-up between the substrate and a silicon feature.
Comment Re:Dystopian Nightmare (Score 1) 87
We could have REAL ZOMBIES! YEAH!
:-)
I hear you. Going to be an interesting future, if we live.
Comment Re:Dystopian Nightmare (Score 5, Insightful) 87
Someone who broke their neck and was suffering from paralysis. You can control a chair or exoskeleton. People who can not hear today have cochlear implants, this is not all that different and might (eventually) work better. Or speak, or see. Other people who are disabled in various ways.
Comment Re:Web Pages Use Same Imaging Model (Score 1) 227
Oops. To continue: I'm just not seeing that it is so hard to access. But then, I use a Linux desktop, which has always come with a proper PDF renderer, there has never been a need to download "Acrobat".
Comment Web Pages Use Same Imaging Model (Score 1) 227
Web pages use SVG to render vector graphics. It uses the exact same imaging model as PDF and is implemented in all modern browsers. The web in general has taken a lot of lessons from Adobe because Warnock and Geshke, in the PostScript Red Book, got so much right about how to build an image model that many GUI developers are still learning today. If you start with a PDF, it should be possible to machine-translate it to SVG and present it as a web page.
PDF exists because it is trivial to generate it from the document renderer meant for printing. Although I have once in a while run into an improperly scaled PDF meant to be printed 8-up, I'm just not
Submission + - From rocks to icebergs, the natural world tends to break into cubes (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes: Perhaps the Cubists were right. Researchers have found that when everything from icebergs to rocks breaks apart, their pieces tend to resemble cubes. The finding suggests a universal rule of fragmentation at scales ranging from the microscopic to the planetary.
The scientists started their study “fragmenting” an abstract cube in a computer simulation by slicing it with 50 two-dimensional planes inserted at random angles. The planes cut the cube into 600,000 fragments, which were, on average, cubic themselves—meaning that, on average, the fragments had six sides that were quadrangles, although any individual fragment need not be a cube. The result led the researchers to suspect that cubes might be a common feature of fragmentation.
The researchers tried to confirm this hunch using real-world measurements. They headed to an outcrop of the mineral dolomite on the mountain Hármashatárhegy in Budapest, Hungary, and counted the number of vertices in cracks in the stone face. Most of these cracks formed squarish shapes, which is one of the faces of a cube, regardless of if they had been weathered naturally or had been created by humans dynamiting the mountain.
Finally, the team created more-powerful supercomputer simulations modeling the breakup of 3D materials under idealized conditions—like a rock being pulled equally in all directions. Such cases formed polyhedral pieces that were, in an average sense, cubes..
The scientists started their study “fragmenting” an abstract cube in a computer simulation by slicing it with 50 two-dimensional planes inserted at random angles. The planes cut the cube into 600,000 fragments, which were, on average, cubic themselves—meaning that, on average, the fragments had six sides that were quadrangles, although any individual fragment need not be a cube. The result led the researchers to suspect that cubes might be a common feature of fragmentation.
The researchers tried to confirm this hunch using real-world measurements. They headed to an outcrop of the mineral dolomite on the mountain Hármashatárhegy in Budapest, Hungary, and counted the number of vertices in cracks in the stone face. Most of these cracks formed squarish shapes, which is one of the faces of a cube, regardless of if they had been weathered naturally or had been created by humans dynamiting the mountain.
Finally, the team created more-powerful supercomputer simulations modeling the breakup of 3D materials under idealized conditions—like a rock being pulled equally in all directions. Such cases formed polyhedral pieces that were, in an average sense, cubes..
Comment Re: Pistons? (Score 1) 67
Lithium battery fires are in the news because they are new. There are many more gasoline fires every day.
Slashdot Top Deals
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo. - Andy Finkel, computer guy
