Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Nobody uses dye-sensitized solar cells (Score 1) 23

Nobody uses dye-sensitized solar cells. They were an interesting idea for a technology, but the improvements in silicon cell performance along with reductions in cost just made their mediocre performance obsolete.

Also, nobody uses plastic coatings for solar cells. Plastics simply deteriorate too fast. Everybody uses glass.

Comment Re:Do it yourself (Score 1) 81

Cppcheck apparently knows "hundreds of other rules covering a multitude of language aspects" so you don't "have to mentally apply against every single line of code you write."

Cppcheck doesn't flag anything in Waffle Iron's example.

It also doesn't find anything wrong with:

std::vector<int> vec = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5};
auto it = vec.begin();
vec.push_back(6);
std::cout << *it << std::endl;

Which is another common example of how you can write memory errors without using C++ pointers.

Comment Re:There is already a safe subset of C++ (Score 1) 81

In the sort of places where MISRA and similar coding guides apply, yes, never allocating memory is expected, because once dynamic allocation exists you can't guarantee that you won't die with an out-of-memory error and similarly can't guarantee any time bounds on how long an alloc and dealloc will take.

Sure, so C++ is safe as long as it's used in a way that makes it incredibly painful. Sounds good. Let's just require all C++ code everywhere to be written that way. Rust usage will skyrocket overnight.

Comment Re: Is there anyone here that voted for Trump (Score 1) 251

It is hard to have fair democracy with winners take it all.

For a really rigorous definition of "fair", it's impossible to have fair democracy at all. Arrow's Theorem demonstrates this to a large degree, although many have argued that some of his fairness axioms are excessive. More recent research has concluded that fairness is the wrong standard, because there's no way for an electorate's "will" to really be fairly represented by any electoral system, not in all cases. Some systems can do better most of the time (and "winner take all" is particularly bad), but all systems fail in some cases.

What we need to aim for instead of fairness is "legitimacy", which is more about building broad acceptance of the system than about fixing the system itself, though it's easier to build acceptance for better-designed systems.

Having the country's top politicians continually claiming the system is unfair and rigged is, of course, the worst possible thing to do if you want to build support for the legitimacy of the system.

Comment Re:Jokes on you (Score 1) 251

Precisely none of those books were ever banned.

I decided to check :-)

According to the Book Censorship Database from the Every Library Institute, both "Of Mice and Men" and "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" have been challenged, but only "Of Mice and Men" was removed, though "restricted" is more accurate. The Birdville Independent School District in Texas removed the book from general access, allowing access only to the AP English class, and the Indian River County Schools in Florida restricted it to high school students.

No Doctor Suess books were banned, although Suess Enterprises voluntarily ceased publication of six books.

Comment Self-licking ice cream cone... (Score 1) 34

"...Workers still at the company claim they are increasingly concerned that they are being set up to replace themselves. According to internal documents viewed by WIRED, GlobalLogic seems to be using these human raters to train the Google AI system that could automatically rate the responses, with the aim of replacing them with AI."

So, the idea is that eventually the AI decides whether its responses to a prompt is accurate or not. Net result is that the AI responses go off into Lalaland without checking against anything real. Eventually, when the AI's training gets to the point where it is trained primarily from other AI generated text, the AI text will have no tether to the real world at all.

Might be interesting to see what comes out once it's no longer constrained by logic or reality...

Comment I have to be honest (Score 1) 59

... I'm more concerned about how *astonishingly* fucking stupid Google as an organization must be that nobody along the way from dev to testing to implementation apparently considered this?

This isn't me writing some macro in Excel that doesn't work. This is Google. 50? 100? ...or even more people had to touch this before it went live on afaik the biggest browser in the world on what 3-5 BILLION machines?

Comment 18.4 liters per year from warhead tritium (Score 3, Informative) 53

I think the US is good for high single thousands of liters on a typical year, from nuclear warhead maintenance; Russia at least theoretically in the same ballpark in terms of warheads that would need their tritium checked, th

Per Wikipedia, the estimated quantity of tritium in a warhead is 4 grams, with decay of this producing about 0.20 grams of 3He per warhead per year ([ref]. The US has 5277 nuclear warheads, Russia a similar number, with 12,331 warheads total in the world. ([ref]. Multiplying, that's 2.4 kilograms of 3He per year. Density of Helium 3 is 0.134 grams per liter at standard temperature and pressure, so I get 18.4 liters per year produced from decay of tritium in all of the nuclear warheads in the world, about 40% of it in the U.S.

Wouldn't hurt to check my math, but unless I slipped a decimal, thousands of liters per year is an overestimate.

Comment Re: USA *deserves* the kick to the ego. (Score 1) 93

The Left assumes the Right is just the same sort of Cult of Personality that they themselves are, just on the other side.*

*(Sadly, as an old school conservative, I'm actually just as or more troubled by the what-we-formerly-called-neoCons and activist Republicans who DO act just like Dems just marching behind a different flag, cf the FCC/Kimmel thing I think is a conservative own-goal because it is asinine the US gov't is 'weighing in' on the content of some mid-talent late night show with like 120k viewers. Likewise most of Trump's bombast just gets in the way of what he's trying to do.)

They don't realize the Left and the Right FUNDAMENTALLY see the relationship to power differently, in a different framework, and with an entirely different context.

Comment Re:How then? (Score 1) 44

I know the global climate change strawman is pretty much everywhere. I've been fighting you morons on this for 30 years since IPCC 2. That's back when they left their sources online - eg tree ring data - so I could gophur it, throw the raw data into excel and see there was NO SUCH TREND as discussed.

"Climate is changing" well yes it's always changed
"but now it's warming" yes we're coming out of an interglacial, duh?
"no, HUMANS are causing this" they really aren't; the climb of temperature is basically identical in scope, slope, and timing to the previous 30x-40x spikes we've seen in paleoclimate reconstructions every 120k-ish years for around the last 4 million years. Temp spikes, then settles back to a rough norm.
"(increasingly shrill) THIS TIME IT'S PEOPLE you fascist!" well, now you have to explain a) how you can discern this is different from one of those, b) where the previous usual expected spike went, and c) how the earth's climate systems that responded to the previous repeat events won't do exactly the same thing.
"grr but 97% of climate scientists agree!" that's been debunked so many times I'm not bothering to do it again. How curious that people who make their living and gov't grants from declaring the sky is falling, insist that indeed, the sky is falling.
"fuck you nazi" yeah, right back at you.

The funny thing is I *absolutely* agree that human activity is very likely increasing the warming to some degree, or if not that, it's probable that a longer steady warming over centuries was suppressed by heavy particulate load from the industrial revolution; our SUCCESS at (and economic changes) clearing/reducing particulates has resulted in the system 'rebounding' likely appearing to be sudden warming.
I also agree it's stupid to shit where you eat, and we absolutely need to work on stronger efforts to clean water, clean air, and a cleaner environment wherever possible.

I just think that this whole discussion is a bullshit trend that the ecomarxists and left have barnacled onto and my failing to genuflect to their Catastrophist Creed and Holy CO2 Ghost marks me as an apostate. (shrug) I don't give a shit.

Is that ELI5 for you? I don't expect to change your mind but occasionally I like to lay it out there on the ridiculously small chance someone other than you reads it.

Slashdot Top Deals

The IBM 2250 is impressive ... if you compare it with a system selling for a tenth its price. -- D. Cohen

Working...