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Comment Carbon dating won't work for aliens (Score 1) 175

So ignoring the probability of this being a legitimate alien here for a minute - Carbon dating is based on the accumulation of Carbon-14 in tissues of life on Earth. Assuming an alien was not living out their lifecycle on Earth, it's entirely possible that they have a different native ratio of c14 in their environment. This would make any dating results (assuming the alien claim was legitimate) invalid.

Comment In case you're wondering why Pai would do this.. (Score 5, Insightful) 134

Don't worry - Pai isn't suddenly getting a conscience. Remember that Pai is basically beholden to Verizon (where he will end up at after his "public service"). Verizon is not a wireline provider (like AT&T, Comcast, Cox etc...) When 5g starts to roll out, one of the key battles is going to be over telephone poles. There are going to be tens of thousands of mini-cells mounted on poles to support this rollout - and if you don't own the poles (like Verizon), you're going to be at a disadvantage compared to the companies who do (like AT&T)

This vote isn't pro-internet or pro-freedom or anti-monopoly - it's entirely about ensuring that Verizon isn't at a competitive disadvantage in rolling out their 5g network.
Transportation

Moscow Plane Crash Caught On Passerby's Dash Cam 253

acidradio writes "Yesterday a Tupolev 204 (Russian-made aircraft equivalent to an Airbus 321 or a shortened 757) overran the runway at Moscow Vnukovo airport and crashed into a nearby highway. A plane crash is always bad, but what makes this seem different is how well it was recorded. It seems like everyone in Russia has a dashcam, here is footage. A driver who just happened to be driving by on the nearby M3 highway (right about here on the map) is pelted by flying nose wheels and a row of coach-class seats! An accident like this has probably never been filmed so up close. We are getting better and better at recording accidents and disasters (whether by coincidence due to overuse of surveillance or maybe on purpose). What does that say about our level of documentation and recording of people's everyday lives? And what's the deal with dashcams in every Russian car?"

Comment First hand experience here (Score 4, Informative) 510

I recently had a "old" (cir 2008) 64gb SSD drive die on me. It's death followed this pattern:

  • Inexplicable system slowdowns. In hindsight, this should have been a warning alarm.
  • System crash, followed by a failure to boot due to unclean ntfs volume which couldn't be fixed by chkdisk
  • Failed to mount r/w under Ubuntu. Debug logs showed that the volume was unclean and all writes failed with a timeout
  • Successful r/o mount showed that the filesystem was largely intact
  • Successful dd imaged the drive and allowed a restore to a new drive.

After popping a new disk in and doing a partition resize, my system was back up and running with no data loss. Of all the storage hardware failures I've experienced, this was probably the most pain-free as the failure caused the drive to simply degrade into a read-only device.

Comment Re:Just goes to show... (Score 4, Insightful) 585

It's not the schedule. It's the process.

When chrome updates to a new version, I don't even know about it and everything just works (including all my addons). When Firefox updates, I have to wait an additional few seconds while it updates, I have to close out a splash page informing me of all the new features that I won't use and I have to figure out how to update and re-enable my all addons which have now magically turned off.

When I open a web browser, I want to do something. If you get in my way of me doing something for 30 seconds every few weeks plus spend 5 minutes trying to get selenium or other addons up and running again, you have failed at your purpose as a web browser.

It is even worse when you have a scenario where you have a few dozen firefox installs across various VMs.. I dread FF updates now because it means that I'm either reimaging test machines or going through a bunch of updates.

Comment Simple & quick solution (Score 1) 335

Have both parties present documentation on their legal bills. The prevailing party, having also won the fees receives the lesser of the two amounts.

Assume we have Joe vs MegaCorp and Joe's legal bill is $1,500 and MegaCorp's is $400,000.

If Joe wins and is entitled to fees, he gets his entire $1,500 (in addition to any damages). If MegaCorp wins, they get their damages plus the lesser of the two legal bills ($1,500). This promotes efficiency throughout the system.

Corporations will be incentivized to match their legal spending with the size of their "target."

Music

Pandora Stabilizes, No Longer Completely Free 268

AbyssWyrm writes "Yesterday, Pandora founder Tim Westergren announced that the music service was on safe ground once again, but will no longer be free for all users. Instead, it will be really cheap — for those with a free account, there will be a cap of 40 hours per month, and a user may pay a one-time fee of $0.99 to resume unlimited listening to music for a month. According to the blog entry, this will affect the top 10% of listeners. Certainly not a bad deal considering the price, and I suspect that Pandora is one of few free internet resources whose users are loyal enough to pay a small fee to keep it afloat. Pandora's future had been uncertain ever since the royalty rates for internet radio were increased in 2007."

Comment Statistical significance in surveys (Score 5, Insightful) 555

Surveys are inherently difficult to present in a neutral fashion, especially when attempting to determine correlation. Take the following (simplified) survey for example:

I like Cheerios:
[Yes] [No] [Sometimes]

Rate your proficiency at math:
[Excellent] [Good] [Average] [Poor]

Now, let's say you found a statistically significant correlation between people who like Cheerios and people who are excellent at math. Congratulations! You just did not find a correlation related to math proficiency at all.

What you did just find is a correlation between people who selected the first option in your survey.

Now, randomizing your answers is a good start and will resolve the above issue. However, there are hundreds of other things which can affect your results and there is an entire survey industry formed around these problems. The immediate problems that spring to mind about the survey in TFA is:
-Respondents must have internet access
-Respondents must have signed up to Amazon's mechanical turk
-Respondents were paid for the survey
-Respondent proficiency at math/language was self-assessed
-Respondents must be able to comprehend English

Anyway, I could go on but my point here is this: despite the fact that a statistically-significant correlation that was found, that correlation may not stem from the questions themselves.

Sci-Fi

How Do You Greet an Extraterrestrial? 803

The LA Times is running a story about Earth Speaks, a companion project to SETI, which focuses on how we would communicate with intelligent extraterrestrial life, should we happen to discover it. Far more effort has been devoted to searching for signals or a means to communicate than the question of what we might say once contact is established, and the folks at SETI have set up a website to gather opinions on what the best questions and statements are. "So far, the messages break down into a few distinct categories. Some people want to throw a block party to welcome the aliens to the neighborhood. Others, less trusting, would warn the aliens that we've got guns and know how to use them. Another group, possibly influenced by having seen too many movies, would have us hide under the bed until they go away. 'If we discover intelligent life beyond Earth, we should not reply — we should freeze and play dead,' wrote one contributor." What would you say first to an alien?

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