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Comment Re:Off-topic but serious question (Score 1) 18

I've seen this kind of thing growing in popularity. It grates on my ears, but it is more and more common (A local TV ad for an automotive glass company states, "Whether your windshield needs repaired or replaced...").

While I agree with the above commenter that it doesn't create ambiguity, I see it as a lazy, bad usage that almost certainly extends to other, similar misuses that do actually create ambiguity. But I'm kind of a stickler.

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:What? (Score 4, Informative) 37

IIRC, it also allowed you to keep track of items you had loaned out. The killer part of it was that barcode scanning, though. It made building your inventory of media so easy. I kept looking for a Windows alternative and never found anything even close.

Comment Re:End Lawfare (Score 1) 1605

He did not say that. The quote in question, frequently and incorrectly cited by Harris and her supporters, was directly in response to a question about what he would do if violent riots broke out in the aftermath of the election/inauguration. He stated that he would call in the National Guard and maybe the military. You know, like Pelosi should have done on January 6th, but decided not to. There is video (which Harris conveniently never showed anywhere). Go watch it. This is right up there with the "fine people on both sides" lie. And the "he wants to execute Liz Cheney" lie. The Harris campaign and the media kept repeating these things over and over and it didn't work. I'd like to think it's because the people saw through it. I'm not sure that's the reason, but I'm an optimist. Sometimes.

And the misleading information wasn't limited to Trump, either. She kept stating that she was going to "crack down" on "corporate price gouging." Even answered that this was her plan when asked directly during an interview about how she planned to reduce the cost of living. The problems with this were that she tied this to the cost of groceries, an industry with a very, very low profit margin, and as stated directly in her plan, was limited to emergency situations. But she kept putting it out there as though it was an overall strategy. The woman couldn't answer a straight question with a straight answer.

I think the Harris campaign would have been better served by laying out (reachable) goals and legitimate plans for her vision of the country rather than misleading, lie-laden attacks on Trump. To my eye, it came across as desperate and ill-conceived. Someone also needed to tell her to speak more off the cuff and not just spout the same (Dreams, Ambitions, and Aspirations...) talking points verbatim over and over. It made her seem like she had no plan at all and didn't really know what she was doing. As though she was in way over her head.

Comment Re:Just do it the old school way (Score 1) 122

Doing it on a burner would take a LOT of attention, assuming you could get a burner to maintain temperature to any degree of constant accuracy at all. When I started cooking sous vide, I did, however, use a cooler. Bring water up to temp, fill cooler, fidget with opening/closing cooler until the temperature is correct, put food in cooler, close lid, wait. Even that took a lot of attention. Had to put enough hot water in when the temps dropped too low to bring it back up and the like. It's possible (check out Serious Eats for some good guides), just not remotely as nice as using a dedicated circulator.

Comment Re: There is somewhat of a defense here (Score 2) 189

Not to mention that, in our case, the issue presented itself overnight. While the vast bulk of our IT department was sleeping. Had our SecOps guy not woken up to pee and decided to take a look at work stuff, we wouldn't have known until business hours started. As it was, we managed to get most things up by midday (servers were up pretty quickly - workstations had to wait).

Comment Instant Hotspot with Tasker (Score 1) 64

I have my phone set up with Tasker to automatically turn on the hotspot when it detects a Bluetooth connection to my car's Android head unit, which the head unit then automatically connects to. It's seamless. And after the Bluetooth connection has been gone for five minutes, Tasker turns off the hotspot.

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