Recent Comments

Completely socialised, mate. Buried in our tax system.
Has been since Bob Hawke, and will continue to be if we can throw that drongo Abbott to the kerb.

In one of Dr.David Brin's lovely Uplift books (and possibly elsewhere in the SF pantheon) radiative cooling was accomplished by using the energy to power a laser. Mind, it was in a close orbit of the Sun, so there was a *lot* of energy to dump, but it's not completely far-fetched to have coherent radiation as a cooling system.

Sorry about the redundant post; got an error the first time I pressed the magic button.

I think your context can be expanded a bit by adding a few years to the timeline. I can see the cost per kilogram going down considerably across the next few years. They will also only fall from orbit if you're launching them into LEO. A higher orbit would encounter less exospheric drag and could stay up for a very long time.

Not that LEO would be all bad; you could tune the orbit such that older servers would fall and burn out at a targeted time, as a means for disposing of obsolescent gear.

Go a little further out into the future, and there's a **lot** of silicon in the inner Solar system; no need to pick the deepest gravity well for your factory, is there?

Personally, I like the thought of a planetary server network, up where the RF isn't attenuated by atmosphere.

I think your context can be expanded a bit by adding a few years to the timeline. I can see the cost per kilogram going down considerably across the next few years. They will also only fall from orbit if you're launching them into LEO. A higher orbit would encounter less exospheric drag and could stay up for a very long time.

Not that LEO would be all bad; you could tune the orbit such that older servers would fall and burn out at a targeted time, as a means for disposing of obsolescent gear.

Go a little further out into the future, and there's a **lot** of silicon in the inner Solar system; no need to pick the deepest gravity well for your factory, is there?

Personally, I like the thought of a planetary server network, up where the RF isn't attenuated by atmosphere.

If you happen to be in/around New York, the Business and Science Library has knock-off Aeron chairs. I don't know the brand, but they're pretty terrific. It's a nice library too.

Maybe you could add this link/meta-data, to make the feed more accessible?

Added.

Submit stories!

The whole system has been so horribly botched.

I'm in NY and used our state health exchange site. While I was eventually able to get it to work, the user interface is very poorly designed and un-intuitive. I also twice encountered HTTP 500 errors which required me to re-login and start the application process over again.

Why not make this year's Summer of Code all about fixing the recent spate of botched ACA health exchange sites?

I was just wondering about this, too. The approach to moderation here is interesting, I think, and I'm eager to see how it pans out, but there are certain aspects of it that have me wondering "is this a feature, or a bug?" I agree that posters shouldn't be able to mod their own posts. Further, it appears I can mod a given post as often as I like, and I think I would prefer that I be able to mod a post only once (though possibly an "undo moderation" option should be available, since I'm clumsy and might click the wrong moderation option).

And fourthed.

I keep forgetting this site is here, but when I do remember to check in on it I'm always impressed with the progress in development. Great job, bryan. I'm hopeful more people will find this site and contribute comments. Other than remembering to visit and, to the best of my meager ability, contribute meaningful comments, is there anything else I could/should be doing to help the site grow?

Drama-mongers? Have you read your IRC logs? Didn't you get banned due to drama and trolling after repeated warnings? You could be unbanned if you could just chill out instead of shilling out. That is seeming less likely by the day thoug.

Good for you for spreading disinformation. You must feel very accomplished.

"no energy loss" was obviously a poor choice of words, but I'm guessing they're referring to the signals within the detector itself which would be very small distances where the difference in attenuation between optical and metal conductors could be very meaningful.

I think that getting rid of attenuation would be the actual breakthrough here. Probably breaking some fundamental law of physics too.

I agree, no important features are missing. The only thing really missing here is up to date content. If the articles posted were identical to slashdot then more people would migrate here permanently, but as it is I now visit both sites - slashdot for the news, and here in the hope that the same article is posted so I can discuss it.

Don't neural cells use electrical potential (ie electrons) for signalling? Why is this novel?

Agreed. I'm still hopeful that SN comes out of their tribulation ok, but I'm much less optimistic than when it launched. At this point |. looks like the best site in the bunch.

I haven't used Firefox OS, but my understanding is it's aimed at lower end smart phones (modest hardware specifications) in emerging markets where there isn't already necessarily a heavily entrenched Apple/Google bias in phone sales. This page lists the devices with specifications and availability.

I like how the site is progressing, but I think what is needed most is more users. I haven't the foggiest idea how that may be implemented through code. We could write an AC Bot! *Kidding* :D As a user, I can start posting pipedot in all my sigs to try and spread the word.

It feels weird always having mod points.

This is awesome. Sounds like this may allow for better detection of exoplanets, or highly accurate mass spectrometry readings of known exoplanet atmospheres. :D Still can't go there though. :(

I think Mozilla made they right decision here. I have heard very few people happy with or actually using the Metro interface.

My favorite comment from the linked article:
Dear Microsoft,

Metro is bad and you should feel bad.

Sincerely,
Damn Near Everyone

Though that makes me wonder why they continue trying to push the Firefox OS. How many people are actually using that? I'm not saying it's bad or I dislike it, but I've never actually seen a device running Firefox OS in person.

Anyone here at |. running Firefox OS? What device do you have?

Sounds like this program is one way Google gives back.

Does it give them a chance to identify future employees as well? If so, its win-win.

I am often envious of the people who get to play in laboratories to figure this kind of effect out.

Thank you for the clarification.

It is not the Windows version that is getting dropped. It is a specialised version that plays better with Metro.

Is between the different corporations who want to control the computing platform whether Microsoft, apple, Google, or any other player.

Application developers have to choose sometimes. Amazing to think that windows is what gets dropped in this choice. Changing times.

Those are some really phenomenal images. I'm just diving into the stereographic images and I'm blown away. Many thanks for the tip.

I think Chrome has a metro interface. I've never seen it though.

Ampersands where disabled until this weekend. They should work now.

If we sucked away the water and atmosphere, it would be easy. Personally I consider a little difficulty in unraveling the geological record a worthwhile tradeoff. ;)

Yeah. I can't get from my comment to the story or thread where the comment was posted.

Leave the search to Google et all- just format the site so that searching is easier with those engines. For example the current format of stories with the line "on YYYY-mm-dd" is likely to work much better than Slashdot's when searching for stories in the past, but could be improved so that story metadata is not confused with comment metadata.

And of course, having posted this, I go back to the main page, and see an article that (1) clarifies any question about this poll's intent, and (2) is really the right place to have posted the above... And it turns out you (bryan) even linked it in the post I replied to.

*hangs head*

I love approval and range voting, think they're generally the best option for choosing a single winner, and am delighted to see pipedot using one of them.

But , in a poll on "which features are the most important", I'm not sure approval's the right answer.

Of course, it depends on what exactly you plan to use the results for -- if the idea is to only implement features that a certain fraction of voters approve, approval's good. But if the idea is that you aim for feature-parity with /, so all these features are to be implemented eventually, but you're seeking to prioritize the order of feature implementation according to community feedback, I think using a rank ballot with Kemeny-Young counting would be better. To me, the poll title suggests the latter, but I could be misinterpreting it...

The thing about approval voting is that (provided the voter is smart about their own threshold of approval) it's good at reflecting the strength of preferences (even though it quantizes them to 1 bit!) -- if you can't stand any but your two favorites, you won't accidentally contribute to the election of the guy you put as number 3. But the flip side is, it loses the order of preference between any two candidates you do approve, and between any two candidates you don't approve. So in a case where all candidates are winning, we just want to sort them, the information of preference order is IMO more important than preference strength.

For example, suppose 60% of voters approve both items A and B (may also approve others, but at least those two), 30% approve neither -- with approval voting, you're letting the remaining 10% decide which order to tackle these two features in (by the difference of (A, !B) vs. (!A,B) votes). But using a rank ballot, you get the priorities of all voters. Of course the 10% with mixed votes will have a known preference, but the 60% block gets to specify which of these two beloved features they find most important, and the 30% block gets to specify which of these useless-to-them features they care least about... end result, Kemeny-Young spits out an order of tackling the features that makes the most people happiest.

Idealized for whom though?

If DNS is so important to the US government, they could quickly fork a replacement system.
As for the rest of us, most content is already fetched via indirection, so a censorfest in DNS may have negligible effect.

Oh, I shouldn't be allowed to upmod my own posts. :)

Because people can't always be on the record. There seems to be a button, but it had no effect.

Okay, that does trump my first suggestion :), rounding debates aside.

Good office chairs appear to cost enough to warrant them being a business need and a business expense rather than having to pay for one out of salary, for example. I fight for myself or any of my colleagues to get good ergonomic equipment at work though. I think it impacts performance and thus can be justified on entirely economic grounds.

That seems like a reasonable projection of recent history. I'm hoping that we end up with a greater democracy through greater exchange though. Maybe things have to get worse before they get better.

"The innermost world has shrunk as it has cooled over time, its surface cracking and wrinkling in the process." from the BBC

The amount of cooling/shrinking depends on the composition of the planet and is being used to estimate the radius of its core.

If you're really going to spend so many hours seated/reclined how about a decent hospital bed with a special air mattress to reduce bed sores? Otherwise you really should get up and walk about regularly ;).

By the way, I find it somewhat interesting how we have been building chairs for thousands of years and yet office chairs are mostly either super expensive or crap (or in some cases both). Many can barely last longer than 7200rpm HDDs which are cheaper, have far longer and better warranties. OK so HDDs don't contain as much metal but have you seen what some charge for a _good_ office chair?

Can we get a description, including proposed features, of the proposed additions rather than just a bullet list?

I'm guessing we'll see a lot more censorship. Yes, the actual government-driven variety. Probably increased costs as each fiefdom requires businesses to conform to local laws

It's incredible to think of a planet shriveling up like that. Imagine how far it will go. Does anyone know why it's shrinking?

This the messenger website (messenger = MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) which gives links to various resolution images for Mercury and the latest DEM (digital elevation model) for its northern hemisphere.

GMT (Generic Mapping Tools) scripts would provide one simple way to generate oblique views down on the DEM.