ringshall

Forget I said this. Clearly it’s impossible and the cranks at mit and nature should not have announced their findings.

You (and seemingly everyone else compiling news-from-2020 lists) forget about the discovery of signs of life in the atmosphere of Venus. Not to be grandiose, but, if true, in 500 years this will likely be the only thing generally remembered about 2020.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02785-5

I agree. (Edit: to add to this, I've always thought that the third-last episode of Futurama, 'Murder on the Planet Express', was a return to form and reminiscent of the heyday of the show).

On the subject of tv shows, ‘Peep Show’, the British sitcom, also had a very strong final season and final episode.

I find this really disgraceful.

A flaw in procedure that led to the initial catastrophes is at least understandable in terms of insidious errors in complex systems.

A continuation after the initial error is hard to explain other than by deliberate personal moral failure.

He says in the Computer History Museum talk that (paraphrasing) ALOHANet was eventually connected to ARPANet, making in effect the first connection of the Internet.

Surfing and invention sound like makings of a good life.

Speaking for myself, 'underappreciated' is the right word to describe his achievements. Quoting the article,

"Metcalfe and his colleagues at Xerox PARC adopted and tweaked the ALOHAnet technology in creating Ethernet"

It's an odd colour scale on that map, red, then light blue through black. Usually it's something simpler, like blue through red.

It takes a look at the scale to realize that the former Soviet Union countries actually have the best price rather than the worst price.

Might be good to have a 2nd map adjusted for PPP as well.

It's been a long time since I've used C, but I recall strncpy being safe. I assume from context that I'm wrong, though.

Nature at least used to publish a single-page science fiction story at the back of every issue. They still publish online, though they've dropped it from the print edition.

edit: https://www.nature.com/nature/articles?type=futures

That’s a quote worthy of bash.org

Now that you point it out, that seems to be the case. The fuzziness around the edges (the east and north especially) threw me off, though that could probably be put down to compression in the image that was used as the source for the crop.

A nit pick, I guess, but it’s a square, not a cube.

The edges are interesting. I wonder what part of the image processing results in the irregularity. Some kind of interpolation, I’d guess, but that’s pure speculation.

Same idea with parentheses, at least I understand them.

Dating myself, but I remember the first time I heard about mp3s. In a school trip, another kid told me that you could download songs in files that were only a megabyte a minute. I was incredulous. Up until then songs were wav files and video was in massive QuickTime files that took decaminutes to download for tiny snippets. Turns out he was right though :)

That's coincidental; according to Wikipedia, Wald and his wife perished in a plane crash in India.

"There are almost certainly multiple vulnerabilities at play here, since long gone are the days where a single vuln gave arbitrary code execution"

Could you go into this in a little more detail?

I'm inferring that chains of vulnerabilities are needed to go from some starting point to arbitrary code execution. Is that correct?

Have efforts to secure computer systems over the past ~2 decades succeeded, at least in that much more effort needs to be invested in order to get to the point of arbitrary code execution?

Correct about the comment in the livestream, see here:

https://youtu.be/zNklfC6jgBs?t=14653

It was Bob. Rough transcript:

"We were surprised a little bit at how smooth things were off the pad. The space shuttle is a pretty rough ride heading into orbit with the SRBs, and our expectation was as we continued with the flight into second stage that things would basically get a lot smoother than the space shuttle did, but Dragon was huffing and puffing all the way into orbit and we were definitely driving and riding a dragon all the way up, and so it was not quite the same ride, the smooth ride, as the space shuttle was, up to MECO. A little bit less Gs, but a little bit more alive is probably the best way I would describe it."

Edit: Just noticed that that description is in the original article, too, fwiw

> It might be helpful to have the age of comments listed

That's... currently the case

Is it currently the case? I'm not seeing it, though it I may be missing it.

I do see, at the bottom of comments, something like

:: edited Apr 23 '15 at 8:40 / answered Mar 11 '09 at 21:11

The date the question was /asked/ does have an age, though, which may be what you're referring to. For the problem at hand, it's the age of the answers that matters more than the age of the questions.

I don't find age has a 1:1 correlation with it being outdated.

No, but there is a correlation.

It might be helpful to have the age of comments listed as part of their metadata, ie alongside the date the comment was posted. Some formatting could be added (eg red highlight for comments > x years).

I know this sort of feature is useful on newspaper websites - The Guardian will flag stories older than some limit as being potentially out-of-date.

Just be careful about 27.

He says in the second article you link that he doesn’t think hotlinking is bad per se, especially when it’s done in support of knowledge and education.

I think the moral is rather that hotlinking is dangerous.

This looks fantastic! Thanks for sharing.

From time to time I've looked around for good charts of the night sky, suitable for printing and browsing. These are the best I've found so far; they might be helpful to users of this program as a guide for how to design charts:

https://www.iau.org/public/themes/constellations/

Also,

“ roughly 10 billion words said, per person (16,000 per day * 26,280 days = ~420,480,000)“

Not sure if I completely missed something but it looks like 420m words per person.

Edit: combine these two errors and it makes sense. The 10b number is in the text but not the arithmetic.

16000 words per day * 26000 days * 11 chars per word = 4.5E9 chars per person.

I doubt you'd want what is essentially medical waste burning off inside a commercial food oven.

Well worth noting:

If everyone is tested, the disease can be controlled:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/18/scientists-say...

Or excel, rc[-1]+366, assuming you typed in the date you want in the cell to the left...

There was a promise at the time (still active, I'm sure) that if your computer discovered a signal from ET, you would be listed as co-discoverer of alien life. I still remember watching the screensaver crunch through work units with the tiny but real hope that the data on my computer had that signal.

Even at the time, the prize seemed a little unearned, since all you had to do was click through an installer. But it was still an incentive. Probably the greatest lottery prize that's ever been offered.

Have the terrorists won?

I don't know why this was downvoted. Sea level does indeed suck as a baseline.

Traditional vertical datums like NAVD88 get their baseline zero elevation from an averaging of mean sea level at a small number (~5) of tidal stations around the area of interest.

The reason why multiple stations are used is that mean sea level is different from place to place. This is because of ocean currents and (I think though I can't say for certain) different levels of gravity at different points on earth's surface.

This is most clearly demonstrated with chart datum, which is a local elevation datum particular to a single maritime chart (eg a single harbor). Chart datum is the mean low tide for the area in question (useful to know if you don't want your craft to run aground...). The point of mentioning this is that: there are different chart datums along a single seaboard. Mean sea level is local.

The current practice is to use geoids which are based on the force of gravity. Einstein described geoids as surfaces on which clocks run at a constant rate. This is analogous to mean sea level on a waterworld in free space, eg sea level without the confounding factors of currents, weather, climate, or astronomical objects.

Trimble has a similar service, called PP-RTX.[1] There are various online PPP services that can give up to CM accuracy in post-processing, but near-real-time CM accuracy is still a new (and unexpected, to me) thing.

As for updates, the NGS have plate models that allow you to get the shift in coordinates at any given location[2] between two moments in time. Those models are in large part based on GNSS signal recorders called continuously operating reference stations[3] (CORS) which give actual movement at locations throughout the states.

For example, Bar Harbor, Maine, is moving at -0.0013 m/y north, 0.0020 m/y east, and -0.0009 m/y in elevation relative to the North American plate, and 0.0071 m/y north, -0.0153 m/y east, and 0.0001 m/y in elevation relative to the world[4].

The NGS is a remarkably good agency. See https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/TOOLS/ for more of their work.

[1] https://trimblertx.com/ [2] https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/TOOLS/Htdp/Htdp.shtml [3] https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/CORS/ [4] https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/cgi-cors/CorsSidebarSelect.prl?site...