Osmium

44 ms·

361.
by Osmium 11y ago
Any news on how to get a free 'reserved' copy? The Verge seems to suggest that you just have to wait, and it might take weeks, since Microsoft wants to do a gradual rollout...
362.
by Osmium 11y ago
> They are also trying to lead the charge in allowing people to invest in private companies through investment vehicles that look similar to funds( ie pooled capital that they raise and invest for share holders). I was just reading in an
363.
by Osmium 11y ago
Ultimately, if a loved one's life could be saved by an organ donation, I would want it to be, and therefore I cannot ethically and logically not be on the organ donation list myself. Any other conclusion is, to my mind, selfish and ant
364.
by Osmium 11y ago
> How accurate are we able to measure? Quite poorly, I believe. I think surface temperature is estimated based on the distance from the star, and I think it assumes an albedo (reflection coefficient) and maybe a typical(?) atmosphere (th
365.
by Osmium 11y ago
Right, but the escape velocity is ~ radius * sqrt(density) anyway, and if you look at the equation for the Earth Similarity Index[0], each term has an associated weighting. So why include escape velocity explicitly, rather than just changin
366.
by Osmium 11y ago
Question: why is 'escape velocity' part of the Earth Similarity Index when, presumably, it's just a function of radius and density (which are also in the index)? I feel like I'm missing something.
367.
by Osmium 11y ago
Aren't all iPhones that can be jailbroken subject to root code execution flaws?
368.
by Osmium 11y ago
> "Geoengineering raises huge ethical and political questions, nationally and internationally." This is true though. We have some treaties[1][2], but not enough, and it still needs to be thought through. What happens if, say,
369.
by Osmium 11y ago
How so? Do you fit the positions of your nuclei to a spline to get your curve? How about quantum uncertainty in its position? How do you assign whether a given nuclei belongs to the 'coast' or to the 'sea', etc. I don&#x
370.
by Osmium 11y ago
Agreed that the fact it's continuously changing is an additional issue, but I don't see the "eventually you start working with curves" argument. Where are these curves on a typical coastline? If you're measuring the
371.
by Osmium 11y ago
> As you "zoom in" on the coast this is what happens to the length: 100km > 120km > 128km > 129.5km > 129.52km > 129.528km > 129.6281km > ... I don't think that's true. In real life this series d
372.
by Osmium 11y ago
So I know very little about rockets, but here's my simplified understanding: The liquid oxygen tank provides the liquid oxygen which fuels the rocket. They use helium to keep the tank pressurised as the liquid oxygen gets used up (why
373.
by Osmium 11y ago
> A butterfly’s colors come from its scales, each a single cell, pigmented a single hue. Fascinating article but I think "pigment" is perhaps misleading. I was taught that butterfly wings are often structurally coloured, i.e.
374.
by Osmium 11y ago
That's a rather cynical view, no? Many people actively enjoy working out, and use these devices as a tracking tool rather than a motivational aide. It's a big market. No doubt your comment is true in some cases, but there have bee
375.
by Osmium 11y ago
> I think the watch will, in the long term, be a flop. Apple needs to find a real killer app for it or it is toast. There already are killer apps. Fitness is one. The question isn't if wearables are going to be a success (they alrea
376.
by Osmium 11y ago
> Also, I believe that all this marketing for "technically clueless" tend to make them even more clueless. In this case, it promotes understanding of "mp3 player" as "a box to play music" instead of what i
377.
by Osmium 11y ago
> You tell a lambda citizen that the iPod has 2GB of storage capcity, it doesn't "speak" to him. I don't really agree with this 'us vs. them' thinking. I'm a technical person, but 2GB doesn't reall
378.
by Osmium 11y ago
I don't think it's glamour though, is it? I mean, Musk is not the best public speaker, and yet his presentations are amazing in spite of this. And they're amazing because they're real: backed by logical thinking, real
379.
by Osmium 11y ago
It'd be nice if those sort of thing became common enough that the BBC had get some syntax highlighting/code formatting set up. Not that the BBC is some monolithic entity, but it's still interesting that they chose to publish
380.
by Osmium 11y ago
CERN had a similar problem too, and the only solution was just to throw away a lot of their data. Do you expect this might happen with SKA, or is the hope that they can capture everything for later processing?
381.
by Osmium 11y ago
This doesn't really bother me because you can use Google Authenticator-style TOTP codes instead, which are free, and I don't expect Fastmail to run their own SMS infrastructure, so they presumably have to pay someone . It would b
382.
by Osmium 11y ago
Well, you're right, but let's put this into context: the only viable alternative at the moment is Microsoft's ActiveSync, another proprietary protocol[1]. IMAP IDLE apparently isn't sufficient for power conscious mobile
383.
by Osmium 11y ago
I am a Gmail user. I personally find the Fastmail interface a lot more performant; it's very responsive for me in a way that Gmail just isn't, though I'm not a Gmail 'power' user, so my experiences might be differen
384.
by Osmium 11y ago
Yay! I am so happy to hear this. Congratulations and thank you to the Fastmail team and people at Apple who made this happen. This has been my only gripe as a Fastmail customer and the only reason I haven't been using Fastmail as my ma
385.
by Osmium 11y ago
> during pluto's formative years? I believe they're saying that this is not the case since they've seen fewer craters on Pluto than they would have expected, which makes them think these mountains are relatively 'rece
386.
by Osmium 11y ago
Ah, I see. We were talking on cross-purposes :) I would favour 'similar' (or 'dissimilar') to 'unique' in that context, but each to their own.
387.
by Osmium 11y ago
Right; that's what I'm talking about too. They can have that many unique planets in principle which (due to lazy evaluation, you could say) they only need to 'assemble' a small number of them. But they can all be uniqu
388.
by Osmium 11y ago
> Clearly the game doesn't have 18*10^15 unique planets, since this is impossible. I don't think this is impossible, since most of those planets will never be visited and hence will never have to be generated. It's possibl
389.
by Osmium 11y ago
> The fact that it's in a (gigantic by current standards) ceramic QFP would also suggest an aerospace application. (For anyone else like myself who didn't know what a QFP was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
390.
by Osmium 11y ago
It really is one of those bizarre things. I can't quite figure out how there's so much money in technology, and yet some common and ubiquitous (and crucial!) open source projects are so incredibly underfunded. There has to be a

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