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Comment Re: What is it? (Score -1, Troll) 35

by coaxial (#65870549) Attached to: Google Sues SerpApi Over Scraping and Reselling Search Data

Itâ(TM)s in its name. SERP = Search Engine Results Page. Theyâ(TM)re scrapes of Google SERPs. This is fallout from the Reddit license where Reddit decided to collect rent from Google and others for scraping their content. Apparently Reddit and Google decided to put Google only visible stuff on their pages (which is explicitly illegal under Googleâ(TM)s TOS, and has resulted in index banning) and then served up this secret content via SerpAPI.

Scraping Google SERPs has been standard behavior for literally as long as Google has existed. Thatâ(TM)s literally how Facebook, Microsoft, and countless startups and academics evaluate their own search engines. Iâ(TM)m not exaggerating. They literally compare their results to Google results, which always made me wonder what Google does.

As far as ignoring robots.txt and using different IPs? Please. Thatâ(TM)s also has been standard behavior for as long as the web has been around.

This is monopoly behavior, and Google is openly engaging in it and attacking the open web because thereâ(TM)s a sympathetic White House administration for them.

Comment Re: Curious catch 22 (Score 5, Informative) 238

by coaxial (#65728246) Attached to: Western Executives Shaken After Visiting China

No. There will always be jobs. Stupid jobs that pay nothing, but there will always be jobs. Why? Because having people you control is a kink for the oligarchs.

Thatâ(TM)s it. Itâ(TM)s about slavery. Never expect UBI, as long as billionaires exist. They want to keep you poor, weak, and most importantly *dependent*.

Comment Re: Reading TFA (Score 2) 82

by coaxial (#65727482) Attached to: US Falls Out of Top 10 on List of the World's Most Powerful Passports

Bruh. Thatâ(TM)s literally how passports work. They work with visas, and visa free travel agreements.

Did you think TFA was going to be about how many grams the cardstock the cover is made out of can support? Seriously, what do you think âoea powerful passportâ means? Itâ(TM)s where you can travel without visas.

Comment Re: This should stop the abuse of H1-B (Score 5, Insightful) 231

by coaxial (#65671228) Attached to: President To Impose $100,000 Fee For H-1B Worker Visas, White House Says

I have been saying for decades now that the F-1 (student) visa should be able to convert to a resident visa upon graduation.

The whole idea of it not being a resident visa was a cold war notion that after graduating, the international student would return to their country and spread the gospel of how wonderful the United States was, and how their local country needed to oppose the Soviets. I doubt that ever really happened.

Today, weâ(TM)re just training people and then at best turning them into indentured servants for a few oligarchs, or even worse (and now the policy of the Trump administration), throwing them out so theyâ(TM)ll build up some other competing country, while weakening our own.

Comment Re: Bruh (Score 2) 51

by coaxial (#65386265) Attached to: Is the Altruistic OpenAI Gone?

The whole âoeitâ(TM)s super dangerousâ thing served two purposes. First, it hyped the product. It must be earth shattering if itâ(TM)s super dangerous. Second, it was a naked play for government regulation to protect them from competition.

The irony of course is that they played up Skynet, the real societal danger was never going be stopped through regulation. The danger I speak of is that of generated content being taken as truth, whether itâ(TM)s propaganda or just lazy danger like putting glue on pizzas or misidentifying mushrooms.

But of course theyâ(TM)re not concerned with that. That makes money, and anyway, it will get better⦠eventually.

Submission + - Another large Black hole in "our" Galaxy (arxiv.org)

Submitted by RockDoctor
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

Submitted by AmiMoJo
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.

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