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Using only the exact time from it and not having it calculate your location would only be useful for something like dead reckoning. They are not looking at a clock and deciding when to turn, they are looking at a GPS device to tell it where they are. The GPS is using the exact timing data to calculate it's location and even tiny errors can cause big errors in your location.

For every nanosecond off you get about 1 foot (0.3 meters) off on your location, 13.7 microseconds is enough for the GPS to think your location is 2.55 miles (4.11 KM) away from where you really are. That is also the error from only one satellite so the error from other ones adds even more error to where the GPS thinks you are.

http://www.montana.edu/gps/und...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Are there any issues with silicon solar cells that make them (protected against visible light, obviously) unsuitable? Compared to power silicon or anything for computation you can get enormous area for relatively little money.

Huh. I hadn't thought of that. A quick google search shows that solar cells can be used as radiation detectors, and they generally have large capture areas. I'll have to try this out.

This looks like a good background document for detecting radiation using semiconductors.

This is the type of amplifier you need as a 1st stage in your detector, should you want to build your own. (Google "Charge Amplifier" for more info.)

The radiation comes in as quick pulses (3 us or so in my circuits), so normal incident light shouldn't interfere with the detection. You could perhaps get both power and detection from the same cell.

I've been interested in detecting not only the radiation, but the direction it came from. A 3-d array of detectors with an incidence/correlation circuit can give a general idea of the direction of the source, relative to the detector. I haven't done this yet due to the complexity and expense of the detectors, but solar cells being cheap and easily available I might just try this out. Hmmm...

Thanks for the suggestion.

Thanks - a little looking has been fun http://www.physics.montana.edu... But, one order of magnitude in density from outer core to center for a neutron star compares to about nine orders of magnitude from center to envelope on our own Sun.

If you have the time, this (pdf warning): personal.stevens.edu/~bmcnair/BME322-S10/Class%2012.pdf (not me, BTW),

and this: http://opal.msu.montana.edu/cftr/IonChannelPrimers/beginners4.htm are good places to start if you're motivated.

L5 is a position in orbit around Earth Without the orbital debris.

Correction: L5 is in the same orbit as Earth.

I don't see how that solves anything. How is L5 better than orbit? It's still in microgravity. You still have all the transport problems.

L5 is a position in orbit around Earth
Without the orbital debris.

I'll give you the "sun doesn't change its path" as common usage, but the earth does in fact change its path: http://www.homepage.montana.edu/~geol445/hyperglac/time1/milankov.htm

The Borealis program at Montana State University has been doing this since 2001. http://spacegrant.montana.edu/borealis/

check it out, i still dunno, so meh

Wow, 9 days, yea, thats how Macs work now, they stay up pretty much until you need to do a software update that requires a reboot. Uptime on my iMac here is 31 days, 17:55, because I've not patched it yet.

My xserve has done over 365 serving files/html.

Vista/XP it doesn't matter, OS X since 10.1 has just been more stable in my experience.

I didn't say USB/Wifi were Apple inventions, I said they were the first to deploy them across the product lines. They did the same thing with DVD-ROM drives, but missed the boat on CD-R/RWs.

Go back to the launch of the iMac and show me what makers deployed USB that vocally, then to iBook launch and show who had Wifi.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-spec7.html

IBM's history of the USB standard credits the iMac.

http://www.coe.montana.edu/ee/rwolff/EE580/history_of_wifi.htm

"The technology had been standardised; it had a name; now Wi-Fi needed a market champion, and it found one in Apple, a computer-maker renowned for innovation. The company told Lucent that, if it could make an adapter for under $100, Apple would incorporate a Wi-Fi slot into all its laptops. Lucent delivered, and in July 1999 Apple introduced Wi-Fi as an option on its new iBook computers, under the brand name AirPort. âoeAnd that completely changed the map for wireless networking,â'

There are automated ones out there that solve this in under a second, but if you want to figure it out yourself try this page:

http://www.esg.montana.edu/meg/consbio/cryptogram/crypto.html

Here's the puzzle text to copy:

VFWTDLCSWV. YD NSLMIJFWEJFD GSW SL NIJNQBLM FOBV EJFDVF DLNIGTFBSL.
KBVBF YYY.AHB.MSK/NSCDC.OFZ FS EDF WV QLSY SA GSWI VWNNDVV.

Just don't spend money on a Giant Rusty Noodle or a set of Spikey Balls out of barbed wire. Wastes of money like those tend to piss off the CS majors.

One theory trying to explain these clouds is the X-ray activity of the sun. The sun is a highly variable star when it comes to X-rays. During its 11-year cycle, the X-ray flux emitted by the sun varies by a factor of 15, with ferocious bursts. We are at a solar minimum, so we see few sun spots and the X-ray activity is also lower on average.

I found an article that is short and readable explaining the link between solar cycles and X-rays: http://solar.physics.montana.edu/nuggets/2000/000407/000407.html. Note that the X-ray activity can vary hugely from the current solar minimum to, say, the 2000-2001 solar max.

The problem is that we don't have that much data on it yet. We need to accumulate several cycles worth of observations before we can answer these questions:
* When does the sun emit X-rays? Is it linked to sun spots?
* What do solar X-rays do to the upper atmosphere?

The X-rays are absorbed by the ionosphere (fortunately for life forms), and this energy transfer is not well known. During each solar minimum, less X-rays arrive in the upper atmosphere, which therefore should cool down. Is it the reason why we see these noctilucent clouds? If so, they should start disappearing in a couple of years, when sun spots return.

This is a very interesting keyhole on a yet unknown mechanism. I hope we'll see updates on the subject.

• "This isn't something you could do on a whim," Camper said. "The risk is low, but it's there." ... What would happen if a pathogen like the bad E. coli-known as the hamburger E. coli for the deaths it caused several years ago at a Jack-in-the-Box restaurant-got into a water system and "interacted" with slime called biofilm? ... To put it a different way, what if colonies of harmless bacteria (called biofilms) that often dwell in water systems, like the bacteria that harmlessly inhabit the human gut, were to trap pathogens and shield them from disinfectants? Could the biofilms become reservoirs for disease? The question isn't a theoretical one. Last year an Ontario city had the bad E. coli (E. coli 0157:H7) in its municipal water system. The military is interested "big time" in what the Montana scientists are trying to develop, said Camper, which is why the MSU Center for Biofilm Engineering has applied for additional funds from the defense organization called DARPA.

The carbon in the air would get sucked up by plants as they grow, we would harvest said plants for the energy they have locked up, and we would use it.

Gigatons/yr produced by fossil fuels: 4-5
Gigatons/yr produced by soil organic matter oxidation/erosion: 61-62
Source [montana.edu]

Assuming crop production happened without plows, lime, or nitrogen fertilizer...

And since lots of US farmland is actually fallow to keep food prices up, using that land for fuel crops would probably be a good idea.

I don't follow. How would putting fallow land into crop production help you reduce CO2 in the atmosphere....

Gigatons/yr produced by fossil fuels: 4-5
Gigatons/yr produced by soil organic matter oxidation/erosion: 61-62
Source

Aside from the whole "let's burn food!" aspect of it.... maybe not such a good idea, eh?

Corn is produced through an incredible usage of fossil fuels. From the fertilizers, through the mechanized Ag cycle. It's just awful!

Putting more land into corn production is a guaranteed way to increase manmade CO2 output. 10x more CO2 is released into the atmosphere by soil erosion/oxidation than the burning of all fossil fuels combined. More cropland = more manmade CO2 unless you intend to grow all this biofuel without tillage. Besides, oil is a fungible commodity. All the oil we aren't burning will be burned by other countries. By not burning the oil ourselves, we simply lower oil prices for everyone else. Biofuels will not reduce the amount of CO2 produced by fossil fuels, but it will considerable increase the CO2 produced by tillage. *Guaranteed increase in manmade CO2.*

just need to snap it again with the reference object in it. http://btc.montana.edu/ceres/html/Universe/images/ cobe.gif

There are a few handy chips off the top of my head:

The various PIC chips may be worthwhile, but probably not what you really want. A classic example is the Zilog Z80 (http://www.zilog.com/products/businessline.asp?bl =273) which offers some development boards, but is probably a bit expensive for this budget. The Motorola HC11, however, is probably perfect. There are dozens of vendors who offer various educational and prototyping boards. There is also vast amounts of information about such things and ample source samples and course materials involving it(for example http://www.coe.montana.edu/ee/cady/ee361/hc11lnks. htm).

Hinode (SOLAR-B) is in may ways an upgrade to the previous Yohkoh (SOLAR-A) mission.

The main difference is that Hinode uses 4 megapixel cameras over the 1 megapixel cameras flown in other space-based solar observatories. (note -- ground based solar observatories have higher resolutiion cameras, but they can't observe these frequencies as x-rays can't make it past the atmosphere. (RHESSI observes in hard x-ray, but it's not a full-disk imager. SXI on GOES is full disk, but it's on soft x-ray)

Now, a couple of weeks after Hinode launched, STEREO also launched -- which is not only 4 megapixel cameras, but two observatories, and besides Ulysses, the first (two) solar observatories not in the sun-earth line. (I'm not a solar physicist, so I don't know what sort of instrumentation package Ulysses carried. Due to the flight path not staying a constant distance from the sun, and because our group doesn't track it*, I can only assume it's insitu and not remote sensing). The more impressive solar observatory will be the Solar Dynamics Observatory, aka SDO.

The reason that SDO is impressive, even though it's in the sun-earth line and isn't as useful as STEREO for solar weather, is that it will be flying 16 megapixel cameras. Because it will be in an inclined geosyncronous orbit, it will have its own ground station for constant data transfer at a full data rate without making use of the Deep Space Network. This allows it to not only send larger pictures, but more of them -- AIA will be taking images every 10 seconds. No space based solar observatory even comes close to that sort of a data rate. (STEREO is estimated at 1.5GB/day, while SDO will be 1TB/day)

* By 'our group', I'm referring to the Virtual Solar Observatory, for which I'm a programmer.
** Please be aware that these are the things that I hear in passing while doing my job. Although I think I'm right on all of this, it wouldn't hurt to get a second source that actually is a solar physicist and deals with the instruments directly.

This fits in well with the widely acknowledged past cycles of ice ages vs greenhouse eras. By some mechanism, (probably Life on Earth), greenhouse gases enter the atmosphere faster than they are removed by natural processes. Eventually, temperatures rise and the icecaps and glaciers melt. The crust adjusts to the loss of lots of pressure on it, causing widespread adjustments in the crust, accompanied by the release of volcanoes that have been corked up for a very long time.

Take the Yellowstone caldera, for instance -- a mega-volcano that has erupted in the past on a roughly 650,000 year cycle (last eruption was 640,000 years ago, the previous 1.3 million years ago, and the one before that 2.1 million years ago). Such an eruption would spew enough dust into the upper atmosphere to block the Sun for a long time, plunging the planet into an ice age as the accumulated atmospheric carbon leaves the atmosphere over several decades and most of the Life on Earth dies off. That would, of course, include me and thee.

Eventually, Life reasserts itself and starts putting carbon back into the atmosphere, after the dust has fallen back onto the planet, and the cycle begins anew.

Just an idea, but it seems to fit the current circumstances. And while we may or may not be responsible for the latest increases in atmospheric carbon (the current warming cycle began 30,000 years ago), we are most certainly contributing to it.

The question is, does this represent a credible notion of what is happening, and if not, what's a better story that fits the historical record?

And if this IS a credible story, what can we do to interrupt the cycle? Greg Benford seems to have several reasonable notions.

And as for Consequences -- consider the incineration of most of Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, with surrounding states including the agricultural areas in the mid-US covered with a meter or so of ash. And with an instant Ice Age in the wings -- now THAT's consequences!

Of course, as a democratic nation, it's our Right to sit around and blather over whether there is a problem of not, and who's to blame, and what SINGLE SOLUTION must be taken to deal with it, or if we should do anything at all, since we cannot prove (until the balloon goes up) whether or not there is anything to this.

Sentient beings would not approach this situation in that manner. Maybe in the next spin of the great wheel of Darwin, some actual sentient beings will come to exist on this planet.

Personally, I'd love to see a merger of touchscreen technology with something along the lines of piezoelectric polymers. This would make it possible to create flexible, touch-sensitive interfaces with surfaces that could be deformed to provide tactile feedback.

Nice speculation. But since the end last ice age most of the coastlines surrounding the Arctic Ocean have undergone isostatic rebound. Most of these areas were highly glaciated and heavily loaded with ice. Once the ice was rapidly removed the land maintained bouyant equilibrium by rising. Apparent sea levels have been falling in these areas for 1000's of years. The only question is how long it will continue and how isostacy and sea level rise interrelate in different areas.

I'm pleased that so many of the principals involved in the Cubesat program have joined this discussion.

I didn't know that they CubeSat Kits were unrelated to the current activities, but more importantly, I want to apologize for omitting the 14th satellite, MEROPE from Montana State University. I want to thank Brian Larsen of MSU for pointing this out to me, and I hope Brian joins this discussion.

One thing I learned about all this activity around space, satellites, and its intersection with computer science and other technologies is that at least among people who are skilled enough in all those disciplines to get a satellite into orbit, amateur radio is still interesting.

Hey that that kind of looks like the rocks here or here or here or here.

and check out these regularily "cut" bad boys here.

But how do you explain natural pyramids?
Oh I don't know maybe this quote:

"If the glacier erodes three or more cirques on different sides of the mountain, a peak will begin to form. The peak may be a steep pyramid shaped rock, which is known as a horn. The Matterhorn in the Swiss Alps is a well known horn."

Yah!

Since, according to him, only the panicky global warming hand-wavers get funding, you've only proven exactly what he said in TFA: research that disputes global warming theory is dismissed out of hand as shill science. The proper response would be to dismantle his assertion that people who go against global warming theory have their funding cut, or better yet, look at and repeat his experiments showing the data he produced is wrong.

Now, your turn: Will you be surprised when you discover an order of magnitude more CO2 is contributed to the atmosphere by soil organic matter decomposition than the burning of ALL fossil fuels combined? Ask yourself how fossil fuels got there in the first place. Now, what happens when you don't put your CO2 away after you play with it? Don't blame cars, blame farmers. But you can't really blame farmers, when the politicians are spending $1.7 billion a year on global warming research and jack squat on no till farming. So... ultimately, it's the fault of politicians who allocate funds to global warming research instead of no till farming equipment and research. And of course that's followed by the only logical conclusion: Those who elected them are at fault. That appears to include you. Therefore, increased level of CO2 in the atmosphere is your fault. :-) Oh, but wait!! That doesn't fit with your global warming theory, therefore it's simply rubbish! Obviously the work of some oil industry shill over at montana.edu. Looks at teh computar modelz!!1

Science is supposed to be falsifiable. Don't agree with the conclusions of his work? Repeat it and prove him wrong. Read any debate on Intelligent Design on Slashdot and the detractors of ID immediately point out that ID is junk science because it is not falsifiable. Global warming is as much junk science as ID. Only it's worse; Global warming is generally accepted junk science. Whenever someone points out that there are serious problems with global warming theory, that information is ignored, shouted down, and disputed with the holy order of indisputable computer models. The response of anyone interested in the truth is to look at the data, repeat the experiments, and either verify it or prove it to be inaccurate. Global warmers are obviously NOT interested in the truth. They're too busy getting fat off that $1.7 billion in government funds. More panic equals more money. So who did you say was shilling for easy money again?

I'll see your five year old national geographic fluff piece, and raise you a two year old government study.

simulations of iron fertilization of the oceans in the Southern Hemisphere initially showed that almost 8 billion tons of carbon would be absorbed by the ocean each year. Yet, after 500 years of continuous fertilization, the net increase in absorption would be less than 1 billion tons of carbon per year.

Now, considering that fossil fuels contribute roughly 4-5 billion tons of C to the atmosphere annually, and we've got about 100 years of fossil fuels left... How in the hell is this not a perfect solution? Oh yeah, that's right... too many global warming chicken littles out there are going to have egg on their face if atmospheric C is reduced to pre-industrial levels and global temps are still rising thanks to the simple fact that the sun is getting hotter. We wouldn't want to actually test that "greenhouse gases cause global warming" theory, now would we? Better just stick to those computer models...

Oh no! I'm challenging global warming rhetoric with scientific studies! Damn!! There goes my Karma! *sniff* Goodbye sweet Karma <sarcasm />

And then there are a handful of us who majored in environmental science in college who think that computer models are as susceptible to subjective modelers as computer benchmarks are to industry types trying to sell you their latest processor. Large majority eh? Got any relevant links? I'm not going to pick on you specifically MightyMartian, because there are a lot of people here racking up +5's with nothing but rhetoric. Here's why I think this global warming business is a sham.

The soil releases an order of magnitude more CO2 into the atmosphere than all the fossil fuels burned each year combined. No till farming in America could take as much CO2 out of the atmosphere as taking half of all the cars in America off the road. A full 40% of the Earth's arable land is being used for agriculture and most of it is being severely degraded by tillage. Why aren't you people up in arms about that? Hey, burn the f'in farmers right? They're greedy evil bastards.

Studies have shown that fertilizing plankton with iron sulfate could significantly reduce atmospheric CO2. (IronEx II is a notable success.) "Oh teh Noes!!11oneone1eleventyone! After 500 years it wont teh wurk anymore!?ONE" Well gee, we'll be out of fossil fuels by then. So why aren't you guys who are belly aching about global warming doing it? Afraid you'll have egg on your face if CO2 drops and mean temps continue to rise? What you say? Your models might be flawed?

Wow, the Sun IS getting hotter, and Earth's temperature correlates directly with it.

And as for plastics, we can make most of that out of corn and it's more environmentally friendly. Most of the crowd around here loves parroting each other with this global warming chicken little horseshit, but I personally am sick to death of hearing it. Produce something besides a BBC article written in layman's terms that says the sky is falling, PLEASE! I thought this was news for nerds, not drama queens.

Would anyone like to provide a little evidence to the contrary that is not entirely based on a computer model?

Are you trying to say that there are stupid people out there that would rather carry an entire corpse to a authentication terminal, rather than delve into the gruesome arts of exacto-knifing those certain finger digits and eyeballs; to assemble a casted mould and a facial mask articulated to correct skin tone with the eyes precisely duplicated in a holographic-depth spectre surface (holographic printer, or inexpensive homemade holography, Holography technique, or even the Amature Holograph Society?) There are even inexpensive technical courses that improves this matter, that can be easily used to purvey an eye-scanner. There is nothing to hide; the technologies thought to provide more security and safety, other than brute-force and immediate consumption, were defeated the moment they were activated. I suppose someone can create every necessary part of a body in three-dimensional clay and it'll pass a scanner test.

I think the counter-actions that inexpensively defeat all the security measures are in good faith, whereas anyone that is coerced to wave standard good-faith handshaking rules and passkeys in their account to a more public and global access have already waived what little security and safety there was meant. I suggest people move their fortunes with them wherever they may need it. This is all the fault of a world-ready currency and central banking, then to let people carry specie in their pockets with a firearm to anyone that wants to take their demurred and stored compensation and barter representations of hard labor.

At least in Canada, they have Life+50 copyright, so that they celebrate Public Domain Day every January 1. (This year: Albert Einstein! Next year: A. A. Milne! And so forth.) There's talk of setting up a Project Gutenberg in Canada, so at least old works from that era will be preserved, if not made legally available in most places. (Australia also has Life+50, but I think that's changing, alas.)

In any case, the set of books copyrighted by January 1, 1923 (not 1922) is indeed finite, but you might be interested to know (see Free Culture, p. 147) that the average copyright term in 1973 in the US was 32.2 years, because most (more than 85% of) works were not renewed. Due to retroactive extensions and associated bullshit, after 1978, works created 1964 or later were automatically renewed. But Project Gutenberg has a Rule 6 to deal with that. Consider (I think you may have to sign in to see this) Plague Ship , by Andre Norton, published in 1956, currently being post-processed.

'Course, the fact that folks are working hard to drag works into the public domain where they would be in a sane legal system at this point doesn't invalidate your original point. But Project Gutenberg isn't about to run out of material, not when they have a big chunk of the 20th century to deal with. (They just don't have anything particularly popular from that period.)

Oh, and PG doesn't really have 16,000 books. Some works were released in little bitty pieces. Consider an example. But there are still, I think I've seen estimated, around 10,000 real, individual titles in there. (Of course, any measure that counts the encyclopedia-sized "Modern Machine-Shop Practice" and the Declaration of Independence equally can't really be that accurate, now can it?)

Everyone's got it so backwards and its really amusing. Global warming is caused by solar warming. This is directly related to the actions of previous democratic administrations, like Bill Clinton. Some like it hot, what can you do?

No really, check out:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/sun_output_0 30320.html

FTA:
Willson said the Sun's possible influence has been largely ignored because it is so difficult to quantify over long periods.
End FTA;

As is the CO2 output and the temperature trend over the last few thousand years, which you would need to do to trend climactic conditions with a reasonable amound of accuracy to see where we are *really headed.

It's only been measured accurately for around 20 years, as has the sun's output. Coincidence? I think not.

Amazing how the solar warming trend is conveniently ignored by the birkenstock crowd when talking about this issue.

FTA:
The new study shows that the TSI has increased by about 0.1 percent over 24 years.
End FTA;
That doesn't sound like a lot, til you consider the temperatures we are talking about. and:

FTA:
A separate recent study of Sun-induced magnetic activity near Earth, going back to 1868, provides compelling evidence that the Sun's current increase in output goes back more than a century, Willson said.
End FTA;

from http://www.montana.edu/wwwpb/univ/acton.html:
For decades, scientists have known that the surface of the sun is about 6,000 degrees Celsius while the corona soars to several million degrees.
end from;
6000x.001=6 degrees every 24 years. Since 1898, that's over 25 degrees C, many many more during periods of high activity. If the earth's temp management is as fragile as the GW crowd says it is, this has to have had at least some effect.

This change is inexorable, unstoppable. While global warming may, arguably, be influenced by people, solar warming, is not, and long term, no matter what we do, we can't stop it. As stars age, they get hotter...

l8,
AC

It absolutely rocks - I would definitely look into it. It inspired me to continue on learning programming. When I started Python, I had already taken a course in C. I learned Python completely online, without books, which was inspirational. Here is the tutorialstarted with. Python is not difficult to learn, though it is a serious language that can do some heavy lifting. You can read about Python's "real world" uses on the python.org site - for example both Google and Industrial Light and Magic use it. I started it in sort of an offhand way, not really thinking much would come of it, and felt I really had some serious work down within a year, without trying very hard. After that I moved on to Perl and now I'm learning Java. I can't recommend it more highly.

Lagrange points http://www.physics.montana.edu/faculty/cornish/lag range.html
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HAS NO COMMA!
Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey

For the visually-oriented minds:

http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_mm/ob_techorbit1.html
http://www.physics.montana.edu/faculty/cornish/lag range.html

For the mathametically inclined:

http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/LagrangePo ints.html

If you don't even know what they are then you shouldn't be spouting useless drivel. fucktard. Try doing a little research first.

http://www.physics.montana.edu/faculty/cornish/lag range.html

The derivations are linked on a page off of Wikipedia.

It's a little too technical. Though it is interesting that they don't have the timescales - I might add those. It's also interesting that one of the pages Wiki links to screws up days and years (http://www.physics.montana.edu/faculty/cornish/la grange.html) for L3's timescale.

I believe all LG points are unstable.

No, L4 and L5 are stable (making the grandparent post incorrect as well). For a map of the LaGrange points and their numbers:

http://www.physics.montana.edu/faculty/cornish/lag range.html

http://www.physics.montana.edu/faculty/cornish/lag range.html

Interesting to note is:
When a satellite parked at L4 or L5 starts to roll off the hill it picks up speed. At this point the Coriolis force comes into play - the same force that causes hurricanes to spin up on the earth - and sends the satellite into a stable orbit around the Lagrange point.

So perhaps it's possible to share L4 & L5 as a kind of virtual gravitational body.

Two words: Orbital mechanics.

There are exactly and only five Lagrange points in any pair of orbiting bodies. Three are unstable and two are stable.

http://www.physics.montana.edu/faculty/cornish/lag range.html

"Centrifugal force" is a convenient name for the apparent forces that appear when translating to a rotating reference frame. The classic method of determining where the Lagrange points are is literally to balance the gravitational and centrifugal forces. See here for a great example.

Of course he was upset. The overhead for recursive functions is many times more than that for implimenting queues. From this page covering what you should have remembered from basic computer science, we find that "Every time a method is called, all of the local variables, registers, and method parameters must be pushed on the call stack. This can make recursion very time consuming since recursion usually adds a lot of method calls."

However, had you recalled Breadth-First-Search, you'd realize that with a queue you could traverse the the tree one level at a time, starting with the root and adding all children found on each level. This explicitly stores in queue the information you implicitly programmed in the recursion. It requires more thinking, but it saves the costly recursive calls, which can pile up very quickly if you're searching an unbalanced tree. You were lazy and neglected algorithmic analysis for the easy recursive solution and got rightly burned for it. This may have happened because you were tired, and that's certainly understandable, but this is early CS/basic algorithms material, and if I was your interviewer I'd also be concerned (but less of a dick about it).

If anyone's interested, there are several sites with instructions on creating your own slide rule.

http://www.sphere.bc.ca/test/build.html

http://solar.physics.montana.edu/kankel/math/csr.h tml

etc.

So what's your opinion on tethers? (IAASE (Systems Engineer), NSS Member, no I don't work for Tethers unlimited) A scaled-up horizontally launched platform (like the successor to SS-1) can reach the minimum altitude for a tether and transfer a crew module into LEO, or possibly MEO. From there you can just about go anywhere (L1 or L2). (Overview on Lagrange Points here)

In a two-body system (earth/sun), there are five such points, of which only two are stable. Neither resides on the axis between the earth and the sun.

One might be able to keep a disc at an unstable point using active control, but that is a separate question. :)

In Free Culture, Lessig gives a background on the Statute of Anne, which was the first codification of modern copyright law. What is interesting is that at the time England already had copyright in the common law. The reason they codified it was to specifically add expiration to break the publishing monopolies, and hence encourage both creativity and capitalism. From a historical perspective, the GP is exactly right - the purpose of copyright law is to expire copyrights. Weird, eh?

http://www.coe.montana.edu/ee/rwolff/ee543%20paper s/verizon.htm
http://www.networkingpipeline.com/showArticle.jhtm l?articleID=23902991

You seem to think it is possible to lay several million miles of fibre in one year. Maybe if you have an infinite budget you could, but the telcos don't. It takes time to dig out the old copper and lay in the new fibre, along with all the rest of the infrastructure, and do it properly.

Bigger picture here.

Interestingly enough, Schweitzer (who is conducting the study), has done previous work on "dino blood" that has been "re-manufactured" by certain creationists to case-in-point their side of the coin:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dinosaur/bl ood.htm l

I scanned the article, but didn't see any reference to dates... the Museum of the Rockies mentions they finished their Hells Creek T-rex dig just recently, and that this particular specimen was excavated 2001-2003(search MOR1125 )... So, when was this bad boy dropped? When did the 'soft tissue' analysis occur?

The L1 point (in between the two large bodies) ... are stable.

Some spacecrafts are in orbits around L1 and L2 point of the earth-sun system, but those orbits are only semi-stable. The spacecrafts use some of their fuel to stay in those orbits longer than they would without propulsion, but eventually they will drift out of their orbits.

One can calculate a gravitational-rotational pseudopotential for the system (see e. g. here). In this pseudopotential, L1, L2 and L3 are saddle points (pseudopotential increases along one axis in both directions and decreases along another axis in both directions), L4 and L5 are maxima - one would expect that a body would move away from them. But the potential cannot include forces which depend on velocity and not on position - in our case the coriolis force - therefore it's called pseudopotential. Coriolis force causes an object to orbit the L4 or L5 point in a complicated path. If the object has more kinetic energy it can get from L4 to L5 via L3 and back again - this is called a horseshoe orbit.