Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates and Microsoft Fund Telescope
coondoggie writes "Bill Gates and the Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences this week donated $30 million to an ambitious telescope that researchers say will be able to survey the entire sky every three nights — something never done before.
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Project got $20 million from the Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences and $10 million from Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates. Expected to see its "first light" in 2014, the 8.4-meter LSST will survey the entire visible sky deeply in multiple colors every week with its 3 billion-pixel digital camera, probing the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy and opening a movie-like window on objects that change or move. With the telescope scientists will be able to quickly find Earth-threatening asteroids and exploding stars called supernovas and will be able to map out 100 billion galaxies, according to researchers."
ac
but does it run Linux?
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
As opposed to the bridge to nowhere or the Woodstock memorial.
Where its inhabitants greet the rising of its four suns by gathering en masse and screaming "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!!"
Yeah, my karma sucks....but so do the mods.
...they are going to use it to search for potential markets for Microsofts` products...
It wont work until it gets a new service pack
it will only look in the direction it chooses too
Before looking though it, you will have to click ten boxes of "are you sure you want to look in that direction" are you sure you want to see that star", are you sure you want to see that spacecraft heading for earth.." and so forth.
...if it didn't take so long to copy the images it takes onto external storage.
It might be arguable that it should, but the reality is that it never will.
One more argument for keeping money in the pocket of the people who earn it, rather than the government's....
Blue Sky Of Death
why don't we just hack in and download the map directly? :P
The winner of the Google Lander program land on the moon.
Isn't this what my Microsoft tax money is supposed to fund?
There. Fixed that for you.
There is no place on earth where you can see the entire night sky over three days. There will always be stars hidden.
I'm glad that private institutions/individuals care about pure science and exploration enough to build this. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if they licensed the telescope in order to turn it into a profit maker.
If Bill Gates happens to spot a giant earth-killing asteroid with his new telescope, will the slashdot community decide maybe Windows wasn't such a bad thing after all?
Do you want to
Script kiddies ate my sig.
"probing the mysteries of dark matter"
.. er at the speed of light.
In my opinion this will go the way of the aether and be totally discredited in time. The aether being denser than Iron and being able to propagate light
The basic evidence for 'dark matter' is that galaxies are rotating to fast and maintaining there shape differently than gravitational allows for. They should fly apart or never been formed. Rather then change the current theory, scientists went out and invented 'dark matter'.
davecb5620@gmail.com
The founders of the U.S. had a problem with taxation without representation, not taxation in general. As long as elected representatives have overseen taxation and government expenditure, all is running as intended. This Slashdot mentality of "This money is mine, and the government is just stealing it!" is just elitist dismissal of democracy, because you think you know better how money should be spent than your community. Plus, it's crazy to claim that the money is yours alone when, hey, there wouldn't be coinage without the government and they can determine what to do with it. If you don't like it, start bartering.
the Blue Star of Death!
KLAATU, BORADA, NIh*ahem*
All that money just to show something blue!? Sure Bill knows a cheaper way! :P
...not Bill Gates and Microsoft. Anybody making that misattribution clearly didn't even read the headline of the actual article, let alone the chunk of text quoted in the summary.
It is in no way an "elitist dismissal of democracy". Is it so bad to think for ourselves instead of expecting big brother to do it for us?
Your mentality is nothing more than you can't do it yourself, you have to have the government. Just another way to destroy individualism.
Moderate taxation isn't a problem, heavy taxation to support social programs is.
Gone!
How geeky of you Sir! Will Galaxy Zoo have access to this data?
... does it run Linux ?
I can't wait to see the television they have to build to display those images...
the following month for $50 on Ebay when they come out with one that has 18 billion pixels at a cost of only $10 million?
I look at my 2 megapixel camera these days and struggle with whether I should buy batteries for it or not...
As a thought experiment, how is this any different than SpaceShipOne? Lots of geeks cheered when private enterprise started doing space travel. And now just because private philanthropy is providing a very capable telescope, suddenly it's why isn't the gummint paying for this? Let's take money away from widows an orphans on this...
Sorry buddy, I think you're pigeonholing all the founders into a category of men who only cared about taxation without representation and nothing more... but lets ignore the fact that the majority of the founding fathers were individualists and against large government in ADDITION to disagreeing with taxation without representation, and take on your argument as if all your premises were true. Sorry, but when you take MY money, apply it to YOUR favorite pet programs that I feel are not worth the money or a detriment to myself and the country, then guess what... I am not being represented in government adequately for the taxes I pay. Dumbass.
Incidentally, a democracy is not what we have, and thank God. Before I let you go, ever hear of the tyranny of the majority? 51% of the people who are mildly in support of something can screw over 49% of the people who are vehemently against it. Just because you and your like-minded friends in the community think it'd be nice to build a $10 billion Museum of Rainbows and Sunshine doesn't make it right to tax me and my friends all our money to do it. Talk about elitism.
>> Bill Gates... donated $30 million to an ambitious telescope
Talk about an expensive subsitute phallus. Most guys just buy a Corvette and get over it.
Only $30 million to look for planet-destroying rocks from outer space? Is that really all it takes to saveguard our species and world from such threats? If so, why aren't there half a dozen of these things already scanning the heavens every second of the day?
Gee, *humans*...
Ice Cream has no bones.
I'd say that governments should exist for the protection of the populace from external threats (other nations), and the protection of their rights and freedoms (for example, if someone were to try to murder you, or if some group were to try to overthrow the government to set up a new government which was more tyrannical). The government should then have to make a choice between "no taxes" and "some taxes", striving for the optimal balance of "just enough taxes to do the two jobs previously listed". It would seem that the founding fathers agree with me, based on some of the evidence they've left behind (Constitution, Federalist Papers, Bill of Rights, etc.).
The founders of the U.S. had a problem with taxation without representation, not taxation in general. As long as elected representatives have overseen taxation and government expenditure, all is running as intended. This Slashdot mentality of "This money is mine, and the government is just stealing it!" is just elitist dismissal of democracy, because you think you know better how money should be spent than your community.
You might want to try reading the original Constitution, prior to the 16th Amendment. You might notice that not only did it proscribe direct taxation of the citizenry, but the word "democracy" doesn't appear even once.
Something tells me you don't understand the intentions of the founders as well as you think you do.
No roads, then? No schools?
.sig withheld by request
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/20/180205
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
There is no dark matter really. Matter of fact it's all dark.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I for one would much rather see a billionaire donating money to charity out of free will, rather than a coercive model which forces the individual to support the program irrespective of his beliefs (and also pay a cut to the middleman: the people in the business of government). What Bill Gates is doing here is true charity, quite unlike what goverment does.
;)
If I was him, I'd do the same thing. I'd do everything in my power to keep my fortune out of the hands of those who employ coercion as a means, and everything in my power to distribute my fortune to those charities and projects which rely on true free will, not coercion -- whether commercial or not.
In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion he's doing exactly that.
Here are links to the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) home page and its layout and construction.
Don't they know that you shouldn't buy a camera just based on the number of megapixels....
Try to put those tasks on paper in an algorithmic form, the founding fathers did and this is where the US ended up. It's not that they had a bad idea, its simply that in terms of humanity there is rarely a condition with only a binary set of solutions or "valid" reactions (no matter how much media groups and marketers wants you to think this way, and by "valid" i mean the kind where you hear the why's of what someone did and you say "i can see that.."). Subjectivity is the root reason for governments to exists, and is also the root reason that any government can have its influence subverted or diverted given powerful enough interest groups.
sucks.
Ice Cream has no bones.
Plus, it's crazy to claim that the money is yours alone when, hey, there wouldn't be coinage without the government and they can determine what to do with it.
You say that like it matters - Do you really believe "wealth" doesn't exist without the underlying pyramid-scheme of fiat currencies?
Perhaps more relevantly - The US Treasury just last month cracked down on a popular form of exactly what you claim we wouldn't have without the government. Doesn't it strike you as strange that they would need to have laws against something that can't exist?
If you don't like it, start bartering.
Sorry, no can do - The government expects its share of that too... Except that leads to the intentionally unmeetable requirement of paying taxes with money you don't have.
I know this is Slashdot and nobody RTFA (especially not editors!), but TFA says nothing about Microsoft being involved. The only connection is Bill Gates and as far as is clear, he is funding this from his own pockets (not Microsoft coffers).
So I get to name it. Right? Who gets to name all the new asteroids and comets they find? The first person to spot it in a photo frame?
I don't seem to understand the point in "investing" millions of dollars into projects that will take more than a few years to complete. It just seems at the rate of technology nowadays, by the time 2014 comes around we'll all have one of these on our cell phones.
Astronomical tradition is UNIX and more recently Linux oriented; besides, most astronomical software is Open Source. It would be hard to port all this software to Windows. That is, unless Mocrosoft donate money for that or do the poprting themselves.
...of course it runs NetBSD!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
One of the major difficulties with this telescope doesn't have anything to do with the telescope itself, but how to handle the 30 Terabytes of data gathered each clear night. How many of us have 30 TB of storage at all, let alone storing and analyzing an additional 30 TB of data a night.
I have to agree with most of what you said, except for one statement: "Subjectivity is the root reason for governments to exist"... and I even agree with the part of the sentence after that statement. I still think the root REASONS government exist are the ones I postulated... over time, the government changes its purpose to suit its own needs, as you stated, and that is an unfortunate fact. However, saying that government exists to become corrupted by compromise and greed until it falls and is replaced is simply not true. That's like saying the reason ice cubes exist is because they melt. Yes they melt, but we make them to absorb heat. Melting is a gradual, unavoidable result of this, but when they are all melted, do we say "great, now that they're melted, we should strive for more puddles of water"? No, we say "dump out that water, let's make some new ice cubes".
If you don't like it, start bartering.
I agree that the idea of switching to a barter-based system is appealing. But the age-old question will still have to be answered: Who runs Bartertown?
This is because "our" representatives spend a lot of money on bread and circuses to benefit people who don't pay their "fair share".
My definition of fair:
(Cost of Government) / (Number of Citizens) = the fair tax per citizen.
Anything else is unfair, but necessary simply because not everyone can afford their share.
All the shenanigans of modern tax code boils down to the politics of extracting unfair amounts of money from whomever can pay.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
People can organize to do things without resorting to theft. You've partly got me on the issue of roads, for some infrastructure the ideal balance of efficiency and ease of implementation is at the national level. Once it is built, however, why can't it be maintained by local government, paid for by user fees? That is both the easiest AND the most efficient solution. On the schooling issue, you are clearly a product of public education. Even if you WANT schools to be completely public, then all of human history up to the present day shows this is best done at the local level, not the federal level. Believe me, we don't need a federal government that's even 20% of the size it is today. Grow some balls and realize that you actually can survive without a corrupt, bloated bureaucracy telling you how to live your life and spend your money... at gunpoint.
It's full of blue.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Plus, it's crazy to claim that the money is yours alone when, hey, there wouldn't be coinage without the government and they can determine what to do with it. If you don't like it, start bartering.
Actually, there were people trying to do exactly that, but the government didn't like the competition...
No, the government didn't like the fraud. If they had made their own currency in a different shape and appearance than U.S. coinage, there wouldn't have been a problem.
Is there a compression algorithm for video of skies?
V2.0 of this telescope should be able to survey the entire sky in real time, and compress the feed down to something reasonable. Tie 3 or 4 of these together in different countries and you have a continuous realtime recording of space as visible from the earth archived for researchers.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
That's odd - nobody has been charged with fraud. Or anything else, for that matter. Who is claiming to have been defrauded?
You should write the President and ask him to give an executive order to not comply with earmarks that do not explicitly appear in legislation. Oddly, the vast majority of earmarks are from conference reports and lack the force of law This is somehow a way for congressmen to avoid taking responsibility for wasteful spending. There has been some talk of Bush doing this, but the pressure from powerful lobbyists and congressmen has turned the administration away from this crucial step.
Seriously, take ten minutes and write. It really does matter. The President's party lost big, partly for corrupt spending, and if enough voters chimed in, I'm confident Bush would take this opportunity to attempt to salvage his party's old fiscal steward position. Bush knows he is so unpopular there is really no way to attack him politically anymore, and this will not be true for the next president. If Bush doesn't do this, no one else will.
if those that make the "liberty dollars" imagine silver or gold are not "fiat" money too, they are deeply ignorant, or crooks. You should search for purchase power variations for an ounce of gold or one of silver ... it went down a lot, on average, since the XVIth century, and in the meantime it varied a lot, with huge ups and downs.
All money are "fiat", and all monetary exchange is kind of a barter ... whether it's paper money or gold or seashells or glass beads.
To be fair, the "bridge to nowhere" gets a bad rap. Two of Stevens' projects were dubbed as "bridges to nowhere," although one of them was arguably a pretty good idea.
The first, and the more famous never had a chance of being built, because even the locals thought it was a terrible and ridiculous idea. Stevens was stupid to propose it....
The second would have opened up large areas of undeveloped land in an area that is otherwise overcrowded, overpopulated, and expensive. Although the area is indeed mostly empty, the bridge would have almost certainly spurred massive development in the area. (Think of it like connecting New York to Long Island, which was very much a vast expanse of nothingness before the road link was constructed). The opponents of the project attached the label of "bridge to nowhere", which many confused with the first project, and it was swiftly voted down.
Stevens has had some awful ideas, although you can't give the rest of the senate all that much credit, as they've proven themselves unable to differentiate between the bad ideas and the good ones.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
By using disc-shaped pieces of metal and rectangular pieces of papers as their currency and recommending them for general purchases, the Liberty Dollar project could have confused the general public. The law 18 U.S.C. 514 is meant to protect against that.
I believe the Canadian government, among others, is also manufacturing disc-shaped pieces of metal and rectangular pieces of papers as their currency and recommending them for general purchases. When are we invading?
Let's hope someone figures out a way to make a boinc or @home project using the images from this new telescope. Looking forward to it.
I'm going to take back some of the things I've said about you, Bill. You...[handing over candybar] You've earned it.
As opposed to the bridge to nowhere or the Woodstock memorial.
Bridges and memorials don't pose a challenge to religious dogma.
You seem philosophically akin to the ignorant bible thumper who takes the mistranslated English version of the bible literally in every way, you seem to merely be the mirror image that thinks science means anti-religion. The truth is that science and religion are compatible. The Vatican operates a telescope and funds research:
Dark Matter and Energy in the Cosmos
The Acceleration of the Universe
Quasars
Globular Clusters
A Supernova Discovery
http://clavius.as.arizona.edu/vo/R1024/Research.html
History is full of religious people who are also scientists. One example is psychics professor and atronomer, and Roman Catholic Priest, Georges Lemaître. The guy who proposed the big bang theory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre
You should note that some scientists were closed minded and dismissed Lemaître's theory because he was a priest, not on merit. I guess for some science becomes a religion and their minds close. I prefer the approach of Hawking and other scientists throughout history, that scientists are exploring the mechanics of the universe and that proving/disproving the existence of God is outside of their work.
"Bill Gates... donated $30 million to an ambitious telescope"
Talk about an expensive subsitute phallus. Most guys just buy a Corvette and get over it.
But the scientist gets to drop lines like "Wanna visit my secluded Hawaiian getaway, I'll show you the stars. Don't forget to pack a parka."
http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/mko/
This Slashdot mentality of "This money is mine, and the government is just stealing it!" is just elitist dismissal of democracy,
As opposed to your attitude that my life and my production belongs to the collective and that I should be grateful that the rabble allows me to keep some.
Plus, it's crazy to claim that the money is yours alone when, hey, there wouldn't be coinage without the government and they can determine what to do with it.
Those metal tokens only have value because they hold the value created by the toil of a strong back or mind.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
All i'm saying is the root of all reasons you postulated is the fact that perspectives are subjective.
Ice Cream has no bones.
It is all of our M$ tax money that is helping. It's a good thing, but I wish uncle Bill would contribute more of his billions to science and health research.
Wait... Did he just say, "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's" "Plus, it's crazy to claim that the money is yours alone when, hey, there wouldn't be coinage without the government and they can determine what to do with it."
I'm sure if the bean counters sharpened their pencils enough they'd find some gubberment moolah used, grant money must have been used to build the mirror lab or NSA funds used in Perl or Perl scripts or some SELinux has got to be in there somewhere. Still maybe now that BillyG is getting some distance from all of the business suits he's starting to reconnect with his inner-nerd and redeveloping his geekitude.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
heavy taxation to pay for Republican deficit interest payments and war mongering. There, I fixed that for you.
Most Hell's Angels chapter yearly donate some money to good causes, like a local orphanage or a cultural institute for the poor. This all helps to portray this 'motor club' as a bunch of good guys. Donating (some) money obtained from illegal and immoral practices does not make these people any better.
...does this have to do with Microsoft? Nothing, as far as I can see.
Telescopes are there to look back into the past... maybe Bill wants to see where Windows Vista went wrong?
Take Nobody's Word For It.
May I nominate Mayor McCheese?
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
We don't need another fries with that.
Windows needs your permission to look at dark matter.
Allow or Cancel ?
If you do not trust this dark matter, do not run this operation. Dark Matter can potentially harm your computer.
Essentia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Microsoft claims to have found a desktop user in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri that actually _likes_ Vista and are attempting to make contact, in order to revoke his/her/its pirated activation key.
Grow some balls.
It's interesting that you posted the link to the Mauna Kea Observatories, without noting (knowing?) that UH has been ahead of the LSST folks with its similar PanSTARRS program. Both are intended to repeatedly resurvey the sky, both sell themselves to the public with the NEO search capability, and most astronomers want them primarily for supernova detection and other deep space research.
Technically, they differ in that the LSST uses one huge cu$tom $cope, while PanSTARRS ties four smaller "commodity" research-grade scopes ganged to stare at the same piece of sky, and then post-processes the four resulting images to subtract cosmic ray detections and errors in the detectors. PanSTARRS currently has a single scope on Maui as a working prototype.
I hope that both systems become fully operational. The more eyes on the sky, the better.
Luke, help me take this mask off
to sue Mead over the rights to the Newtonian Telescope!
Will this spell this the end of amateur comet hunting? Will all newly-discovered comets henceforth be named after Microsoft products?
I, for one, welcome our new telescopic overlords.
I'm glad that Bill is going to look for Earth-crossing asteroids. Maybe he could also spend a little research money towards developing a flu vaccine in days rather than months?
Why should we expect our politicians to fund these projects when half of them don't even believe in evolution or greenhouse gasses?
>>> "That's just mind-boogeling amounts of data"
640K, should be enough memory to hold, it. Wouldn't you think.
[Bill Gates claims he never said it incidentally http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1997/01/1484%5D
So, now we can call him Billy "Robin Hood" Gates. Cool.
1) $30 million dollars is pocket change to bill gates
2) An asteroid hitting the earth would kill billions of potential microsoft customers
3) The idea of bill gates saving the world would drive linux users nuts.
4) Its tax deductible
5) Its good PR
6) The data accumulated can be used in a future Microsoft Encarta Universe program.
The LSST (and Lowel Observatory's Discovery Channel Telescope for the northern third of the sky) might literally find the asteroid that "has our name on it". So, this item heralds the opportunity we humans have to truly defend our species from extinction! I certainly appreciate a good joke, or a bad one for that matter. And I'm definitely no fan of the overly ruthless business practices of the latest donors of the money to fund the LSST. However, just as the overly ruthless Andrew Carnegie gave away much of his ill-gotten gains, Gates, Simonyi and Microsoft are giving away much of their ill-gotten gains. So, let's "hold our collective nose" and hope that this telescope gets online in time to fine that asteroid before it's too late. After all, the dinosaurs failed to notice what was going on in the sky until it was too late. Have we seen very many of them walking around lately?
but your sins against computer users will never be absolved
That hardly makes sense. Regardless, the "amount" of taxation doesn't matter, per se; it's how's the money being spent, how cost-effective is it, and what on?
The LSST and Google have also announced some degree of collaboration: http://www.lsst.org/News/google.shtml.
Indeed, an ex-Google "VP of Engineering", Wayne Rosling, joined the LSST project in June 05. That Google announced a joint effort with the LSST some time later is not therefore totally surprising--sometimes it's who you know.
--
$tar -xvf
Apparently you don't understand the difference between voluntary association and coercion? Come on, man, even a 2-year-old can understand it.
Its wonderful all this info will make it to professionals and amateurs alike thats to Google and MicroSoft alumni.
Thanks for your reply. I had begun to think no one read anything that had been posted more than a few minutes after the original item was posted. I stand by what I wrote. We're talking about the survival of our species, nothing less. Using this post to take cheap shots at Bill Gates, et al, is just a waste of time. Furthermore, assuming that the only choices that exist are either "big asteroid or small writing" is a bit too simple. There are a number of factors: 1. The relative velocity of the asteroid to Earth when the collision occurs. 2. How humanity reacts to the possibility that an asteroid is on a collision course with Earth. 3. Where the asteroid is projected to hit. Beyond that, I believe that knowing what might be about to happen to us is a lot better than remaining ignorant. For me, that applies even if we find out too late to do anything to avoid the collision. However, the point may be moot. My experience working on a parallel program (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Program for NASA in the 1980s) suggests that any large government agency would likely try to bury or obfuscate information about a probable collision. That was certainly the case when we were trying to get an operations plan approved. The sticking point was that none of the "suits" could agree on how (of IF!) the public would be told of the existence of evidence of intelligent radio transmissions from an extraterrestrial source! (The program was scaled-back and then cancelled long before we could obtain agreement on this point.) I know that SETI is no longer a government program. And nor are the asteroid searches that are being conducted or are to be conducted government programs. However, you can assume that ALL such programs receive partial government funding. That means that the government will have a lot to say about what happens if we find that an asteroid is on a collision course with Earth.
You simply can't serve two contradictory masters, one of which is telling you he is always right even if there is evidence of the contrary.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
His science almost cost his life. He was a very religious guy.
Ditto for Darwin, who was at extreme pains to live with his findings.
Religious people feel always threatened by science, because science doesn't pay homage to the platitudes of religious dogma.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.