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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."
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.
...they are going to use it to search for potential markets for Microsofts` products...
...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.
There is no place on earth where you can see the entire night sky over three days. There will always be stars hidden.
Do you want to
Script kiddies ate my sig.
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.
Depends if the OS of the nuke-intercept-missile crashes along the way to said asteroid...
Shh.
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'.
So care to explain why there appears to be an expanding universe? Dark matter is a stop gap, but unless you provide a better reason, its all we got. I think that was the point of projects like this to either prove or disprove 'dark matter'.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
...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!
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.
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*...
Galactic rotation curves are only one of the pieces of evidence of dark matter. There is also a lot of evidence due to weak lensing that there are large invisible mass distributions. The Bullet Cluster is an especially impressive observation of two clusters colliding. The shockwave from the baryonic gases smacking into each other has separated the hydrogen from the dark matter, as seen when you overlay the xray map and the mass distribution reconstructed with weak lensing. Modified theories of gravity can most easily explain discrepancies when the visible matter and apparent invisible matter are concentric (such as in rotation curves). Then you just need to tweak the radial force strength at large distance. But in a system like the bullet cluster, the visible and dark matter have been separated, and that's a lot harder to explain with modified gravity. (Not that people aren't trying, of course...)
Astronomers fought long and hard against dark matter, but grudgingly accepted it after it became more and more difficult to explain galactic rotation curves, weak lensing, the large scale structure of galactic clusters, and the power spectrum of variations in the cosmic microwave background without it. It all fits together much better when you introduce a very weakly interacting source of mass into the soup that makes up the universe. (Weakly interacting enough to become a nearly collisionless fluid early on during the expansion of the universe.) The smoking gun will be the detection of dark matter in a controlled lab setting. Those searches are just now beginning to ramp up.
No roads, then? No schools?
.sig withheld by request
There is no dark matter really. Matter of fact it's all dark.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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.
..and what fuels this wonderful "rate" of technology, if not people investing millions into multi-year (i.e. DIFFICULT) projects.
If we stopped investing millions into projects like these, your cell phone in 2014 would look exactly the same as it does today.
It's full of blue.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like 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.
heavy taxation to pay for Republican deficit interest payments and war mongering. There, I fixed that for you.
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.