Rather like when my Democratic U.S. House Representative was asking about why the military wasn't using solar power for their bases in Afghanistan. Pure B.S.
Actually, fuel to bases in Afghanistan has to be brought there by road from Pakistan. There are people along the route who think sabotaging that transport is a good idea.
Those people destroy or hijack the transports. You think moving to solar is some kind of ideological move. I suspect it's more about the military seeing that their supply lines are not in order.
Someone over 50 can be so good at the job that he/she is the equivalent of two or three "young enough" workers. It could even be that they do look down on older applicants, but decided the younger ones were trash compared to this experienced person.
check your history, young 'un. for example, the The IMF, also known as the ÃoeFund,Ã was conceived at a United Nations conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, United States, July 1944.
Yes, I know that. This does not make it a UN agency - UN agencies aren't that through arcane family history, they're UN agencies if they are officially part of the UN.
If you want to hate a lot of international organizations and the UN then that's okay. That still doesn't make everything you hate an UN organization.
A great way to get innovative technology into use without delay is to test it too little.
Would you want to fly in the airplane equivalent of KDE 4.0 or the first Unity Ubuntu desktop?
Seeing as how Airbus has been selling a lot during the 787 development I get the feeling that Boeing actually gets lots of integrity points out of all this.
Mind you they have had very few virus(virii ?) there
'Viruses' is the correct plural form in English. Virii is completely wrong no matter how you look at it. 'Virus' is wrong, but knowing the original it makes sense, and it's the plural in Swedish to give one example.
1.6x crop probably means you have a Canon DSLR. All I can say is that you should really explore the manual modes - with digital you can just try different shutter speeds until you get it right. The moon is illuminated by the sun so the settings that work in sunny daylight should work for photographing the moon too.
Photographing stars often isn't a matter of magnification, but rather of light gathering. Only few stars are close/large enough to be imaged as disks, and that's with professional equipment - you'll never resolve a star into a disk yourself.
Rather, stars are point sources. Everything comes from a single point, only the intensity and colour of that point varies. If you want to see fainter stars with a camera, you just need to expose longer. An 18-55 kit lens might very well be able to image this given the right other circumstances. The resolution of 500 mm would be more than enough in any case.
In fact, the hardest problem would probably be to get low enough magnification - the sky moves all the time and therefore everything is blurred when you make the shutter speeds longer. This means you need large apertures more than you need long focal lengths, and pretty fast you need a tripod/mount that's capable of tracking the sky.
You're probably joking, but let's put it like this:
The star Betelgeuse could go supernova tomorrow or a million years from now. It's about 600 light years distant. The consensus is that it won't pose any danger to us.
The supernova we're discussing here, SN 2011fe, is about 20 million light years away from us. So if this supernova was 30 000 times closer to us it would most likely still be safe. =)
I suspect that a lot of the time the people pointing it out do so because they have nothing else to contribute to the discussion.
I'm guessing it's a form of disinterest really - someone sees news about an exceptional supernova and would rather discuss a sentence in a Slashdot summary.
Another warning from another astronomy enthusiast: note that the guy in the video talks about "decent-sized" binoculars and then specifies 20x80 or 20x100.
That 100 at the end means the lenses at the front have a diameter of ten centimetres (four inches) each! So under any normal circumstances those are considered HUGE rather than decent binoculars.
My advice on how to see this supernova: ask someone into astronomy who has a telescope or huge binoculars. Doing the observing "from scratch" is probably a too tall order.
Does anyone have a link to the post about CmdrTaco buying underwear? In one of these nostalgic Slashdot discussions someone linked an ancient post where he said he had bought some pairs of underwear, meaning he now had a "full set" that would enable him to go a week without doing laundry.
It was such an excellent example of how Slashdot started out as a personal blog, not to mention funny. Many thanks if someone can unearth it (yes, I've tried all kinds of Googling.)
You people need some patience and perspective. Here's one of the previous state of the art pictures: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Vesta-HST-Color.jpg . And apart from the huge improvement already evident there's the fact that Dawn is supposed to be in orbit for a year. Expecting maximum performance at this point is misguided.
This is just more of the usual from Slashdot: errors and ambiguities that even an unskilled editor would have corrected prior to submitting it to a large audience. The headline should have read "Online Collaboration Helps Victims of the Mumbai Attack". It does not take much mastery of the English language to understand that.
I don't understand myself how they can edit so badly, but this is not an example of that. This is what happens in English. It's probably down to the way adjectives, nouns and verbs change roles in all ways possible.
If you want PLENTY of examples from much more reputable ("Oxford English") sources than Slashdot then do a search on "British Left Waffles On Falklands". Oh and the rule of capitalizing every word in headlines can't help either.
I'm interested in languages but I have yet to find similar lists of ambiguous headlines for my native Swedish and Finnish. So it's most likely down to how English is, and you can't blame Slashdot for that.
It's true that this is not ready. However, the basics are probably sound - changing battery electrodes can boost power significantly. They're pretty much the movers and shakers in batteries, after all.
Lithium ion and lithium polymer batteries probably started this way too. There will always be a lot of fluff but it's important to keep an eye out for technical developments since some will actually be the next big thing, like powerful LEDs. New electrodes in some shape and form are probably it when it comes to lithium batteries.
External radiation isn't nearly as big of deal as internal radiation and heavy metal toxicity. Plutonium and uranium don't go away very quickly, even on geologic timescales. Once in the biosphere, they keep getting recycled (even with phytoremediation, you still gotta do something with the plant bound heavy metals).
From what I hear doubt has been cast on the "lung hotspot" theory of radiation-induced cancer, which should make lingering radioactives much less dangerous.
As for heavy metal toxicity, then we get to the advantages of nuclear: a reactor is a relatively small thing. Most of it is supporting equipment. Put differently, there isn't enough of the stuff to make an area uninhabitable for a long time.
Why should we as a species accept that kind of downside just to boil water? Oh, and before the slashdot-nuke-lovers start their "coal,coal,coal" chant, fuck coal too. Another shitty way to boil water.
For a million reasons. You have to provide answers to a million questions to get away from coal and nuclear. No one has them yet, since no one on any side seems interested enough in making a complete plan of how we should make ends meet after migrating away.
You say we should do away with both coal and nuclear but you're probably like everyone else in that you can't actually say how it should be done. Even with political will (which is sorely lacking) there would be so many problems to solve. It's probably quite doable with conservation and our current renewable energy sources, but it would require an entirely different economical system which we don't have yet.
I suspect many of the pro-nuclear people here on Slashdot at least are like me: pro-nuclear as long as it is seen as a stopgap solution. Renewable idealists often end up propping up coal in practice, which is a bad outcome.
After they fail spectacularly, how many of the above continue to be deadly for longer than mammals have existed?
I hope you don't really think nuclear accidents can do anything like that, since that would mean you're actually talking about something you don't understand. I'm actually hoping you're trolling.
Isotopes with long half-lives aren't very radioactive. Isotopes with short half-lives are very radioactive. Isotopes with long-half-lives are around a long time. Isotopes with short half-lives disappear quickly.
This means that anything left after 220 million years (the time span you mentioned) will be extremely weakly radioactive, if at all. If left undisturbed, such a substance would most likely be much, much less radioactive than the body of any human who has ever lived.
In actual reality, Hiroshima and Nagasaki already have fine radiation levels. The worse contamination in Chernobyl (outside the plant area) will most likely go down to normal levels in decades, or centuries at most. It's thoroughly contaminated, but on the time scale you mentioned it's no more radioactive than anything on Earth.
Yeah, and you know what'll happen if people either do or don't overanalyse the implications? The same stuff. The analysis doesn't drive the reality, and it certainly isn't the important part.
Scientific study of reality doesn't change it directly. This is nothing new, and isn't considered a reason not to do it.
I'm aware that my opinion will be unpopular here, where overintellectual masturbation is basically the order of the day. Just don't mistake the fact that you love that dreamy feeling with any actual importance.
Heh, if you think the grandparent is overintellectual masturbation then you've seen nothing. His comparison of AIM and Facebook is very interesting too, which is more than can be said about your post which is mostly name-calling. Wouldn't it be more constructive and interesting to discuss how these things affect us yourself, it being the topic of the discussion and all?
While it is geeky and kinda cool the appeal is limited. Anyone who isn't already familiar with this will not understand what is going on at all. Anyone who is already familiar won't be impressed.
I think you shouldn't be so quick to assume that others will be equally disinterested. I was born around the time things might have looked like this and I found it plenty interesting. It was interesting to see how much basic familiarity with the Ubuntu command line helped despite it being "bad Unix".
But seriously, I have looked at the sky where there was very little light pollution and I have never seen the red or white cloud like structures. I guess that comes out with the long exposure. It is pretty cool how much you can see without an actual telescope.
These sky photographers tend to overdo it a bit. This is understandable, since it looks good and it's hard to emulate the really weird human vision system.
However, in reality we perceive the sky with either peripheral vision which is monochromatic or the central vision which is much, much better at seeing blue than red. Which is a shame, since this means the only red you'll ever see in the sky are some profoundly red stars.
It would be interesting if someone made a similar effort to this and processed it to emulate human vision under ideal conditions though. It would be especially valuable since many people are completely ignorant about how pollution-free skies look.
Slashdot Mirror
Rather like when my Democratic U.S. House Representative was asking about why the military wasn't using solar power for their bases in Afghanistan. Pure B.S.
Actually, fuel to bases in Afghanistan has to be brought there by road from Pakistan. There are people along the route who think sabotaging that transport is a good idea.
Those people destroy or hijack the transports. You think moving to solar is some kind of ideological move. I suspect it's more about the military seeing that their supply lines are not in order.
Someone over 50 can be so good at the job that he/she is the equivalent of two or three "young enough" workers. It could even be that they do look down on older applicants, but decided the younger ones were trash compared to this experienced person.
You forgot Lutetium, you insensitive clod!
check your history, young 'un. for example, the The IMF, also known as the ÃoeFund,Ã was conceived at a United Nations conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, United States, July 1944.
Yes, I know that. This does not make it a UN agency - UN agencies aren't that through arcane family history, they're UN agencies if they are officially part of the UN.
If you want to hate a lot of international organizations and the UN then that's okay. That still doesn't make everything you hate an UN organization.
WTO, IMF (which I'm guessing you meant) and the World Bank are in no way part of the UN.
Check your facts before blindly blaming anything and everything on the UN. Same goes for the moderators.
While Slashdot is late to the party here Spaceweather does say that people near the poles should still keep an eye out.
So the story essentially becomes: "If you're in Alaska, Northern Europe or somewhere similar there is a greater than usual chance of auroras today."
In the southern hemisphere only Antarctica is south enough and the people there probably don't need outside help in spotting auroras. =)
A great way to get innovative technology into use without delay is to test it too little.
Would you want to fly in the airplane equivalent of KDE 4.0 or the first Unity Ubuntu desktop?
Seeing as how Airbus has been selling a lot during the 787 development I get the feeling that Boeing actually gets lots of integrity points out of all this.
Since all I can see is an unspecified galaxy I'm thinking it's much more likely to be an NGC object.
Hydrogen still works perfectly fine as a lifting gas. Doubly so when you're doing crazy last resort geoengineering.
Mind you they have had very few virus(virii ?) there
'Viruses' is the correct plural form in English. Virii is completely wrong no matter how you look at it. 'Virus' is wrong, but knowing the original it makes sense, and it's the plural in Swedish to give one example.
For entertaining and well-written information on correct and incorrect latin plurals, see http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2139/what-is-the-plural-of-penis.
1.6x crop probably means you have a Canon DSLR. All I can say is that you should really explore the manual modes - with digital you can just try different shutter speeds until you get it right. The moon is illuminated by the sun so the settings that work in sunny daylight should work for photographing the moon too.
Photographing stars often isn't a matter of magnification, but rather of light gathering. Only few stars are close/large enough to be imaged as disks, and that's with professional equipment - you'll never resolve a star into a disk yourself.
Rather, stars are point sources. Everything comes from a single point, only the intensity and colour of that point varies. If you want to see fainter stars with a camera, you just need to expose longer. An 18-55 kit lens might very well be able to image this given the right other circumstances. The resolution of 500 mm would be more than enough in any case.
In fact, the hardest problem would probably be to get low enough magnification - the sky moves all the time and therefore everything is blurred when you make the shutter speeds longer. This means you need large apertures more than you need long focal lengths, and pretty fast you need a tripod/mount that's capable of tracking the sky.
You're probably joking, but let's put it like this:
The star Betelgeuse could go supernova tomorrow or a million years from now. It's about 600 light years distant. The consensus is that it won't pose any danger to us.
The supernova we're discussing here, SN 2011fe, is about 20 million light years away from us. So if this supernova was 30 000 times closer to us it would most likely still be safe. =)
I suspect that a lot of the time the people pointing it out do so because they have nothing else to contribute to the discussion.
I'm guessing it's a form of disinterest really - someone sees news about an exceptional supernova and would rather discuss a sentence in a Slashdot summary.
Some other poster already posted a very constructive post though, I suggest we read that instead: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2413680&cid=37309370 .
Another warning from another astronomy enthusiast: note that the guy in the video talks about "decent-sized" binoculars and then specifies 20x80 or 20x100.
That 100 at the end means the lenses at the front have a diameter of ten centimetres (four inches) each! So under any normal circumstances those are considered HUGE rather than decent binoculars.
My advice on how to see this supernova: ask someone into astronomy who has a telescope or huge binoculars. Doing the observing "from scratch" is probably a too tall order.
You've made this site a place where geeks of all stripe can find a good story and a good troll.
My name is Natalie Portman and I've just poured hot grits down the pants that cover the lower part of my petrified body. Thank you.
Does anyone have a link to the post about CmdrTaco buying underwear? In one of these nostalgic Slashdot discussions someone linked an ancient post where he said he had bought some pairs of underwear, meaning he now had a "full set" that would enable him to go a week without doing laundry.
It was such an excellent example of how Slashdot started out as a personal blog, not to mention funny. Many thanks if someone can unearth it (yes, I've tried all kinds of Googling.)
If the moon was made of cheese would it still be outside Earth's rochefort limit?
You people need some patience and perspective. Here's one of the previous state of the art pictures: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Vesta-HST-Color.jpg . And apart from the huge improvement already evident there's the fact that Dawn is supposed to be in orbit for a year. Expecting maximum performance at this point is misguided.
This is just more of the usual from Slashdot: errors and ambiguities that even an unskilled editor would have corrected prior to submitting it to a large audience. The headline should have read "Online Collaboration Helps Victims of the Mumbai Attack". It does not take much mastery of the English language to understand that.
I don't understand myself how they can edit so badly, but this is not an example of that. This is what happens in English. It's probably down to the way adjectives, nouns and verbs change roles in all ways possible.
If you want PLENTY of examples from much more reputable ("Oxford English") sources than Slashdot then do a search on "British Left Waffles On Falklands". Oh and the rule of capitalizing every word in headlines can't help either.
I'm interested in languages but I have yet to find similar lists of ambiguous headlines for my native Swedish and Finnish. So it's most likely down to how English is, and you can't blame Slashdot for that.
It's true that this is not ready. However, the basics are probably sound - changing battery electrodes can boost power significantly. They're pretty much the movers and shakers in batteries, after all.
Lithium ion and lithium polymer batteries probably started this way too. There will always be a lot of fluff but it's important to keep an eye out for technical developments since some will actually be the next big thing, like powerful LEDs. New electrodes in some shape and form are probably it when it comes to lithium batteries.
External radiation isn't nearly as big of deal as internal radiation and heavy metal toxicity.
Plutonium and uranium don't go away very quickly, even on geologic timescales. Once in the biosphere, they keep getting recycled (even with phytoremediation, you still gotta do something with the plant bound heavy metals).
From what I hear doubt has been cast on the "lung hotspot" theory of radiation-induced cancer, which should make lingering radioactives much less dangerous.
As for heavy metal toxicity, then we get to the advantages of nuclear: a reactor is a relatively small thing. Most of it is supporting equipment. Put differently, there isn't enough of the stuff to make an area uninhabitable for a long time.
Why should we as a species accept that kind of downside just to boil water? Oh, and before the slashdot-nuke-lovers start their "coal,coal,coal" chant, fuck coal too. Another shitty way to boil water.
For a million reasons. You have to provide answers to a million questions to get away from coal and nuclear. No one has them yet, since no one on any side seems interested enough in making a complete plan of how we should make ends meet after migrating away.
You say we should do away with both coal and nuclear but you're probably like everyone else in that you can't actually say how it should be done. Even with political will (which is sorely lacking) there would be so many problems to solve. It's probably quite doable with conservation and our current renewable energy sources, but it would require an entirely different economical system which we don't have yet.
I suspect many of the pro-nuclear people here on Slashdot at least are like me: pro-nuclear as long as it is seen as a stopgap solution. Renewable idealists often end up propping up coal in practice, which is a bad outcome.
After they fail spectacularly, how many of the above continue to be deadly for longer than mammals have existed?
I hope you don't really think nuclear accidents can do anything like that, since that would mean you're actually talking about something you don't understand. I'm actually hoping you're trolling.
Isotopes with long half-lives aren't very radioactive. Isotopes with short half-lives are very radioactive. Isotopes with long-half-lives are around a long time. Isotopes with short half-lives disappear quickly.
This means that anything left after 220 million years (the time span you mentioned) will be extremely weakly radioactive, if at all. If left undisturbed, such a substance would most likely be much, much less radioactive than the body of any human who has ever lived.
In actual reality, Hiroshima and Nagasaki already have fine radiation levels. The worse contamination in Chernobyl (outside the plant area) will most likely go down to normal levels in decades, or centuries at most. It's thoroughly contaminated, but on the time scale you mentioned it's no more radioactive than anything on Earth.
Yeah, and you know what'll happen if people either do or don't overanalyse the implications? The same stuff. The analysis doesn't drive the reality, and it certainly isn't the important part.
Scientific study of reality doesn't change it directly. This is nothing new, and isn't considered a reason not to do it.
I'm aware that my opinion will be unpopular here, where overintellectual masturbation is basically the order of the day. Just don't mistake the fact that you love that dreamy feeling with any actual importance.
Heh, if you think the grandparent is overintellectual masturbation then you've seen nothing. His comparison of AIM and Facebook is very interesting too, which is more than can be said about your post which is mostly name-calling. Wouldn't it be more constructive and interesting to discuss how these things affect us yourself, it being the topic of the discussion and all?
While it is geeky and kinda cool the appeal is limited. Anyone who isn't already familiar with this will not understand what is going on at all. Anyone who is already familiar won't be impressed.
I think you shouldn't be so quick to assume that others will be equally disinterested. I was born around the time things might have looked like this and I found it plenty interesting. It was interesting to see how much basic familiarity with the Ubuntu command line helped despite it being "bad Unix".
But seriously, I have looked at the sky where there was very little light pollution and I have never seen the red or white cloud like structures. I guess that comes out with the long exposure. It is pretty cool how much you can see without an actual telescope.
These sky photographers tend to overdo it a bit. This is understandable, since it looks good and it's hard to emulate the really weird human vision system.
However, in reality we perceive the sky with either peripheral vision which is monochromatic or the central vision which is much, much better at seeing blue than red. Which is a shame, since this means the only red you'll ever see in the sky are some profoundly red stars.
It would be interesting if someone made a similar effort to this and processed it to emulate human vision under ideal conditions though. It would be especially valuable since many people are completely ignorant about how pollution-free skies look.