Wild pigeons? As in ones that live on insects and seeds and the like? Hell yeah, it's like extra-gamey pheasant, quite a livery taste, very nice indeed. If you want to eat a little more efficiently then go for something bigger like goose, but pigeon is very nice indeed. I wouldn't recommend the city variety though, never tasted it but I'm sure it's not as good for you...
Although using "gaol" instead of "jail" is still fairly common in the UK. I'm called Geoff. I don't own a giraffe, gelatinous, ginger, giant or otherwise.
Yup, I still use them for block-colour logos, an alternative to Flash adverts and for rendering short (ie a second or so) Blender animations inline. There's always going to be low-bandwidth users on a website, gifs are very good at keeping image sizes down if you're willing to sacrifice a wide colour palette.
It was more of an aside than an argument, but if you want one it is this: It's very difficult to know who to give the money to if you want to pay directly to an artist unless they're an indie singer/songwriter. Want to send money to whoever came up with Track X? Would that be the performer? The writer? The lawyer who drafted the agreement between performer and writer? The session musicians? At the end of the day it's often a simple choice between paying a huge record company or paying a single singer/songwriter, there's not a lot of middle ground.
Yes indeed, you can say whatever you want on "the internet". That's why, for example, you can find child porn or incitements to murder all members of $religion or $politicalStance. Doesn't make it right, and you have to take personal responsibility for what you post, but yes, you can say what you want.
A Slashdot editor who confuses "Facebook" with "The Internet"? Really? Or is that just the obvious-mistake-to-draw-pageviews?
The best selling songwriter in the UK is Mel C from the Spice Girls. Seriously. She writes a high percentage of all the UK produced pop songs. "Chart" music has very little to do with artists, it's more of a fashion marketing company than anything else.
You see the light leaving you at 299792458ms^-1. A stationary person also sees the light leaving you at 299792458ms^-1. This is one of the central tenants of relativity. To make sense of this the only option is that distances and/or times change depending on your point of view. Speed = distance / time, but speed never changes for light, therefore....?
Yes - work on that crazy niche of people who will still be buying horse whips in the crazy year 2012 when most people are riding their jetpacks to the moon. Those who enjoy riding horses for pleasure, the horse racing industry etc. Also never forget rule 34 - there will always be a niche sexual element to any product, so make sure you target the BDSM market with some classy designs.
Same for physical DVD rental. Target those who don't just want to watch a film, but those who want to have a real life experience around it. Hold the equivalent of a book club, promote one DVD a week that all your members can rent for, say, 1 penny, then hold a weekly get-together to discuss the film. Promote the art-house side of things, quirky foreign films, all the things that are tucked away on the NetFlix submenus. Hell, why not, hold a singles evening once a month, there's plenty of single film nerds out there.
Oh trust me, we're working on it. Over the last few years I've formed the opinion that party politics are one of the most harmful elements of the modern world. When the good of the nation takes a back seat to keeping the party sponsors happy there's something seriously wrong.
It's exactly at the point of the Big Bang. As are you. As is Jupiter, Spica, and an empty bit of space a billion lightyears from our galaxy. The Big Bang happened everywhere, it's just that "everywhere" was all in one place at the time.
The article didn't explain how they've correlated distance with age. Doppler shift?
Most likely, redshift is commonly used for the really big distances, and it's calibrated by measuring the comparative luminosity of a particular type of supernova which is always the same brightness.
It's a perfectly good question, and a tricky one to fully explain. The first thing to look at is how you measure distances - because we're talking about light here we're firmly in the realm of relativity, so there's no such thing as "space" and "time", you have to bundle them together in spacetime. And talking of x-light-years or y-million-years doesn't actually make much sense, you have to measure both at once, so instead of distances or times things are measured in "spacetime intervals" which account for all four dimensions.
Now this is the tricky bit - for any "light-like" path (more technically called a "null geodesic") the spacetime interval is zero. So the light that we're receiving from the galaxy here and now has a spactime interval of zero. The light that this galaxy emits all travels the same spacetime interval of zero - some of those photons would have been aimed at (as you suggest) "our galaxy" when it was "closer" - although in fact "our galaxy" was just a wisp of hydrogen at the time. Other photons (the ones we see today) were essentially aimed at a point that was also 13Bn years IN THE FUTURE, and those are the ones we see hitting us today.
Long story short, you don't just aim light at a point in space, you also aim it at some point in the future, and the further away in space it's aimed then the further into the future it's aimed. In a million years we'll still be able to see this galaxy (assuming it doesn't slip over the cosmic horizon), and the photons we'll detect then are currently still in transit, aimed at when/wherever we will be then, just as the photons we detect today were still in transit last week, last year and 13Bn years ago.
Erm...yeah...don't quite get your meaning there old chap.
Bits of it are certainly right - we've got Liz as the ultimate head of state with plenty of "in theory" powers, and ultimate control over the armed forces. Then we elect a government, the majority party or group put forward their PM and he or she runs the place for four years under Her Majesty's consent.
I'm a bit of a republican on principle, but I can't deny a monarchy has its good side, such as a voice independent of party bickering, if only the powers were used a little more to stop the childish bickering that is as much a part of UK politics as it is the US.
OK, just a few tiny points. Firstly, the Time Lords are not extinct. The Doctor is a Time Lord, therefore there is at least one. Plus The Master's fate is uncertain (as in "Heisenberg" uncertain), plus there are several part-time-lords (the "Doctor's Daughter", River Song etc etc) and Rassilon et al may still be out there.
Secondly, "just going back in time to kill all the Daleks" is the definition of a time war - both sides did this continuously, trying to outdo the other, until The Doctor did *something* which wiped pretty much all of both sides out. As the exchange recently went:
House: "Fear me, I've killed hundreds of Time Lords."
Doctor: "Fear me, I've killed all of them."
So he did *something* which resulted in the annihilation of both sides - there must have been a good reason - he had the chance to wipe out all the Daleks back in the Tom Baker days and he decided he didn't have the moral authority.
This is the big mystery of the modern series - what happened between McGann and Ecclestone? What did he do and why?
If they follow their general model we'll probably be looking at something ad supported - in-browser, SMS ads, that sort of thing - to support "unlimited" data, and with the option to pay $5/month to remove them. If Google take this as a near-loss-leader then we could see a big shake up amongst providers, although I suspect we'll simply see a host of competitiveness lawsuits and the lawyers will be the only winners...again.
Nope, we just invented manners, it's very different.
For those who don't know, here's the actual situation in the UK:
The courts generally consider internet posts in the same way they do traditional journalism, you can say what you want as long as it isn't libelous, incitement to commit a crime, or "grossly offensive". Bloggers and Tweeters etc are generally given more leeway and lower fines/sentences than traditional journalists on the grounds that, while ignorance is no excuse, "proper" journalists should very certainly know better. There is no written constitution as such in the UK, and therefore no official right to free speech, but it is generally accepted that the really important free speech, such as speaking out against the government, is protected, and European legislation does provide some protection which UK law omits entirely.
The big problem is the highly subjective "grossly offensive" element mentioned above. The interpretation of this is very much down to the opinion of the judge and/or jury overseeing the case. In my opinion they've been overly touchy about this - after all, you can shout at somebody in a pub that you are going to kill them and chances are the worst you'll see is the inside of a cell for 12hrs and a drunk and disorderly charge.
You've got to wonder where all the money is actually going. If the wealth is being concentrated in the top few percent you'd at least expect to see lots of jobs being created on golf courses and luxury yacht manufacturing, but we're not, we're seeing an accumulation of wealth that isn't being spent on anything obvious - I'm seriously starting to wonder if the old sci-fi staple of the mega-rich building some kind of ark to avoid the giant mutant space goat...
Countries do and do not communicate their real and fake intentions, single points of influence in the system have excessively large of small effects, corporations lobby in multiple countries....the whole system is so chaotic (in a mathematical sense) that trying to simulate it with a small game-theory experiment can't have any bearing on real life, surely?
I'm in the Scottish Highlands, it can get pretty darn cold! So I suppose the lesson is to buy it immediately after a delivery in the winter and immediately before in the summer, so you're always getting the coldest possible fuel.
Buy your fuel on cold days, you get a *little* more for your $50 than you do on a hot day (hence airlines buy fuel by weight, not volume).
We had the same problem with British Telecom - I asked how they calculated bandwidth used and was told it was calculated at the local exchange and we were not allowed access to anything other than the final figure, which we had to pay for. They were nice enough to give us a free upgrade to an "unlimited" (eg about 50Gb/month) account when I complained that I thought the figures were inaccurate.
Yes, specifically Bs Mesons (cue the "BS!" gags...) decaying into a muon pair.
In a fairly hand-wavy way, supersymmetry predicts we should see this quite a lot, but the experiment shows it happens far less frequently, implying the current version of SUSY is either incorrect or completely wrong.
So which is it, "a flood" or "several"? I realise there's probably an xkcd for this, but floods and "several" seem to be two different extremes to me. I wonder how many are submitted in the average month as well. In the UK we can also submit online petitions to a government website, they're mostly "bring corporal/capital punishment", "make region X independent" and "say the UK government loves Bieber". Doesn't mean any of these things are likely to happen, or indeed a good idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Wild pigeons? As in ones that live on insects and seeds and the like? Hell yeah, it's like extra-gamey pheasant, quite a livery taste, very nice indeed. If you want to eat a little more efficiently then go for something bigger like goose, but pigeon is very nice indeed. I wouldn't recommend the city variety though, never tasted it but I'm sure it's not as good for you...
I wasn't aware you could restrict the palette on a PNG, useful tip, cheers!
Although using "gaol" instead of "jail" is still fairly common in the UK. I'm called Geoff. I don't own a giraffe, gelatinous, ginger, giant or otherwise.
Yup, I still use them for block-colour logos, an alternative to Flash adverts and for rendering short (ie a second or so) Blender animations inline. There's always going to be low-bandwidth users on a website, gifs are very good at keeping image sizes down if you're willing to sacrifice a wide colour palette.
It was more of an aside than an argument, but if you want one it is this: It's very difficult to know who to give the money to if you want to pay directly to an artist unless they're an indie singer/songwriter. Want to send money to whoever came up with Track X? Would that be the performer? The writer? The lawyer who drafted the agreement between performer and writer? The session musicians? At the end of the day it's often a simple choice between paying a huge record company or paying a single singer/songwriter, there's not a lot of middle ground.
Thank you.
Yes indeed, you can say whatever you want on "the internet". That's why, for example, you can find child porn or incitements to murder all members of $religion or $politicalStance. Doesn't make it right, and you have to take personal responsibility for what you post, but yes, you can say what you want.
A Slashdot editor who confuses "Facebook" with "The Internet"? Really? Or is that just the obvious-mistake-to-draw-pageviews?
The best selling songwriter in the UK is Mel C from the Spice Girls. Seriously. She writes a high percentage of all the UK produced pop songs. "Chart" music has very little to do with artists, it's more of a fashion marketing company than anything else.
You see the light leaving you at 299792458ms^-1. A stationary person also sees the light leaving you at 299792458ms^-1. This is one of the central tenants of relativity. To make sense of this the only option is that distances and/or times change depending on your point of view. Speed = distance / time, but speed never changes for light, therefore....?
Yes - work on that crazy niche of people who will still be buying horse whips in the crazy year 2012 when most people are riding their jetpacks to the moon. Those who enjoy riding horses for pleasure, the horse racing industry etc. Also never forget rule 34 - there will always be a niche sexual element to any product, so make sure you target the BDSM market with some classy designs.
Same for physical DVD rental. Target those who don't just want to watch a film, but those who want to have a real life experience around it. Hold the equivalent of a book club, promote one DVD a week that all your members can rent for, say, 1 penny, then hold a weekly get-together to discuss the film. Promote the art-house side of things, quirky foreign films, all the things that are tucked away on the NetFlix submenus. Hell, why not, hold a singles evening once a month, there's plenty of single film nerds out there.
Oh trust me, we're working on it. Over the last few years I've formed the opinion that party politics are one of the most harmful elements of the modern world. When the good of the nation takes a back seat to keeping the party sponsors happy there's something seriously wrong.
It's exactly at the point of the Big Bang. As are you. As is Jupiter, Spica, and an empty bit of space a billion lightyears from our galaxy. The Big Bang happened everywhere, it's just that "everywhere" was all in one place at the time.
Most likely, redshift is commonly used for the really big distances, and it's calibrated by measuring the comparative luminosity of a particular type of supernova which is always the same brightness.
It's a perfectly good question, and a tricky one to fully explain. The first thing to look at is how you measure distances - because we're talking about light here we're firmly in the realm of relativity, so there's no such thing as "space" and "time", you have to bundle them together in spacetime. And talking of x-light-years or y-million-years doesn't actually make much sense, you have to measure both at once, so instead of distances or times things are measured in "spacetime intervals" which account for all four dimensions.
Now this is the tricky bit - for any "light-like" path (more technically called a "null geodesic") the spacetime interval is zero. So the light that we're receiving from the galaxy here and now has a spactime interval of zero. The light that this galaxy emits all travels the same spacetime interval of zero - some of those photons would have been aimed at (as you suggest) "our galaxy" when it was "closer" - although in fact "our galaxy" was just a wisp of hydrogen at the time. Other photons (the ones we see today) were essentially aimed at a point that was also 13Bn years IN THE FUTURE, and those are the ones we see hitting us today.
Long story short, you don't just aim light at a point in space, you also aim it at some point in the future, and the further away in space it's aimed then the further into the future it's aimed. In a million years we'll still be able to see this galaxy (assuming it doesn't slip over the cosmic horizon), and the photons we'll detect then are currently still in transit, aimed at when/wherever we will be then, just as the photons we detect today were still in transit last week, last year and 13Bn years ago.
Erm...yeah...don't quite get your meaning there old chap.
Bits of it are certainly right - we've got Liz as the ultimate head of state with plenty of "in theory" powers, and ultimate control over the armed forces. Then we elect a government, the majority party or group put forward their PM and he or she runs the place for four years under Her Majesty's consent.
I'm a bit of a republican on principle, but I can't deny a monarchy has its good side, such as a voice independent of party bickering, if only the powers were used a little more to stop the childish bickering that is as much a part of UK politics as it is the US.
OK, just a few tiny points. Firstly, the Time Lords are not extinct. The Doctor is a Time Lord, therefore there is at least one. Plus The Master's fate is uncertain (as in "Heisenberg" uncertain), plus there are several part-time-lords (the "Doctor's Daughter", River Song etc etc) and Rassilon et al may still be out there.
Secondly, "just going back in time to kill all the Daleks" is the definition of a time war - both sides did this continuously, trying to outdo the other, until The Doctor did *something* which wiped pretty much all of both sides out. As the exchange recently went:
House: "Fear me, I've killed hundreds of Time Lords."
Doctor: "Fear me, I've killed all of them."
So he did *something* which resulted in the annihilation of both sides - there must have been a good reason - he had the chance to wipe out all the Daleks back in the Tom Baker days and he decided he didn't have the moral authority.
This is the big mystery of the modern series - what happened between McGann and Ecclestone? What did he do and why?
If they follow their general model we'll probably be looking at something ad supported - in-browser, SMS ads, that sort of thing - to support "unlimited" data, and with the option to pay $5/month to remove them. If Google take this as a near-loss-leader then we could see a big shake up amongst providers, although I suspect we'll simply see a host of competitiveness lawsuits and the lawyers will be the only winners...again.
Nope, we just invented manners, it's very different.
For those who don't know, here's the actual situation in the UK:
The courts generally consider internet posts in the same way they do traditional journalism, you can say what you want as long as it isn't libelous, incitement to commit a crime, or "grossly offensive". Bloggers and Tweeters etc are generally given more leeway and lower fines/sentences than traditional journalists on the grounds that, while ignorance is no excuse, "proper" journalists should very certainly know better. There is no written constitution as such in the UK, and therefore no official right to free speech, but it is generally accepted that the really important free speech, such as speaking out against the government, is protected, and European legislation does provide some protection which UK law omits entirely.
The big problem is the highly subjective "grossly offensive" element mentioned above. The interpretation of this is very much down to the opinion of the judge and/or jury overseeing the case. In my opinion they've been overly touchy about this - after all, you can shout at somebody in a pub that you are going to kill them and chances are the worst you'll see is the inside of a cell for 12hrs and a drunk and disorderly charge.
You've got to wonder where all the money is actually going. If the wealth is being concentrated in the top few percent you'd at least expect to see lots of jobs being created on golf courses and luxury yacht manufacturing, but we're not, we're seeing an accumulation of wealth that isn't being spent on anything obvious - I'm seriously starting to wonder if the old sci-fi staple of the mega-rich building some kind of ark to avoid the giant mutant space goat...
Countries do and do not communicate their real and fake intentions, single points of influence in the system have excessively large of small effects, corporations lobby in multiple countries....the whole system is so chaotic (in a mathematical sense) that trying to simulate it with a small game-theory experiment can't have any bearing on real life, surely?
If you pay somebody else to carry out a crime or civil offence on your behalf you're also guilty.
I'm in the Scottish Highlands, it can get pretty darn cold! So I suppose the lesson is to buy it immediately after a delivery in the winter and immediately before in the summer, so you're always getting the coldest possible fuel.
Buy your fuel on cold days, you get a *little* more for your $50 than you do on a hot day (hence airlines buy fuel by weight, not volume).
We had the same problem with British Telecom - I asked how they calculated bandwidth used and was told it was calculated at the local exchange and we were not allowed access to anything other than the final figure, which we had to pay for. They were nice enough to give us a free upgrade to an "unlimited" (eg about 50Gb/month) account when I complained that I thought the figures were inaccurate.
Thank you, a far better description.
Yes, specifically Bs Mesons (cue the "BS!" gags...) decaying into a muon pair.
In a fairly hand-wavy way, supersymmetry predicts we should see this quite a lot, but the experiment shows it happens far less frequently, implying the current version of SUSY is either incorrect or completely wrong.
So which is it, "a flood" or "several"? I realise there's probably an xkcd for this, but floods and "several" seem to be two different extremes to me. I wonder how many are submitted in the average month as well. In the UK we can also submit online petitions to a government website, they're mostly "bring corporal/capital punishment", "make region X independent" and "say the UK government loves Bieber". Doesn't mean any of these things are likely to happen, or indeed a good idea.