Sorry. I mis-read it to be that you were suggesting there was some sort of nefarious laser to be used (because, as Hollywood movies have shown us time and time again, lasers and the military always mean something is going to be destroyed).
I am not sure what you are getting at. A laser metrology system is used to measure, very precisely, the positions and orientations of all the optical components inside the imaging system. This way you can focus it up somehow (there are a variety of ways to do this), then your laser metrology system measures the positions of all the relevant components in the system. Then when you move your telescope around and things shake, or gravity sag, or whatever, you know where all the optics are supposed to be and you can re-position them with actuators so that the system returns to its focus position. This has nothing to do with shooting out lasers for measurement (that would be satellite laser ranging (SLR), which is already done to measure the distances to sateliltes).
There is a HUGE difference between launching people and not. I guarantee you that if this first flight was a manned mission, they would spend just as much effort on the safety issues. For what it is worth, the unmanned rockets (Deltas, etc.) get launched much more frequently and much quicker than shuttles for that very reason, so you should be comparing the cost benefits of the Falcon to the comparable non-manned rockets presently in use.
Here is a nice article on how to home brew your own coffee ale and how to best brew with coffee and/or coffee beans. For those who haven't tried, home brewing is really rather easy (if you can make homemade soup, you can make homemade beer). The only downside (in my opinion) is all the sanitation and cleaning up, i.e., "doin' the dishes." I presently have a Christmas Ale in the fermenter that is about as black as coffee (I hope it mellows a bit between now and Christmas).
Here is one recipe from that link (I just might have to try it):
Ingredients 8.0 lbs. (3.9 kg) 2-row pale malt 2.25 lbs. (1 kg) crystal (60ö80¡ L) 1.5 lbs. (0.7 kg) wheat malt 1.25 lbs. (0.6 kg) chocolate malt 0.5 lb. (0.2 kg) roasted barley 0.5 lb. (0.2 kg) black patent malt 18.75 AAU Northern Brewer hops (bittering) (2.5 oz./71 g of 7.5% alpha acids) 1.5 oz. (42 g) finishing hops (Northern Brewer or Cascade) 15 oz. (445 mL) of espresso Ale yeast (your choice)
Step by Step Mash in all grains at 149¡ F (65¡ C). Hold until converted, about 1 hour. Mash off at 170¼ F (77¡ C) and begin lautering. Sparge to achieve eight gallons (30 L) of wort. Bring to a boil and add 2.5 oz. (71 g) boiling hops. Total boil is 70 minutes. After the boil, turn off the heat and add 1.5 oz. (43 g) finish hops for five minutes. Cool to 70¼ F (21¡ C) and ferment with ale yeast. Original gravity goal is 17.5¡ Plato (1.069 SG). Terminal gravity will be pretty high, approximately 1.016. Add espresso at end of primary fermentation, bottle and enjoy!
I believe that this one gets modded down because it is a recycled post that shows up all the time, much like how the Netcraft/BSD used to. It is a post that can generate useful comments, but it now gets pulled out for baiting and trolling purposes. Some people claim it is part of the slashbot arsenal that gets posted automatically depending on the topic subject. Once one sees it in three or four times different discussions, one tends to mod it down for its repetition, not its content.
I wouldn't say the cops had a lousy lawyer considering it went up to the Supreme Court. The analyses of that ruling are interesting (including the link I provided). The bit that Scalia argues in the post points out the importance of the government having access to techniques and instrumentation that is not available to the general populace. All the examples you bring up are using techniques and instrumentation that is widely available, so I don't think that the majority opinion would have had an issue with those. For what it is worth, the minority opinion mentions some of the things that you mention, particularly how the thermal imager does not provide a detailed image of what is behind the wall.
Here is a quote from Scalia writing for the majority:
"We think that obtaining by sense-enhancing technology any information
regarding the interior of the home that could not otherwise have been obtained without physical `intrusion into a constitutionally protected area,'...constitutes a search at least where (as here) the technology in question is not in general public use. This assures preservation of that degree of privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted. On the basis of this criterion, the information obtained by the thermal imager in this case was the product of a search."
You have a very nice site which I will certainly bookmark. I did find it interesting that you do not have a link to TheOpenCD. I would think it would complement your site very nicely as it provides a nice ISO containing a lot of the software you recommend, which makes their installation very convenient.
I only did a quick run through of your site, but am I correct that it is a Windows-only software site? I will certainly pass your URL around because I work with some people who seem to feel that software isn't any good or reliable unless they paid someone money for it.
That's it! They had 2- and 4-person versions. Man, that was fun, and you really got a workout spinning those track balls. Looking back on it, given the problems I have had with mouse track balls, I am impressed the track ball in that football game held up so well under the wear and tear.
Battlezone was way cool as well. Nothing like running for your life backwards all the while shooting at that red tank!
Definately arcades. They were just the coolest thing I've seen. I don't know how many quarters I dropped in Asteroids, Defender, that two person football game with the big track balls, etc., etc. There are not many games even today that can stand up to the fun and gameplay of those games.
Whenever these "Linux isn't ready for the desktop" articles come out, they all boil down to saying that Linux isn't exactly like Windows. This fella is basically saying that Linux isn't there yet because it can't handle specialized Windows-only software, or IE-only web development. Well guess what, by that definition the only OS that will ever be "ready for the desktop" is Windows, and that it just plain nonsense. The only acceptance criteria seems to be that the OS in question has to be a drop-in replacement for Windows. That leads me to wonder whether the older versions of Windows are now no longer "ready for the desktop" when they were deemed such only a few years ago.
This particular article talks about enterprise applications, but you even hear it in articles when talking about the general user. Linux isn't ready for the general user because it can't run Quicken or some other such specific application. That might be a reason that someone wants to stick with Windows, but it sure isn't a reason that Linux isn't good for grandma. What cannot Linux do that the general populace needs?
I loved the SCTV 3-D Theater. The joke, of course, for those too young to have seen it, was being poked at the whole useless 3-D genre. As you mention, the skit would be Levy and Candy taking an otherwise normal scene and adding gratituous 3-D features like picking up a pencil and making a very obvious point of pointing it at the camera, then away from the camera. It was funny because it was true; the crappy 3-D movies had to go out of their way to obviously work in things that would stand out in 3-D.
By the way, years ago at Disney's MGM Park in Orlando, in the Muppets theater they used to have (I don't know if they still do) a 3-D production that was basically The Muppet Show done in 3-D. I enjoyed it very much because it was done with the same humor as SCTV (for example, Fozzie would do obvious 3-D things a la Levy and Candy).
In your example, the car didn't stop. If the car hits a brick wall and stops, will will do this faster than when hitting water barrels.
The basic physics, in the car problem at least, is that it takes a certain amount of energy to stop the car, and it doesn't matter whether you are doing that hard and fast, or slow and easy. To bring a car traveling at velocity V to a stop, somehow you need to get rid of 0.5*m*V*V of energy. Water barrels are a nice solution because a good deal of that energy goes into crushing the barrels and spraying the water high in the air (or in the case of indy cars, a lot of energy goes into crushing the crush zones and into the parts that fly off).
In the case of charged particles, all they care about is the amount of material they see. They do not act like photons and refract at each different interface. Maybe they'll interact at an interface, and maybe they won't. What you are suggesting is that, if you have a slab of lead of a certain thickness, you get better shielding if you slice that slab into n layers and move the layers apart. If you have a particle that was going to stop in half the thickness of that slab, then it would have stopped in n/2 of those layers. You are better off using the thin dense slab than the "bubbly" thick slab because it takes up much less space in the first case.
Particle scattering isn't directional in the way you describe. For the kind of interactions under consideration, the scattering in the transverse direction (the direction perpendicular to the direction of travel) is pretty equally likely, meaning that if you took a whole bunch of equivalent particles (say, protons with a given energy) and shot them into a material in the same way (like out of a proton gun), then the scatter pattern at any position (such as at a detection screen) will end up looking circular in shape, with more events in the center than out at the edges.
a very light metallic sponge that is several feet thick and 60 feet in diameter will do more to limit radiation exposure than carrying the same weight in solid metal.
Charged particles only care about how much material they traverse. They don't care whether it is in the form of fluffy bubbles or a solid mass. In short, it takes a certain amount of mass to stop a particle whether it is in the form of lots of low density stuff, or a little high density stuff. There are all sorts of caveats to that, but one way to think of it is stopping a car where you can jam on the brakes and stop quickly, or tap the brakes and stop over a much longer distance.
Yes, because it would be absolutely impossible to add that information to each element with the chart in this format wouldn't it.
But isn't that the point he was trying to make? Forgive me if I am putting words in his mouth, but I believe he was saying that this table may be attractive and all, but is not very useful otherwise.
To me, I suppose, it depends on what kind of schools are ordering them. If elementary schools are putting them up, that is one thing, but I hope that the junior high and high schools are using a style (most likely the "old" style) where real information and elemental relationships can be easily learned and extracted.
Well, he could sample 120 times a second, but then only keep one data point for each three seconds, with that one data point being calculated from the 360 readings taken before it.
I'm not quite sure I understand you. Doing this you'd only be sampling at 0.3 Hz. To satisfy Nyquist, as the other guy said, you'd need to make sure you sample at least 240 Hz to make sure you don't get lots of aliasing and mistake something measured at low frequencies that is really happening at high frequencies.
It is all a matter of age. When GI Joe, et al. came out (20 or so years ago) I found them all unwatchable and annoying then (poor animation, cliche stories and characters, etc.), just as you find unwatchable whatever they're pushing now. Especially since, to me, GI Joe was supposed to be 9.5-inches tall and had Kung-Fu Grip!
And it was always irksome then that TV went heavy into a "what about the children?" mode where the cartoon censorship got heavy. I grew up on Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner Show reruns and I still get annoyed when I see a Looney Tunes cartoon with an obvious censored cut such as a removal of a gunshot. GI Joe and other cartoons rubbed me the same wrong way as well. You'd have the HUGE plane crash/explosion and everyone would come running out of the flames unhurt. It was even more annoying in the live-action stuff like The A-Team: the roof-less jeep explodes and flips over, but they make sure to show you that the two riders in the jeep crawl out OK.
I am ignorant on this topic, and a quick look at the Ubuntu FAQ didn't help, but what exactly is the relationship between Debian and Ubuntu? Is Ubuntu a complete fork, or is it dependent on Debian for core functionality?
I am a bit confused because I see some people here give high praise for Ubuntu over Debian, things like how Debian is way too slow to release while Ubuntu is up to date, while others have pointed out that Ubuntu has the advantage where they can cherry pick the best things out of the x86 code that have gone through the rigorous testing in Debian.
From a support standpoint, when a security flaw is found, does Ubuntu fix it themselves (and thus make it available for Debian), or do they have to wait for the Debian packages to be fixed?
i have data that's over 300 years old stating the world is flat.
You need to make sure you have a good data set. I hear there was some fella who measured the circumference of the round earth over 2000 years ago.:)
I am not sure of the inaccuracies to which you are referring for the 1976 Standard Atmosphere. There are other atmospheric models out there that specialize in various parts of the atmosphere, but the standard is called the standard because it is still used internationally as such, despite it being 30 years old. It represents a steady-state atmosphere under moderate solar activity, which is the best you can expect when you are talking about the atmosphere in a general sense.
The minus sign, as I think you understand me, is to denote the wind velocity (not just the speed). The minus direction is in opposite to the positive direction, where zero velocity is calm air.
As an aside, at a given latitude and altitude, half the year the winds blow one direction (say, east to west) and then blow the other direction the other half of the year. Two times during the year the winds are very calm because they are switching direction. I have been involved in high altitude balloon research where in the span of several weeks we have seen the winds at 100 kft switch from blowing 100 kts west to east to blowing 100 kts east to west. We launched our balloon during the "turnaround" time and it stayed up for about 40 hours and ended up landing very close to where we launched it (which was our goal).
There is a nice little experiment where you can measure the speed of light using your microwave oven and a dish of marshmallows (it makes use of the uneven heating you describe).
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry. I mis-read it to be that you were suggesting there was some sort of nefarious laser to be used (because, as Hollywood movies have shown us time and time again, lasers and the military always mean something is going to be destroyed).
I am not sure what you are getting at. A laser metrology system is used to measure, very precisely, the positions and orientations of all the optical components inside the imaging system. This way you can focus it up somehow (there are a variety of ways to do this), then your laser metrology system measures the positions of all the relevant components in the system. Then when you move your telescope around and things shake, or gravity sag, or whatever, you know where all the optics are supposed to be and you can re-position them with actuators so that the system returns to its focus position. This has nothing to do with shooting out lasers for measurement (that would be satellite laser ranging (SLR), which is already done to measure the distances to sateliltes).
There is a HUGE difference between launching people and not. I guarantee you that if this first flight was a manned mission, they would spend just as much effort on the safety issues. For what it is worth, the unmanned rockets (Deltas, etc.) get launched much more frequently and much quicker than shuttles for that very reason, so you should be comparing the cost benefits of the Falcon to the comparable non-manned rockets presently in use.
Here is one recipe from that link (I just might have to try it):
Thanks, that reminds me, it should have a button that plays La Cucaracha when pressed. :)
You must be some kind of young'n. If you want to be old school, the song is supposed to start: One, two, three o'clock, four o'clock rock ...
I believe that this one gets modded down because it is a recycled post that shows up all the time, much like how the Netcraft/BSD used to. It is a post that can generate useful comments, but it now gets pulled out for baiting and trolling purposes. Some people claim it is part of the slashbot arsenal that gets posted automatically depending on the topic subject. Once one sees it in three or four times different discussions, one tends to mod it down for its repetition, not its content.
I wouldn't say the cops had a lousy lawyer considering it went up to the Supreme Court. The analyses of that ruling are interesting (including the link I provided). The bit that Scalia argues in the post points out the importance of the government having access to techniques and instrumentation that is not available to the general populace. All the examples you bring up are using techniques and instrumentation that is widely available, so I don't think that the majority opinion would have had an issue with those. For what it is worth, the minority opinion mentions some of the things that you mention, particularly how the thermal imager does not provide a detailed image of what is behind the wall.
Here is a quote from Scalia writing for the majority:
I only did a quick run through of your site, but am I correct that it is a Windows-only software site? I will certainly pass your URL around because I work with some people who seem to feel that software isn't any good or reliable unless they paid someone money for it.
Battlezone was way cool as well. Nothing like running for your life backwards all the while shooting at that red tank!
Definately arcades. They were just the coolest thing I've seen. I don't know how many quarters I dropped in Asteroids, Defender, that two person football game with the big track balls, etc., etc. There are not many games even today that can stand up to the fun and gameplay of those games.
This particular article talks about enterprise applications, but you even hear it in articles when talking about the general user. Linux isn't ready for the general user because it can't run Quicken or some other such specific application. That might be a reason that someone wants to stick with Windows, but it sure isn't a reason that Linux isn't good for grandma. What cannot Linux do that the general populace needs?
By the way, years ago at Disney's MGM Park in Orlando, in the Muppets theater they used to have (I don't know if they still do) a 3-D production that was basically The Muppet Show done in 3-D. I enjoyed it very much because it was done with the same humor as SCTV (for example, Fozzie would do obvious 3-D things a la Levy and Candy).
The basic physics, in the car problem at least, is that it takes a certain amount of energy to stop the car, and it doesn't matter whether you are doing that hard and fast, or slow and easy. To bring a car traveling at velocity V to a stop, somehow you need to get rid of 0.5*m*V*V of energy. Water barrels are a nice solution because a good deal of that energy goes into crushing the barrels and spraying the water high in the air (or in the case of indy cars, a lot of energy goes into crushing the crush zones and into the parts that fly off).
In the case of charged particles, all they care about is the amount of material they see. They do not act like photons and refract at each different interface. Maybe they'll interact at an interface, and maybe they won't. What you are suggesting is that, if you have a slab of lead of a certain thickness, you get better shielding if you slice that slab into n layers and move the layers apart. If you have a particle that was going to stop in half the thickness of that slab, then it would have stopped in n/2 of those layers. You are better off using the thin dense slab than the "bubbly" thick slab because it takes up much less space in the first case.
Particle scattering isn't directional in the way you describe. For the kind of interactions under consideration, the scattering in the transverse direction (the direction perpendicular to the direction of travel) is pretty equally likely, meaning that if you took a whole bunch of equivalent particles (say, protons with a given energy) and shot them into a material in the same way (like out of a proton gun), then the scatter pattern at any position (such as at a detection screen) will end up looking circular in shape, with more events in the center than out at the edges.
: P
To me, I suppose, it depends on what kind of schools are ordering them. If elementary schools are putting them up, that is one thing, but I hope that the junior high and high schools are using a style (most likely the "old" style) where real information and elemental relationships can be easily learned and extracted.
And it was always irksome then that TV went heavy into a "what about the children?" mode where the cartoon censorship got heavy. I grew up on Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner Show reruns and I still get annoyed when I see a Looney Tunes cartoon with an obvious censored cut such as a removal of a gunshot. GI Joe and other cartoons rubbed me the same wrong way as well. You'd have the HUGE plane crash/explosion and everyone would come running out of the flames unhurt. It was even more annoying in the live-action stuff like The A-Team: the roof-less jeep explodes and flips over, but they make sure to show you that the two riders in the jeep crawl out OK.
Thank you. That was an excellent explanation.
I am a bit confused because I see some people here give high praise for Ubuntu over Debian, things like how Debian is way too slow to release while Ubuntu is up to date, while others have pointed out that Ubuntu has the advantage where they can cherry pick the best things out of the x86 code that have gone through the rigorous testing in Debian.
From a support standpoint, when a security flaw is found, does Ubuntu fix it themselves (and thus make it available for Debian), or do they have to wait for the Debian packages to be fixed?
I am not sure of the inaccuracies to which you are referring for the 1976 Standard Atmosphere. There are other atmospheric models out there that specialize in various parts of the atmosphere, but the standard is called the standard because it is still used internationally as such, despite it being 30 years old. It represents a steady-state atmosphere under moderate solar activity, which is the best you can expect when you are talking about the atmosphere in a general sense.
The minus sign, as I think you understand me, is to denote the wind velocity (not just the speed). The minus direction is in opposite to the positive direction, where zero velocity is calm air.
As an aside, at a given latitude and altitude, half the year the winds blow one direction (say, east to west) and then blow the other direction the other half of the year. Two times during the year the winds are very calm because they are switching direction. I have been involved in high altitude balloon research where in the span of several weeks we have seen the winds at 100 kft switch from blowing 100 kts west to east to blowing 100 kts east to west. We launched our balloon during the "turnaround" time and it stayed up for about 40 hours and ended up landing very close to where we launched it (which was our goal).
Science: fun and delicious!