So you're stating that a civil trial cannot go before a jury?
Don't know about the U.S., but in Canada, a civil trial can go in front of a jury, if requested by the participants. I don't recall the details of who has to want it, but it can happen. It just doesn't all that often. And I believe there are only six people on a civil case jury instead of twelve.
Although most cases in Canada are tried by judges without a jury, the Charter states that any person who is charged with a criminal offence for which there can be a prison sentence of five years or more has the right to a trial by jury. In some cases, a person who is charged with a criminal offence for which there can be a prison sentence of less than five years may have a right to choose a trial by jury. In some jurisdictions, some civil cases can also be tried by judge and jury.
I would expect the U.S. to be similar: a civil trial with a jury is unlikely, but possible. And, unfortunately, probably more likely in cases which the lawyers feel can be swayed with emotional arguments.
Most credit card agreements state the same thing: by using the card, you agree that they can change the terms at any time. Your recourse is to cancel the card. I've done that once before.
Two differences I can think of, though:
First, the credit card companies (or, usually, the bank that issued the credit card) generally give you advance notice of any changes. You can sometimes find an insert in with your bill describing the changes that will happen next month.
Second, credit card companies aren't a monopoly, as much as most of them would like to be.
One Metric ton is 1000 kg (also called a long ton, at 2204.6 lb).
No, a 'long ton' is not the same as a metric tonne. A long ton is 2240 pounds, equal to twenty 'long hundredweight' in the avoirdupois measurement system. The avoirdupois is what the U.S. normally uses, with the standard 'ounce' being the avoirdupois ounce instead of the troy ounce. Take a look at http://www.m-w.com/mw/table/weight.htm for more detail.
-- Bryan Feir
Re:In the short run, this will make for bad polici
on
Politicizing Science
·
· Score: 1
The only thing that I could see them agree on is the socially conservative end of things. CEO's want to keep people sheepish to spend their money, CF's want to keep people sheepish so they'll come to church. Do they really get that much from eachother?
Sure, they get to have a chance to stay in power. As I understand it, main reason the 'fiscal conservatives' and 'moral conservatives' haven't split into separate parties yet is that both sides figure if they do that, the Democrats will be unbeatable. They can use as evidence the Progressive Conservative/Alliance split in Canada that has helped lead to three consecutive Liberal majorities...
Windows, OTOH, has always addressed security via add-on programs. (Well, NT made some attempt at security, e.g., it created users that it could be difficult to get into. And admin priviledges. I admit I don't know what they were...)
Well, sort of. The underlying core of Windows NT is, in theory, considerably more secure than your average Unix. The built-in ACL and 'capabilities' models are actually fairly sophisticated, and allow for finer grained control than most versions of UNIX.
Then Microsoft decided to slap the Windows 95 UI on top of it to make it 'user friendly', and made accessing the low-level capabilities difficult. Then they decided to move all the video drivers into kernel space in NT4.0 because they weren't fast enough when running in user space, so a video driver bug could trash the system. And things like Office would require you to shut off important parts of your file system security because of lazy design that assumed it could play in the/SYSTEM/ directory just like on Windows 95.
NT actually had the chance to be a truly secure system from the ground up. Then marketing started to override engineering decisions again...
THE EARLIEST EXAMPLE that springs to mind is on Radio Shack's TRS-80 Color Computers. There was some story about doubling the RAM by bending two pins on a socketted IC chip. The story was that the onboard capacity was crippled for the sake of easy in-store upgrades.
Hmm. If this is what I think you're referring to, that's not quite true. (You may be referring to soemthing I hadn't heard about, of course.)
What Tandy did do with the early CoCo 2 series was to take 64K memory chips that had tested with one or two bad bits, grab a set of them that were all bad in the same half of memory, then sell the result as a cheap 32K machine. Because of the way the Microsoft BASIC ROMs were mapped into memory, you couldn't use more than 32K of RAM under BASIC anyway.
Side note: because of the way dynamic RAM is arranged with row and column addresses, DRAM chips will always have an even number of address bits. So nobody ever made 32K chips (which would require 15 address bits).
Soon enough 64K chips became dirt cheap anyway, so there was no point in using bad ones; it was still cheaper to use 64K chips than twice as many 16K ones for a 32K computer. And besides, the CoCo 2 motherboard didn't have enough memory sockets to use 16K chips. The 'extra' 32K was only useful if you were running something like Flex09 or OS-9; OS-9 being a real-time multi-tasking operating system written for the 6809 processor, and available for the CoCo back in the early to mid eighties.
So it wasn't a matter of 'easy in-store upgrades'; it was a matter of it being a lot cheaper to build that way.
Please tell me there is someone on here who got their knowledge of the classics from actually reading Carl Barks rather than watching Ducktales.
Yes, there is. I've got a couple of comics dating back to that era, even. (At least, I think it was Barks who did the one about Scrooge having to go to South America to get his special nutmeg because the natives had revolted and were no longer shipping the stuff to him...)
>Which building number does not exist on the Microsoft campus?
Building 7
I haven't worked for Microsoft for over ten years, but as I recall, there's quite a story behind that one. I was there as part of a co-op education program while buildings 8, 9, and 10 were being built.
First, a little background: all of buildings 1 through 6 are X-shaped, four arms spreading from a central core, with buildings 8 to 10 being in the shape of two X's attached by one arm, forming a line with two bars through it, similar to a double-dagger mark. Building shape is probably to maximize the number of window offices. Building layout is roughly:
+-++-+
+-+
XX
*X X
XX
With the X's being numbered 1-6 from right to left above, and the +-+ figures being 8-10 from right to left. Note the *, the obvious space where building 7 would have been.
As I was told, the main problem was in dealing with the fire regulations. Microsoft is right against the border between Bellevue and Redmond, and therefore near the edge of the support district for the local fire department. Zoning laws prevent construction of large buildings if fire trucks can't reach them within a certain set time. Unfortunately, the long winding road from what was then the main entrance near building 1 around to building 7 would have taken too long to drive down for the fire trucks, putting it just outside of the allowed area.
So, Microsoft planned on building a second entrance on the other side of the 'campus'. Even had the initial area for the 'driveway' cleared. Problem was, that back entrance would have opened onto Bellevue-Redmond Road, (aka Bell-Red) which formed the boundary line between the two cities. With typical city bureaucracy, both cities considered it the other city's job to make sure the road is maintained. In other words, it's a mess. Worse, because it's a mess (and because of the self-same city bureaucracy), fire trucks can't go down it at full emergency speed. So adding the new entrance there wouldn't have helped; they still couldn't get the zoning for Building 7.
Instead, they went around to the other side and built buildings 8-10 (as well as 11-12, which were smaller, special purpose buildings and not office blocks), putting in the new main entrance over nearer building 9. By that point, the land where building 7 was supposed to be was being used for parking anyway, and enough new space was present that it was seen as unneeded. So building 7 was never built.
Note, there may be some errors or misinterpretations in this: it was over twelve years ago now. If anybody has a better idea, feel free to correct me.
Each PC needs to have a sticker on it that says "$120 of the price of this PC goes to Microsoft for its products" like they have for the $.33 gasoline tax here in Indiana.
Except that they can't. Part of the whole argument over Windows OEM pricing is that the big OEMs like Compaq and Dell, as part of their OEM licencing agreement that gives them cheap bulk Windows licences, are not allowed to make public how much it cost them. After all, if one OEM could publicly state that they got Windows cheaper than anyone else, then all the other OEMs would be able to ask Microsoft WHY they weren't getting the same deal. Keeping the OEMs from being able to compare notes allows Microsoft to set what prices they want, and make deals the way they want.
And every particle DOES have "simultaneous exact position and momentum," it's just that we aren't capable of determining both through observation. We can determine one or the other.
No, not exactly, though this is a common misconception.
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle has nothing to do with the act of observation. The actual uncertainty is fundamental to the quantum model. It's not that you can't measure both the position and the momentum at the same time, it's more that the particle's wave aspect cannot be constrained by both 'measurements' at the same time. Think of the particle like a water balloon on the position/momentum graph: if you compress it in one direction (measuring position) it spills out in the other (uncertain momentum).
The fun part is that you can actually use the uncertainty principle to make more accurate measurements. An experiment that was done years ago in Australia proved this. The idea is that a photon travelling here from a distant star has a very narrowly defined transverse momentum: it's heading almost directly towards us, so the uncertainty in its side-to-side momentum is directly related to how much space it takes up in the sky. (Since that defines the range of angles the photon could arrive from.) Since the transverse momentum is highly constrained, the transverse position must be highly spread out. So in theory the photon could be seen as a paper-thin pancake several miles across.
Now, from the standard double-slit experiments, you get an interference pattern as long as there is a possibility of the photon 'hitting' both slits at the same time. In this experiment, the slits were replaced with radio telescopes on train cars, on a long straight section of track. (Hence why this was done in the Australian outback.) So long as the telescopes are closer together than the uncertainty in the photon's position, you get an interference pattern. Once they're further apart than that, you revert to two seperate streams of photons.
So, you slowly move the telescopes apart, watching the star, until the interference pattern disappears. Presto, you have the 'size' of the photon, which gives the uncertainty of its transverse position. Back-calculating throug Heisenberg's inequality gives you a limit on its transverse momentum. And that gives you a good idea of the 'size' of the star in the sky, in fractions of an arc second.
This has been done, and gave answers that agreed with other observations of the stars. So the Uncertaintly Principle has, in this case, improved the accuracy of measurements.
And demonstrated that the HUP is a lot more fundamental than what you said. Particles simply do NOT have "simultaneous exact position and momentum."
No, OS-9 was by Microware. And it wasn't originally written for the CoCo, though they did port it to that machine.
Philips created a system called CD-I (Compact Disc Interactive) back about fifteen years ago, as an adjunct to the main CD standard, allowing moving images, still images, audio, and a box that had a moving cursor to allow you to interact with the displays on the screen. It was one of the earlier ideas of a 'convergence box', and unfortunately it lost out in the consumer market to the more dedicated video game machines. It did have some success in the business training market, where it's still in use in many places.
This box used OS-9, which was designed for use in embedded applications like that.
Doesn't the absence of negative gravity rather preclude the possibily of gravity existing at all ?
No, not really. In some versions of the attempt at a Grand Unified Theory, the spin of the mediating particle becomes an exponent of sorts in the equation. The photon that mediates electromagnetism is a spin-1 particle, while the graviton is a spin-2 particle. Gravity is then considered always an attractive force because the square of a number is always positive.
Grossly oversimplified, anyway. But yes, in some theories, gravity is always an attractive force for good reasons.
What I want to know is: why don't we British have an independence day?
Well, Guy Fawkes Day isn't quite the same thing, but there are a lot of people out there who celebrate it as if they should work to make it an Independence Day by following through on Fawkes' failed plan...
(For the non-Brits, Guy Fawkes plotted to blow up the houses of Parliament with a keg of gunpowder, only to get turned in by one of his co-conspirators. On November the fifth every year, Guy Fawkes is burned in effigy.)
Remember, remember, the Fifth of November,
The gunpowder treason and plot.
I know of no reason why the gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
Exactly. The Bible. In German instead of Latin. Which meant that a lot more people could read it for themselves instead of having to accept what the priest said was in it. Now untrained laymen could actually argue with the Church over the meanings of passages, and make up their own minds! Horrors!
It's not entirely coincidental that the Protestant Reformation kicked off not long after the deployment of the printing press. (Admittedly, more directly due to the fact that Luther's points got spread a lot more widely than he originally expected due to some helpful reprinting...)
Yes, I remember Lynx, and Random & Moira... Islandia required a rewrite of the original TinyMUD code because it was the first to pass 65536 objects, as I recall. Not to mention one of the first implementations of an '@recycle' command to uncreate objects and return used DBrefs to the available pool.
Heck, I remember my first day on there, ending up in the middle of a food fight in the town square with, among several others, Mutant (aka Martin Terman, Mutant for Hire for thost people who read Usenet).
I remember the days when the 'page' command couldn't have messages attached, so people would rename their rooms and send 'ErmaFelna has summoned you from: Want to meet by the post office for a tour?'
I remember my first real online role-playing experience, a journey into the pouches of DreamWeaver to recover something I no longer remember, but which turned into an epic adventure, run almost entirely off-the-cuff by the people involved.
I think the death of Islandia really started when it went down for a few days unexpectedly in mid-1990. The shock started some of the people looking for other places to spend time, such as Chaos (the first Random&Moira MUCK)... multi-mudding was more difficult in those days, since there weren't relatively sophisticated clients like TinyFugue yet. The original user base started filtering outward. And, eventually, Islandia sank beneath the waves.
To those of us who remember those days, Islandia will always have a special place in our hearts.
The TRS-80 Color Computer had legions of devoted fans, lots of talented programmers, and absolutely no chance in the burning brimstone pits of hell of getting licenses for hot properties. Not that this stopped the talented programmers from porting the games anyway.
Well, I wouldn't quite say that... by the time the CoCo 3 came around, there were actually a lot of licenced properties for it. Silpheed, Thexder, Robot Odyssey, Rampage... heck, I've actually still got a copy of Kings Quest III for the CoCo 3 around here somewhere.
There was a big push right around the time of the CoCo 3 to get licenced titles so that the CoCo 3 would be taken reasonably seriously by the market. What ended up killing it, really, was Tandy's decision that the IBM PC was 'where the industry was going', and so they dropped things like the CoCo and the original TRS-80 line to focus on the Tandy 1000, one of the least compatible 'IBM compatibles' ever built. The Deskmate software (an early office suite) almost but not quite made up for the problems. Of course, nowadays, it's not as if Tandy actually makes its own computers anymore, having shot themselves in the foot enough to bleed to death...
I, for one, am eagerly awaiting 10^9 meter baseline radio interferometers. Also, if you build an optical interferometer of that kind of scale, you can pick out the canals on Mars from Alpha Centauri. Or vice-versa.
Well, there's always the Japanese HALCA satellite, part of the VSOP project. This was the first working satellite for a Space VLBI mission, and it had the expected problems with dealing with interferometry between quickly moving objects. True, it's apogee is only at 21 400 km, so it's not quite at the 10^9m level, but it's close.
While HALCA itself is nearing the end of its useful operating lifespan (There were some problems with the satellite losing its targetting that resulted in using up the maneuvering fuel faster than planned), the success of the mission has helped get the Russian Radioastron project back on its feet, and pave the way for other Space VLBI projects.
The main problems in space interferometry have already been tested and dealt with, and there's been some work in the radio astronomy community for dual-satellite interferometry, once some of the second-genaration systems like VSOP-2 and ARISE are in space in a few years. With two satellites each with a 50 000km apogee, we can actually hit the 10^9 meter baseline level.
(Yes, I know a moderate amount about this from my work with the S2 data recording system which is used at a number of radio observatories around the world for VLBI.)
The 'Cygnus Tree' that he talks about has existed for quite some time now; I know it existed when I first built GCC 2.8.1 back in October of 1998. All it really boils down to is that most of the GNU projects can be put into a directory with a single large makefile at the top level that runs through each project in turn, and already knows which ones have to be made first. The GCC and GDB distributions already come made with that structure, because of the number of other projects they're based on. (Like libiberty, which contains a lot of library routines like the extended GNU getopt that aren't guaranteed to exist on all systems.)
He's not the only one who would like to see a full 'tree' release, but he's probably the only one who considers it some massive coverup and mismanagement that has to be dealt with as opposed to just different project groups having different release schedules.
Umm, you do realize that the word 'Bible' just means 'book'? In French, a library is 'Bibliotheque'. A list of books used as references is a 'Bibliography'. Someone who loves books is a 'Bibliophile'. If you want to specifically refer to the Christian 'book', it's 'The Holy Bible', though 'The Bible' (always capitalized and singular) has admittedly become common shorthand.
"I have a sneaking suspicion that if there were a way to make movies without actors, George (Lucas) would do it."
The scary thing is, I can see this. Lucas has always seemed obsessed about the 'vision'. He's got his own ideas how things should look and how they'd go, and the more people he has to get to help him realize that vision, the more diluted it gets by everyone else's contributions.
Makes perfect sense seen from that point of view. The fewer other 'personalities' involved, the more tightly you can control the outcome.
Purity of vision is a double-edged sword, though. Some writers just desperately need editors riding herd on them. It may be exactly the masterpiece the writer wanted, but if nobody other than the writer can understand it because nobody with sufficient clout could sit him down and say 'this doesn't make sense', well...
Some of the other people here have already answered the basic question: a radio telescope acts much like an optical telescope, except it uses radio waves which then get converted into images by computer. Why use radio waves? For one thing, you can pick up emissions from warm interstellar gas that isn't hot enough to actually glow visibly; some of the basic ionization effects in the universe occur at specific microwave frequencies; and radio doesn't get as distorted as much as light does when passing through the atmosphere.
The real fun part comes when you start hooking multiple radio telescopes together to perform VLBI: Very Long Baseline Interferometry. By viewing the same object from multiple locations, you can pick up details that either telescope by itself would have missed. The more radio telescopes you have, and the further apart they are, the better resolution you can get on the final image.
For really long baselines, the Japanese launched a radio telescope up into orbit a few years back. By itself it's not all that good; radio telescopes don't get as much of a boost from being outside of the atmosphere. But combine that with telescopes on the ground at the same time, and the combined system has a resolution over a hundred times better than the Hubble. People have actually managed to pick up details from quasars that nobody had been able to see until recently.
Of course, you can also reverse VLBI: once you have a quasar or some other highly distant object mapped out, you can invert the calculations and determine the exact relative locations of the telescopes from a new observation. This means, for example, you can determine if two telescopes have moved further apart since the last time you looked at this quasar: you can track continental drift. Or the rotational period of the Earth to sub-millisecond precision. Or there's been talk of using radio telescopes and VLBI to help correct for phase drift errors in GPS satellites.
Not to mention some of the other work on tracking space debris and meteors by using radio telescopes...
As in 'please enter your password and press the hash key'.
And this is also a pound: #
It is used to refer to a pound as in the weight, and I have seen it used as such in a couple of old recipe books instead of the more common abbreviation lb (which is actually from the Latin/French librum, or balance, I believe).
Yet even EM doesn't match gravity's uniquely far reaching ability to bend space and time.
The jury's still out on that one.
Well...
As I understand it, QED (Quantum ElectroDynamics, which is the basis of quantum EM theory) makes the assumption that EM propagates through space as a background, not affecting the metric through which it travels. In other words, it assumes that EM doesn't bend space and time.
QED's prediction of the EM coupling constant has been verified out to at least a dozen decimal places as far as I know, and that was over a decade ago. If EM does have any effect on the local space-time metric (aside from the fact that photons have energy, which equals mass, which means they should generate gravity in sufficient concentration), certainly nobody's been able to detect it as of yet.
Part of the reason that nobody's been able to come up with a workable Quantum GravitoDynamics theory is that gravity does affect the local metric of space and time. This means one of the basic simplifying assumptions goes right out the window. EM may have gravity's range (the other two fundamental forces use massive particles as intermediaries, and so don't have an infinite range), but it doesn't affect the underlying structure the same way. At least, not to any significant degree.
Part of the reason that Hydro Quebec suffered such major losses the previous time is that they run their main distribution network at a higher voltage; I think it's at 635kV instead of the 500kV that most other distribution networks use. Now, under normal circumstances, higher voltage => lower current for the same power => less I2R losses, and thus a more efficient system. Unfortunately, the cost of the more efficient system is that it's a lot more prone to corona effects, which causes problems when the air starts to get ionized, as happens in a thunderstorm or heavy solar storm.
Other problem with Hydro Quebec is just the sheer length of the lines, which of course they can't do much about given the sheer size of the province. Solar storms play hell with local magnetic fiels, and the longer a power line is, the more power gets induced in it when the magnetic field changes...
Of course, given how much of the system had to be replaced after the ice storm a couple of years back, hopefully they've better isolated some of the distribution lines by now.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't know about the U.S., but in Canada, a civil trial can go in front of a jury, if requested by the participants. I don't recall the details of who has to want it, but it can happen. It just doesn't all that often. And I believe there are only six people on a civil case jury instead of twelve.
Ah, here we are, from The government web site:
I would expect the U.S. to be similar: a civil trial with a jury is unlikely, but possible. And, unfortunately, probably more likely in cases which the lawyers feel can be swayed with emotional arguments.
-- Bryan Feur
Most credit card agreements state the same thing: by using the card, you agree that they can change the terms at any time. Your recourse is to cancel the card. I've done that once before.
Two differences I can think of, though:
First, the credit card companies (or, usually, the bank that issued the credit card) generally give you advance notice of any changes. You can sometimes find an insert in with your bill describing the changes that will happen next month.
Second, credit card companies aren't a monopoly, as much as most of them would like to be.
-- Bryan Feir
One Metric ton is 1000 kg (also called a long ton, at 2204.6 lb).
No, a 'long ton' is not the same as a metric tonne. A long ton is 2240 pounds, equal to twenty 'long hundredweight' in the avoirdupois measurement system. The avoirdupois is what the U.S. normally uses, with the standard 'ounce' being the avoirdupois ounce instead of the troy ounce. Take a look at http://www.m-w.com/mw/table/weight.htm for more detail.
-- Bryan Feir
The only thing that I could see them agree on is the socially conservative end of things. CEO's want to keep people sheepish to spend their money, CF's want to keep people sheepish so they'll come to church. Do they really get that much from eachother?
Sure, they get to have a chance to stay in power. As I understand it, main reason the 'fiscal conservatives' and 'moral conservatives' haven't split into separate parties yet is that both sides figure if they do that, the Democrats will be unbeatable. They can use as evidence the Progressive Conservative/Alliance split in Canada that has helped lead to three consecutive Liberal majorities...
-- Bryan Feir
Windows, OTOH, has always addressed security via add-on programs. (Well, NT made some attempt at security, e.g., it created users that it could be difficult to get into. And admin priviledges. I admit I don't know what they were...)
/SYSTEM/ directory just like on Windows 95.
Well, sort of. The underlying core of Windows NT is, in theory, considerably more secure than your average Unix. The built-in ACL and 'capabilities' models are actually fairly sophisticated, and allow for finer grained control than most versions of UNIX.
Then Microsoft decided to slap the Windows 95 UI on top of it to make it 'user friendly', and made accessing the low-level capabilities difficult. Then they decided to move all the video drivers into kernel space in NT4.0 because they weren't fast enough when running in user space, so a video driver bug could trash the system. And things like Office would require you to shut off important parts of your file system security because of lazy design that assumed it could play in the
NT actually had the chance to be a truly secure system from the ground up. Then marketing started to override engineering decisions again...
-- Bryan Feir
THE EARLIEST EXAMPLE that springs to mind is on Radio Shack's TRS-80 Color Computers. There was some story about doubling the RAM by bending two pins on a socketted IC chip. The story was that the onboard capacity was crippled for the sake of easy in-store upgrades.
Hmm. If this is what I think you're referring to, that's not quite true. (You may be referring to soemthing I hadn't heard about, of course.)
What Tandy did do with the early CoCo 2 series was to take 64K memory chips that had tested with one or two bad bits, grab a set of them that were all bad in the same half of memory, then sell the result as a cheap 32K machine. Because of the way the Microsoft BASIC ROMs were mapped into memory, you couldn't use more than 32K of RAM under BASIC anyway.
Side note: because of the way dynamic RAM is arranged with row and column addresses, DRAM chips will always have an even number of address bits. So nobody ever made 32K chips (which would require 15 address bits).
Soon enough 64K chips became dirt cheap anyway, so there was no point in using bad ones; it was still cheaper to use 64K chips than twice as many 16K ones for a 32K computer. And besides, the CoCo 2 motherboard didn't have enough memory sockets to use 16K chips. The 'extra' 32K was only useful if you were running something like Flex09 or OS-9; OS-9 being a real-time multi-tasking operating system written for the 6809 processor, and available for the CoCo back in the early to mid eighties.
So it wasn't a matter of 'easy in-store upgrades'; it was a matter of it being a lot cheaper to build that way.
-- Bryan Feir
Please tell me there is someone on here who got their knowledge of the classics from actually reading Carl Barks rather than watching Ducktales.
Yes, there is. I've got a couple of comics dating back to that era, even. (At least, I think it was Barks who did the one about Scrooge having to go to South America to get his special nutmeg because the natives had revolted and were no longer shipping the stuff to him...)
-- Bryan Feir
>Which building number does not exist on the Microsoft campus?
Building 7
I haven't worked for Microsoft for over ten years, but as I recall, there's quite a story behind that one. I was there as part of a co-op education program while buildings 8, 9, and 10 were being built.
First, a little background: all of buildings 1 through 6 are X-shaped, four arms spreading from a central core, with buildings 8 to 10 being in the shape of two X's attached by one arm, forming a line with two bars through it, similar to a double-dagger mark. Building shape is probably to maximize the number of window offices. Building layout is roughly:
+-++-+
+-+
XX
*X X
XX
With the X's being numbered 1-6 from right to left above, and the +-+ figures being 8-10 from right to left. Note the *, the obvious space where building 7 would have been.
As I was told, the main problem was in dealing with the fire regulations. Microsoft is right against the border between Bellevue and Redmond, and therefore near the edge of the support district for the local fire department. Zoning laws prevent construction of large buildings if fire trucks can't reach them within a certain set time. Unfortunately, the long winding road from what was then the main entrance near building 1 around to building 7 would have taken too long to drive down for the fire trucks, putting it just outside of the allowed area.
So, Microsoft planned on building a second entrance on the other side of the 'campus'. Even had the initial area for the 'driveway' cleared. Problem was, that back entrance would have opened onto Bellevue-Redmond Road, (aka Bell-Red) which formed the boundary line between the two cities. With typical city bureaucracy, both cities considered it the other city's job to make sure the road is maintained. In other words, it's a mess. Worse, because it's a mess (and because of the self-same city bureaucracy), fire trucks can't go down it at full emergency speed. So adding the new entrance there wouldn't have helped; they still couldn't get the zoning for Building 7.
Instead, they went around to the other side and built buildings 8-10 (as well as 11-12, which were smaller, special purpose buildings and not office blocks), putting in the new main entrance over nearer building 9. By that point, the land where building 7 was supposed to be was being used for parking anyway, and enough new space was present that it was seen as unneeded. So building 7 was never built.
Note, there may be some errors or misinterpretations in this: it was over twelve years ago now. If anybody has a better idea, feel free to correct me.
-- Bryan Feir
Each PC needs to have a sticker on it that says "$120 of the price of this PC goes to Microsoft for its products" like they have for the $.33 gasoline tax here in Indiana.
Except that they can't. Part of the whole argument over Windows OEM pricing is that the big OEMs like Compaq and Dell, as part of their OEM licencing agreement that gives them cheap bulk Windows licences, are not allowed to make public how much it cost them. After all, if one OEM could publicly state that they got Windows cheaper than anyone else, then all the other OEMs would be able to ask Microsoft WHY they weren't getting the same deal. Keeping the OEMs from being able to compare notes allows Microsoft to set what prices they want, and make deals the way they want.
-- Bryan Feir
You might expect that security restrictions would be the same when flying domestically, but this is international.
No. St. John's, Newfoundland, CANADA, to Toronto, Ontario, CANADA. I don't see any national borders being crossed here.
-- Bryan Feir
And every particle DOES have "simultaneous exact position and momentum," it's just that we aren't capable of determining both through observation. We can determine one or the other.
No, not exactly, though this is a common misconception.
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle has nothing to do with the act of observation. The actual uncertainty is fundamental to the quantum model. It's not that you can't measure both the position and the momentum at the same time, it's more that the particle's wave aspect cannot be constrained by both 'measurements' at the same time. Think of the particle like a water balloon on the position/momentum graph: if you compress it in one direction (measuring position) it spills out in the other (uncertain momentum).
The fun part is that you can actually use the uncertainty principle to make more accurate measurements. An experiment that was done years ago in Australia proved this. The idea is that a photon travelling here from a distant star has a very narrowly defined transverse momentum: it's heading almost directly towards us, so the uncertainty in its side-to-side momentum is directly related to how much space it takes up in the sky. (Since that defines the range of angles the photon could arrive from.) Since the transverse momentum is highly constrained, the transverse position must be highly spread out. So in theory the photon could be seen as a paper-thin pancake several miles across.
Now, from the standard double-slit experiments, you get an interference pattern as long as there is a possibility of the photon 'hitting' both slits at the same time. In this experiment, the slits were replaced with radio telescopes on train cars, on a long straight section of track. (Hence why this was done in the Australian outback.) So long as the telescopes are closer together than the uncertainty in the photon's position, you get an interference pattern. Once they're further apart than that, you revert to two seperate streams of photons.
So, you slowly move the telescopes apart, watching the star, until the interference pattern disappears. Presto, you have the 'size' of the photon, which gives the uncertainty of its transverse position. Back-calculating throug Heisenberg's inequality gives you a limit on its transverse momentum. And that gives you a good idea of the 'size' of the star in the sky, in fractions of an arc second.
This has been done, and gave answers that agreed with other observations of the stars. So the Uncertaintly Principle has, in this case, improved the accuracy of measurements.
And demonstrated that the HUP is a lot more fundamental than what you said. Particles simply do NOT have "simultaneous exact position and momentum."
-- Bryan Feir
o.O THE OS/9 ? For the CoCo? That was by Philips?
No, OS-9 was by Microware. And it wasn't originally written for the CoCo, though they did port it to that machine.
Philips created a system called CD-I (Compact Disc Interactive) back about fifteen years ago, as an adjunct to the main CD standard, allowing moving images, still images, audio, and a box that had a moving cursor to allow you to interact with the displays on the screen. It was one of the earlier ideas of a 'convergence box', and unfortunately it lost out in the consumer market to the more dedicated video game machines. It did have some success in the business training market, where it's still in use in many places.
This box used OS-9, which was designed for use in embedded applications like that.
Take a look at The International CD-I Association FAQ for more details.
-- Bryan Feir
Doesn't the absence of negative gravity rather preclude the possibily of gravity existing at all ?
No, not really. In some versions of the attempt at a Grand Unified Theory, the spin of the mediating particle becomes an exponent of sorts in the equation. The photon that mediates electromagnetism is a spin-1 particle, while the graviton is a spin-2 particle. Gravity is then considered always an attractive force because the square of a number is always positive.
Grossly oversimplified, anyway. But yes, in some theories, gravity is always an attractive force for good reasons.
-- Bryan Feir
What I want to know is: why don't we British have an independence day?
Well, Guy Fawkes Day isn't quite the same thing, but there are a lot of people out there who celebrate it as if they should work to make it an Independence Day by following through on Fawkes' failed plan...
(For the non-Brits, Guy Fawkes plotted to blow up the houses of Parliament with a keg of gunpowder, only to get turned in by one of his co-conspirators. On November the fifth every year, Guy Fawkes is burned in effigy.)
Remember, remember, the Fifth of November,
The gunpowder treason and plot.
I know of no reason why the gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
-- Bryan Feir
But the first thing they printed was the bible!
Exactly. The Bible. In German instead of Latin. Which meant that a lot more people could read it for themselves instead of having to accept what the priest said was in it. Now untrained laymen could actually argue with the Church over the meanings of passages, and make up their own minds! Horrors!
It's not entirely coincidental that the Protestant Reformation kicked off not long after the deployment of the printing press. (Admittedly, more directly due to the fact that Luther's points got spread a lot more widely than he originally expected due to some helpful reprinting...)
-- Bryan Feir
Yes, I remember Lynx, and Random & Moira... Islandia required a rewrite of the original TinyMUD code because it was the first to pass 65536 objects, as I recall. Not to mention one of the first implementations of an '@recycle' command to uncreate objects and return used DBrefs to the available pool.
Heck, I remember my first day on there, ending up in the middle of a food fight in the town square with, among several others, Mutant (aka Martin Terman, Mutant for Hire for thost people who read Usenet).
I remember the days when the 'page' command couldn't have messages attached, so people would rename their rooms and send 'ErmaFelna has summoned you from: Want to meet by the post office for a tour?'
I remember my first real online role-playing experience, a journey into the pouches of DreamWeaver to recover something I no longer remember, but which turned into an epic adventure, run almost entirely off-the-cuff by the people involved.
I think the death of Islandia really started when it went down for a few days unexpectedly in mid-1990. The shock started some of the people looking for other places to spend time, such as Chaos (the first Random&Moira MUCK)... multi-mudding was more difficult in those days, since there weren't relatively sophisticated clients like TinyFugue yet. The original user base started filtering outward. And, eventually, Islandia sank beneath the waves.
To those of us who remember those days, Islandia will always have a special place in our hearts.
-- Bryan Feir
The TRS-80 Color Computer had legions of devoted fans, lots of talented programmers, and absolutely no chance in the burning brimstone pits of hell of getting licenses for hot properties. Not that this stopped the talented programmers from porting the games anyway.
Well, I wouldn't quite say that... by the time the CoCo 3 came around, there were actually a lot of licenced properties for it. Silpheed, Thexder, Robot Odyssey, Rampage... heck, I've actually still got a copy of Kings Quest III for the CoCo 3 around here somewhere.
There was a big push right around the time of the CoCo 3 to get licenced titles so that the CoCo 3 would be taken reasonably seriously by the market. What ended up killing it, really, was Tandy's decision that the IBM PC was 'where the industry was going', and so they dropped things like the CoCo and the original TRS-80 line to focus on the Tandy 1000, one of the least compatible 'IBM compatibles' ever built. The Deskmate software (an early office suite) almost but not quite made up for the problems. Of course, nowadays, it's not as if Tandy actually makes its own computers anymore, having shot themselves in the foot enough to bleed to death...
-- Bryan Feir
I, for one, am eagerly awaiting 10^9 meter baseline radio interferometers. Also, if you build an optical interferometer of that kind of scale, you can pick out the canals on Mars from Alpha Centauri. Or vice-versa.
Well, there's always the Japanese HALCA satellite, part of the VSOP project. This was the first working satellite for a Space VLBI mission, and it had the expected problems with dealing with interferometry between quickly moving objects. True, it's apogee is only at 21 400 km, so it's not quite at the 10^9m level, but it's close.
While HALCA itself is nearing the end of its useful operating lifespan (There were some problems with the satellite losing its targetting that resulted in using up the maneuvering fuel faster than planned), the success of the mission has helped get the Russian Radioastron project back on its feet, and pave the way for other Space VLBI projects.
The main problems in space interferometry have already been tested and dealt with, and there's been some work in the radio astronomy community for dual-satellite interferometry, once some of the second-genaration systems like VSOP-2 and ARISE are in space in a few years. With two satellites each with a 50 000km apogee, we can actually hit the 10^9 meter baseline level.
(Yes, I know a moderate amount about this from my work with the S2 data recording system which is used at a number of radio observatories around the world for VLBI.)
-- Bryan Feir
The 'Cygnus Tree' that he talks about has existed for quite some time now; I know it existed when I first built GCC 2.8.1 back in October of 1998. All it really boils down to is that most of the GNU projects can be put into a directory with a single large makefile at the top level that runs through each project in turn, and already knows which ones have to be made first. The GCC and GDB distributions already come made with that structure, because of the number of other projects they're based on. (Like libiberty, which contains a lot of library routines like the extended GNU getopt that aren't guaranteed to exist on all systems.)
He's not the only one who would like to see a full 'tree' release, but he's probably the only one who considers it some massive coverup and mismanagement that has to be dealt with as opposed to just different project groups having different release schedules.
-- Bryan Feir
Umm, you do realize that the word 'Bible' just means 'book'? In French, a library is 'Bibliotheque'. A list of books used as references is a 'Bibliography'. Someone who loves books is a 'Bibliophile'. If you want to specifically refer to the Christian 'book', it's 'The Holy Bible', though 'The Bible' (always capitalized and singular) has admittedly become common shorthand.
-- Bryan Feir
"I have a sneaking suspicion that if there were a way to make movies without actors, George (Lucas) would do it."
The scary thing is, I can see this. Lucas has always seemed obsessed about the 'vision'. He's got his own ideas how things should look and how they'd go, and the more people he has to get to help him realize that vision, the more diluted it gets by everyone else's contributions.
Makes perfect sense seen from that point of view. The fewer other 'personalities' involved, the more tightly you can control the outcome.
Purity of vision is a double-edged sword, though. Some writers just desperately need editors riding herd on them. It may be exactly the masterpiece the writer wanted, but if nobody other than the writer can understand it because nobody with sufficient clout could sit him down and say 'this doesn't make sense', well...
-- Bryan Feir
Some of the other people here have already answered the basic question: a radio telescope acts much like an optical telescope, except it uses radio waves which then get converted into images by computer. Why use radio waves? For one thing, you can pick up emissions from warm interstellar gas that isn't hot enough to actually glow visibly; some of the basic ionization effects in the universe occur at specific microwave frequencies; and radio doesn't get as distorted as much as light does when passing through the atmosphere.
The real fun part comes when you start hooking multiple radio telescopes together to perform VLBI: Very Long Baseline Interferometry. By viewing the same object from multiple locations, you can pick up details that either telescope by itself would have missed. The more radio telescopes you have, and the further apart they are, the better resolution you can get on the final image.
For really long baselines, the Japanese launched a radio telescope up into orbit a few years back. By itself it's not all that good; radio telescopes don't get as much of a boost from being outside of the atmosphere. But combine that with telescopes on the ground at the same time, and the combined system has a resolution over a hundred times better than the Hubble. People have actually managed to pick up details from quasars that nobody had been able to see until recently.
Of course, you can also reverse VLBI: once you have a quasar or some other highly distant object mapped out, you can invert the calculations and determine the exact relative locations of the telescopes from a new observation. This means, for example, you can determine if two telescopes have moved further apart since the last time you looked at this quasar: you can track continental drift. Or the rotational period of the Earth to sub-millisecond precision. Or there's been talk of using radio telescopes and VLBI to help correct for phase drift errors in GPS satellites.
Not to mention some of the other work on tracking space debris and meteors by using radio telescopes...
-- Bryan Feir
This is a pound: £
It is used as currency.
This is a hash: #
As in 'please enter your password and press the hash key'.
And this is also a pound: #
It is used to refer to a pound as in the weight, and I have seen it used as such in a couple of old recipe books instead of the more common abbreviation lb (which is actually from the Latin/French librum, or balance, I believe).
-- Bryan Feir
The jury's still out on that one.
Well...
As I understand it, QED (Quantum ElectroDynamics, which is the basis of quantum EM theory) makes the assumption that EM propagates through space as a background, not affecting the metric through which it travels. In other words, it assumes that EM doesn't bend space and time.
QED's prediction of the EM coupling constant has been verified out to at least a dozen decimal places as far as I know, and that was over a decade ago. If EM does have any effect on the local space-time metric (aside from the fact that photons have energy, which equals mass, which means they should generate gravity in sufficient concentration), certainly nobody's been able to detect it as of yet.
Part of the reason that nobody's been able to come up with a workable Quantum GravitoDynamics theory is that gravity does affect the local metric of space and time. This means one of the basic simplifying assumptions goes right out the window. EM may have gravity's range (the other two fundamental forces use massive particles as intermediaries, and so don't have an infinite range), but it doesn't affect the underlying structure the same way. At least, not to any significant degree.
-- Bryan Feir
Part of the reason that Hydro Quebec suffered such major losses the previous time is that they run their main distribution network at a higher voltage; I think it's at 635kV instead of the 500kV that most other distribution networks use. Now, under normal circumstances, higher voltage => lower current for the same power => less I2R losses, and thus a more efficient system. Unfortunately, the cost of the more efficient system is that it's a lot more prone to corona effects, which causes problems when the air starts to get ionized, as happens in a thunderstorm or heavy solar storm.
Other problem with Hydro Quebec is just the sheer length of the lines, which of course they can't do much about given the sheer size of the province. Solar storms play hell with local magnetic fiels, and the longer a power line is, the more power gets induced in it when the magnetic field changes...
Of course, given how much of the system had to be replaced after the ice storm a couple of years back, hopefully they've better isolated some of the distribution lines by now.
-- Bryan Feir