The worst, imo, are the ones that aren't heavy, and are still expensive. I had one in college, for Theory of Computation, that was $80 for a 200 page book. That's 40 cents a page! It was a pretty good textbook, but I was still glad that I was able to just borrow one from someone else for the semester.
I don't think the U.N. has the resources to actually monitor the entire continent in any detail. Just paint your roof white and you'll be fine. Might have some minor difficulties getting food, though.
I'm not actually an astrophysicist, but I may be able to sort of explain. Take a look at the diagram in TFA: it's just in two dimensions, specifically the plane defined by the distant star, the massive object, and the observer. We see two images that are in that plane, because only light rays from the star that are traveling in that plane can be bent by the massive object so that they can reach us; rays traveling in any other plane would be bent to arrive at some other location. And the star is effectively a point source, so we see exactly two point images. With multiple massive objects, there are more planes, but the planes are still discrete, so there are still discrete images. The only exception is when the star, the massive object, and the observer are exactly in line, in which case we see a circle.
Galaxies, on the other hand, are not point sources, which is why when we see gravitationally lensed galaxies they often look stretched out along arcs -- different points in the galaxy line up differently, and thus can look farther apart from each other than they would if we were seeing them without lensing.
Eh, my father lives in upstate New York and had a pickup that was 19 years old when he sold it. Mind you, you could look down next to the gearstick and see the road going by underneath, but it still ran, anyway.
We currently call objects in other stellar systems exoplanets, which seems good enough for me. It will be a long time before we can study them in enough detail for it to really matter in any case.
I think the good reason for keeping plutoids separate from other dwarf planets is that plutoids are Kuiper Belt objects, rather than asteroids (which is a word that has its own issues, of course), so they have quite different origins and compositions
Nothing illegal about it... yet. The point is that WikiLeaks is the most likely to expose information that the government doesn't want the public to know about. That could be anything from treatment of political prisoners to uses of surveillance. Anyone in power who is abusing it (i.e. most of them) will want to avoid having that come to light.
Okay, yes, I'm kind of paranoid. The U.S., at least, still has some protections on freedom of speech and press, as do some other countries, and those may actually protect WikiLeaks. But given some of the efforts that governments have been taking to reduce those rights, I'm not certain.
Not sure what you mean by raw speed. Currently, iIrc, hard drives still beat flash for sequential writes, but that may not last. Given the way flash prices have been plummeting and sizes have been increasing, hard drives' advantage in total storage space, even at the top end, will only last a few more years, too.
Because smaller is more energy efficient, which is useful on a number of levels: for one, it saves electricity, and it also means that the chips produce less heat, which lets them run better.
I wasn't a physics major myself, but I did know several in college (graduated five years ago), and they all had to do some amount of programming; if not for actual coursework, then for their summer research assistant jobs. As I recall, Fortran, Matlab, and IDL were all used, probably C as well. I don't think actual CS courses were a requirement, but I know that many of them took at least an intro CS course anyway. My take from this is that while it may not be necessary to require students to learn programming, they're pretty much going to have to do so one way or another.
What's most interesting to me is that, as someone who has been buying computers (mostly Macs, it's true) for a long time, over $1,000 still doesn't really seem high end. PC prices have come down a huge amount in the past decade or two; I can still remember a time when it was impossible to get pretty much any system for under $1,000, even before adjusting for inflation. 10 years ago the iMac was a great deal for a complete system at a mere $1,300.
Roosevelt never appeared in public in a wheelchair. He used leg braces and a cane to walk short distances (by swiveling his torso), and he had aides to help support him while he was speaking. The truth about his paralysis didn't become public until after his death. And he was probably right, people wouldn't have accepted a presidential candidate in a wheelchair back then any more than they would today.
Re:It's as if a thousands hands screamed out in pa
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iMac Turns 10
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Yup. Fortunately, some third party company made something called an iCatch, which cost about $5 and slid onto the puck to make it into a more normal shaped mouse.
As for upgrades... my lime iMac has 256 MB of RAM, a 40 GB hard drive, a new CMOS battery (the old one died), and a nice quiet fan. The fan was the hard bit -- it involved taking the case completely apart, a lot of screws, and getting up close and personal with the CRT. Works great, though.
Number 23 claims that driving more slowly due to cell phone use costs fuel. That's patently ridiculous -- on the highway, driving more slowly saves fuel, which is why highway speed limits were set to 55 during the last oil crisis. Driving while on the phone is still a bad idea, but not because you're going slower.
I went to a liberal arts college pretty similar to the one you describe. The CS program was still top notch, and though it was focused on theoretical aspects of computing, I learned some good practical stuff, too. Even so, I don't usually use most of what I learned in school in my day-to-day job as a developer. Instead, I use what I learned over the course of several summer jobs that I had while in college -- but I got those jobs through connections at my school.
There are things in CS that I didn't learn in college because I was busy taking courses in other areas, but I haven't missed them yet. And the major thing that I learned in college was how to learn, so I'm confident that I could pick them up, either on my own or by taking a course somewhere else in my spare time, if I find that I need them in the future.
Oh, and my friends and I in CS still worked incredibly hard. We just took time to work at other things, too.
So my advice is to go to the liberal arts school. You'll be happier while you're there, and even if the education isn't as practical as it might be at an engineering school, you can get practical experience over the summers (and practical experience is superior to practical education in any case). When you're looking for a job, any good hiring manager will be much more impressed by your skills than by the name of the institution on your degree (and if you go somewhere like I did, they probably won't even recognize the institution enough to know it's a liberal arts college, even if it is one of the top three in the country -- and if they do recognize it, they'll be impressed rather than dismissive).
I don't think that's right. 'Weird' comes from Old English 'wyrd', meaning 'destiny', or more specifically the power to control destiny, as in 'the weird sisters'. That grew into the 'unearthly' or 'unnatural' meanings, which then evolved to the modern meanings, but I don't think it ever had a form of 'wayward'.
Regardless, though, the word's etymology doens't have much bearing on what it means today, which certainly includes just 'strange' or 'unusual'. There are plenty of more extreme examples out there, like 'nice', which used to mean 'stupid' or 'ignorant', but its meaning changed enough over time (through several intermediate stages) that it got to what we use today.
We don't really have any previous data on how common they are, though, so "more common than we thought" is pretty much meaningless. We've only just started having the technology to potentially detect systems like our own (and we still can't detect terrestrial planets like ours). All we knew before was that systems quite unlike our own were common, which doesn't say much when they were the only kind we could detect. It will be awhile longer before we can even make an initial statement of whether they're rare or common.
What about emacs? Grep? Sed? This book sounds like a good idea, but it's not so useful without a wider selection of applications. Frankly, though, I just want a short guide as to which things need to be escaped to get which meanings, and what character classes are available.
And for that matter, life didn't evolve on our own planet in exactly what we now think of as a normal environment, one notable difference being that there was pretty much no molecular oxygen in the atmosphere.
Warm or hot, probably not. Capable of supporting life, who knows? Given the kinds of extremophiles we know about on Earth, it's still possible that life could exist even at such low temperatures. But there's no way to know for sure until we send a probe to the surface, and I don't think there are current plans for one.
I think the biggest difficulty would be power. Our Mars rovers have been solar powered, but it's unlikely that that would work on Titan, since it's much farther from the Sun, and its atmosphere will block most of what little light does reach it, since it's basically opaque. All of our outer solar systems probes have been nuclear powered, and there might be difficulties in engineering that to fit on a rover and provide sufficient power. A rover would also have to contend with the weather (it rains methane), and the atmosphere might pose a challenge for radio communications to orbit. I don't think any of these challenges are insurmountable, but they definitely mean that we can't just drop a rover engineered for Mars on Titan -- it will take an entirely new design.
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The worst, imo, are the ones that aren't heavy, and are still expensive. I had one in college, for Theory of Computation, that was $80 for a 200 page book. That's 40 cents a page! It was a pretty good textbook, but I was still glad that I was able to just borrow one from someone else for the semester.
The news segment starts after the commercial, though I don't think it's really worth your time to watch it.
I don't think the U.N. has the resources to actually monitor the entire continent in any detail. Just paint your roof white and you'll be fine. Might have some minor difficulties getting food, though.
I'm not actually an astrophysicist, but I may be able to sort of explain. Take a look at the diagram in TFA: it's just in two dimensions, specifically the plane defined by the distant star, the massive object, and the observer. We see two images that are in that plane, because only light rays from the star that are traveling in that plane can be bent by the massive object so that they can reach us; rays traveling in any other plane would be bent to arrive at some other location. And the star is effectively a point source, so we see exactly two point images. With multiple massive objects, there are more planes, but the planes are still discrete, so there are still discrete images. The only exception is when the star, the massive object, and the observer are exactly in line, in which case we see a circle.
Galaxies, on the other hand, are not point sources, which is why when we see gravitationally lensed galaxies they often look stretched out along arcs -- different points in the galaxy line up differently, and thus can look farther apart from each other than they would if we were seeing them without lensing.
Eh, my father lives in upstate New York and had a pickup that was 19 years old when he sold it. Mind you, you could look down next to the gearstick and see the road going by underneath, but it still ran, anyway.
Right, because lying in the course of giving compliments, as Americans do as an integral part of our culture, is so much better.
We currently call objects in other stellar systems exoplanets, which seems good enough for me. It will be a long time before we can study them in enough detail for it to really matter in any case.
I think the good reason for keeping plutoids separate from other dwarf planets is that plutoids are Kuiper Belt objects, rather than asteroids (which is a word that has its own issues, of course), so they have quite different origins and compositions
Indeed, we should expect the apocalypse in 2012, since there's been an apocalypse every eleven years so far.
Nothing illegal about it... yet. The point is that WikiLeaks is the most likely to expose information that the government doesn't want the public to know about. That could be anything from treatment of political prisoners to uses of surveillance. Anyone in power who is abusing it (i.e. most of them) will want to avoid having that come to light. Okay, yes, I'm kind of paranoid. The U.S., at least, still has some protections on freedom of speech and press, as do some other countries, and those may actually protect WikiLeaks. But given some of the efforts that governments have been taking to reduce those rights, I'm not certain.
Not sure what you mean by raw speed. Currently, iIrc, hard drives still beat flash for sequential writes, but that may not last. Given the way flash prices have been plummeting and sizes have been increasing, hard drives' advantage in total storage space, even at the top end, will only last a few more years, too.
Because smaller is more energy efficient, which is useful on a number of levels: for one, it saves electricity, and it also means that the chips produce less heat, which lets them run better.
I wasn't a physics major myself, but I did know several in college (graduated five years ago), and they all had to do some amount of programming; if not for actual coursework, then for their summer research assistant jobs. As I recall, Fortran, Matlab, and IDL were all used, probably C as well. I don't think actual CS courses were a requirement, but I know that many of them took at least an intro CS course anyway. My take from this is that while it may not be necessary to require students to learn programming, they're pretty much going to have to do so one way or another.
What's most interesting to me is that, as someone who has been buying computers (mostly Macs, it's true) for a long time, over $1,000 still doesn't really seem high end. PC prices have come down a huge amount in the past decade or two; I can still remember a time when it was impossible to get pretty much any system for under $1,000, even before adjusting for inflation. 10 years ago the iMac was a great deal for a complete system at a mere $1,300.
Roosevelt never appeared in public in a wheelchair. He used leg braces and a cane to walk short distances (by swiveling his torso), and he had aides to help support him while he was speaking. The truth about his paralysis didn't become public until after his death. And he was probably right, people wouldn't have accepted a presidential candidate in a wheelchair back then any more than they would today.
Yup. Fortunately, some third party company made something called an iCatch, which cost about $5 and slid onto the puck to make it into a more normal shaped mouse. As for upgrades... my lime iMac has 256 MB of RAM, a 40 GB hard drive, a new CMOS battery (the old one died), and a nice quiet fan. The fan was the hard bit -- it involved taking the case completely apart, a lot of screws, and getting up close and personal with the CRT. Works great, though.
Not the very first model, but I have a lime one, which was only about a year later. It's a little pokey, but it runs Ubuntu quite happily.
Number 23 claims that driving more slowly due to cell phone use costs fuel. That's patently ridiculous -- on the highway, driving more slowly saves fuel, which is why highway speed limits were set to 55 during the last oil crisis. Driving while on the phone is still a bad idea, but not because you're going slower.
I went to a liberal arts college pretty similar to the one you describe. The CS program was still top notch, and though it was focused on theoretical aspects of computing, I learned some good practical stuff, too. Even so, I don't usually use most of what I learned in school in my day-to-day job as a developer. Instead, I use what I learned over the course of several summer jobs that I had while in college -- but I got those jobs through connections at my school.
There are things in CS that I didn't learn in college because I was busy taking courses in other areas, but I haven't missed them yet. And the major thing that I learned in college was how to learn, so I'm confident that I could pick them up, either on my own or by taking a course somewhere else in my spare time, if I find that I need them in the future.
Oh, and my friends and I in CS still worked incredibly hard. We just took time to work at other things, too.
So my advice is to go to the liberal arts school. You'll be happier while you're there, and even if the education isn't as practical as it might be at an engineering school, you can get practical experience over the summers (and practical experience is superior to practical education in any case). When you're looking for a job, any good hiring manager will be much more impressed by your skills than by the name of the institution on your degree (and if you go somewhere like I did, they probably won't even recognize the institution enough to know it's a liberal arts college, even if it is one of the top three in the country -- and if they do recognize it, they'll be impressed rather than dismissive).
I don't think that's right. 'Weird' comes from Old English 'wyrd', meaning 'destiny', or more specifically the power to control destiny, as in 'the weird sisters'. That grew into the 'unearthly' or 'unnatural' meanings, which then evolved to the modern meanings, but I don't think it ever had a form of 'wayward'.
Regardless, though, the word's etymology doens't have much bearing on what it means today, which certainly includes just 'strange' or 'unusual'. There are plenty of more extreme examples out there, like 'nice', which used to mean 'stupid' or 'ignorant', but its meaning changed enough over time (through several intermediate stages) that it got to what we use today.
We don't really have any previous data on how common they are, though, so "more common than we thought" is pretty much meaningless. We've only just started having the technology to potentially detect systems like our own (and we still can't detect terrestrial planets like ours). All we knew before was that systems quite unlike our own were common, which doesn't say much when they were the only kind we could detect. It will be awhile longer before we can even make an initial statement of whether they're rare or common.
What about emacs? Grep? Sed? This book sounds like a good idea, but it's not so useful without a wider selection of applications. Frankly, though, I just want a short guide as to which things need to be escaped to get which meanings, and what character classes are available.
If you're worrying about the KGB, you should be more worried about them making you radioactive than investigating you for already being radioactive.
And for that matter, life didn't evolve on our own planet in exactly what we now think of as a normal environment, one notable difference being that there was pretty much no molecular oxygen in the atmosphere.
Warm or hot, probably not. Capable of supporting life, who knows? Given the kinds of extremophiles we know about on Earth, it's still possible that life could exist even at such low temperatures. But there's no way to know for sure until we send a probe to the surface, and I don't think there are current plans for one.
I think the biggest difficulty would be power. Our Mars rovers have been solar powered, but it's unlikely that that would work on Titan, since it's much farther from the Sun, and its atmosphere will block most of what little light does reach it, since it's basically opaque. All of our outer solar systems probes have been nuclear powered, and there might be difficulties in engineering that to fit on a rover and provide sufficient power. A rover would also have to contend with the weather (it rains methane), and the atmosphere might pose a challenge for radio communications to orbit. I don't think any of these challenges are insurmountable, but they definitely mean that we can't just drop a rover engineered for Mars on Titan -- it will take an entirely new design.