Case in point. The WWII carrier pigeon letter that was found in an excavated chimney in England last year. It had a short code sequence. The Internets (including slashdot) were all a buzz with trying to crack it to see what it actually said. This went on for months, and no one could do it. People were speculating that it was a OTP, and thus "Impossible" to crack. When all it took was some dude in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada who dragged out an old RAF recon code book they had in their attic and translated the whole mess in about 20 minutes.
Is there any reason to use an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere on the space station, rather than oxygen/some-other-gas, such as helium? This would presumably avoid the decompression sickness problem, much like deep divers use oxygen/helium mixes.
The problem with Helium is its very (very!) high diffusion rate through everything,
including solid steel etc., so the station would need a constant resupply of Helium just
to keep the internal pressure stable. They still do need air resupply, but with O2/N2, it's at
a much more manageable rate.
Because the spacesuits use pure O2 at very low pressure to remain flexible.
Inflating a spacesuit with "normal" air at normal pressure would make it very
stiff and require big forces to bend, making for very expensive balloon animals
and not much work done by the astronaut contained within.
The "pre-breathing" is required to adapt the human physiology to such an atmosphere.
Just using normal air at very low pressure isn't an option, because the partial pressure
of Oxygen would be too low to breathe (same as very-high-altitude air on Earth).
Making a useable spacesuit is suprisingly hard. One of the challenges for example
is that the suits internal volume should always stay the same, even when bent.
Otherwise the pressure would change (and by quite a bit too) every time it is deformed,
annoying the hell out of or even injuring the astronaut.
However, there are many positions at NASA not open to non-citizens of the US.
Hell, even some NASA facility tours are "citizen only", which is really ridiculous.
Institutions that do not already hold a name in the.edu domain are eligible to receive one if they are post-secondary institutions that are institutionally accredited, i.e., the entire institution and not just particular programs, by agencies on the U.S. Department of Education's list of Nationally Recognized Accrediting Agencies.
Being accredited by some US agency is necessary, being a US institution isn't however.
Will all these stupid new TLDs even be used? Right now, how often do you go to a legitimate website (non-spam, non-scam, non-malware) that doesn't use.com,.net,.org,.gov or.edu ? I'll bet it's pretty rare.
On the contrary, it's daily, and multiple domains.
All of which are ccTLDs however, and I completely agree about
the stupidity and uselessness of TLD spam.
All "big players" will want to register their name with all new TLDs to redirect to
their canonical ones. I smirk at something like http://google.amazon - now where
will you end up with that one? Phising just isn't easy enough nowadays, right?
"We don't hate them because we're homophobes, "
wait, what?
Yeah, that is completelty without context, and totally stupid.
Unless of course EA is somehow particularly gay - which I'm
pretty sure it is not, not even in the old meaning of the word.
... a strong Brownian Motion producer, which is essential for the Infinite Improbability Drive which powers Zaphod's stolen spaceship, the Heart of Gold.
So Adams must have mentioned tea in more than one body of work, which isn't too surprising for an Englishman.
Completely useless stats for the record:
Tea is mentioned 31 times in the five volumes of the Hitchhiker Trilogy. That includes
once in the first volume's dedication ("...for tea, sympathy, and a sofa"), and three
uses of the phrase "a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea"
(twice in vol. 1, once in vol. 2).
I have never encountered a "vibration alarm" in a phone that's silent.
In most cases, the buzzing sound is actually quite annoying, and often
suprisingly loud.
I have seen people kicked out of theatre performances because they
let their phone "ring" on vibrate and completely ignored it. The whole
audience would've gladly assisted the usher.
For much less distracting alarms, a friend of mine uses a custom ringtone
of two low power clicks that goes off once.
It is really annoying to be running an app playing some video full screen and in order to adjust the screen brightness I must:
1. Hit home to get out of the app.
2. Access the quick settings menu in the upper right.
3. Adjust the brightness.
4. Open the recently-used list to find the app and go back.
The only reason this is necessary is because Android allows apps to run full screen and block access to the notification bar. If I'm on a 10" tablet, I don't mind having a few pixels of mostly black space set aside so that I can still have notifications. By all means make it configurable, but I want to be able to keep apps from blocking access to it.
Well, I on the other hand hate to have other stuff on the screen when I'm watching
full screen video. And notfications interrupting/overlaying/distracting from my movie?
I'd kill them with fire. Yes, even on my 10" tablet.
Oh, and to adjust the screen brightness while playing full screen video, I just swipe up or
down in the left half of the screen - check out MX player on Android.
And, surely you're familiar with the rounding errors involved in trying to represent base 10 decimals in binary? That is, no finite representation of 1 cm in meters? 1 1 cm = 0.0000001010001110101... m
BCD. In use in computers pretty much since computers stopped being people.
Slashdot Mirror
Case in point. The WWII carrier pigeon letter that was found in an excavated chimney in England last year. It had a short code sequence. The Internets (including slashdot) were all a buzz with trying to crack it to see what it actually said. This went on for months, and no one could do it. People were speculating that it was a OTP, and thus "Impossible" to crack. When all it took was some dude in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada who dragged out an old RAF recon code book they had in their attic and translated the whole mess in about 20 minutes.
No he didn't.
I imagine calm sea waves don't actually do much to a large barge with 600 tons on it.
A 600-ton barge isn't large.
At 100 hours per minute, youtube is filling at a rate of 6000x real time (6000h/h).
Age of the universe: About 13.8 billion years.
13.8e9 years / 6000 = 2.3e6
So, assuming a constant upload rate (a huge assumption): in 2.3 million years.
(I should have includeed the additional age of the universe until this happens,
but that's less than a rounding error at this precision.)
Is there any reason to use an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere on the space station, rather than oxygen/some-other-gas, such as helium? This would presumably avoid the decompression sickness problem, much like deep divers use oxygen/helium mixes.
The problem with Helium is its very (very!) high diffusion rate through everything,
including solid steel etc., so the station would need a constant resupply of Helium just
to keep the internal pressure stable. They still do need air resupply, but with O2/N2, it's at
a much more manageable rate.
Because the spacesuits use pure O2 at very low pressure to remain flexible.
Inflating a spacesuit with "normal" air at normal pressure would make it very
stiff and require big forces to bend, making for very expensive balloon animals
and not much work done by the astronaut contained within.
The "pre-breathing" is required to adapt the human physiology to such an atmosphere.
Just using normal air at very low pressure isn't an option, because the partial pressure
of Oxygen would be too low to breathe (same as very-high-altitude air on Earth).
Making a useable spacesuit is suprisingly hard. One of the challenges for example
is that the suits internal volume should always stay the same, even when bent.
Otherwise the pressure would change (and by quite a bit too) every time it is deformed,
annoying the hell out of or even injuring the astronaut.
However, there are many positions at NASA not open to non-citizens of the US.
Hell, even some NASA facility tours are "citizen only", which is really ridiculous.
You must have seen another movie than the rest of us.
In our version, the guy giving the "you can't handle the truth"
speech is not one of the good guys...
Still, he's correct that it's only *open* to US institutions. It's just that anyone who managed to get a domain before 2001 were grandfathered in.
.edu is open to institutions worldwide – solvay.edu and kit.edu are from 2003 and 2006 respectively.
From educause's policy page:
Being accredited by some US agency is necessary, being a US institution isn't however.
IIRC, to this day, EDU and GOV are only open for US based registrants, and are in no way "generic".
polytechnique.edu
solvay.edu
nist.edu (an unexpected one, with no relation whatsoever to nist.gov...)
kit.edu
au.edu
Will all these stupid new TLDs even be used? Right now, how often do you go to a legitimate website (non-spam, non-scam, non-malware) that doesn't use .com, .net, .org, .gov or .edu ? I'll bet it's pretty rare.
On the contrary, it's daily, and multiple domains.
All of which are ccTLDs however, and I completely agree about
the stupidity and uselessness of TLD spam.
All "big players" will want to register their name with all new TLDs to redirect to
their canonical ones. I smirk at something like http://google.amazon - now where
will you end up with that one? Phising just isn't easy enough nowadays, right?
In the interim, it snowed, and the local snowboarders made good use of the car as a jump. There are photos. :)
Well? WELL?
Damn you, I want to see those. All I managed to find with quite a bit
of googleing are those, entirely devoid of both snow and boards.
If you have an iPhone you could get a mophie case. It adds durability and batter
Mmmmmh, deep-fried iPhone...
Given the proximity of North and South, ahem, Korea. Me thinks you don't get much lead time...
Good thing then that Yokohama is in, ahem, neither.
"We don't hate them because we're homophobes, "
wait, what?
Yeah, that is completelty without context, and totally stupid.
Unless of course EA is somehow particularly gay - which I'm
pretty sure it is not, not even in the old meaning of the word.
Not so. During WW II the submarines were named for fish. That was fairly cool.
Until you get deployed to the SS Flounder...
Hey, getting the "L" in there was a big engineering effort!
... a strong Brownian Motion producer, which is essential for the Infinite Improbability Drive which powers Zaphod's stolen spaceship, the Heart of Gold.
So Adams must have mentioned tea in more than one body of work, which isn't too surprising for an Englishman.
Completely useless stats for the record:
Tea is mentioned 31 times in the five volumes of the Hitchhiker Trilogy. That includes
once in the first volume's dedication ("...for tea, sympathy, and a sofa"), and three
uses of the phrase "a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea"
(twice in vol. 1, once in vol. 2).
In detail:
How hard is it to learn Chinese?
Very.
I have never encountered a "vibration alarm" in a phone that's silent.
In most cases, the buzzing sound is actually quite annoying, and often
suprisingly loud.
I have seen people kicked out of theatre performances because they
let their phone "ring" on vibrate and completely ignored it. The whole
audience would've gladly assisted the usher.
For much less distracting alarms, a friend of mine uses a custom ringtone
of two low power clicks that goes off once.
I'd argue that Android doesn't go far enough.
It is really annoying to be running an app playing some video full screen and in order to adjust the screen brightness I must: 1. Hit home to get out of the app. 2. Access the quick settings menu in the upper right. 3. Adjust the brightness. 4. Open the recently-used list to find the app and go back.
The only reason this is necessary is because Android allows apps to run full screen and block access to the notification bar. If I'm on a 10" tablet, I don't mind having a few pixels of mostly black space set aside so that I can still have notifications. By all means make it configurable, but I want to be able to keep apps from blocking access to it.
Well, I on the other hand hate to have other stuff on the screen when I'm watching
full screen video. And notfications interrupting/overlaying/distracting from my movie?
I'd kill them with fire. Yes, even on my 10" tablet.
Oh, and to adjust the screen brightness while playing full screen video, I just swipe up or
down in the left half of the screen - check out MX player on Android.
And, surely you're familiar with the rounding errors involved in trying to represent base 10 decimals in binary? That is, no finite representation of 1 cm in meters? 1 1 cm = 0.0000001010001110101... m
BCD. In use in computers pretty much since computers stopped being people.
Do your employees enjoy not being able to receive personal phone calls at work?
Yeah, because nobody has a phone on the desk. Also: How on Earth did you survive
in pre-mobile-phone times?
Gold is finite in supply, too. Why isn't that disasterous?
Look up what happened to the gold standard...
It is indeed quite baffling if you really think about it.
There's an essay by Eugene Wigner about exactly that topic:
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences
The difference is people are still willing to lend us money hand over fist, even at a known loss to themselves.
France Joins Germany to Sell T-Bills At Negative Yield.
Because they believe that PEOPLE should help people in need, rather than rely on the government to take other people's money to do it for them?
Governments are (made of) people, my friend.