The primary method of determining what's out there is infrared spectroscopy. Each and every element and compound has its own infrared signature; regardless of temperature, luminosity, or the conditions of the surrounding space, the signature of a given compound/element is the same, therefore where you see a given signature you can be pretty certain that the compound to which it refers is present. What makes the science even more fun is that you can determine the signature of each molecule using samples on Earth. If you see the same signature through the telescope, as it were, you'd be looking at a significant mass of that molecule.
Here is a list of molecules found on a regular basis in interstellar clouds.
you can't draw that conclusion. It could just as easily mean that the asteroid took a significant amount of time to resolidify after a major collision or two (it's happened to Earth several times - most dramatically when a body the size of Mars collided with Earth not just once, but twice, and the resulting debris cloud formed the Moon and the shepherd asteroids at L4 and L5, and bestowed upon our planet an abnormally large and hot iron core - if Earth didn't have that core we wouldn't have the Moon either, and the core of our planet would be as cold as New York concrete in March).
This is a rehash of a paper published in November 2008 (Beltran, et. al.). By the way, glucolaldehyde is NOT a sugar, it is a diose. Well, the only diose.
um... this is why they have DCS and CTCSS squelch, like you have on personal mobile radios. You can transmit on the same carrier, any number of channels you like; the way you separate them is to transmit a tonal subcarrier (an audio tone which modulates the carrier or in the case of DCS a stream of FSK digital data) which the receiver detects if tuned to that subcarrier, and reject any other signal. Using this method the quality of the received signal depends entirely on the quality of the receiving hardware. Early commercial broadcast satellite from what I remember from playing with my mum's 16-channel receiver back in the 80's, discriminated using horizontal and vertical polarisation, doubling the number of available channels (which was enough back then, there weren't that many satellite broadcasting stations to begin with).
oh, waitasec... what are we talking about here? 22,223 mile radius circle, that's roughly 139631 miles of orbital path. Based on the assumption that each satellite occupies 100 feet of space in the orbital track (that's to include a fairly generous solar array), then that means there's room in that specific orbit for 7,372,528 satellites. I *think* we've got some way to go yet before we fill the geostationary track up with dead birds. At a launch-to-orbit rate of say 1,000 a year (that's more than two launches *per day*) it'd still take seventy Centuries to fill the one orbit. By the way, two objects in the same stable orbit will *never* collide - it's physically impossible.
yeah... would be a good reference, except that in the Shatner/Kirk timeline, Voyager VI was an interstellar probe, not a piece of space junk. And the fact that it received no immediate reply to its calls for the Creator was not a problem of determination; it was however convinced that the Creator was a silicon based machine life form like itself, not a carbon based infestation such as it had found inhabiting its place of origin. There was also a problem, it saw, in that carbon based life was imperfect, and could never be perfect, hence needed to be removed. It had its own ideas for perfection but that would require physical contact and "becoming one" with the Creator. What it ended up with was "becoming one" with William Decker - which wasn't a plot hole because as the Ilia probe pointed out, only the Creator could know the command sequence instructing V'Ger to transmit the data it had gleaned over two hundred years. If Decker knew the command sequence then by that logic, Decker must be the Creator.
well, it's not wrong or overrated. He's right. To capture a dead bird all you have to do is match orbits. That's easy. Even travelling at 17,000mph, you can maintain a mutual closing speed of an inch a second, which is pretty damn precise. Slow enough that you can manipulate an arm to capture the bird at its launch/retrieval junction rather than just grabbing it at any random point (which would most likely destroy it rather than just cause a little damage).
To retrofit a bird you have to switch out modules/circuit boards, replace solar arrays, refuel ACS tanks, etc., etc., etc. All of this is hard because most if not all satellites are built as fully integrated payloads (exception that pops into my head is the HST, which was successfully repaired in space for the simple reason that the instrumentation was built in separate modules). There are no user-serviceable components. No pop-out modules. The solar panels are hard-wired. And if you want to know how hard it is working in space, get on a treadmill and run hard for twenty minutes, then while continuing to run assemble a mechanical watch while wearing gardening gloves.
BP p.l.c., Chevron Corporation, ExxonMobil Corporation, Royal Dutch Shell plc, Total S.A.., ConocoPhillips Company and the OPEC Cartel would all have some very strong opinions against biodiesel - as they have already done so resulting in what should be a 1% cost-per-Watt-at-the-pump fuel source compared with fossil oil, costing almost the same if not *more*.
Such is the political environment where those with declared interests in those companies that lobby TPTATB (The Powers That Appear To Be) to protect their interests are those lobbied! I'm looking at YOU, Dubya! It's not all bombing Iraq to the Stone Age (I swear I just heard Achmed The Dead Terrorist yelp "Ooh! Upgrade!"), it's oil interests that have held back high efficiency solar plant, wind/tide farms, offshore biomass for fuel and food (kelp!), and better hybrids (I don't know of any that meet Obama's 54.5 target for whenever it is (2015?), among many other innovations that have the potential to save stupid amounts of money for individuals and put paid to war over fossil fuel.
...will be getting their build past CAA inspection, which is mandatory before you even get to roll the aircraft onto the apron. Then you got static avionics tests, static engine tests at idle and full power, then you got taxiing tests, takeoff-circle-approach-waveoff-approach-landing and testing systems all the while, while making sure you don't wrap yourself around a building... you'll probably spend more time running tests to satisfy the inspector than you will have done building the thing (IIRC there's a minimum number of hours build time on a two seater that's something like 2500 hours; on a hot air balloon envelope it's 1,000 hours per 800,000cu.ft (that I do know having been there and worn the T-shirt) and the inspection involves a close eyeball inspection of every single inch of stitching. I shit ye not).
Kit aircraft (of any description) is more than throwing bits together and giving it a lick of paint, just bear that in mind if you get the urge to have a garage project... perhaps you'd prefer something a little less involved, like a forty foot boat? The only requirement of a boat is that it floats and is steerable. You might have a river users' licence to get but that's a piece of piss, even easier than getting a fully qualified drivers licence.
::snicker:: you been to Walthamstow lately? I've been once. Don't want to make it twice, the place is a shit pit. Brompton is much nicer. I said it. I mean it.
Highfields Science Park began as, and is still, a niche research facility owned and administered by the University of Nottingham. Its original commercial intent was as a supportive facility for tech startups. The Lace Market quarter was renovated and equipped with facilities aimed at Dotcom startups. Failed. Most of the units now sit unused and unoccupied, and almost entirely owned by New College Nottingham and now used mainly for storage. The Howitt Building was renovated much as the Lace Market was, as a springboard for tech companies. Has never had more than 25% occupancy. Owned and run as a secured building by the City Council, with the accompanying extortionate office rents. The Island Business Park is currently occupied by the BBC, Experian, Capital One and the NHS. Little else, more than half the site is still undeveloped.
We're talking about the place where electron microscopes, CAT scanners, and several more of the most amazing medtech breakthroughs in history have been made. *Nobody* is interested in setting up shop there except Boots, Capital One, Experian and Games Workshop?? Makes me wonder why...
so use said socnets/email access to inform those who need to know names of survivors so they can reconnect said survivors to families:) Probably something better left to those rescue teams on the ground who aren't pulling stray limbs out of rubble than @random_survivor tho...
This. My phone informs me with a series of messages: "Sending SMS", "Message sent" or "Sending Failed". Seems to be a binary condition. Whether or not it went to the right number, however...
answer to problem 1: should browsers, whose primary purpose is to interpret markup language, be specified to interpret markup language and display server-provided content according to that markup, and NOTHING MORE? As in, malformed/maltagged content should be IGNORED (ie dropped, not processed further)?
Oh, got it. Microsoft helped specify the capabilities of mainstream browsers, didn't they - though not until after they looked at what Nutscrape were trying to do, arseraped them and implemented most of the Nutscrape shit into IE... think back to the.wmf mess, back in the days when.wmf was the preferred file format for print clipart(! Yeah, I know - I still have dozens of CDs full of wmf cliparts)...
CB/CW is still useful (I use it regularly and there's quite a dispersed radio community around here), but there are so many channels on so many bands it's got to the point where my 800 channel scanner is basically full (I have the bottom nine channels for broadcast WFM/AM, the rest for CB/CW/PMR). It takes a solid minute to scan through the big block (the 791 NFM channels), which means I can (and do) miss messages unless I narrow down to my (six) "regular" channels (all PMR) + local emergency frequencies, in which case: 28 channels, around 2.5 seconds.
...is it a server problem, with the way it interprets record data, or the browser (any browser) (maybe as instructions rather than markup)? I'm guessing server in this case, since if the stream is intercepted and there's a referrer URL that directly references an image or other blob on the same or another server on a subdomain, that could be used to pwn the account/whatever... I'm not up on that sort of hack (you can probably tell). I don't quite get how hosting blobs on an entirely different domain would mitigate against that hack, since you would require some sort of URI that the other domain would recognise to be able to serve up the correct file - which would be in the URL request! Someone want to try and make sense of what I'm trying to say here?
I still have an internal 120MB Zip drive - still works, I still have five disks as well. I also have a 120MB Floptical drive (these could also read 1.44MB/2.88MB floppies). What I'm really after is an internal minicassette drive like this one. Absent one of these, I've had to fall back to ol' reliable Walkman.
Slashdot Mirror
if I must.
The primary method of determining what's out there is infrared spectroscopy. Each and every element and compound has its own infrared signature; regardless of temperature, luminosity, or the conditions of the surrounding space, the signature of a given compound/element is the same, therefore where you see a given signature you can be pretty certain that the compound to which it refers is present. What makes the science even more fun is that you can determine the signature of each molecule using samples on Earth. If you see the same signature through the telescope, as it were, you'd be looking at a significant mass of that molecule.
Here is a list of molecules found on a regular basis in interstellar clouds.
there's a reason.
you can't draw that conclusion. It could just as easily mean that the asteroid took a significant amount of time to resolidify after a major collision or two (it's happened to Earth several times - most dramatically when a body the size of Mars collided with Earth not just once, but twice, and the resulting debris cloud formed the Moon and the shepherd asteroids at L4 and L5, and bestowed upon our planet an abnormally large and hot iron core - if Earth didn't have that core we wouldn't have the Moon either, and the core of our planet would be as cold as New York concrete in March).
This is a rehash of a paper published in November 2008 (Beltran, et. al.). By the way, glucolaldehyde is NOT a sugar, it is a diose. Well, the only diose.
where's my math wrong?
um... this is why they have DCS and CTCSS squelch, like you have on personal mobile radios. You can transmit on the same carrier, any number of channels you like; the way you separate them is to transmit a tonal subcarrier (an audio tone which modulates the carrier or in the case of DCS a stream of FSK digital data) which the receiver detects if tuned to that subcarrier, and reject any other signal. Using this method the quality of the received signal depends entirely on the quality of the receiving hardware. Early commercial broadcast satellite from what I remember from playing with my mum's 16-channel receiver back in the 80's, discriminated using horizontal and vertical polarisation, doubling the number of available channels (which was enough back then, there weren't that many satellite broadcasting stations to begin with).
?? You just need to know how to count using more than your fingers, it's not that hard, really.
oh, waitasec... what are we talking about here? 22,223 mile radius circle, that's roughly 139631 miles of orbital path. Based on the assumption that each satellite occupies 100 feet of space in the orbital track (that's to include a fairly generous solar array), then that means there's room in that specific orbit for 7,372,528 satellites. I *think* we've got some way to go yet before we fill the geostationary track up with dead birds. At a launch-to-orbit rate of say 1,000 a year (that's more than two launches *per day*) it'd still take seventy Centuries to fill the one orbit. By the way, two objects in the same stable orbit will *never* collide - it's physically impossible.
yeah... would be a good reference, except that in the Shatner/Kirk timeline, Voyager VI was an interstellar probe, not a piece of space junk. And the fact that it received no immediate reply to its calls for the Creator was not a problem of determination; it was however convinced that the Creator was a silicon based machine life form like itself, not a carbon based infestation such as it had found inhabiting its place of origin. There was also a problem, it saw, in that carbon based life was imperfect, and could never be perfect, hence needed to be removed. It had its own ideas for perfection but that would require physical contact and "becoming one" with the Creator. What it ended up with was "becoming one" with William Decker - which wasn't a plot hole because as the Ilia probe pointed out, only the Creator could know the command sequence instructing V'Ger to transmit the data it had gleaned over two hundred years. If Decker knew the command sequence then by that logic, Decker must be the Creator.
I stop before I go into Geek Overload.
well, it's not wrong or overrated. He's right. To capture a dead bird all you have to do is match orbits. That's easy. Even travelling at 17,000mph, you can maintain a mutual closing speed of an inch a second, which is pretty damn precise. Slow enough that you can manipulate an arm to capture the bird at its launch/retrieval junction rather than just grabbing it at any random point (which would most likely destroy it rather than just cause a little damage).
To retrofit a bird you have to switch out modules/circuit boards, replace solar arrays, refuel ACS tanks, etc., etc., etc. All of this is hard because most if not all satellites are built as fully integrated payloads (exception that pops into my head is the HST, which was successfully repaired in space for the simple reason that the instrumentation was built in separate modules). There are no user-serviceable components. No pop-out modules. The solar panels are hard-wired. And if you want to know how hard it is working in space, get on a treadmill and run hard for twenty minutes, then while continuing to run assemble a mechanical watch while wearing gardening gloves.
How did they find the guy who played Obi Wan??
I know it's seriously OT, but I'll bite: how many police were convicted of the guy's death? I'm guessing zero.
BP p.l.c., Chevron Corporation, ExxonMobil Corporation, Royal Dutch Shell plc, Total S.A.., ConocoPhillips Company and the OPEC Cartel would all have some very strong opinions against biodiesel - as they have already done so resulting in what should be a 1% cost-per-Watt-at-the-pump fuel source compared with fossil oil, costing almost the same if not *more*.
Such is the political environment where those with declared interests in those companies that lobby TPTATB (The Powers That Appear To Be) to protect their interests are those lobbied! I'm looking at YOU, Dubya! It's not all bombing Iraq to the Stone Age (I swear I just heard Achmed The Dead Terrorist yelp "Ooh! Upgrade!"), it's oil interests that have held back high efficiency solar plant, wind/tide farms, offshore biomass for fuel and food (kelp!), and better hybrids (I don't know of any that meet Obama's 54.5 target for whenever it is (2015?), among many other innovations that have the potential to save stupid amounts of money for individuals and put paid to war over fossil fuel.
...will be getting their build past CAA inspection, which is mandatory before you even get to roll the aircraft onto the apron. Then you got static avionics tests, static engine tests at idle and full power, then you got taxiing tests, takeoff-circle-approach-waveoff-approach-landing and testing systems all the while, while making sure you don't wrap yourself around a building... you'll probably spend more time running tests to satisfy the inspector than you will have done building the thing (IIRC there's a minimum number of hours build time on a two seater that's something like 2500 hours; on a hot air balloon envelope it's 1,000 hours per 800,000cu.ft (that I do know having been there and worn the T-shirt) and the inspection involves a close eyeball inspection of every single inch of stitching. I shit ye not).
Kit aircraft (of any description) is more than throwing bits together and giving it a lick of paint, just bear that in mind if you get the urge to have a garage project... perhaps you'd prefer something a little less involved, like a forty foot boat? The only requirement of a boat is that it floats and is steerable. You might have a river users' licence to get but that's a piece of piss, even easier than getting a fully qualified drivers licence.
::snicker:: you been to Walthamstow lately? I've been once. Don't want to make it twice, the place is a shit pit. Brompton is much nicer. I said it. I mean it.
Nottingham has tried it several times already.
Highfields Science Park began as, and is still, a niche research facility owned and administered by the University of Nottingham. Its original commercial intent was as a supportive facility for tech startups.
The Lace Market quarter was renovated and equipped with facilities aimed at Dotcom startups. Failed. Most of the units now sit unused and unoccupied, and almost entirely owned by New College Nottingham and now used mainly for storage.
The Howitt Building was renovated much as the Lace Market was, as a springboard for tech companies. Has never had more than 25% occupancy. Owned and run as a secured building by the City Council, with the accompanying extortionate office rents.
The Island Business Park is currently occupied by the BBC, Experian, Capital One and the NHS. Little else, more than half the site is still undeveloped.
We're talking about the place where electron microscopes, CAT scanners, and several more of the most amazing medtech breakthroughs in history have been made. *Nobody* is interested in setting up shop there except Boots, Capital One, Experian and Games Workshop?? Makes me wonder why...
so use said socnets/email access to inform those who need to know names of survivors so they can reconnect said survivors to families :) Probably something better left to those rescue teams on the ground who aren't pulling stray limbs out of rubble than @random_survivor tho...
snap! FNARR!
This. My phone informs me with a series of messages: "Sending SMS", "Message sent" or "Sending Failed". Seems to be a binary condition. Whether or not it went to the right number, however...
answer to problem 1: should browsers, whose primary purpose is to interpret markup language, be specified to interpret markup language and display server-provided content according to that markup, and NOTHING MORE? As in, malformed/maltagged content should be IGNORED (ie dropped, not processed further)?
Oh, got it. Microsoft helped specify the capabilities of mainstream browsers, didn't they - though not until after they looked at what Nutscrape were trying to do, arseraped them and implemented most of the Nutscrape shit into IE... think back to the .wmf mess, back in the days when .wmf was the preferred file format for print clipart(! Yeah, I know - I still have dozens of CDs full of wmf cliparts)...
CB/CW is still useful (I use it regularly and there's quite a dispersed radio community around here), but there are so many channels on so many bands it's got to the point where my 800 channel scanner is basically full (I have the bottom nine channels for broadcast WFM/AM, the rest for CB/CW/PMR). It takes a solid minute to scan through the big block (the 791 NFM channels), which means I can (and do) miss messages unless I narrow down to my (six) "regular" channels (all PMR) + local emergency frequencies, in which case: 28 channels, around 2.5 seconds.
...is it a server problem, with the way it interprets record data, or the browser (any browser) (maybe as instructions rather than markup)? I'm guessing server in this case, since if the stream is intercepted and there's a referrer URL that directly references an image or other blob on the same or another server on a subdomain, that could be used to pwn the account/whatever... I'm not up on that sort of hack (you can probably tell). I don't quite get how hosting blobs on an entirely different domain would mitigate against that hack, since you would require some sort of URI that the other domain would recognise to be able to serve up the correct file - which would be in the URL request! Someone want to try and make sense of what I'm trying to say here?
Joe Sixpack Help! My home is burning down and my kids are trapped inside!
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Who controls this "fuel bank"? The United States?
That makes me feel instantly safer...~
I still have an internal 120MB Zip drive - still works, I still have five disks as well. I also have a 120MB Floptical drive (these could also read 1.44MB/2.88MB floppies). What I'm really after is an internal minicassette drive like this one. Absent one of these, I've had to fall back to ol' reliable Walkman.