It's scary just how many different things out there seem waiting to kill you; from asteroids to stellar explosions to, now, death-star black-holes.
On the other hand: I'd imagine it's terribly useful to see what a galaxy does to such an emission. It's got to tell us a lot about things like the real density of the glactic body, and to what extent, if any, a galaxy clears space around it.
Although some of the suggestions I've read on slashdot seem to have missed the article addressing them; the price in question seems high.
How big is a digital master with a lossless compression? Would 40 Terrabytes do it?
To pick a technology at random: That would be 100 LTO3 tapes... 200 to have a duplicate of each tape.
That would be $16,000 to archive whatever you could fit on 40 Terrabytes.
According to Verbatim, an LTO3 tape has a storage life of 30 years. Assuming we halve that, we have just over $1000 per year in physical storage devices. We also have a days work for one individual for 15-years of storage (let's tack on another $1000 in inscidentals).
In 15 years you'll have to fire up the LTO3 you kept in storage and retrieve them to transfer them to whatever you are using then, but I doubt the costs will go up.
A decade ago, astronomers noticed that distant supernovae - exploding stars on the very fringes of the universe - seemed to be moving faster than those nearer to the centre, suggesting that they were accelerating as they shot through space.
This is one of a couple of things that has confused me in the layman's explanations. If we look farther back in time (a far away supernova) we see it moving faster than something more recently ("nearer the center"). So since farther back in time the thing was moving faster, we conclude what seems to be the exact opposite... that things are moving faster now.
Sorry to ask a basic question, but how does something in the past moving faster than something nearer the present mean that in the past things moved slower? What am I missing?
If you want Morgoth on stage it would have to be either the story of Beren and Luthien, or the duel with Fingolfin at the gates of Angband.
Was actually the first thing that came to mind, but I couldn't remember the spellings:).
There are some compelling other stories alluded to in the Epologue of the Hobbit as well, and (of course) what the rest of Middle-Earth was doing during the War of the Ring (alluded to repeatedly, including in Gimli's reason for coming to Rivendell). Also, there's the end of the second age (with the defeat of Sauron by Isuldur).
I can think of a great deal of fertile fodder (is that a mixed metaphor) for stories.
I'm wondering if they'll be able to get Ian McKellen to play Gandalf again. I'm trying to think how many recurrent characters there were across the Hobbit and LOTR -- Bilbo, Gandalf, and maybe Elrond (it's been a long time since I read the Hobbit).
Bilbo, Gandalf, Elrond and Gollum were alive and in The Hobbit. Gandalf, Elrond, and Gollum could easily be done by the same actors.
Gimli was, I believe, alive at the time and may have arrived as a young dwarf with the forces from the Iron Hills at the battle of three armies. Aragorn was alive and living in Rivendell as was Arwen. Legolas was alive and living (presumably) in Mirkwood with his father... pretty much all of them could make cameos... with Gimli being the least likely.
I'd like to see individual stories from the Silmarillion fleshed out into full movies / movie-series. Jackson et.al. have already shown a willingness to rewrite work, why not forge new ground from old ideas?
The story of Morgoth, etc?
Can anybody explain the commercial benefit to space travel?... I assume by "space travel" you mean "manned space flight"
1) Most obviously it offers a direct benifit to commerce of directly paying money. Money spent on manned space flight doesn't disappear into the eather, it is spent on people and companies who benifit fiscally.
2) The ability to launch, recapture, return, and/or repair objects in space (anything from a communications satillite, to a millitary one, to a weather satilitte, to a spaceborn telescope). (companies pay for these services)
3) The ability to perform experiments in micro-gravity which require human intervention. (companies and government agencies pay for these services and can earn money from the produce of the resulting knowledge)
4) Commercially viable spin-off technologies like kidney dialysis machines, fetal heart monitors, and programmable heart pacemakers.
5) It looks poised to offer high-speed business travel for commercial and recreational use.
6) Space tourism.
Given the significant resources spend for NASA, is this monies better off spent elsewhere or is this spent responsibly?
Can you help me understand "signifigant" here. I believe NASA's total budget is around $14B (manned and unmanned combined), out of a national budget of more than $1500B... it's about 1%.
I would think this rather obvious: using a black-berry to receive emails when you are out in the field during your business day is enabling remoteness, while using it to return emails at dinner is removing the work/home distinction.
I don't generally see a black-berry as offering a distinct advantage over a cellphone with text messaging in the case of those "get everyone on the phone, the server is down" emergencies... and if you are doing routine emails during your off-hours then they are not off-hours.
Actually, no. Though the sun will swell in 4 billion years, perhaps enough the reach Earth's current orbit; the Earth will have an average oribt of 1.7AU by then (caused by the reduced pull of a sun with lower mass) and be well outside the Sun's expansion.
The article touches on but, in my opinion, doesn't do justice to a well documentet trait of human nature: That how appealing we find a representation (robot, image, etc) lives on a bell curve. Something that has some resembelance to, say, a dog; we will connect with. When it moves from "dog-ish" to looking like a plastic-dog-zombie, it grosses us out.
As long as we are seeing the robot and finding similarities with the dog, it's appealing for the resembelances. When the reality gets close enough that we are seeing the dog and finding the robot, then it's freaky.
The answer is simple, and hardly does anything to stop adoption of robots... give them faces, but not ones that look like zombie-people. I think the movie I-Robot did a really good job of creating a robotic design that had all the traits that would cause us to view it as a peer, while keeping out that "freaky" effect of the rubber mask.
BTW: We see the same thing in rendered people. When we move from "realistic but obviously a CGI" to "looks not-quite-real" we cease to find them appealing (they also stop feeling generic).
There's also a place for distinctly non-human robots. While I do agree that the telepresence robot likely should have been taller and had more manipulation ability... I see no reason that the roomba should have been 4ft and worked a vacuum with its hands... that's just adding unneccessairy size and complexity to an efficient little robot.
...unless you change weight groups before dying.
Which makes me wonder. Given that we tend to loose weight in our old age, is the number off-put by people dying simply of old age being not-fat?
Really. Look at the 70-year-old population and tell me they are, on average, as heavy as the 40-year-old population.
I would imagine that it's actually something more serious, like an inappropriate work relationship (still thinking it's not something they would fire you for, at the CIO level)
Recall though that Melindia Gates was an employee of Bill Gates.
It would have to be *very* inappropriate.
You beat me to it... though in defense of Congress: the current congress has not been a supporter of warrantless wiretaps.
Still, we might want to look at that proverbial log in our eye.
I think that online contacts would be a big boon for me personally. I don't have a particularly sophisticaed cell-phone, and while it's great to have my contacts at home, I'd like to be able to access them while travelling.
OTOH, between security breeches and corporate data-mining (Google wouldn't do this if they didn't think they made money off it), I'm hesitent to put so much information in one online location that everyone knows about.
So I'm excited, but apprehensive... but not as much of either as I am over the medical directory.
We do suffer, indeed people die, from an inability to rapidly and accuragtely get complete medical information on someone. The basic idea of a secure database of medical history is, in my opinion, quite sound.
The problems are security and abuse. The instances of hacking of companies like Microsoft and Googe are rife. Certainly, our money is online and I won't say that Citigroup or TeleCheck are immune to hacking either; but they do seem to have a better record.
There is, correctly, a concern of MS finding ways to mine this information that it considered legal and disrupting privacy.
I won't go as far as to condemn a program I've never seen the particulars of; but I am very wary of it.
Let me ask you developers who are kernel guys a question: When you contributed code to the kernel, was it your intent that it be used against Red Hat?
I know it's a small piece of a bigger article: but since when does it matter what someone who submitted something to GPL intended their code to be used for. The licese is explicitly and intentionally designed to allow open-source code to be used for any purpose by anyone, as long as it's credited and open-source.
I'm sure there's someone out there who wrote code who thinks cell-phones cause cancer and dislikes his LINUX code running on a cell; or someone who'se pissed about millitary research done on LINUX clusters, or most anything else.
It's a really baseless argument intended to appeal more to emotion than reason; and I have to say that I'm prone to dismissing the author based on just such an example.
My apologies if this has already been suggested, but you did mention satilite as unavailable because you live on the north-facing side of a mountain... have you considered using a microwave transmitter to connect to a satillite reciever on another point on the mountain that can reach a satallite? I'd imagine that you could use something similar to get down to an area with broadband if such an area is within a few miles.
Perhaps even a point-to-point wireless with the hospital itself?
I mean, come on "less lethal than beating deaths" well, they would be wouldn't they? If you really know that chokeholds have a far higher higher fatality rate than taser usage, I'd be impressed. You really seem to think that tasers are an appropriate method of coercing a non-violent individual. I suspect you'll never be dissuaded of that.
In 5000 taserings by the county of LosAngeles, there was only one taser-related death (http://www.keme.co.uk/~mack/Electronic.htm) which was a man with a severely debilitated heart who had OD'd on PCP.
There were two deaths from batons, and one from a choke-hold. This is especially interesting in considering how much more often tasers are used than choke holds these days.
I was responding to what the OP said. But if you want to go down that path, since when is application of potentially lethal force an acceptable response when the subject is unarmed and down on the ground?
OK. "Since the beginning of police organizations".
Simply taking someone to the ground in the first place is "potentially lethal force". People have died of injury, exacustion, respitory failure, cardiac failure, and any number of other health problems related to being pinned on the ground.
Also: How long would you like them to sit there struggling with him? Twenty minutes? An hour? What would you do with the increasingly agitated crowd, and the fact tha tthey are continuing to cause a disruption to the meeting in general.
There is no police agency that will simply fight indefinately with a struggling perpitrator, nor should they; and there is no way to control the actions of a resisting person which is not "potentially lethal".
The tazer is a relatively safe weapon, certainly far safer than the batons which it replcaes. I've been tazed, as has any poclie officer in Florida who wields a tazer. Not all uses are justified, but this one appears to be.
Your statement is completely and demonstrably false. Campus police are sworn law-enforcement officers working for the State of Florida (http://police.ucf.edu/)
And here we have the root of your problem - you don't like what he had to say, and you think the police the are the ones who should punish him for it. It's hard to imagine a more un-American set of values than that.
And the root of yours is ignoring the fact that he physically resisted arrest for several minutes and was tazered because of his unlawful resistance.
It had nothing to do with what he said at the podium.
Why were the university police, who were in attendance, the ones who removed a student remaining at the podium after his time had expired?
I'm confused as to who you thing should have removed him if not the police?
The police are, in fact, campus security (it's the campus police department).
Because, when being led from the podium he physically attempted to overpower the police and escape back towads the podium. Once on the ground, he can be seen struggling against police there as well.
You are propigating a false assertion. He was not tazed for anything he said or did while at the mike.
Slashdot Mirror
It's scary just how many different things out there seem waiting to kill you; from asteroids to stellar explosions to, now, death-star black-holes.
On the other hand: I'd imagine it's terribly useful to see what a galaxy does to such an emission. It's got to tell us a lot about things like the real density of the glactic body, and to what extent, if any, a galaxy clears space around it.
Although some of the suggestions I've read on slashdot seem to have missed the article addressing them; the price in question seems high.
How big is a digital master with a lossless compression? Would 40 Terrabytes do it?
To pick a technology at random: That would be 100 LTO3 tapes... 200 to have a duplicate of each tape.
That would be $16,000 to archive whatever you could fit on 40 Terrabytes.
According to Verbatim, an LTO3 tape has a storage life of 30 years. Assuming we halve that, we have just over $1000 per year in physical storage devices. We also have a days work for one individual for 15-years of storage (let's tack on another $1000 in inscidentals).
In 15 years you'll have to fire up the LTO3 you kept in storage and retrieve them to transfer them to whatever you are using then, but I doubt the costs will go up.
This is one of a couple of things that has confused me in the layman's explanations. If we look farther back in time (a far away supernova) we see it moving faster than something more recently ("nearer the center"). So since farther back in time the thing was moving faster, we conclude what seems to be the exact opposite... that things are moving faster now.
Sorry to ask a basic question, but how does something in the past moving faster than something nearer the present mean that in the past things moved slower? What am I missing?
10x the weight.
1/20th the battery life.
No cell-net connectivity
signifigantly larger closed
Immensely larger open
Much slower to come on / off
can't really be used with one hand
The list goes on. I love my laptop, but would never consider it as a book replacement. An E-Book reader is pretty much there.
Was actually the first thing that came to mind, but I couldn't remember the spellings :).
There are some compelling other stories alluded to in the Epologue of the Hobbit as well, and (of course) what the rest of Middle-Earth was doing during the War of the Ring (alluded to repeatedly, including in Gimli's reason for coming to Rivendell). Also, there's the end of the second age (with the defeat of Sauron by Isuldur).
I can think of a great deal of fertile fodder (is that a mixed metaphor) for stories.
Bilbo, Gandalf, Elrond and Gollum were alive and in The Hobbit. Gandalf, Elrond, and Gollum could easily be done by the same actors.
Gimli was, I believe, alive at the time and may have arrived as a young dwarf with the forces from the Iron Hills at the battle of three armies. Aragorn was alive and living in Rivendell as was Arwen. Legolas was alive and living (presumably) in Mirkwood with his father... pretty much all of them could make cameos... with Gimli being the least likely.
I'd like to see individual stories from the Silmarillion fleshed out into full movies / movie-series. Jackson et.al. have already shown a willingness to rewrite work, why not forge new ground from old ideas? The story of Morgoth, etc?
Can anybody explain the commercial benefit to space travel? ... I assume by "space travel" you mean "manned space flight"
1) Most obviously it offers a direct benifit to commerce of directly paying money. Money spent on manned space flight doesn't disappear into the eather, it is spent on people and companies who benifit fiscally.
2) The ability to launch, recapture, return, and/or repair objects in space (anything from a communications satillite, to a millitary one, to a weather satilitte, to a spaceborn telescope). (companies pay for these services)
3) The ability to perform experiments in micro-gravity which require human intervention. (companies and government agencies pay for these services and can earn money from the produce of the resulting knowledge)
4) Commercially viable spin-off technologies like kidney dialysis machines, fetal heart monitors, and programmable heart pacemakers.
5) It looks poised to offer high-speed business travel for commercial and recreational use.
6) Space tourism.
Given the significant resources spend for NASA, is this monies better off spent elsewhere or is this spent responsibly?
Can you help me understand "signifigant" here. I believe NASA's total budget is around $14B (manned and unmanned combined), out of a national budget of more than $1500B... it's about 1%.
There's copyright protection on an product designed for illegal use? Isn't that like complaining that someone stole your cocaine?
I would think this rather obvious: using a black-berry to receive emails when you are out in the field during your business day is enabling remoteness, while using it to return emails at dinner is removing the work/home distinction. I don't generally see a black-berry as offering a distinct advantage over a cellphone with text messaging in the case of those "get everyone on the phone, the server is down" emergencies... and if you are doing routine emails during your off-hours then they are not off-hours.
Actually, no. Though the sun will swell in 4 billion years, perhaps enough the reach Earth's current orbit; the Earth will have an average oribt of 1.7AU by then (caused by the reduced pull of a sun with lower mass) and be well outside the Sun's expansion.
The article touches on but, in my opinion, doesn't do justice to a well documentet trait of human nature: That how appealing we find a representation (robot, image, etc) lives on a bell curve. Something that has some resembelance to, say, a dog; we will connect with. When it moves from "dog-ish" to looking like a plastic-dog-zombie, it grosses us out. As long as we are seeing the robot and finding similarities with the dog, it's appealing for the resembelances. When the reality gets close enough that we are seeing the dog and finding the robot, then it's freaky. The answer is simple, and hardly does anything to stop adoption of robots... give them faces, but not ones that look like zombie-people. I think the movie I-Robot did a really good job of creating a robotic design that had all the traits that would cause us to view it as a peer, while keeping out that "freaky" effect of the rubber mask. BTW: We see the same thing in rendered people. When we move from "realistic but obviously a CGI" to "looks not-quite-real" we cease to find them appealing (they also stop feeling generic). There's also a place for distinctly non-human robots. While I do agree that the telepresence robot likely should have been taller and had more manipulation ability... I see no reason that the roomba should have been 4ft and worked a vacuum with its hands... that's just adding unneccessairy size and complexity to an efficient little robot.
...unless you change weight groups before dying. Which makes me wonder. Given that we tend to loose weight in our old age, is the number off-put by people dying simply of old age being not-fat? Really. Look at the 70-year-old population and tell me they are, on average, as heavy as the 40-year-old population.
You beat me to it... though in defense of Congress: the current congress has not been a supporter of warrantless wiretaps. Still, we might want to look at that proverbial log in our eye.
I think that online contacts would be a big boon for me personally. I don't have a particularly sophisticaed cell-phone, and while it's great to have my contacts at home, I'd like to be able to access them while travelling. OTOH, between security breeches and corporate data-mining (Google wouldn't do this if they didn't think they made money off it), I'm hesitent to put so much information in one online location that everyone knows about. So I'm excited, but apprehensive... but not as much of either as I am over the medical directory.
We do suffer, indeed people die, from an inability to rapidly and accuragtely get complete medical information on someone. The basic idea of a secure database of medical history is, in my opinion, quite sound. The problems are security and abuse. The instances of hacking of companies like Microsoft and Googe are rife. Certainly, our money is online and I won't say that Citigroup or TeleCheck are immune to hacking either; but they do seem to have a better record. There is, correctly, a concern of MS finding ways to mine this information that it considered legal and disrupting privacy. I won't go as far as to condemn a program I've never seen the particulars of; but I am very wary of it.
My apologies if this has already been suggested, but you did mention satilite as unavailable because you live on the north-facing side of a mountain... have you considered using a microwave transmitter to connect to a satillite reciever on another point on the mountain that can reach a satallite? I'd imagine that you could use something similar to get down to an area with broadband if such an area is within a few miles. Perhaps even a point-to-point wireless with the hospital itself?
Your statement is completely and demonstrably false. Campus police are sworn law-enforcement officers working for the State of Florida (http://police.ucf.edu/)
Why were the university police, who were in attendance, the ones who removed a student remaining at the podium after his time had expired? I'm confused as to who you thing should have removed him if not the police? The police are, in fact, campus security (it's the campus police department).
Because, when being led from the podium he physically attempted to overpower the police and escape back towads the podium. Once on the ground, he can be seen struggling against police there as well. You are propigating a false assertion. He was not tazed for anything he said or did while at the mike.