I don't particularly WANT credit, but it is widely used as a metric of trust, not just by banks, but by an increasing number of corporations and businesses.
One personal example: I couldn't get a mobile phone because I had NO credit record - they assume NO credit == BAD credit.
My experiences have been the same here in Arizona. I moved from Britain where I had a credit card Visa and a few thousand pound limit (no debts) but nobody wanted to give me a card here in the US.
I'd be happy with no credit card at all, but I travel a lot in hire cars and they won't accept any other payment other than credit card.
Like szyzyg, I went from graduate student (on 5000 pounds/year) to a postdoc with 5 times the salary - and guess what? No credit record sir, sorry we can't do that for yer, sir. What a completely fscked up system.... I managed to get a card through the University and I am building credit on that, but what a major irritation. It's also prevented me from getting a mobile phone as they want a 1000 dollars down. Thank God they just introduced the concept of 'Pay as you Go' phones into Tucson...
Marcy and Butler have been knocking out the planets for a few years now, and as their observation baselines get longer, the signal to noise in their data gets better and so they can start to pull out more planets out of the data.
Planet formation theory is taking a real battering, though, as none of the theorists have predicted this kind of planetary distribution. This is of course, a Good Thing (tm) as then the theorists can ask for more money and jobs to get bigger computers to run simulations on.
Doppler techniques only get you the Jupiter size planets close in - to get more earth-sized planets requires different techniques.
In fact, my bet is that the next big discovery will be earth sized moons around the transiting planetary system HD 209458, as you can detect the presence of a moon by timing the exact moment of the beginning of the planets' eclipse of the parent star. It requires a lot of careful work, though...
I'm not sure if this was a troll or not, but I'll feed the little blighter anyway...
>I mean, when the model considers a star to be made from hydrogen, helium and "other stuff" how can you take it seriously?
You can take it extremely seriously. Stellar modelling codes do just fine for many types of stars by representing their constituents as hydrogen, helium, and 'all the other stuff', misnomered as 'metals'. An astronomer's Periodic Table looks very simple - H, He and Z, where Z represents all the heavier elements lumped together. Since most stars are virtually all H and He, the models do spit out good comparable stellar models.
>Whilst these discoveries are great for further illuminating what's out there, they yet again cast doubt on much of astrophysical "theories".
No, they don't. Before, planet forming theory was difficult because the ONLY data points were from the Solar System. Now we have more data, its back to the computers and models they go. An ounce of observation beats a ton of theory, but then isn't that the case for all science?
> We need to remember that as a subject, it's one of the shakiest scientific disciplines around.
Not unless you count biology, but then is that a science? *grin* Anyway, the practical classes in astronomy are absolute bastards to do... "Take 10^30 kg of Hygrogen, and allow to settle for 10^10 years. Write down your observations."
Matt (about to get lynched by a horde of angry biologists).
>What is Tuneprint?
>
>The first goal of the Tuneprint project is to develop an audio fingerprinting algorithm, that is
>to say, a computer program that can take a few seconds of music, calculate some kind of unique
>'fingerprint' of that sound
...snip...
Hmmm, haven't quite worked out the algorithm yet? A little bit like that old annoying Fermat's Last Theorem, isn't it?
"I'd show you the algorithm, but I haven't got space on my Web Server..."
... all you need is someone with a CD of the album to rip it and Napster it? Even if it was an 'ad only' release, then it defaults to the 'plugin will remove the ad' case.
I wrote my thesis in Word95 two years ago. Yes, I am a Linux user, but my thesis had over 200 figures that needed to be drawn, and I did not fancy the horror of LaTex with a poor version of xfig. Believe it or not, I think the Word drawing utilities are very good, and I needed the ability to modify and use a WYSINWYG (WYSI Nearly WYG) editor. I was in a hurry, I was weak, the dog ate my homework, etc.
But, oh boy, have I paid for my mistake - I tried recently to get a couple of figures out using Word 2000 and all the inserted images and painstaking drawings are gone - with a lot of fuss I have PDF'ed it all in 97 and I have the originally printed Postscript files still to hand, but I now wish I had a time machine so I could go back and slap Mr Gates around the face a few times.
The trouble is, there *is* no broad cross-platform alternative - StarOffice doesn't cut it at the moment and I'd be terrified to commit to writing a big thesis-type document with it. I don't want my work beta-testing a word processor. At the moment it seems that plain text or maybe HTML is the only way to ensure your text and graphical content gets through.
Just to add to an earlier comment... read Stephen Baxter's "Timelike Infinity" - this is hard SF that covers the issues with this type of wormhole and how you can use them as time machines.
His wormholes also need negative energy density to prop them open by initially you 'threading' a quantum tunnel and expanding it up to macro size. You then can cart off one end of the hole on a relativistic trip, bring it back to it's original twin and presto! your own time machine. One porblem though is that you can never travel back to a point before the holes were threaded up... AFAIK this was Hawking's explanation as to why we weren't flooded with tourists from the future yet....
You can see the point of some, but....
on
Dumb Laws
·
· Score: 1
... I would dearly love to know the stroy behind: 'Donkeys are not allowed to sleep in bathtubs'.
Is there a danger that companies will pull out of the video DVD market now they are frightened of ripping? Although the DVD market is strong here in America, I know that in Britain it is still taking off, and I could imagine big companies panicking and cutting out of the British Video DVD market until another 'secure' video scheme comes along.
Even though millions of dollars have been invested in DVD, I wouldn't be too surprised at seeing companies cutting their losses...
To be honest, I'd rather have the government keep all my buying habits and personal details rather than ten or twenty private companies who will sell my personal info to the highest bidder.
Privacy is virtually non-existent anyway - the amount of computer related junk mail I receive shows that they know my demographics pretty well...
You're right - there could be a few planets further out in the system that have yet to be detected exerting a wobble on the parent star. But multiple planet systems have already been found - Upsilon Andromedae has three planets going around it (found by Marcy and Butler, I think...) in April this year.
The technique is good for very close in, big planets, but not sensitive enough for Eath-mass planets at Earth-Sun type distances. But there are other techniques in the pipeline, such as nulling interferometry...
The Marcy and Butler spectrograph used iodine absorption cells to help calibrate the Doppler spectra they took of the parent stars. They can get down to about 3 meters/second accuracy, compared to about 50-100 meters/s with conventional techniques.
It turned out that 3m/s is good enough to start seeing the Doppler wobbles induced by the Jovian planets going around the parent stars. It's then a matter of patiently looking at lots of stars and hoping you'll strike lucky....
Slashdot Mirror
*looks rueful* Don't I just know it...
I don't particularly WANT credit, but it is widely used as a metric of trust, not just by banks, but by an increasing number of corporations and businesses.
One personal example: I couldn't get a mobile phone because I had NO credit record - they assume NO credit == BAD credit.
My experiences have been the same here in Arizona. I moved from Britain where I had a credit card Visa and a few thousand pound limit (no debts) but nobody wanted to give me a card here in the US.
I'd be happy with no credit card at all, but I travel a lot in hire cars and they won't accept any other payment other than credit card.
Like szyzyg, I went from graduate student (on 5000 pounds/year) to a postdoc with 5 times the salary - and guess what? No credit record sir, sorry we can't do that for yer, sir. What a completely fscked up system.... I managed to get a card through the University and I am building credit on that, but what a major irritation. It's also prevented me from getting a mobile phone as they want a 1000 dollars down. Thank God they just introduced the concept of 'Pay as you Go' phones into Tucson...
Ah well. At least the weather's nice.
Marcy and Butler have been knocking out the planets for a few years now, and as their observation baselines get longer, the signal to noise in their data gets better and so they can start to pull out more planets out of the data.
Planet formation theory is taking a real battering, though, as none of the theorists have predicted this kind of planetary distribution. This is of course, a Good Thing (tm) as then the theorists can ask for more money and jobs to get bigger computers to run simulations on.
Doppler techniques only get you the Jupiter size planets close in - to get more earth-sized planets requires different techniques.
In fact, my bet is that the next big discovery will be earth sized moons around the transiting planetary system HD 209458, as you can detect the presence of a moon by timing the exact moment of the beginning of the planets' eclipse of the parent star. It requires a lot of careful work, though...
I'm not sure if this was a troll or not, but I'll feed the little blighter anyway...
>I mean, when the model considers a star to be made from hydrogen, helium and "other stuff" how can you take it seriously?
You can take it extremely seriously. Stellar modelling codes do just fine for many types of stars by representing their constituents as hydrogen, helium, and 'all the other stuff', misnomered as 'metals'. An astronomer's Periodic Table looks very simple - H, He and Z, where Z represents all the heavier elements lumped together. Since most stars are virtually all H and He, the models do spit out good comparable stellar models.
>Whilst these discoveries are great for further illuminating what's out there, they yet again cast doubt on much of astrophysical "theories".
No, they don't. Before, planet forming theory was difficult because the ONLY data points were from the Solar System. Now we have more data, its back to the computers and models they go. An ounce of observation beats a ton of theory, but then isn't that the case for all science?
> We need to remember that as a subject, it's one of the shakiest scientific disciplines around.
Not unless you count biology, but then is that a science? *grin* Anyway, the practical classes in astronomy are absolute bastards to do... "Take 10^30 kg of Hygrogen, and allow to settle for 10^10 years. Write down your observations."
Matt (about to get lynched by a horde of angry biologists).
IMHO you should keep:
1) OLGA (+ lyrics)
2) IMDB
3) Mathworld
Does anyone know if IMDB would fall prey to a similiar lawsuit?
Matt
So they're changing it to....
"Sue differently."
From the FAQ:
>What is Tuneprint?
>
>The first goal of the Tuneprint project is to develop an audio fingerprinting algorithm, that is
>to say, a computer program that can take a few seconds of music, calculate some kind of unique
>'fingerprint' of that sound
...snip...
Hmmm, haven't quite worked out the algorithm yet? A little bit like that old annoying Fermat's Last Theorem, isn't it?
"I'd show you the algorithm, but I haven't got space on my Web Server..."
Back to sleep...zzzzz
... all you need is someone with a CD of the album
to rip it and Napster it? Even if it was an 'ad only' release, then it defaults to the 'plugin will remove the ad' case.
Shurely shome mistake?
A sob story:
I wrote my thesis in Word95 two years ago. Yes, I am a Linux user, but my thesis had over 200 figures that needed to be drawn, and I did not fancy the horror of LaTex with a poor version of xfig. Believe it or not, I think the Word drawing utilities are very good, and I needed the ability to modify and use a WYSINWYG (WYSI Nearly WYG) editor. I was in a hurry, I was weak, the dog ate my homework, etc.
But, oh boy, have I paid for my mistake - I tried recently to get a couple of figures out using Word 2000 and all the inserted images and painstaking drawings are gone - with a lot of fuss I have PDF'ed it all in 97 and I have the originally printed Postscript files still to hand, but I now wish I had a time machine so I could go back and slap Mr Gates around the face a few times.
The trouble is, there *is* no broad cross-platform alternative - StarOffice doesn't cut it at the moment and I'd be terrified to commit to writing a big thesis-type document with it. I don't want my work beta-testing a word processor.
At the moment it seems that plain text or maybe HTML is the only way to ensure your text and graphical content gets through.
Just to add to an earlier comment... read Stephen Baxter's "Timelike Infinity" - this is hard SF that covers the issues with this type of wormhole and how you can use them as time machines.
His wormholes also need negative energy density to prop them open by initially you 'threading' a quantum tunnel and expanding it up to macro size. You then can cart off one end of the hole on a relativistic trip, bring it back to it's original twin and presto! your own time machine. One porblem though is that you can never travel back to a point before the holes were threaded up... AFAIK this was Hawking's explanation as to why we weren't flooded with tourists from the future yet....
... I would dearly love to know the stroy behind:
'Donkeys are not allowed to sleep in bathtubs'.
The mind boggles...
More of a question than a comment:
Is there a danger that companies will pull out of the video DVD market now they are frightened of ripping? Although the DVD market is strong here in America, I know that in Britain it is still taking off, and I could imagine big companies panicking and cutting out of the British Video DVD market until another 'secure' video scheme comes along.
Even though millions of dollars have been invested in DVD, I wouldn't be too surprised at seeing companies cutting their losses...
Any thoughts on this, or am I being too paranoid?
To be honest, I'd rather have the government keep all my buying habits and personal details rather than ten or twenty private companies who will sell my personal info to the highest bidder.
Privacy is virtually non-existent anyway - the amount of computer related junk mail I receive shows that they know my demographics pretty well...
You're right - there could be a few planets further out in the system that have yet to be detected exerting a wobble on the parent star. But multiple planet systems have already been found - Upsilon Andromedae has three planets going around it (found by Marcy and Butler, I think...) in April this year.
The technique is good for very close in, big planets, but not sensitive enough for Eath-mass planets at Earth-Sun type distances. But there are other techniques in the pipeline, such as nulling interferometry...
The Marcy and Butler spectrograph used iodine absorption cells to help calibrate the Doppler
spectra they took of the parent stars. They can get down to about 3 meters/second accuracy, compared to about 50-100 meters/s with conventional techniques.
It turned out that 3m/s is good enough to start seeing the Doppler wobbles induced by the Jovian planets going around the parent stars. It's then a matter of patiently looking at lots of stars and hoping you'll strike lucky....