I'm not a geologist, but don't things on this scale happen very slowly? You wouldn't go to sleep one night with your compass pointing north and suddenly have it point south when you woke up. This would happen gradually over hundreds or thousands of years. Although this is geologically overnight, the magnetic pole wouldn't move significantly during a person's, or turtle's, lifetime.
Having said that, I doubt even the turtles that rely on the field for navigation would notice. They would adapt to sense the less powerful field over time or they would loose the need to use it. Navigation is done by point of reference. And since the navigational lines of force are moving so slowly, the turtles wouldn't care. The North Pole being 200 miles from where it was for the turtle's great grandparents really doesn't matter to today's turtle. He just wants to get back to where he started from a year or so ago. The shift should be slow enough for him to do this.
The reduced magnetic field seems to be much more of a concern. But, again, we will adapt much like the turtles will. But instead of adapting our biology, we'll adapt our technology. It's not that we can't make a satellite or power grid that can handle solar wind and storms; it's just that we haven't done it. Why not? We haven't needed to. Think of the reduced magnetic field as job security.
Cassini on DirecTV...
on
Saturn Hailstorm
·
· Score: 2, Informative
For all you Cassini watchers who own DirecTV. They recently added NASA TV to their free lineup for total choice subscribers. I noticed it about a day after the Venus transit last month.
It has been great for keeping up with the Cassini stuff though. I had it on during the entire SOI burn. It beats the crap out of a/.ed webcast.
I wish this story went into more details into the algorithms used. Saying stuff like "we take tons of data and out comes a 3D image" is great, but what does the 3D image actually represent? What are the dimensions being graphed?
My company manages a very large portfolio of auto loans. I'd like to know more details as to what they are actually doing so that I can judge whether we can use this technology or one like it to predict trends in our consumer base, or to develop better scoring models.
The dang thing was destined to burn up in the atmosphere anyway, so why waste Titanium on it. It just needed to hold together long enough to get the capsule on its way to the moon.
How come no one has brought up the truly sad thing about these 3 Saturn Vs? The fact that we had already paid for and constructed 3 complete Saturn Vs and we never launched them! NASA saved the manpower and fuel costs only by canceling Apollo 18, 19 and 20. Can you imagine what we would have learned on those last couple of missions? To quote Jack Schmidt, the only actual scientist to go to the moon, "...we were just starting to get good at it."
The Tablet PC hardware spec requires that any "pure slate" tablet have a "CTRL+ALT+DEL" button. XP requires you to enter that combination, as I'm sure you know, to enter it's "secure" mode for login switching, etc.
I wonder if the scholars of the time of Gutenberg had a similar view. "I prefer a good 'ol hand copied book, re-copied and re-copied over the centuries by monks, as they should be. Forget all this mass produced, printed material. Give me penmanship any day over movable type."
It's almost a religious experience to read a book printed 200+ years ago in it's original binding of lambskin and parchment.
Funny you should say that. Before the time of Gutenberg, it was a religious experience to read a book. If you were reading a book, the Church most likely produced it. The printing press allowed non Church sanctioned ideas to make it into print. They could even be mass produced.
The Internet and digital text allows for an even more open model. In order for my ideas to be archived in the form of a book, I must first convince a publisher that my book has merit (read, will sell). With the Internet, no such limitation exists. Anyone who can create text can publish that text.
Books are not the content, books are the storage and retrieval device. The words and images printed on the pages of the books are the important part. Gutenberg knew this. He saw that by creating a way to copy these words and images quickly and cheaply, he could get the message to more and more people. This is all putting books online will do. It will enable people to utilize the content of a book in more ways than simply to sit and read it.
Herr Librarian needs to understand that making books available online doesn't lock the user in to reading them online. Years ago a device called a printer was invented that solves this problem (not to mention handheld computers, etc.). Putting a book online gives a reader enhanced access to the book without the long drive to Washington.
There are other benefits to digitizing these books as well. Can you imagine the Star Trek like database the Internet would become if every printed word were searchable from AltaVista.com! Beats the crap out of the dewey decimal system if you ask me.
Here is an article from Sky and Telescope magazine that is a little less technical than the CRAF report I posted earlier. It gives a good introduction into the problems radio astromomer's face(d) with the Iridium system.
I for one say CONTINUE! at least until the death of these frequency leaking noise makers!
Here is a report from the The Committee on Radio Astronomy Frequencies (CRAF) of the European Science Foundation (ESF). It has more details on the interference with Radio Astronomy (particulary the work of the VLA and the VLBA (Very Large Baseline Array).
I visited the VLA last year, and was saddened to hear that Iridium seem to care so little about the outright damage they were doing to the scientific observations of these hard working scientists. This report speaks of limiting their observations to low traffic hours, giving them only about 4 hours a day! This is terrible. Radio astronomy doesn't require darkness like visual astronomy, so under normal conditions, observations can take place 24x7.
So, if it were up to me, I'd continue the boycott.
First off, I love that O'Reilly is making their books available in a soft copy format. I even love that they present these texts in HTML. But, I don't think HTML is the best format for storing the content of the e-text. I agree with a previous post by harmonica, XML is a much better choice long term.
With XML, you get all the formatting options of HTML, with the addition of a CSS or XSL stylesheet, but since you are keeping the data separate from the presentation, you open the door for many different types of presentation. XSL already gives you the power to easily transform XML documents on either the server or client into HTML (and other formats as well). And the XML is machine readable, so converting the text to a another format for something like the palm pilot is much easier for an XML document vs. an HTML document. And it also allows you to easily incorporate the content of the document into other more complicated applications without having to worry about stripping out all that formatting HTML.
Here is an example of how this might be useful. Imagine a research tool that allows you to do full text searches of e-texts. Since the XML stores the e-text in a structured way, the search could be limited easily to only searching specific chapters, or only searching captions of figures, etc. This just scratches the surface of the potential a set of standard DTDs or Schemas for XML e-text could do for e-publishing.
I've not investgated this much, but I'm sure that there probably are already standardized DTDs and Schemas for specific types of e-texts. DocBook comes to mind. DocBook allows you to use SGML or XML to markup technical documentation for later transformation to formats like HTML, InfoText, PS, etc.. People like the Linux Document Project and even Sun Microsystems have seen the value in this type of system. It seems to translate very well into the realm of e-books. I can't think of any reason not to embrace it.
In Frank G. Soltis' book Inside the AS/400, he mentions that the low level hardware interface for the AS/400 was designed and implemented in C++. The OO nature of the OS made C++ the best choice for abstracting the hardware.
The AS/400 is many things, but slow isn't one of them. This tells me that high performance, system level programming is indeed possible with C++. I suppose it is easier when you are designing the hardware and software, and you can build a closed system. But still, I agree with Bjarne. C++ can be used at the system level even in an open system, as long as programmers are mindful of what they are doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of that, Firefly re-runs start on SciFi next week at 7pm EDT adding to the already stellar lineup.
?
So this is why Apple made the iPod battery non-replaceable.
I didn't see a response to the question: "How long does the copyright last?"
Does anyone know?
I'm not a geologist, but don't things on this scale happen very slowly? You wouldn't go to sleep one night with your compass pointing north and suddenly have it point south when you woke up. This would happen gradually over hundreds or thousands of years. Although this is geologically overnight, the magnetic pole wouldn't move significantly during a person's, or turtle's, lifetime.
Having said that, I doubt even the turtles that rely on the field for navigation would notice. They would adapt to sense the less powerful field over time or they would loose the need to use it. Navigation is done by point of reference. And since the navigational lines of force are moving so slowly, the turtles wouldn't care. The North Pole being 200 miles from where it was for the turtle's great grandparents really doesn't matter to today's turtle. He just wants to get back to where he started from a year or so ago. The shift should be slow enough for him to do this.
The reduced magnetic field seems to be much more of a concern. But, again, we will adapt much like the turtles will. But instead of adapting our biology, we'll adapt our technology. It's not that we can't make a satellite or power grid that can handle solar wind and storms; it's just that we haven't done it. Why not? We haven't needed to. Think of the reduced magnetic field as job security.
For all you Cassini watchers who own DirecTV. They recently added NASA TV to their free lineup for total choice subscribers. I noticed it about a day after the Venus transit last month.
/.ed webcast.
It has been great for keeping up with the Cassini stuff though. I had it on during the entire SOI burn. It beats the crap out of a
I wish this story went into more details into the algorithms used. Saying stuff like "we take tons of data and out comes a 3D image" is great, but what does the 3D image actually represent? What are the dimensions being graphed?
My company manages a very large portfolio of auto loans. I'd like to know more details as to what they are actually doing so that I can judge whether we can use this technology or one like it to predict trends in our consumer base, or to develop better scoring models.
The dang thing was destined to burn up in the atmosphere anyway, so why waste Titanium on it. It just needed to hold together long enough to get the capsule on its way to the moon.
How come no one has brought up the truly sad thing about these 3 Saturn Vs? The fact that we had already paid for and constructed 3 complete Saturn Vs and we never launched them! NASA saved the manpower and fuel costs only by canceling Apollo 18, 19 and 20. Can you imagine what we would have learned on those last couple of missions? To quote Jack Schmidt, the only actual scientist to go to the moon, "...we were just starting to get good at it."
Just another reason to hate Richard Nixon.
The Tablet PC hardware spec requires that any "pure slate" tablet have a "CTRL+ALT+DEL" button. XP requires you to enter that combination, as I'm sure you know, to enter it's "secure" mode for login switching, etc.
--Lar
It's almost a religious experience to read a book printed 200+ years ago in it's original binding of lambskin and parchment.
Funny you should say that. Before the time of Gutenberg, it was a religious experience to read a book. If you were reading a book, the Church most likely produced it. The printing press allowed non Church sanctioned ideas to make it into print. They could even be mass produced.
The Internet and digital text allows for an even more open model. In order for my ideas to be archived in the form of a book, I must first convince a publisher that my book has merit (read, will sell). With the Internet, no such limitation exists. Anyone who can create text can publish that text.
Books are not the content, books are the storage and retrieval device. The words and images printed on the pages of the books are the important part. Gutenberg knew this. He saw that by creating a way to copy these words and images quickly and cheaply, he could get the message to more and more people. This is all putting books online will do. It will enable people to utilize the content of a book in more ways than simply to sit and read it.
?
There are other benefits to digitizing these books as well. Can you imagine the Star Trek like database the Internet would become if every printed word were searchable from AltaVista.com! Beats the crap out of the dewey decimal system if you ask me.
?
?
Here is a report from the The Committee on Radio Astronomy Frequencies (CRAF) of the European Science Foundation (ESF). It has more details on the interference with Radio Astronomy (particulary the work of the VLA and the VLBA (Very Large Baseline Array).
I visited the VLA last year, and was saddened to hear that Iridium seem to care so little about the outright damage they were doing to the scientific observations of these hard working scientists. This report speaks of limiting their observations to low traffic hours, giving them only about 4 hours a day! This is terrible. Radio astronomy doesn't require darkness like visual astronomy, so under normal conditions, observations can take place 24x7.
So, if it were up to me, I'd continue the boycott.
?
With XML, you get all the formatting options of HTML, with the addition of a CSS or XSL stylesheet, but since you are keeping the data separate from the presentation, you open the door for many different types of presentation. XSL already gives you the power to easily transform XML documents on either the server or client into HTML (and other formats as well). And the XML is machine readable, so converting the text to a another format for something like the palm pilot is much easier for an XML document vs. an HTML document. And it also allows you to easily incorporate the content of the document into other more complicated applications without having to worry about stripping out all that formatting HTML.
Here is an example of how this might be useful. Imagine a research tool that allows you to do full text searches of e-texts. Since the XML stores the e-text in a structured way, the search could be limited easily to only searching specific chapters, or only searching captions of figures, etc. This just scratches the surface of the potential a set of standard DTDs or Schemas for XML e-text could do for e-publishing.
I've not investgated this much, but I'm sure that there probably are already standardized DTDs and Schemas for specific types of e-texts. DocBook comes to mind. DocBook allows you to use SGML or XML to markup technical documentation for later transformation to formats like HTML, InfoText, PS, etc.. People like the Linux Document Project and even Sun Microsystems have seen the value in this type of system. It seems to translate very well into the realm of e-books. I can't think of any reason not to embrace it.
?
The AS/400 is many things, but slow isn't one of them. This tells me that high performance, system level programming is indeed possible with C++. I suppose it is easier when you are designing the hardware and software, and you can build a closed system. But still, I agree with Bjarne. C++ can be used at the system level even in an open system, as long as programmers are mindful of what they are doing.
?