How many laptops weigh less than a pound and a half yet deliver 10 hours of battery life? How many laptops for 500 dollars have capacitive multi-touch screens? How many laptops at that price have zero moving parts to break? How many laptops are an "always on" device that will continue to get your email and notifications and perform tasks even when the unit is on "standby"? Tablets in this class have built-in accelerometers and GPS, front and rear cameras, etc. And on and on.
Man, that sounds awesome! Can I get one with a keyboard?
Would these ultra cool brown dwarves serve in putting more fruit to dark matter theories?
Almost certainly not. Dark matter made up of brown dwarfs was searched for in the gravitational microlensing experiments like the MACHO project. They didn't find nearly enough to account for the dark matter.
I can't believe how racist slashdot has become. They may be ultra cool, but calling them brown is inciting hate. African American little people is the PC term.
Given that space is big, and we will never get to even the closest star within anyone's lifetime, meanwhile the Earth is going through an existential weather and economic crisis... exactly why does this science matter?
Ten thousand years ago, I am sure somebody was saying "Why waste time painting pictures of caribou when we need to be out hunting to feed our families?" Turns out representational art formed the original basis for written language, which stands as one of the seminal breakthroughs in human evolution. Nobody painting on a cave wall knew that at the time.
Five hundred years ago, I am sure somebody else was saying "We have the plague to contend with, wars, political chaos. Why should we waste money figuring out whether the planets orbit in circles or ellipses? What possible use is that?" Turns out understanding the structure of the universe (at the time, just the solar system) paved the way for Newton to formulate his laws of motion, which utterly revolutionized every aspect of human civilization and formed the foundation for our modern technological society. Nobody at the time could possibly have foreseen that.
Why fund basic research, or art, or music, or theater, or literature? Because it's what great civilizations do, and the moment they stop doing it is the moment they enter an inevitable phase of decline. Civilizations grow on their ideas, and nobody can say in advance which idea is going to be the one that pushes humanity forward into a new phase.
default on your debt and rebuild the economy from their.
The U.S. debt is currently about equal to its GDP, which is a cause for concern, but not a reason for default. I owe roughly as much on my house as I make in a year, and I am far from in a panic about my debt level.
Failing to raise the debt ceiling at this point is so stupid it boggles the mind. It's like trying to fix a nosebleed with a hammer.
NASA has, over time, become more and more dominated by the people who want to spend money on stuff, as opposed to the people who want to do stuff.
Perhaps true of the manned space program, but missions like the Webb are the real deal and have widespread support in the scientific community.
What's worse to me is that, if it is funded and launched, it will probably be late, and will die well before any replacement, thus causing huge gaps in our ability to observe from above the atmosphere.
I think that end-of-lifing of the Hubble ST is a major strategic blunder by NASA
HST was a wonderful instrument, but it is simply not capable of doing the science that needs doing next, for example constraining the properties of Dark Energy or exploring the end of the cosmic "dark ages" at redshifts of 5-10. And repairing HST was never cost-effective: the repair missions cost roughly as much as building a new telescope.
No one will openly say it, but the U.S. doesn't have the money for space projects anymore.
Bullshit. The U.S. isn't broke. We have suddenly decided that we don't want to pay for anything. All "we the people" want to do at this point is sit on our fat asses and bitch about how high our taxes are and how much gas costs. Neal Stephenson got it wrong: we don't even do software any more, just pizza delivery.
We could be, and ought to be, an historically great nation, busy building a new renaissance of science, technology, and art. Instead, we're turning ourselves into a third-world shithole, with our national wealth and heritage looted by robber barons. Thanks, Tea Party!
The Treasury is empty and we're $14 Trillion in the hole.
Which is about equal to the amount of wealth created in the U.S. every year. The treasury is empty because the American people are unwilling to apply a sufficient fraction of that wealth to paying for the operation of their own government. Remember the last time we had a surplus? It was under moderately higher tax rates than we have today, which we could easily reinstate. Anybody who claims to be serious about deficit reduction but refuses to consider tax increases (on everybody, not just the wealthy) is a liar and a charlatan.
Since we have no shortage of energy but we have a desperate shortage of funds in the Treasury, these types of projects should not be funded. Let a less bankrupt country fund them.
The U.S. isn't bankrupt. We're just unwilling to pay for anything. Big difference.
My understanding has been that, so far, it's a very high maintenance (albeit necessary) way of checking various existing theories in the mound of increasingly untested theoretical physics. IOW, it's more of an engineering feat than a scientific one. Or are unexpected observations being made leading to new physics?
Um. How are they supposed to be able to tell ahead of time when unexpected things will happen?
Blu-ray players connected to the Web can offer games, extra movie features, and additional bonus materials online that DVD players generally can't. And the latest Blu-ray players can handle 3D discs, something no DVD player can do.
I don't want any of that shit, especially if I have to pay extra for it. I just want to watch a movie.
this may or may not apply to academic hospitals, but the notion of a port being closed in a university is absurd.
Thanks very much for pointing this out amid the choruses of "he should immediately be fired!" Hospitals are admittedly a special case, but in a general university environment, running a server, so long as it does not interfere with actual network operations, is squarely an issue of academic freedom. I don't know of any university which has a TOS with a blanket prohibition against servers, and I know lots of places where people sysadmin their own systems / subnets. It's completely normal. IT departments in academic environments, especially public universities, have an obligation to maintain a network which is as open as possible consistent with operational and legal requirements. It is not "their" network, or "their" switches: the network belongs to the university community. IT's job is to provide network access to that community.
“[My approach] would be entirely different from today's documents where you look at one page at a time and you can see a ribbon or beam connecting documents together,” he said. “Having to refer to a paragraph and a sentence in an e-mail is just so barbaric when you could just strike it out and make the connection between sentences.”
Is it just me, or is this just completely incoherent? What the hell is he talking about?
Running a mail server from home would violate just about every ISP ToS I have seen as well.
Pay a commercial provider for SMTP connections to/from the outside world, and have them forward the messages to your local server. Configure your IMAP server to listen on a non-standard port. The point is to have the storage be local.
An ISP that blocks all incoming connections isn't an ISP.
Run your own mail server. It's not a complete solution, since in principle ISPs could be storing data transmitted over their networks, but it at least makes it more expensive to violate your privacy.
But Gmail? Facebook? I am continually amazed by people who store their personal data in these places and expect it to stay private.
"So, um, in the big-bang theory, what they do is, there is this big explosion and there is all this temperature going off and the temperature decreases really rapidly because it's really big. The other day I calculated, they have this period where they suppose the hydrogen and helium were created, and, um, I don't care about the hydrogen and helium, but I thought, wouldn't there have to be some sort of carbon?" ...
I calculated, the time it would take to create 2 percent of the carbon in the universe, it would actually have to be several micro-seconds. Or a couple of nano-seconds, or something like that. An extremely small period of time. Like faster than a snap. That isn't gonna happen."
This is total gibberish. There is no carbon created in the Big Bang, only hydrogen, helium, and lithium. This was understood in the 1970's. All of the carbon in the universe is created in stars. This is likewise well understood. Also, the earth is mostly iron, not carbon. If this kid's new theory of relativity is anything like his theory of cosmology, he needs to be back in school getting an education, not doing independent research.
Well thank you, Taco, for calling everybody who doesn't approve of homosexuality a bigot. Have you, or any of the other homosexuality-supporters, ever considered that there are more than two sides to this? You don't have to fully 100% approve or disaprove of homosexuality, and as a Catholic I take offense when being labled as one of them.
Who would possibly be the market for this app? Consider the fraction of the population which is gay, say around 10%:
- Of these, what fraction is not in some level of denial? (guess 20%)
- Of these, what fraction think they can be "cured" (guess 1%)?
- Of those, how many would actually believe that they could be cured by an Iphone app? (guess 1%)
- Of those, how many would actually be willing to risk being discovered by their friends/spouse with such an app on their phone? (guess 10%)
That gives two people in 10^7 who would download the app, or about 60 in the U.S. and 1200 in the world. Why is anyone even bothering to worry about it?
Uh, why? That's a perfectly accurate statement. One simple way to write the condition for a circular orbit, for example is that the gravitational and centrifugal forces are equal and opposite.
Slashdot Mirror
How many laptops weigh less than a pound and a half yet deliver 10 hours of battery life? How many laptops for 500 dollars have capacitive multi-touch screens? How many laptops at that price have zero moving parts to break? How many laptops are an "always on" device that will continue to get your email and notifications and perform tasks even when the unit is on "standby"? Tablets in this class have built-in accelerometers and GPS, front and rear cameras, etc. And on and on.
Man, that sounds awesome! Can I get one with a keyboard?
Four Horsemen of the Infoclypse (as Tim May put it)
The 90's called: they want their paranoid meme back.
Would these ultra cool brown dwarves serve in putting more fruit to dark matter theories?
Almost certainly not. Dark matter made up of brown dwarfs was searched for in the gravitational microlensing experiments like the MACHO project. They didn't find nearly enough to account for the dark matter.
I can't believe how racist slashdot has become. They may be ultra cool, but calling them brown is inciting hate. African American little people is the PC term.
Mass disadvantaged stars of color.
Given that space is big, and we will never get to even the closest star within anyone's lifetime, meanwhile the Earth is going through an existential weather and economic crisis... exactly why does this science matter?
Ten thousand years ago, I am sure somebody was saying "Why waste time painting pictures of caribou when we need to be out hunting to feed our families?" Turns out representational art formed the original basis for written language, which stands as one of the seminal breakthroughs in human evolution. Nobody painting on a cave wall knew that at the time.
Five hundred years ago, I am sure somebody else was saying "We have the plague to contend with, wars, political chaos. Why should we waste money figuring out whether the planets orbit in circles or ellipses? What possible use is that?" Turns out understanding the structure of the universe (at the time, just the solar system) paved the way for Newton to formulate his laws of motion, which utterly revolutionized every aspect of human civilization and formed the foundation for our modern technological society. Nobody at the time could possibly have foreseen that.
Why fund basic research, or art, or music, or theater, or literature? Because it's what great civilizations do, and the moment they stop doing it is the moment they enter an inevitable phase of decline. Civilizations grow on their ideas, and nobody can say in advance which idea is going to be the one that pushes humanity forward into a new phase.
End the wars
OK, with you there.
default on your debt and rebuild the economy from their.
The U.S. debt is currently about equal to its GDP, which is a cause for concern, but not a reason for default. I owe roughly as much on my house as I make in a year, and I am far from in a panic about my debt level.
Failing to raise the debt ceiling at this point is so stupid it boggles the mind. It's like trying to fix a nosebleed with a hammer.
NASA has, over time, become more and more dominated by the people who want to spend money on stuff, as opposed to the people who want to do stuff.
Perhaps true of the manned space program, but missions like the Webb are the real deal and have widespread support in the scientific community.
What's worse to me is that, if it is funded and launched, it will probably be late, and will die well before any replacement, thus causing huge gaps in our ability to observe from above the atmosphere.
I think that end-of-lifing of the Hubble ST is a major strategic blunder by NASA
HST was a wonderful instrument, but it is simply not capable of doing the science that needs doing next, for example constraining the properties of Dark Energy or exploring the end of the cosmic "dark ages" at redshifts of 5-10. And repairing HST was never cost-effective: the repair missions cost roughly as much as building a new telescope.
No one will openly say it, but the U.S. doesn't have the money for space projects anymore.
Bullshit. The U.S. isn't broke. We have suddenly decided that we don't want to pay for anything. All "we the people" want to do at this point is sit on our fat asses and bitch about how high our taxes are and how much gas costs. Neal Stephenson got it wrong: we don't even do software any more, just pizza delivery.
We could be, and ought to be, an historically great nation, busy building a new renaissance of science, technology, and art. Instead, we're turning ourselves into a third-world shithole, with our national wealth and heritage looted by robber barons. Thanks, Tea Party!
Here you go. Dipshit.
....why I don't want a URL bar? How the hell am I supposed to type in the places I want to go. What are they thinking? I don't get it.
Everything is on Facebook now, so other URLs are obsolete. Didn't you get the tweet?
Is lunch with the team counted as on the clock? If not, the boss has no right to tell anybody with whom they should or should not eat.
Well said. Wish I had some mod points.
The Treasury is empty and we're $14 Trillion in the hole.
Which is about equal to the amount of wealth created in the U.S. every year. The treasury is empty because the American people are unwilling to apply a sufficient fraction of that wealth to paying for the operation of their own government. Remember the last time we had a surplus? It was under moderately higher tax rates than we have today, which we could easily reinstate. Anybody who claims to be serious about deficit reduction but refuses to consider tax increases (on everybody, not just the wealthy) is a liar and a charlatan.
Since we have no shortage of energy but we have a desperate shortage of funds in the Treasury, these types of projects should not be funded. Let a less bankrupt country fund them.
The U.S. isn't bankrupt. We're just unwilling to pay for anything. Big difference.
My understanding has been that, so far, it's a very high maintenance (albeit necessary) way of checking various existing theories in the mound of increasingly untested theoretical physics. IOW, it's more of an engineering feat than a scientific one. Or are unexpected observations being made leading to new physics?
Um. How are they supposed to be able to tell ahead of time when unexpected things will happen?
Blu-ray players connected to the Web can offer games, extra movie features, and additional bonus materials online that DVD players generally can't. And the latest Blu-ray players can handle 3D discs, something no DVD player can do.
I don't want any of that shit, especially if I have to pay extra for it. I just want to watch a movie.
this may or may not apply to academic hospitals, but the notion of a port being closed in a university is absurd.
Thanks very much for pointing this out amid the choruses of "he should immediately be fired!" Hospitals are admittedly a special case, but in a general university environment, running a server, so long as it does not interfere with actual network operations, is squarely an issue of academic freedom. I don't know of any university which has a TOS with a blanket prohibition against servers, and I know lots of places where people sysadmin their own systems / subnets. It's completely normal. IT departments in academic environments, especially public universities, have an obligation to maintain a network which is as open as possible consistent with operational and legal requirements. It is not "their" network, or "their" switches: the network belongs to the university community. IT's job is to provide network access to that community.
“[My approach] would be entirely different from today's documents where you look at one page at a time and you can see a ribbon or beam connecting documents together,” he said. “Having to refer to a paragraph and a sentence in an e-mail is just so barbaric when you could just strike it out and make the connection between sentences.”
Is it just me, or is this just completely incoherent? What the hell is he talking about?
Running a mail server from home would violate just about every ISP ToS I have seen as well.
Pay a commercial provider for SMTP connections to/from the outside world, and have them forward the messages to your local server. Configure your IMAP server to listen on a non-standard port. The point is to have the storage be local.
An ISP that blocks all incoming connections isn't an ISP.
Run your own mail server. It's not a complete solution, since in principle ISPs could be storing data transmitted over their networks, but it at least makes it more expensive to violate your privacy.
But Gmail? Facebook? I am continually amazed by people who store their personal data in these places and expect it to stay private.
http://xkcd.com/768/
Explanation at http://www.indystar.com/article/20110320/LOCAL01/103200369/Genius-work-12-year-old-studying-IUPUI
Here is his "debunking" of the big bang:
"So, um, in the big-bang theory, what they do is, there is this big explosion and there is all this temperature going off and the temperature decreases really rapidly because it's really big. The other day I calculated, they have this period where they suppose the hydrogen and helium were created, and, um, I don't care about the hydrogen and helium, but I thought, wouldn't there have to be some sort of carbon?"
...
I calculated, the time it would take to create 2 percent of the carbon in the universe, it would actually have to be several micro-seconds. Or a couple of nano-seconds, or something like that. An extremely small period of time. Like faster than a snap. That isn't gonna happen."
This is total gibberish. There is no carbon created in the Big Bang, only hydrogen, helium, and lithium. This was understood in the 1970's. All of the carbon in the universe is created in stars. This is likewise well understood. Also, the earth is mostly iron, not carbon. If this kid's new theory of relativity is anything like his theory of cosmology, he needs to be back in school getting an education, not doing independent research.
Well thank you, Taco, for calling everybody who doesn't approve of homosexuality a bigot. Have you, or any of the other homosexuality-supporters, ever considered that there are more than two sides to this? You don't have to fully 100% approve or disaprove of homosexuality, and as a Catholic I take offense when being labled as one of them.
Dude. You're a bigot.
Who would possibly be the market for this app? Consider the fraction of the population which is gay, say around 10%:
- Of these, what fraction is not in some level of denial? (guess 20%)
- Of these, what fraction think they can be "cured" (guess 1%)?
- Of those, how many would actually believe that they could be cured by an Iphone app? (guess 1%)
- Of those, how many would actually be willing to risk being discovered by their friends/spouse with such an app on their phone? (guess 10%)
That gives two people in 10^7 who would download the app, or about 60 in the U.S. and 1200 in the world. Why is anyone even bothering to worry about it?
I stoped reading his "perspective" here :
centrifugal force counteracts gravity
Uh, why? That's a perfectly accurate statement. One simple way to write the condition for a circular orbit, for example is that the gravitational and centrifugal forces are equal and opposite.