Given the 5 to 3 ratio in apertures between the two telescopes, I think that it will be able to "peer" (25/9)^0.5 = 5/3 = 1.67 times "further into space," where "peer" means resolve an object at a given signal to noise ratio. Collected light scales with the square of aperture, but signal to noise ratio only improves with the square root of the number of collected photons. In more useful terms, it should be able to resolve the same thing to the same statistical certainty in 3/5 of the time.
That's the kind of thing that the internet simply ignores and national news ignores because it's not sexy to 20 year old twitter users or infuriating to middle aged voters. Local news sources doing real investigative reporting addressed a need that is increasingly being ignored.
It sounds like the author's concerns are pretty similar to those the Chinese government has for all its citizens. Maybe an English language Baidu would be a good place to start.
As has been demonstrated experimentally countless times (by Consumer Reports among many others), ABS doesn't decrease stopping distance. It simply improves handling during a stop.
Stopping distance has absolutely nothing to do with the proposal. The line indicates where you need to be to keep going at the speed limit and make it through the light during the yellow cycle.
Stopping time is an entirely different matter, already addressed in the rules for yellow light timing in Section 21455.7 of the CA vehicle code. The problem here, though, is that nearly every major city has yellow lights set to illegally short times.
4. In California, most yellow lights are set to be illegally short - there are laws governing how long a yellow light must last depending on the speed limit. Additionally, many speed limits in California are illegally low (this is bizarre, but true). Taking a video of the yellow light, time-stamping the beginning and end of it, and bringing it to court will get people out of most tickets where the light just changed, but the amazing thing is that the judge won't order for the yellow light to be lengthened. Basically there's a small club of people who are pretty much immune to illegal tickets but cities intentionally continue to give these invalid, illegal tickets to everyone else.
These problems are the tip of the iceberg. Police do a better job than cameras of identifying and not punishing a marginal case where a car is validly stuck in the intersection through the end of the cycle, turning right on red, etc.
Here's my take, if a nuclear reactor explodes, a rare but possible occurrence, it will contaminate a hundred square kilometers or so so it cannot be inhabited for a century or there abouts. If you want a hydro system with the same power output, you generally flood a valley and not only prevent it from being inhabited while the dam stands, but also ruin it for plants and animals too, unlike Chernobyl which is returning to natural forest flora and fauna. Nuclear probably won't explode and if it does, it still isn't all that bad compared to hydro.
Also, hydro has a death caused per joule generated rate much higher than nuclear, which is safer than any other source:
Agreed. My wife and I both have 120GB Zunes, and we share a Zune Pass. The player hardware is rock solid, the software is decent, and the Zune Pass just kicks ass all day long.
Yes, Zune marketing has undeniably failed. But it's a shame, because the product itself is actually pretty damned good.
I've only owned iPods in the music player space, but I've played with various Zunes. My impression was that MS made the best music player on the market at precisely the time that being just a good music player was no longer good enough. Nothing in the iPod lineup is as good as a Zune for music, but the Zunes can't compete with the extra functionality of the iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad ecosystem. That, and they marketed them poorly.
Completely agree, his example of STV is quite accurate as conforming well to a certain game design, but being horribly boring place for a normal person.
You will never condition a person to like doing "kill X Y times" especially not as many times as nesingwary missions. The only reason a person does it is because of some other gain, it'll never be because of enjoyment. Killing something once, that has uniqueness and interest, killing something which spawns again after a couple of minutes has no enjoyment, especially when it's more than 3.
In my experience, STV has historically been where a large fraction of players abandon characters as they move from entertaining early zones to dreary, repetitive higher level zones without as clear or compelling as a narrative. That doesn't detract from Bartle's blog post, but it does point out that what may be interesting for a developer is quite the opposite for the player. But speaking of the post, I've rarely graded an essay so poorly thought out - it's a perfect example of forcing reality to conform to a metaphor and losing track of reality itself in the process.
Florian is not a blogger, he is a professional troll.
I'd never heard of him before, but looking at his arguments is like watching Glen Beck. Given a lack of evidence to support his fear-mongering, he puts his fingers in his ears and repeatedly says, "I'm just asking the question: can we really say there's definitely no infringement?" When every specific example he cites is debunked, he returns to his litany and insists that infringement is possible, then chides his opponents for being unable to prove the impossible. Having debated competitively, I detect the belief that aggressively responding to every argument is equivalent to winning.
People have been saying this for the entire life of OS X, and I say "put up or shut up" - the claims are that it's just not worth it, or that no one cares, but that it's really a ripe, low-hanging fruit that is so vulnerable... yet no one has bothered, in 10 years , to even *try*? Not even to "stick Mac users' noses in it" (with the sort of "HAHAHA!" crowing that we've seen from slashdot users over this simple trojan).
You're telling me that *no one* in over 10 years has decided to prove this supposed "common wisdom" that OS X is virus free solely due to install base? I simply don;t buy it. The security model it uses, the security updates it receives, and the software base that it is based on would suggest otherwise.
As far as I know there has been a single proof of concept virus that has never been seen in the wild and has a 24 hour self termination feature, and that the bug it exploits is patched.
Now, I'm not going to claim any OS is immune, but I would say OS X's track record is pretty damn good.
What is this talk of no one? Every year OSX is shown to be the least secure OS on the planet when it loses the pwn2own competition. It's been objectively demonstrated annually to be the least secure OS and you're still drinking the koolaid? Bravo.
So far, I'd disagree with that. The malware detection is built into the system, invisible, automatic, and self updating. So the user doesn't have to do X, Y, or even Z at all. We're still at "It just works."
Not saying that couldn't change in the future, but we're not there yet.
Okay, maccodemonkey, here's the thing: if the malware detection which is built into the system, invisible, automatic, and self updating is defeated within hours of it being release, we are no longer at "It just works." What part of "It doesn't work anymore" sounds like "It just works" to you?!?
For years I have understood that Unix systems were less prone to security threats posed by malware/viruses/hackers due to the basic security model of unix. When naysayers said Mac was less prone because of marketshare, the argument against this is the large number of Linux servers which have never been successfully targeted by any major security threat. While this malware attack is a trojan (and more social engineering), are the naysayers actually correct that Mac is not been successfully attacked because of marketshare? If so, are unix systems not inherently more secure due to their design than other OSes?
Thanks!
When given equal incentives ($10k and/or a free laptop) to compromise an OS, OSX has always gone down first and most easily in the annual pwn2own contest. That's been a pretty clear indication that security by obscurity is Apple's main defense. "Unix systems" can be incredibly secure, but OSX is a rather flimsy incarnation of one.
Rip the thing to your hard drive if you want to have a copy of the latest Euro-pop to give your nephew/neice in a couple of months to keep them ahead of the curve and make them sound cool by having it before everyone else has it.
Good luck finding a radio station or public space in Greece that doesn't play >75% bad American music.
It is a mountain kingdom, lots of hydro potential and very few people. Why would they want the infinite expense and risks involved with current nuclear? They can have free power without difficulty and hydro does not stop at night. It is easy for those here to say that anyone that does not want nuclear must be a crank or green but that is just stupid. I worked for BNFL and am not green (maybe a crank). I just happen to look at the whole picture without rose coloured glasses.
In Wales there are dams that were built by the Victorians and they are still good. The reactors I have worked with are not good but there is nothing you can do to stop a Magnox reactor. The British Magnox reactors are still running after their expected lifespan because no-one knows what to do with them. Trawsfynydd still consumes considerable amounts of electricity to keep it stable. The costs do not stop after the fifty years of lifespan. The costs go on and on for tens of thousands of years making them unbelievably expensive when compared to any other power source. Burning money in a generator would be cheaper.
There are better options and this decision is not the best way forward. I hope that advances will soon make Thorium into a good commercial choice. Anything but Uranium/Plutonium...
Infinite risks?
Hydro 0.10 (europe death rate, 2.2% of world energy)
Hydro - world including Banqiao 1.4 (about 2500 TWh/yr and 171,000 Banqiao dead)
Who appears to do this sorta thing professionally. The 16 year old should be given a BIG pat on the back for contacting a LONG list of scientists to find one that would work with him. Unfortunately, the news industry really likes to play up the whole "Kid Genius" story, since it make all of us feel old, and useless.:)
I doubt they'd have as many people passing around the article if it focused on a normal research group working as intended and including (as is typical) young mentees in the process so that they can learn about the research process.
None. Ever. Even the underpants bomber made it through.
Since the inception of the TSA, they have stopped *zero* hijacking/bombing attempts from the airport.
Biggest waste of money on security theater going.
-- BMO
The parent should be modded to 5, and all Slashdot readers should be sure to spread this point as much as possible to everyone they know. The TSA has an $8.1 annual billion budget and has yet to have a single success.
We can't comment definitively on the deterrent effect mentioned by an AC reply, though our very limited data points make deterrence seem unlikely, given that 1) every attempted bomber in the last 10 years has successfully made it through security and 2) the 100% failure rate probably doesn't put much fear into the hearts of potential attackers.
The point is that given the inevitability of human error and insatiable greed, is nuclear the best option? This is the point the anti-nuke crowd has been making. Yes, it CAN be done safely...in theory. But, what happens when corporation A figures that regulation X hurts profits too much so they lobby to get it waivered, and regulation Y is weakly enforced, so they just ignore it altogether?
Personally, I like the idea of nuclear power. I just don't trust it in the hands of any organization with a profit motive.
But coal power is also handled by an organization with a profit motive. If we stop letting corporations run nuclear plants, it means we open new coal plants. Given our current level of inevitable human error, nuclear power has the lowest cost in human lives of any power source. Even with our big mistakes and the disasters we've seen, it just can't compete with the "working as intended" performance of coal:
Last point, I bet 70% non-Windows, means at least 60% on OS X, and approximately 10% on Linux.
You're correct. Also of note: those stats are for Google employees' work computers, not their home use, and it's because after the China gmail debacle Google decided to switch all users away from Windows. They haven't completed the process, but soon the Windows user share in Google will be down to nearly 0, because already it takes some heavy petitioning to be given an exception to the rule and allowed to keep running Windows. A lot of people are requesting those exceptions, but they're not handed out very freely.
I'm amused that Google's response to a targeted security breach is to move to the operating system that is most vulnerable to targeted security breaches, as OSX loses pwn2own almost every year.
Pop-quantum physics is, alas, absolutely fucking rife with nonsense derived from the interpretation that the "observer" in ye olde Schrödinger's cat thought experiment means "conscious, in the way I imagine myself to be, observer" rather than "virtually any outside interaction that disrupts the closed system". From that fount much bullshit flows...
There have been serious arguments among academic philosophers based on that misconception.
The joke is that dolphin speech is actually quite simple - it's spanish - and the scientists are over thinking the problem so much they don't recognize what should be a simple code. It's another twist on the old "time is money; look at the clock!" followed by "get that bird to shut up!" bit.
Slashdot Mirror
Given the 5 to 3 ratio in apertures between the two telescopes, I think that it will be able to "peer" (25/9)^0.5 = 5/3 = 1.67 times "further into space," where "peer" means resolve an object at a given signal to noise ratio. Collected light scales with the square of aperture, but signal to noise ratio only improves with the square root of the number of collected photons. In more useful terms, it should be able to resolve the same thing to the same statistical certainty in 3/5 of the time.
I'll use this example because you made fun of the idea of local reporters investigating bakery-related crime: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Your_Black_Muslim_Bakery#Chauncey_Bailey_investigation
That's the kind of thing that the internet simply ignores and national news ignores because it's not sexy to 20 year old twitter users or infuriating to middle aged voters. Local news sources doing real investigative reporting addressed a need that is increasingly being ignored.
It sounds like the author's concerns are pretty similar to those the Chinese government has for all its citizens. Maybe an English language Baidu would be a good place to start.
As has been demonstrated experimentally countless times (by Consumer Reports among many others), ABS doesn't decrease stopping distance. It simply improves handling during a stop.
Stopping distance has absolutely nothing to do with the proposal. The line indicates where you need to be to keep going at the speed limit and make it through the light during the yellow cycle.
Stopping time is an entirely different matter, already addressed in the rules for yellow light timing in Section 21455.7 of the CA vehicle code. The problem here, though, is that nearly every major city has yellow lights set to illegally short times.
4. In California, most yellow lights are set to be illegally short - there are laws governing how long a yellow light must last depending on the speed limit. Additionally, many speed limits in California are illegally low (this is bizarre, but true). Taking a video of the yellow light, time-stamping the beginning and end of it, and bringing it to court will get people out of most tickets where the light just changed, but the amazing thing is that the judge won't order for the yellow light to be lengthened. Basically there's a small club of people who are pretty much immune to illegal tickets but cities intentionally continue to give these invalid, illegal tickets to everyone else.
These problems are the tip of the iceberg. Police do a better job than cameras of identifying and not punishing a marginal case where a car is validly stuck in the intersection through the end of the cycle, turning right on red, etc.
I don't know the history of Microsoft suing people, but then again neither does Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation#Private
It looks like Microsoft gets sued by other companies over patents but doesn't bring lawsuits of its own.
Or a $33 copy of Windows, but if you want to pay MS 6x as much for no reason, feel free.
Here's my take, if a nuclear reactor explodes, a rare but possible occurrence, it will contaminate a hundred square kilometers or so so it cannot be inhabited for a century or there abouts. If you want a hydro system with the same power output, you generally flood a valley and not only prevent it from being inhabited while the dam stands, but also ruin it for plants and animals too, unlike Chernobyl which is returning to natural forest flora and fauna. Nuclear probably won't explode and if it does, it still isn't all that bad compared to hydro.
Also, hydro has a death caused per joule generated rate much higher than nuclear, which is safer than any other source:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
Agreed. My wife and I both have 120GB Zunes, and we share a Zune Pass. The player hardware is rock solid, the software is decent, and the Zune Pass just kicks ass all day long.
Yes, Zune marketing has undeniably failed. But it's a shame, because the product itself is actually pretty damned good.
I've only owned iPods in the music player space, but I've played with various Zunes. My impression was that MS made the best music player on the market at precisely the time that being just a good music player was no longer good enough. Nothing in the iPod lineup is as good as a Zune for music, but the Zunes can't compete with the extra functionality of the iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad ecosystem. That, and they marketed them poorly.
And neither can Germany.
Completely agree, his example of STV is quite accurate as conforming well to a certain game design, but being horribly boring place for a normal person.
You will never condition a person to like doing "kill X Y times" especially not as many times as nesingwary missions. The only reason a person does it is because of some other gain, it'll never be because of enjoyment. Killing something once, that has uniqueness and interest, killing something which spawns again after a couple of minutes has no enjoyment, especially when it's more than 3.
In my experience, STV has historically been where a large fraction of players abandon characters as they move from entertaining early zones to dreary, repetitive higher level zones without as clear or compelling as a narrative. That doesn't detract from Bartle's blog post, but it does point out that what may be interesting for a developer is quite the opposite for the player. But speaking of the post, I've rarely graded an essay so poorly thought out - it's a perfect example of forcing reality to conform to a metaphor and losing track of reality itself in the process.
Florian is not a blogger, he is a professional troll.
I'd never heard of him before, but looking at his arguments is like watching Glen Beck. Given a lack of evidence to support his fear-mongering, he puts his fingers in his ears and repeatedly says, "I'm just asking the question: can we really say there's definitely no infringement?" When every specific example he cites is debunked, he returns to his litany and insists that infringement is possible, then chides his opponents for being unable to prove the impossible. Having debated competitively, I detect the belief that aggressively responding to every argument is equivalent to winning.
People have been saying this for the entire life of OS X, and I say "put up or shut up" - the claims are that it's just not worth it, or that no one cares, but that it's really a ripe, low-hanging fruit that is so vulnerable... yet no one has bothered, in 10 years , to even *try*? Not even to "stick Mac users' noses in it" (with the sort of "HAHAHA!" crowing that we've seen from slashdot users over this simple trojan).
You're telling me that *no one* in over 10 years has decided to prove this supposed "common wisdom" that OS X is virus free solely due to install base? I simply don;t buy it. The security model it uses, the security updates it receives, and the software base that it is based on would suggest otherwise.
As far as I know there has been a single proof of concept virus that has never been seen in the wild and has a 24 hour self termination feature, and that the bug it exploits is patched.
Now, I'm not going to claim any OS is immune, but I would say OS X's track record is pretty damn good.
What is this talk of no one? Every year OSX is shown to be the least secure OS on the planet when it loses the pwn2own competition. It's been objectively demonstrated annually to be the least secure OS and you're still drinking the koolaid? Bravo.
maccodemonkey writes:
So far, I'd disagree with that. The malware detection is built into the system, invisible, automatic, and self updating. So the user doesn't have to do X, Y, or even Z at all. We're still at "It just works."
Not saying that couldn't change in the future, but we're not there yet.
Okay, maccodemonkey, here's the thing: if the malware detection which is built into the system, invisible, automatic, and self updating is defeated within hours of it being release, we are no longer at "It just works." What part of "It doesn't work anymore" sounds like "It just works" to you?!?
Maybe he meant that the malware "just works."
For years I have understood that Unix systems were less prone to security threats posed by malware/viruses/hackers due to the basic security model of unix. When naysayers said Mac was less prone because of marketshare, the argument against this is the large number of Linux servers which have never been successfully targeted by any major security threat. While this malware attack is a trojan (and more social engineering), are the naysayers actually correct that Mac is not been successfully attacked because of marketshare? If so, are unix systems not inherently more secure due to their design than other OSes?
Thanks!
When given equal incentives ($10k and/or a free laptop) to compromise an OS, OSX has always gone down first and most easily in the annual pwn2own contest. That's been a pretty clear indication that security by obscurity is Apple's main defense. "Unix systems" can be incredibly secure, but OSX is a rather flimsy incarnation of one.
...can it run Metro 2033 on High?
My single GTX580 can.
Rip the thing to your hard drive if you want to have a copy of the latest Euro-pop to give your nephew/neice in a couple of months to keep them ahead of the curve and make them sound cool by having it before everyone else has it.
Good luck finding a radio station or public space in Greece that doesn't play >75% bad American music.
It is a mountain kingdom, lots of hydro potential and very few people. Why would they want the infinite expense and risks involved with current nuclear? They can have free power without difficulty and hydro does not stop at night. It is easy for those here to say that anyone that does not want nuclear must be a crank or green but that is just stupid. I worked for BNFL and am not green (maybe a crank). I just happen to look at the whole picture without rose coloured glasses.
In Wales there are dams that were built by the Victorians and they are still good. The reactors I have worked with are not good but there is nothing you can do to stop a Magnox reactor. The British Magnox reactors are still running after their expected lifespan because no-one knows what to do with them. Trawsfynydd still consumes considerable amounts of electricity to keep it stable. The costs do not stop after the fifty years of lifespan. The costs go on and on for tens of thousands of years making them unbelievably expensive when compared to any other power source. Burning money in a generator would be cheaper.
There are better options and this decision is not the best way forward. I hope that advances will soon make Thorium into a good commercial choice. Anything but Uranium/Plutonium...
Infinite risks?
Hydro 0.10 (europe death rate, 2.2% of world energy)
Hydro - world including Banqiao 1.4 (about 2500 TWh/yr and 171,000 Banqiao dead)
Nuclear 0.04 (5.9% of world energy)
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
As with literally every alternative, picking hydro over nuclear results in increased deaths.
Who appears to do this sorta thing professionally. The 16 year old should be given a BIG pat on the back for contacting a LONG list of scientists to find one that would work with him. Unfortunately, the news industry really likes to play up the whole "Kid Genius" story, since it make all of us feel old, and useless. :)
I doubt they'd have as many people passing around the article if it focused on a normal research group working as intended and including (as is typical) young mentees in the process so that they can learn about the research process.
>2) How many times have explosives been found?
None. Ever. Even the underpants bomber made it through.
Since the inception of the TSA, they have stopped *zero* hijacking/bombing attempts from the airport.
Biggest waste of money on security theater going.
--
BMO
The parent should be modded to 5, and all Slashdot readers should be sure to spread this point as much as possible to everyone they know. The TSA has an $8.1 annual billion budget and has yet to have a single success.
We can't comment definitively on the deterrent effect mentioned by an AC reply, though our very limited data points make deterrence seem unlikely, given that 1) every attempted bomber in the last 10 years has successfully made it through security and 2) the 100% failure rate probably doesn't put much fear into the hearts of potential attackers.
The point is that given the inevitability of human error and insatiable greed, is nuclear the best option? This is the point the anti-nuke crowd has been making. Yes, it CAN be done safely...in theory. But, what happens when corporation A figures that regulation X hurts profits too much so they lobby to get it waivered, and regulation Y is weakly enforced, so they just ignore it altogether?
Personally, I like the idea of nuclear power. I just don't trust it in the hands of any organization with a profit motive.
But coal power is also handled by an organization with a profit motive. If we stop letting corporations run nuclear plants, it means we open new coal plants. Given our current level of inevitable human error, nuclear power has the lowest cost in human lives of any power source. Even with our big mistakes and the disasters we've seen, it just can't compete with the "working as intended" performance of coal:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
Last point, I bet 70% non-Windows, means at least 60% on OS X, and approximately 10% on Linux.
You're correct. Also of note: those stats are for Google employees' work computers, not their home use, and it's because after the China gmail debacle Google decided to switch all users away from Windows. They haven't completed the process, but soon the Windows user share in Google will be down to nearly 0, because already it takes some heavy petitioning to be given an exception to the rule and allowed to keep running Windows. A lot of people are requesting those exceptions, but they're not handed out very freely.
I'm amused that Google's response to a targeted security breach is to move to the operating system that is most vulnerable to targeted security breaches, as OSX loses pwn2own almost every year.
Pop-quantum physics is, alas, absolutely fucking rife with nonsense derived from the interpretation that the "observer" in ye olde Schrödinger's cat thought experiment means "conscious, in the way I imagine myself to be, observer" rather than "virtually any outside interaction that disrupts the closed system". From that fount much bullshit flows...
There have been serious arguments among academic philosophers based on that misconception.
Never did get that particular Far Side.
The joke is that dolphin speech is actually quite simple - it's spanish - and the scientists are over thinking the problem so much they don't recognize what should be a simple code. It's another twist on the old "time is money; look at the clock!" followed by "get that bird to shut up!" bit.