The antenna reflector is not a perfect parabola, it's shaped to reflect power in the required footprint.
Before this technique was developed, the reflector was a perfect parabola and the feed, instead of being a single horn, was made of a bunch of tiny horns arranged in the form of the desired footprint.
Buying a used satellite is like buying a used bus... the only reason someone would sell it is because it has become cheaper to buy a new one than to maintain the old one!
If you believe that, you don't know anything about the satellite communications business.
I've been working at this for over a quarter of a century, and let me tell you that there are many factors that would influence buying a used satellite.
- How much remaining lifetime does it have? - Do I need it right now, or can I wait the 2 years+ it would take to build a new one? - Is it in inclined orbit? - What's the coverage footprint? - What's the frequency plan? - What's the EIRP? - What's the receive G/T? - Do I have the landing rights? - Does it have failed transponders, or any other failure?
It often happens that one has a satellite that will be perfect for someone else, but for our own specific purpose we need a replacement.
Hello, I have this wonderful bridge and I want to sell it really cheap. I think you would love it. I also happen to have a tower in Paris that I'm willing to sell at a bargain price.
BTW, are you interested in getting a commission for taking a few million dollars out of Nigeria?
(US: Torture, invasions, abuse of power, runaway government spending - Mexico: Rampant Corruption - Egypt:Mass censorship, dictatorship - Pretty much every government: Civil Rights Issues, police state tendencies, etc)
And my brother is the most evil of all, he kicked my dog!
If you are trying to equate any of those other governments' wrongdoings with one that tries to stone a woman to death for "adultery" because she befriended another man two years after her husband died you are as wacko as the Iranian theocrats.
Don't the precessions influence the relative position of the sun and Earth in a way that would be significant after 10k years, meaning that something on Earth aligned with a specific Sun position at a specific time of the year now would not be valid 10k years ago, and conversely?
Yes, but that only changes the positions relative to the stars. Precession means the rotation axis of the earth changes the way it points, but the axis is the same. North is always the same direction, apart from a relatively small polar motion.
Only problem with your argument is that cars only provide one of the functions of a horse, which we've actually imposed on the poor creature, and that's locomotion.
Likewise, we don't need all of the functions of natural brains in an artificial brain.
> If he's doing a better job than somebody else for the same or less pay, then it is ethical. As per your stupidity, slavery is the most ethical system. Wait: paying to do a job is even more ethical.
If you think there's no difference between working without pay and slavery that's because you haven't noticed the chains and whips that motivate the slaves to work. It's no wonder you think everyone is "stupid", you look through your own stupidity when you see other people so you see stupidity everywhere.
Creating something that works like the brain does not mean simulating how the brain works. Cars don't have legs, yet they perform the same function as horses.
I think it's funny how so many people believe that we will never be able to emulate the brain's functions because the brain seems to be so complex. Don't they realize that you can build complex things out of simple elements?
The whole English literature is an arrangement of twenty six letters and some punctuation symbols, think of that.
For a long enough tower (too lazy to compute now, but much larger than the distance Earth-Moon), the velocity given by a normal human toss would be enough
Much lower than that, it's geostationary altitude.
If he's doing a better job than somebody else for the same or less pay, then it is ethical.
What is NOT ethical is what the current worldwide corporate managers do. They get paid more than anybody else in the company to produce absolutely nothing. What they call "leadership" is worth nothing, do they think it requires any talent to say "hey, you! make this thing work!"
I believe in Leadership as it was in the old days, the leaders were the people who had worked in the factory floor and had showed their talent there. They understood the processes, the technical details that made the company create the products people would buy.
Today, the MBAs know nothing about that, all they do is bullshit.
I'm under the impression that a trademark must be associated with a certain product. That's why there's Linux soap. If Sarah Palin wants to register her name as a trademark, fine, that's her problem, but she cannot keep people from using it for other purposes.
one can certainly construct inertial reference frames (e.g. with large velocities relative to us) where the event occurred at different times
There's the key question: are all inertial reference frames equivalent?
I would say that we do have one preferred inertial frame, which is the one where the background radiation of the universe has zero dipole. Of course, considering the expansion of the universe, this preferred frame is local, but it allows us to define a universal "now" for all practical purposes.
A fact that should be always kept in mind is that relativity has been very useful for accurate calculations in dimensions scaling up to solar system size, but this does not mean it can be extrapolated to infinity. The galaxy rotation problem is one fact that has been showing problems with relativity in the last fifty years. More recently, the Pioneer anomaly shows that our orbital measurements are becoming so precise that general relativity needs corrections.
Science is like that, relativity was good enough until the end of the twentieth century, same as Newtonian mechanics was good enough until the final decades of the nineteenth century. But when measurements become so accurate that they do not match the current theory it's time to move on to a new theory.
These days "dark matter" seems very much like Ptolemy's epicycles, a kludge to force new measurements into the old theory.
This is one case where security through obscurity might actually work.
As long as only the white hats knew about the exploit, they could go there and secretly study the sites. Now that it's public knowledge, it will be a race between the grave robbers and the fanatic muslims to destroy the sites.
'Relatively' invisible may not be good enough. In this book the main character was invisible except for his retinas. H. G. Wells had thought it out, if light didn't interact at all with his eyes he would be blind.
There was a moment when he was discovered because someone noticed those two tiny spots moving around.
I can't see why a fucking tweet about anything from a shoe salesman is so worthy being news for nerds.
It's the Slashdot rule, if you tweet about it or put it on Facebook it becomes news for nerds automatically. That's for the same reasons laws are rewritten, patents are issued, anything that's "on the internet or "using a computer" gains a new life of its own, independent of any former incarnation.
Lack of evidence for a correlation means logical people, scientists, do not believe that there is a correlation
That's not how it works, at least not for scientific purposes. Correlation is a mathematical term. To prove correlation or absence of among two variables you need to have a statistically significant sample set of each variable and calculate the covariance between them.
Given two variables, crime rate and harshness of penalties, you need a statistically significant number of cases in order to prove or disprove a correlation between them. If you did have a significant number of samples and took care to eliminate any bias you would be able to prove non-correlation among them, if they really were non-correlated variables.
Slashdot Mirror
The antenna reflector is not a perfect parabola, it's shaped to reflect power in the required footprint.
Before this technique was developed, the reflector was a perfect parabola and the feed, instead of being a single horn, was made of a bunch of tiny horns arranged in the form of the desired footprint.
Buying a used satellite is like buying a used bus... the only reason someone would sell it is because it has become cheaper to buy a new one than to maintain the old one!
If you believe that, you don't know anything about the satellite communications business.
I've been working at this for over a quarter of a century, and let me tell you that there are many factors that would influence buying a used satellite.
- How much remaining lifetime does it have?
- Do I need it right now, or can I wait the 2 years+ it would take to build a new one?
- Is it in inclined orbit?
- What's the coverage footprint?
- What's the frequency plan?
- What's the EIRP?
- What's the receive G/T?
- Do I have the landing rights?
- Does it have failed transponders, or any other failure?
It often happens that one has a satellite that will be perfect for someone else, but for our own specific purpose we need a replacement.
That old bastard worked hard to produce the cheapest damned cars in the world, didn't he?
He also paid his workers enough that they could afford to buy his cars.
Then I would have pretty rainbows too.
Just imagine what Scaled Composites would be able to do with $1.5 billion!
I was thinking of Ariane, those $1.5 billion would buy twenty flights, each sending twenty tons to low-earth orbit.
I'm sure that with that kind of budget something better than the shuttle could be developed, at least for the uses they mentioned in TFA
Hello, I have this wonderful bridge and I want to sell it really cheap. I think you would love it. I also happen to have a tower in Paris that I'm willing to sell at a bargain price.
BTW, are you interested in getting a commission for taking a few million dollars out of Nigeria?
Ouch
That's what she said.
No, that was what he, the Iranian suicide terrorist, said when he found out that the virgins in Paradise were not females...
(US: Torture, invasions, abuse of power, runaway government spending - Mexico: Rampant Corruption - Egypt:Mass censorship, dictatorship - Pretty much every government: Civil Rights Issues, police state tendencies, etc)
And my brother is the most evil of all, he kicked my dog!
If you are trying to equate any of those other governments' wrongdoings with one that tries to stone a woman to death for "adultery" because she befriended another man two years after her husband died you are as wacko as the Iranian theocrats.
"The technique now needs to be extended to handle arbitrary photographs, not just uniform regions."
Great, I've always wanted some way to tell if the blank wall in the background had been edited and replaced by another blank wall...
Don't the precessions influence the relative position of the sun and Earth in a way that would be significant after 10k years, meaning that something on Earth aligned with a specific Sun position at a specific time of the year now would not be valid 10k years ago, and conversely?
Yes, but that only changes the positions relative to the stars. Precession means the rotation axis of the earth changes the way it points, but the axis is the same. North is always the same direction, apart from a relatively small polar motion.
YMMV, but I've been watching these stones for fifty years and they move around quite a lot.
Only problem with your argument is that cars only provide one of the functions of a horse, which we've actually imposed on the poor creature, and that's locomotion.
Likewise, we don't need all of the functions of natural brains in an artificial brain.
> If he's doing a better job than somebody else for the same or less pay, then it is ethical.
As per your stupidity, slavery is the most ethical system. Wait: paying to do a job is even more ethical.
It might surprise you to learn this, but there are many people who work without pay, or pay to work.
If you think there's no difference between working without pay and slavery that's because you haven't noticed the chains and whips that motivate the slaves to work. It's no wonder you think everyone is "stupid", you look through your own stupidity when you see other people so you see stupidity everywhere.
Creating something that works like the brain does not mean simulating how the brain works. Cars don't have legs, yet they perform the same function as horses.
I think it's funny how so many people believe that we will never be able to emulate the brain's functions because the brain seems to be so complex. Don't they realize that you can build complex things out of simple elements?
The whole English literature is an arrangement of twenty six letters and some punctuation symbols, think of that.
For a long enough tower (too lazy to compute now, but much larger than the distance Earth-Moon), the velocity given by a normal human toss would be enough
Much lower than that, it's geostationary altitude.
If he's doing a better job than somebody else for the same or less pay, then it is ethical.
What is NOT ethical is what the current worldwide corporate managers do. They get paid more than anybody else in the company to produce absolutely nothing. What they call "leadership" is worth nothing, do they think it requires any talent to say "hey, you! make this thing work!"
I believe in Leadership as it was in the old days, the leaders were the people who had worked in the factory floor and had showed their talent there. They understood the processes, the technical details that made the company create the products people would buy.
Today, the MBAs know nothing about that, all they do is bullshit.
I'm under the impression that a trademark must be associated with a certain product. That's why there's Linux soap. If Sarah Palin wants to register her name as a trademark, fine, that's her problem, but she cannot keep people from using it for other purposes.
one can certainly construct inertial reference frames (e.g. with large velocities relative to us) where the event occurred at different times
There's the key question: are all inertial reference frames equivalent?
I would say that we do have one preferred inertial frame, which is the one where the background radiation of the universe has zero dipole. Of course, considering the expansion of the universe, this preferred frame is local, but it allows us to define a universal "now" for all practical purposes.
A fact that should be always kept in mind is that relativity has been very useful for accurate calculations in dimensions scaling up to solar system size, but this does not mean it can be extrapolated to infinity. The galaxy rotation problem is one fact that has been showing problems with relativity in the last fifty years. More recently, the Pioneer anomaly shows that our orbital measurements are becoming so precise that general relativity needs corrections.
Science is like that, relativity was good enough until the end of the twentieth century, same as Newtonian mechanics was good enough until the final decades of the nineteenth century. But when measurements become so accurate that they do not match the current theory it's time to move on to a new theory.
These days "dark matter" seems very much like Ptolemy's epicycles, a kludge to force new measurements into the old theory.
A supernova explodes. Slashdot reports 64 million years later.
64 million years and 29 days, to be precise.
This is one case where security through obscurity might actually work.
As long as only the white hats knew about the exploit, they could go there and secretly study the sites. Now that it's public knowledge, it will be a race between the grave robbers and the fanatic muslims to destroy the sites.
The Terminator uses Apple II code. It was published on Nibble magazine so, yes, it is open source.
'Relatively' invisible may not be good enough. In this book the main character was invisible except for his retinas. H. G. Wells had thought it out, if light didn't interact at all with his eyes he would be blind.
There was a moment when he was discovered because someone noticed those two tiny spots moving around.
I can't see why a fucking tweet about anything from a shoe salesman is so worthy being news for nerds.
It's the Slashdot rule, if you tweet about it or put it on Facebook it becomes news for nerds automatically. That's for the same reasons laws are rewritten, patents are issued, anything that's "on the internet or "using a computer" gains a new life of its own, independent of any former incarnation.
Lack of evidence for a correlation means logical people, scientists, do not believe that there is a correlation
That's not how it works, at least not for scientific purposes. Correlation is a mathematical term. To prove correlation or absence of among two variables you need to have a statistically significant sample set of each variable and calculate the covariance between them.
Given two variables, crime rate and harshness of penalties, you need a statistically significant number of cases in order to prove or disprove a correlation between them. If you did have a significant number of samples and took care to eliminate any bias you would be able to prove non-correlation among them, if they really were non-correlated variables.