And we're talking about builds, not in-use resource consumption... where it behaves just like every other browser.
Nope. It doesn't even behave like the 3.x series (of the very same browser, Firefox!) before rampant version number inflation. A perfectly serviceable "Athlon XP" based system with 750MB of RAM went from just fine to useless (in terms of firefox usage) at the version number break, under both Windows XP and Fedora. Memory footprint was my first suspect, but throwing in more RAM (up to 2.5GB now) helped but didn't make it completely better. Ironically, it's almost ok now under XP and still atrocious under Fedora.
Something baaad happened. But who cares about old systems, right? Only users, it turns out, not people triaging bugs.
Yes, yes, today's neutrino detectors are larger than the ones operating in 1987. However, I don't think they could make up this sort of difference.
Correct, it's a simple matter of 1/r^2 geometry. SN1987A was at 51.4 kpc. M101 is at 6.5 Mpc. So even if this was a core-collapse supernova (which it's not), we would see only 62-millionths of the signal as we did in 1987. Our detectors are bigger, but only 50 times bigger. We're still three orders of magnitude away from seeing this one with neutrinos.
Even a neutrino producing SN in the next big galaxy neighbor we have (M31 in Andromeda) would only give us about one neutrino event in our biggest detector (Super-K), which likely would go unnoticed. On the other hand, pretty much anything in our own galaxy or its small satellites will produce a huge signal. Space is a big, empty place.
And if you're curious and eager to learn about that once-a-century event before your slightly less-geeky buddies, check out the Supernova Early Warning System, sign up to get an email when we see neutrinos from a "nearby" supernova. Just don't hold your breath while waiting.
"eight megs and constantly swapping" used to be what emacs stood for. Imagine how svelte it would be if it were only eight megs today! Typed in a 173 meg firefox process, which is indeed positively svelte compared to the 700+MB it was yesterday - "firefox 4 is better and faster" my butt.
Do they? Or do they often collide with atoms and experience the same kind of "conversion"? As far as I know, nobody has performed any experiments to find out. The very idea that they might change from one form to another is very recent.
On the contrary, we've been doing experiments about this non-stop for decades, and the answer is "no, neutrinos don't interact very much". While the interaction cross sections with things have kind of large error bars by particle physics standards, they're still known to ~20%, and are Really Tiny. A good perspective - the mean free path for your typical neutrino is something like a light year of lead before it interacts with matter at all, and when it does, it's not doing flavor changing. How do we know? Since we can't build a light year of lead sized experiment to catch half of the neutrinos we shoot, we build them as big as we can and shoot trillions of neutrinos per accelerator pulse, run the thing every couple seconds for years at a time, and observe those few neutrinos which are so incredibly unlucky as to smack something dead-on. How dead on? The weak force has a range of ~10^-18m. A proton is only 10^-15m in size. So a neutrino happily passes straight through a proton most of the time, to say nothing of all the empty space in an atom (which are 10^-10m in size).
On the other hand, the data fit the hypothesis of quantum mechanical flavor mixing quite well. That happens regardless of the presence of matter. However, if there is a lot of matter in the way (say, solar neutrinos exiting the core of the sun) it is a big effect - the "MSW Effect" explains how the presence of matter nearby changes neutrino oscillations.
In the case of the earth (which has a comparatively puny mount of matter) the effects are a lot more subtle, but neutrino beams going through a lot of the earth should be sensitive to this in the next decade or so. The Japanese beam is comparatively short so isn't ideal for such a measurement, the under-construction NOvA experiment in the US will do better, and people would really like to do a Fermilab->South Dakota beam to nail it down in spades.
They don't need to measure the type of neutrinos they're emitting, they already know what type they are.
But if you measure what the neutrino beam looks like right after you make it (by sampling a tiny fraction of the neutrinos), then you get an even better measurement.
And T2K does - they have a whole suite of "near detectors" to carefully characterize what got made, and so can do a great "before and after" experiment.
Makes me wonder if the recent earthquakes put their aim off, possibly requiring recalibration at the sending end. I know this happens to radars after large quakes.
In fact, the quake shut down the neutrino beam, it will remain off till next year as they carefully line it up again.
This paper is from the data they got before the quake shut things down.
But they *do* measure individual neutrino interactions via the Cherenkov radiation emitted from their interactions in very large reservoirs of shielded heavy water.
Just regular water in this case. Very pure water (well over 100m attenuation length for light in that water), and a lot of it (50,000 m^3), but still just ordinary water.
Assuming this result is correct then this result implies that there is a CP symmetry violation between the neutrino and anti-neutrino.
The oscillation T2K just observed is not related to CP violation. It's simpler than that. There are three types of neutrinos. If they can change types, then there are three ways they could do so (draw yourself a triangle with each neutrino at a vertex, the sides are how they could change into each other).
Solar neutrinos start of as electron neutrinos and change on their way to earth (that's one of the sides). muon neutrinos are seen to change to tau neutrinos in Super-K's atmospheric neutrino signal and the MINOS accelerator experiment (that's the second side). This result is the first clear measurement of the third side, electron to muon changes. MINOS has made a similar but much messier measurement, T2K's is much cleaner.
CP violation is in the theory, but it's a second-order effect. That effect is multiplied by the size of this new electron/muon effect, so we need to measure this first, then we can look for "delta", the CP-violating phase.
(and yes, I Am a Neutrino Physicist - worked for many years on Super-K, now work on MINOS and Nova).
Work to fix the parts of the entry shaft which were damaged by the fire will stop public tours for the next few months, but we hope things will be back to normal at that point.
Yes, "normal" includes regularly scheduled lab tours as well as historical mine tours. If you're up in this part of the world for touristy reasons (most of which involve fishing and canoeing) definitely look up the Soudan Underground Mine State Park.
It is indeed at the Soudan Mine. Our website doesn't do a good job at explaining the smaller experiments which operate there, although we are working on fixing that.
My favorite example was freshman physics. A hall mate got a copy of the previous years test through his fraternity. We studied every concept on that test. When we got into the test, it was *literally* the same test. Maybe a few numbers different but the exact same test.
Speaking as a physics prof, I wouldn't consider this cheating. We are well aware that old tests are out there. If people use them to study, fantastic! You're studying. Going over old tests is a great way to study. Cheating is copying solutons from the net and handing them in as homework sets. That's just plain stupid, since when you get to the test you won't have actually practiced how to do any of the problems, and you will bomb.
Now, if the prof in question simply reused a test wholesale, that might not be the best test of your abilities, but I bet that if you truely "studied every concept on that test", you would have gotten a good grade even if he'd cooked up a completely new test. There are only a limited number of concepts we're trying to teach you, after all.
On the other hand, I quite often recycle problems the class had issues with verbatim for finals. And tell the class "hey, remember that Gauss' Law problem from midterm #2? Study it". Those who go back and learn from their mistakes do well. A disappointing number of students still crash and burn.
Also for what it's worth - I agree that having the students memorize formulae is not so useful, in the real world you'd pull out your old textbook or go to the library and get one anyway. I generally tell students to bring a page of notes, I don't care what's on it. The very act of figuring out what they should put on their page is a good way to study. Unfortunately many students obsess so hard about copying down in 2-pt font every example problem available that they don't bother trying to understand how they actually work. And the whole point of physics is being able to figure out how stuff works, which is why you CS majors are made to take it. Problem solving skills transfer from free body diagrams to state graphs just fine.
Where this system wins out over the battery based system isn't in the efficiency of the electrical or pneumatic motor - it's the efficiency of being able to take in the braking energy quickly.
From memory (take that for what it's worth) a typical hybrid car can only convert ~40% of the inrush current you get when braking back into potential energy stored in the battery. A pump/tank system is about twice that efficient.
This is the same basic physics problem as why you can't recharge your laptop battery instantly, even though you really want to be able to get reloaded in the 10 minutes between flights you have left after you find a free socket in the gate area.
You would think it would be a no-brainer to have the SIM cards on some sort of custom phone plan which only allows calls to a fixed set of numbers, though.
My thoughts when hearing this story on the radio the other day:
"You can produce modified traffic lights that can do all this cool stuff, but then you can't lock the sim cards to that particular bit of proprietary hardware? Whiiiiiffffffff"
But the "change the calling plan" idea could be done quickly after the fact and save the rest of their installed base, that's even easier.
Anything in the public domain can't really be classified, let alone when its distributed in such a massive way like how Wikileaks does it.
No, the classification of a document isn't magically changed because it appears somewhere, and like it or not, the AF computer systems have to follow the rules about which documents end up in which security layer, regardless of source.
Regulations aside, think of this from a forensics standpoint. I'm sure the Air Force is (rightly so) rather interested in tracking down who leaked the stuff. That's a crime, and if you work for the Air Force, one you're liable for (as opposed to random people in Australia or Sweden, who aren't subject to those security laws). So - they're in the unenviable situation of having to track down who had access to which data when -- and suddenly copies of that data are pouring into systems from all over. That's going to muddy the trail a little bit, don't you think? How many more bogus hits on a phrase is the investigator's find/grep script going to turn up?
Finally, they are their computers, so they can do what they want with the content on them. C ensorship would be going out and telling other people what they can or can't do with their own systems. Big difference.
I've often wondered why anyone would bother building a data center in a warm place like Florida. You double your power bill - paying once to use the power, and again to air condition the resulting heat away.
Put the same equipment up north, and for much of the year you just have to open a window. Or, duct the waste heat over to an adjacent facility occupied by humans who will pay to use the hot air.
Warning - a lot of things look like they follow a power law. You need a lot of data to be sure.
More interestingly, many things which are at their heart completely random follow power laws.
For example, the arrival time distributions of cosmic rays, or the energy distribution of those particles one might observe. (ok, so I'm a cosmic ray physicist, so that's the topic I think a lot about). Thus, you can't use this information to predict anything about any one cosmic ray (or insurgent attack). What you can do is use the data to try and understand something about whatever's behind your ensemble of data, e.g. the sources accelerating the cosmic rays or organizing the insurgents.
They've also introduced, with great fanfare, and then eliminated a whole lot of games. What are some of GW's best games? Mordheim (discontinued), BloodBowl (discontinued, though I expect it will come back now they've got a computer version), Battlefleet Gothic (discontinued)...
Blood Bowl is actually a post-GW success story, independent of the computer game. The rules have been updated continuously by the player base, which has really cleaned the rough edges off what was already a pretty good game (google on Blood Bowl Living Rulebook). There's also an active tournament scene out there, with an international governing body (NAF) and ladder rankings. One can still buy the basic boxed set from GW (along with packs of team minis), download the current rules.pdf from the net, and play. Or, go buy any of the high-quality 3rd party miniatures out there, download the rulebook, download board-making instructions, and play without giving the Evil Empire a penny. I guess it's hard to sue people for making football-themed fantasy miniatures.
Can anyone name a single discovery in HEP in the last 25 years that has led to a practical improvement of anything whatsoever? The only thing HEP has generated is paper.
Still waiting for my top-quark amplifier...
25 years is pretty short-term here. How long was it after Franklin defining charge and Thomson discovering electrons was it before you got your run-of-the-mill electron-based amplifier? And lightning bolts were much more obviously potentially practical things to be investigating.
Will ignore the obvious comment that without HEP in general and CERN in particular we wouldn't be writing this in html, as that was pretty tangential to the whole process:)
The vast majority of this list are packages in the old, fortran-based CERNLIB. Still around bug in legacy code mode. The modern replacement is Root.
Aimed squarely at high energy experimentalists, and used for data analysis and simulation. In that field, DAQ code is nearly universally highly custom since the electronics it is interfacing with is also custom. Usually built with FOSS tools, though, such as gcc.
Yes fine, but how do you look at the Milky Way's black hole, circa 10 billion years ago, when it's distance is only 100,000 lightyears away?
Take advantage of the power of statistics. Find a lot of other galaxies that are a lot like the Milky Way, then look at the ones that are 10by away.
Not perfect, of course, but there are zillions of galaxies out there and so long as you're careful with how you answer the question "which ones are like our own galaxy" it can actually work out quite well.
Considering that add-ons (AdBlock, for example) can already inject and/or remove HTML from the dynamic page, it doesn't surprise me in the least.
Oh great. I hope the FF team doesn't take this as reason to remove the ability of plugins to do this.
They already screwed up file selection dialogs for alleged security reasons. In FF3, if you need to select a file for upload in some interactive form, you can't type or edit the filename - only click through a file selection dialog. This is an enourmous PITA if you've got a number of things you're uploading, or if you're happier typing instead of clicking. And, they've locked this down so you can't write a plugin to fix things, lest someone write a malware plugin to circumvent their "defense".
On the way straight back to a read-only web. Early 90's here we come!
Give them a multiple choice test where some, all, or none of the answers might be correct, rather than the usual "process of elimination" mode. To get the question right, you need to have filled in exactly all the right answers and none of the wrong ones.
While still easy for teachers to grade, students quickly learn to appreciate the "write out your work" tests!
I once moved/var/mail to/tmp on a Solaris machine, while trying to re-arrange partitions for some more room. Then rebooted.
The machine comes back up, and I learned that/tmp on Solaris was set to be a ramdisk by default.
Oops. My boss back then (more than a decade ago) still reminds me about losing years of his mail. (don't remember why we didn't have that backed up, Yet Another Lesson).
Slashdot Mirror
And we're talking about builds, not in-use resource consumption... where it behaves just like every other browser.
Nope. It doesn't even behave like the 3.x series (of the very same browser, Firefox!) before rampant version number inflation. A perfectly serviceable "Athlon XP" based system with 750MB of RAM went from just fine to useless (in terms of firefox usage) at the version number break, under both Windows XP and Fedora. Memory footprint was my first suspect, but throwing in more RAM (up to 2.5GB now) helped but didn't make it completely better. Ironically, it's almost ok now under XP and still atrocious under Fedora.
Something baaad happened. But who cares about old systems, right? Only users, it turns out, not people triaging bugs.
Yes, yes, today's neutrino detectors are larger than the ones operating in 1987. However, I don't think they could make up this sort of difference.
Correct, it's a simple matter of 1/r^2 geometry. SN1987A was at 51.4 kpc. M101 is at 6.5 Mpc. So even if this was a core-collapse supernova (which it's not), we would see only 62-millionths of the signal as we did in 1987. Our detectors are bigger, but only 50 times bigger. We're still three orders of magnitude away from seeing this one with neutrinos.
Even a neutrino producing SN in the next big galaxy neighbor we have (M31 in Andromeda) would only give us about one neutrino event in our biggest detector (Super-K), which likely would go unnoticed. On the other hand, pretty much anything in our own galaxy or its small satellites will produce a huge signal. Space is a big, empty place.
And if you're curious and eager to learn about that once-a-century event before your slightly less-geeky buddies, check out the Supernova Early Warning System, sign up to get an email when we see neutrinos from a "nearby" supernova. Just don't hold your breath while waiting.
"eight megs and constantly swapping" used to be what emacs stood for. Imagine how svelte it would be if it were only eight megs today! Typed in a 173 meg firefox process, which is indeed positively svelte compared to the 700+MB it was yesterday - "firefox 4 is better and faster" my butt.
Do they? Or do they often collide with atoms and experience the same kind of "conversion"? As far as I know, nobody has performed any experiments to find out. The very idea that they might change from one form to another is very recent.
On the contrary, we've been doing experiments about this non-stop for decades, and the answer is "no, neutrinos don't interact very much". While the interaction cross sections with things have kind of large error bars by particle physics standards, they're still known to ~20%, and are Really Tiny. A good perspective - the mean free path for your typical neutrino is something like a light year of lead before it interacts with matter at all, and when it does, it's not doing flavor changing. How do we know? Since we can't build a light year of lead sized experiment to catch half of the neutrinos we shoot, we build them as big as we can and shoot trillions of neutrinos per accelerator pulse, run the thing every couple seconds for years at a time, and observe those few neutrinos which are so incredibly unlucky as to smack something dead-on. How dead on? The weak force has a range of ~10^-18m. A proton is only 10^-15m in size. So a neutrino happily passes straight through a proton most of the time, to say nothing of all the empty space in an atom (which are 10^-10m in size).
On the other hand, the data fit the hypothesis of quantum mechanical flavor mixing quite well. That happens regardless of the presence of matter. However, if there is a lot of matter in the way (say, solar neutrinos exiting the core of the sun) it is a big effect - the "MSW Effect" explains how the presence of matter nearby changes neutrino oscillations.
In the case of the earth (which has a comparatively puny mount of matter) the effects are a lot more subtle, but neutrino beams going through a lot of the earth should be sensitive to this in the next decade or so. The Japanese beam is comparatively short so isn't ideal for such a measurement, the under-construction NOvA experiment in the US will do better, and people would really like to do a Fermilab->South Dakota beam to nail it down in spades.
They don't need to measure the type of neutrinos they're emitting, they already know what type they are.
But if you measure what the neutrino beam looks like right after you make it (by sampling a tiny fraction of the neutrinos), then you get an even better measurement.
And T2K does - they have a whole suite of "near detectors" to carefully characterize what got made, and so can do a great "before and after" experiment.
Makes me wonder if the recent earthquakes put their aim off, possibly requiring recalibration at the sending end. I know this happens to radars after large quakes.
In fact, the quake shut down the neutrino beam, it will remain off till next year as they carefully line it up again.
This paper is from the data they got before the quake shut things down.
But they *do* measure individual neutrino interactions via the Cherenkov radiation emitted from their interactions in very large reservoirs of shielded heavy water.
Just regular water in this case. Very pure water (well over 100m attenuation length for light in that water), and a lot of it (50,000 m^3), but still just ordinary water.
Assuming this result is correct then this result implies that there is a CP symmetry violation between the neutrino and anti-neutrino.
The oscillation T2K just observed is not related to CP violation. It's simpler than that. There are three types of neutrinos. If they can change types, then there are three ways they could do so (draw yourself a triangle with each neutrino at a vertex, the sides are how they could change into each other).
Solar neutrinos start of as electron neutrinos and change on their way to earth (that's one of the sides). muon neutrinos are seen to change to tau neutrinos in Super-K's atmospheric neutrino signal and the MINOS accelerator experiment (that's the second side). This result is the first clear measurement of the third side, electron to muon changes. MINOS has made a similar but much messier measurement, T2K's is much cleaner.
CP violation is in the theory, but it's a second-order effect. That effect is multiplied by the size of this new electron/muon effect, so we need to measure this first, then we can look for "delta", the CP-violating phase.
(and yes, I Am a Neutrino Physicist - worked for many years on Super-K, now work on MINOS and Nova).
It would be one of the few legitimate excuses to submit a schematic drawing of your genitalia to a government office...
Sounds like a great way to get congressional support, seems at least several congresscritters would love to do this.
Work to fix the parts of the entry shaft which were damaged by the fire will stop public tours for the next few months, but we hope things will be back to normal at that point.
Yes, "normal" includes regularly scheduled lab tours as well as historical mine tours. If you're up in this part of the world for touristy reasons (most of which involve fishing and canoeing) definitely look up the Soudan Underground Mine State Park.
It is indeed at the Soudan Mine. Our website doesn't do a good job at explaining the smaller experiments which operate there, although we are working on fixing that.
My favorite example was freshman physics. A hall mate got a copy of the previous years test through his fraternity. We studied every concept on that test. When we got into the test, it was *literally* the same test. Maybe a few numbers different but the exact same test.
Speaking as a physics prof, I wouldn't consider this cheating. We are well aware that old tests are out there. If people use them to study, fantastic! You're studying. Going over old tests is a great way to study. Cheating is copying solutons from the net and handing them in as homework sets. That's just plain stupid, since when you get to the test you won't have actually practiced how to do any of the problems, and you will bomb.
Now, if the prof in question simply reused a test wholesale, that might not be the best test of your abilities, but I bet that if you truely "studied every concept on that test", you would have gotten a good grade even if he'd cooked up a completely new test. There are only a limited number of concepts we're trying to teach you, after all.
On the other hand, I quite often recycle problems the class had issues with verbatim for finals. And tell the class "hey, remember that Gauss' Law problem from midterm #2? Study it". Those who go back and learn from their mistakes do well. A disappointing number of students still crash and burn.
Also for what it's worth - I agree that having the students memorize formulae is not so useful, in the real world you'd pull out your old textbook or go to the library and get one anyway. I generally tell students to bring a page of notes, I don't care what's on it. The very act of figuring out what they should put on their page is a good way to study. Unfortunately many students obsess so hard about copying down in 2-pt font every example problem available that they don't bother trying to understand how they actually work. And the whole point of physics is being able to figure out how stuff works, which is why you CS majors are made to take it. Problem solving skills transfer from free body diagrams to state graphs just fine.
Where this system wins out over the battery based system isn't in the efficiency of the electrical or pneumatic motor - it's the efficiency of being able to take in the braking energy quickly.
From memory (take that for what it's worth) a typical hybrid car can only convert ~40% of the inrush current you get when braking back into potential energy stored in the battery. A pump/tank system is about twice that efficient.
This is the same basic physics problem as why you can't recharge your laptop battery instantly, even though you really want to be able to get reloaded in the 10 minutes between flights you have left after you find a free socket in the gate area.
You would think it would be a no-brainer to have the SIM cards on some sort of custom phone plan which only allows calls to a fixed set of numbers, though.
My thoughts when hearing this story on the radio the other day:
"You can produce modified traffic lights that can do all this cool stuff, but then you can't lock the sim cards to that particular bit of proprietary hardware? Whiiiiiffffffff"
But the "change the calling plan" idea could be done quickly after the fact and save the rest of their installed base, that's even easier.
Anything in the public domain can't really be classified, let alone when its distributed in such a massive way like how Wikileaks does it.
No, the classification of a document isn't magically changed because it appears somewhere, and like it or not, the AF computer systems have to follow the rules about which documents end up in which security layer, regardless of source.
Regulations aside, think of this from a forensics standpoint. I'm sure the Air Force is (rightly so) rather interested in tracking down who leaked the stuff. That's a crime, and if you work for the Air Force, one you're liable for (as opposed to random people in Australia or Sweden, who aren't subject to those security laws). So - they're in the unenviable situation of having to track down who had access to which data when -- and suddenly copies of that data are pouring into systems from all over. That's going to muddy the trail a little bit, don't you think? How many more bogus hits on a phrase is the investigator's find/grep script going to turn up?
Finally, they are their computers, so they can do what they want with the content on them. C ensorship would be going out and telling other people what they can or can't do with their own systems. Big difference.
I've often wondered why anyone would bother building a data center in a warm place like Florida. You double your power bill - paying once to use the power, and again to air condition the resulting heat away.
Put the same equipment up north, and for much of the year you just have to open a window. Or, duct the waste heat over to an adjacent facility occupied by humans who will pay to use the hot air.
No hurricanes to worry about, either.
More interestingly, many things which are at their heart completely random follow power laws.
For example, the arrival time distributions of cosmic rays, or the energy distribution of those particles one might observe. (ok, so I'm a cosmic ray physicist, so that's the topic I think a lot about). Thus, you can't use this information to predict anything about any one cosmic ray (or insurgent attack). What you can do is use the data to try and understand something about whatever's behind your ensemble of data, e.g. the sources accelerating the cosmic rays or organizing the insurgents.
They've also introduced, with great fanfare, and then eliminated a whole lot of games. What are some of GW's best games? Mordheim (discontinued), BloodBowl (discontinued, though I expect it will come back now they've got a computer version), Battlefleet Gothic (discontinued)...
Blood Bowl is actually a post-GW success story, independent of the computer game. The rules have been updated continuously by the player base, which has really cleaned the rough edges off what was already a pretty good game (google on Blood Bowl Living Rulebook). There's also an active tournament scene out there, with an international governing body (NAF) and ladder rankings. One can still buy the basic boxed set from GW (along with packs of team minis), download the current rules .pdf from the net, and play. Or, go buy any of the high-quality 3rd party miniatures out there, download the rulebook, download board-making instructions, and play without giving the Evil Empire a penny. I guess it's hard to sue people for making football-themed fantasy miniatures.
Can anyone name a single discovery in HEP in the last 25 years that has led to a practical improvement of anything whatsoever? The only thing HEP has generated is paper.
Still waiting for my top-quark amplifier...
25 years is pretty short-term here. How long was it after Franklin defining charge and Thomson discovering electrons was it before you got your run-of-the-mill electron-based amplifier? And lightning bolts were much more obviously potentially practical things to be investigating.
Will ignore the obvious comment that without HEP in general and CERN in particular we wouldn't be writing this in html, as that was pretty tangential to the whole process :)
Yes.
The computing needs of both the current (MINOS) and future (Nova) detectors are primarily linux boxes, both of data acquisition and analysis.
The vast majority of this list are packages in the old, fortran-based CERNLIB. Still around bug in legacy code mode. The modern replacement is Root.
Aimed squarely at high energy experimentalists, and used for data analysis and simulation. In that field, DAQ code is nearly universally highly custom since the electronics it is interfacing with is also custom. Usually built with FOSS tools, though, such as gcc.
Yes fine, but how do you look at the Milky Way's black hole, circa 10 billion years ago, when it's distance is only 100,000 lightyears away?
Take advantage of the power of statistics. Find a lot of other galaxies that are a lot like the Milky Way, then look at the ones that are 10by away.
Not perfect, of course, but there are zillions of galaxies out there and so long as you're careful with how you answer the question "which ones are like our own galaxy" it can actually work out quite well.
Considering that add-ons (AdBlock, for example) can already inject and/or remove HTML from the dynamic page, it doesn't surprise me in the least.
Oh great. I hope the FF team doesn't take this as reason to remove the ability of plugins to do this.
They already screwed up file selection dialogs for alleged security reasons. In FF3, if you need to select a file for upload in some interactive form, you can't type or edit the filename - only click through a file selection dialog. This is an enourmous PITA if you've got a number of things you're uploading, or if you're happier typing instead of clicking. And, they've locked this down so you can't write a plugin to fix things, lest someone write a malware plugin to circumvent their "defense".
On the way straight back to a read-only web. Early 90's here we come!
Give them a multiple choice test where some, all, or none of the answers might be correct, rather than the usual "process of elimination" mode. To get the question right, you need to have filled in exactly all the right answers and none of the wrong ones.
While still easy for teachers to grade, students quickly learn to appreciate the "write out your work" tests!
I once moved /var/mail to /tmp on a Solaris machine, while trying to re-arrange partitions for some more room. Then rebooted.
The machine comes back up, and I learned that /tmp on Solaris was set to be a ramdisk by default.
Oops. My boss back then (more than a decade ago) still reminds me about losing years of his mail. (don't remember why we didn't have that backed up, Yet Another Lesson).