The photo is noteworthy for a number of reasons. Among them:
1) This was done by a guy with a portable telescope and camera that he carts around in the back of his car, not a mountaintop observatory or mega-million satellite.
2) You had to be in exactly the right place at the right time. That is, in a line a few km long for the less-than-one-second that the transit took place.
3) You have to know how to photograph the Sun without frying your equipment or going blind. You need enough magnification to resolve the spacecraft but not so much to miss the target.
4) For a non-professional, this photo took an impressive amount of equipment, configured properly and operated perfectly.
And it's no fake. There's another photo showing the Shuttle and the ISS transiting the Sun and the two are very similar. In that photo, the ISS is the more prominent object.
Regardless of why the funds were redirected, it was the right thing to do anyway. Why make the difficult task of inventing cost-effective fuel cells even more difficult by mandating that the system is for automobiles? A mobile system adds to the difficulties: crash-proof hydrogen storage, maintenance, consumer-based fueling infrastructure, size and weight of the system, etc.
Stationary systems (which already exist commercially in limited numbers) are the common-sense first step. Millions of homes and businesses are heated by fuel oil, and I would welcome a fuel cell replacement for those filthy and un-green furnaces. And those fuel cell systems have very few constraints for size or weight. They could be fueled and serviced by the same infrastructure used by the heating oil and propane industry, and down the road, perhaps a hydrogen delivery system similar to residential and commercial natural gas could be developed.
I have a 10+ year old email account that was used all over the place, and now has the dubious honor of getting well over 100 spams per day (unfiltered). I've recently applied the zen.spamhaus.org RBL and a short list of blacklisted domains and keywords (sorry, Mr. Hoodia,
I won't be getting your emails). Applying a proper SPF record to the domain has drastically cut down on the non-deliverable backscatter. A couple of times a year, my email address was used as the reply-to address for an entire block of spam and in those cases I'd get hundreds of bounce messages in the course of a few hours. Now it's down to a few now and then, usually from hotmail.
As for opt-out, the remaining spam comes from what look like legit marketers. I definitely did NOT opt in to their list, but once one crooked spammer sells his "double opt-in email list", you're on it for good. The legit marketers send their mail from different domains, but if the spam has a good SPF record, and the opt-out notice goes to the marketing company and not the domain of the sender, I click on the opt-out link. Incoming mail that fails SPF is rejected. No SPF record and I don't opt out. And after a few weeks, I see a negligible amount of repeat email from these marketers, and overall the incoming spam has been reduced over 90%.
As you say, typical. However, if the forward voltage of the string is less than 12V, you get excessive current, and if you have more than 12V, you get diminished current. And maybe not coincidentally, the designers weren't satisfied with the IR output of their LED array.
Proper practice is to leave enough margin so that the variation in forward drop of the string doesn't drastically change the current. This design fails in that regard, and it's not "fine" as you imply.
On the other hand, the NK engineers responsible for the failure could be facing a firing squad as we speak. In their regime, the actual cause of the failure may be less important to them than simply avoiding getting the blame.
Probably not worth the trouble. They're about 50 years behind the USA/Russian space capabilities, and the intelligence networks probably know already from where they have stolen or misappropriated the technology.
People who grew up with TOS are in their 50's now. The new movie is not meant to appeal to them at all - it's the passing of the guard to a new generation a few decades younger. Whether the oldies (like me) consider the new movie a triumph or an abomination will be irrelevant to its success or failure.
Did Tigh lose his eye on camera? And not that anyone would look forward to it, the eye has no pain receptors so the pain of extracting an eye is limited to damage to the surrounding viscera. Tigh doesn't even appear to have had a scar, or much of one.
And sure, everybody suffers, but describing something that's happened is a lot less powerful than watching it happen. As for Leoben, he seemed to be unique as the "punching bag" Cylon, but still not as bad as the Sixes throughout the series.
If that's the case, atheists must be very easy to offend. Considering that atheists still make up a minority of the population, they should be very used to religious symbology used in the culture, even if they don't agree with it.
Should a Christian be "insulted" by fairy tales that involve pixies and trolls, but leave out God? Maybe some would, but the sensible majority can separate fantasy entertainment from religious philosophy.
And if it's any consolation to anti-christian atheists, the "god" in BSG wouldn't have made a very good substitute for the Judeo-Christian God. As stated in the finale, the BSG god is neither good nor evil - it's the people that are good or evil. That puts the BSG god a couple of notches below the "good God" most people recognize, and even lower than The Force...
Re:If you didn't vote libertarian, you ASKED FOR T
on
Obama DOJ Sides With RIAA
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost." -- John Quincy Adams
I think many so-called Libertarians these days would feel more closely allied with the Constitution Party, which supports enforcing the borders and is pro-life. The Libertarian stance is for open borders and no restrictions on abortion.
BSG was by far the best thing on television, but did anyone else notice the undercurrent of violence particularly towards women? That, and the tendency for strong male figures to break down into emotional Jello? By the end of the series, NONE of the remaining principal characters were human females. Laura Roslin, Starbuck, Dualla and Callie were all dead.
I'm not talking about the Starbuck character's sex change. That, taken by itself was a great decision. Women in action/sf movies are almost exclusively portrayed as tough-as-nails, drink the guys under the table, A-type overachievers, and in that regard BSG was no different. But what disturbed me was the repetitive and gruesome nature of the violence that seemed to be more focused on women.
Sharon/Athena's frequent facial beatings, complete with long-lasting bandages and bloody scars. Many instances of Sixes being beaten, tortured and raped, usually with lurid shots of bloody wounds and scars to the body and face. Countless beatings taken and given by Starbuck, usually accompanied with much blood. Callie gets tossed out of an airlock, but not before she gets beaten to a pulp by Tory, who in the end gets strangled to death with Ty's bare hands. Pilots killed in space battles seem to be disproportionately women, and they die not so much in a ball of flame as usual, but in a way where we can view the lifeless corpse. There's Dualla's pointless suicide, ironically just after the character drops the "killer chick" facade. For years we witnessed the slow and painful deterioration of Laura Roslyn, with plenty of humiliating shots in a hospital bed, and years of moaning and grunting in pain. It was such a relief just to see her die peacefully. Ellen Tigh gets poisoned by her husband, and then barely escapes being dissected alive. A similar fate awaited the innocent child Hera, who only had to face days of terror, starvation and isolation. D'Anna dares to speak out against authority and in return she and her clone sisters are "boxed" and ultimately all destroyed save her. Sure, Baltar got his ass kicked a lot, but he deserved it. The only gruesome and painful injury to a male that I recall is to Felix, with his nagging amputation. Of course, the ancillary BSG episodes show him to be gay...
So in typical BSG ambiguity, it leaves us with a question. In the eyes of the producers, are these women truly "liberated", or do they have to pay a price for living in a man's world? Similarly (even congruently), are men weakened when surrounded by strong women?
Hey, it's SciFi, so they floated a new idea. At the thought of setting up yet another city, with all of the infrastructure, laws, political baggage
and everything else, Lee came up with a chance to try something novel. Look how our own lives could be improved if we could "roll back the clock" on certain aspects of civilization. Sure, "gun control" is a good idea in principle, but only if everyone is equally disarmed. Even when the colonies flew as a "rag tag" fleet of ships they maintained strong ties to their destroyed home worlds. Building new cities based on those obsolete affinities would quickly lead to conflict, competition and maybe war.
Here was, for the first time, the chance to successfully put the genie back in the bottle.
I found the decision to leave technology behind a daring and fitting end. They were already being decimated in their dealings with the Cylons, so even without technology they would have a better chance of survival in the place of their choosing on Earth.
As for leaving "some" technology in reserve behind for whatever purpose would have un-done the entire justification for abandoning the technology to begin with. It would have allowed some group from a future generation to destroy or enslave everyone else.
As for flying all the ships into the Sun, I would have put them in orbit around one of the outer planets, where they would not be discovered until humanity (re)gained significant spaceflight capabilities.
I've had an application pending for some time now. I submitted (by fax, how 20th century) some corporate documents, and later I received a couple of unintelligible voice mail messages from Apple. They were sent at odd hours, and the all had the same characteristics: low volume, very high background noise, and a heavily-accented voice, which rendered the messages incomprehensible. Then I get an email telling me that I haven't submitted the documents that I had indeed submitted, and to reply as soon as possible. The return address for he email? do-not-reply@apple.com.
I've used Dreamweaver for a few years, and I've found it's a great tool as long as you don't get too attached to the WYSIWYG mode and its automatic style sheet generation. WYSIWYG editing generally creates horribly wrong HTML, and the automatic style sheet generation works as long as you change your style thinking from CSS to Dreamweaver's proprietary methods.
The figure comes from a government site, based on location but assuming no blockage from trees or other objects. It takes into account cloudy days (based on historical observations) as well. The location is just north of NYC - not exactly the Arctic Circle.
The 2.5 figure is not the number of hours of full sun - it's the total average per-day output of a panel, expressed as full-sun-hours. It's also based on fixed panels,
positioned at the optimal angle. Tracking panels would generate somewhat more.
The other figure often neglected is the amount of power (in kWH) generated based on your locale. Obviously, solar panels generate nothing at night, but depending upon your longitude and other factors, the average power generated is substantially less than 1/2 the rated output. For me, the figure is 2.5 full sun hours, which means that the daily average output is the rated output of the panel for 2.5 hours. So, a 10 kW array, which would generate 10 kW under full sun conditions will only generate 25 kWH on the average day vs. the intuitive thinking that you'd get 12 hours of full power output per day (240 kWH). That's almost a 10:1 discrepancy.
Slashdot Mirror
The photo is noteworthy for a number of reasons. Among them:
1) This was done by a guy with a portable telescope and camera that he carts around in the back of his car, not a mountaintop observatory or mega-million satellite.
2) You had to be in exactly the right place at the right time. That is, in a line a few km long for the less-than-one-second that the transit took place.
3) You have to know how to photograph the Sun without frying your equipment or going blind. You need enough magnification to resolve the spacecraft but not so much to miss the target.
4) For a non-professional, this photo took an impressive amount of equipment, configured properly and operated perfectly.
And it's no fake. There's another photo showing the Shuttle and the ISS transiting the Sun and the two are very similar. In that photo, the ISS is the more prominent object.
Regardless of why the funds were redirected, it was the right thing to do anyway. Why make the difficult task of inventing cost-effective fuel cells even more difficult by mandating that the system is for automobiles? A mobile system adds to the difficulties: crash-proof hydrogen storage, maintenance, consumer-based fueling infrastructure, size and weight of the system, etc.
Stationary systems (which already exist commercially in limited numbers) are the common-sense first step. Millions of homes and businesses are heated by fuel oil, and I would welcome a fuel cell replacement for those filthy and un-green furnaces. And those fuel cell systems have very few constraints for size or weight. They could be fueled and serviced by the same infrastructure used by the heating oil and propane industry, and down the road, perhaps a hydrogen delivery system similar to residential and commercial natural gas could be developed.
At one end of the lawn would be the goat breeding facility, run by volunteer Google staffers. At the other end of the lawn, GOATBURGERS!
Shoulda spelled it quewe
I have a 10+ year old email account that was used all over the place, and now has the dubious honor of getting well over 100 spams per day (unfiltered). I've recently applied the zen.spamhaus.org RBL and a short list of blacklisted domains and keywords (sorry, Mr. Hoodia, I won't be getting your emails). Applying a proper SPF record to the domain has drastically cut down on the non-deliverable backscatter. A couple of times a year, my email address was used as the reply-to address for an entire block of spam and in those cases I'd get hundreds of bounce messages in the course of a few hours. Now it's down to a few now and then, usually from hotmail.
As for opt-out, the remaining spam comes from what look like legit marketers. I definitely did NOT opt in to their list, but once one crooked spammer sells his "double opt-in email list", you're on it for good. The legit marketers send their mail from different domains, but if the spam has a good SPF record, and the opt-out notice goes to the marketing company and not the domain of the sender, I click on the opt-out link. Incoming mail that fails SPF is rejected. No SPF record and I don't opt out. And after a few weeks, I see a negligible amount of repeat email from these marketers, and overall the incoming spam has been reduced over 90%.
Where's Thunderbird 5 when you need it?
As you say, typical. However, if the forward voltage of the string is less than 12V, you get excessive current, and if you have more than 12V, you get diminished current. And maybe not coincidentally, the designers weren't satisfied with the IR output of their LED array.
Proper practice is to leave enough margin so that the variation in forward drop of the string doesn't drastically change the current. This design fails in that regard, and it's not "fine" as you imply.
In TFA they connect 8 LEDs in series directly to a 12V rail with no bias resistor(s). This is a bogus design and they should have known better.
Then maybe Japan should change its flag so that it looks less like a bullseye.
On the other hand, the NK engineers responsible for the failure could be facing a firing squad as we speak. In their regime, the actual cause of the failure may be less important to them than simply avoiding getting the blame.
Probably not worth the trouble. They're about 50 years behind the USA/Russian space capabilities, and the intelligence networks probably know already from where they have stolen or misappropriated the technology.
People who grew up with TOS are in their 50's now. The new movie is not meant to appeal to them at all - it's the passing of the guard to a new generation a few decades younger. Whether the oldies (like me) consider the new movie a triumph or an abomination will be irrelevant to its success or failure.
Did Tigh lose his eye on camera? And not that anyone would look forward to it, the eye has no pain receptors so the pain of extracting an eye is limited to damage to the surrounding viscera. Tigh doesn't even appear to have had a scar, or much of one.
And sure, everybody suffers, but describing something that's happened is a lot less powerful than watching it happen. As for Leoben, he seemed to be unique as the "punching bag" Cylon, but still not as bad as the Sixes throughout the series.
If that's the case, atheists must be very easy to offend. Considering that atheists still make up a minority of the population, they should be very used to religious symbology used in the culture, even if they don't agree with it.
Should a Christian be "insulted" by fairy tales that involve pixies and trolls, but leave out God? Maybe some would, but the sensible majority can separate fantasy entertainment from religious philosophy.
And if it's any consolation to anti-christian atheists, the "god" in BSG wouldn't have made a very good substitute for the Judeo-Christian God. As stated in the finale, the BSG god is neither good nor evil - it's the people that are good or evil. That puts the BSG god a couple of notches below the "good God" most people recognize, and even lower than The Force...
"Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost." -- John Quincy Adams I think many so-called Libertarians these days would feel more closely allied with the Constitution Party, which supports enforcing the borders and is pro-life. The Libertarian stance is for open borders and no restrictions on abortion.
Yes, going back to the "old days" is not a new concept, but actually being able to pull it off is.
BSG was by far the best thing on television, but did anyone else notice the undercurrent of violence particularly towards women? That, and the tendency for strong male figures to break down into emotional Jello? By the end of the series, NONE of the remaining principal characters were human females. Laura Roslin, Starbuck, Dualla and Callie were all dead.
I'm not talking about the Starbuck character's sex change. That, taken by itself was a great decision. Women in action/sf movies are almost exclusively portrayed as tough-as-nails, drink the guys under the table, A-type overachievers, and in that regard BSG was no different. But what disturbed me was the repetitive and gruesome nature of the violence that seemed to be more focused on women.
Sharon/Athena's frequent facial beatings, complete with long-lasting bandages and bloody scars. Many instances of Sixes being beaten, tortured and raped, usually with lurid shots of bloody wounds and scars to the body and face. Countless beatings taken and given by Starbuck, usually accompanied with much blood. Callie gets tossed out of an airlock, but not before she gets beaten to a pulp by Tory, who in the end gets strangled to death with Ty's bare hands. Pilots killed in space battles seem to be disproportionately women, and they die not so much in a ball of flame as usual, but in a way where we can view the lifeless corpse. There's Dualla's pointless suicide, ironically just after the character drops the "killer chick" facade. For years we witnessed the slow and painful deterioration of Laura Roslyn, with plenty of humiliating shots in a hospital bed, and years of moaning and grunting in pain. It was such a relief just to see her die peacefully. Ellen Tigh gets poisoned by her husband, and then barely escapes being dissected alive. A similar fate awaited the innocent child Hera, who only had to face days of terror, starvation and isolation. D'Anna dares to speak out against authority and in return she and her clone sisters are "boxed" and ultimately all destroyed save her. Sure, Baltar got his ass kicked a lot, but he deserved it. The only gruesome and painful injury to a male that I recall is to Felix, with his nagging amputation. Of course, the ancillary BSG episodes show him to be gay...
So in typical BSG ambiguity, it leaves us with a question. In the eyes of the producers, are these women truly "liberated", or do they have to pay a price for living in a man's world? Similarly (even congruently), are men weakened when surrounded by strong women?
Hey, it's SciFi, so they floated a new idea. At the thought of setting up yet another city, with all of the infrastructure, laws, political baggage and everything else, Lee came up with a chance to try something novel. Look how our own lives could be improved if we could "roll back the clock" on certain aspects of civilization. Sure, "gun control" is a good idea in principle, but only if everyone is equally disarmed. Even when the colonies flew as a "rag tag" fleet of ships they maintained strong ties to their destroyed home worlds. Building new cities based on those obsolete affinities would quickly lead to conflict, competition and maybe war.
Here was, for the first time, the chance to successfully put the genie back in the bottle.
Bzzt. The Cylons saw the death of one of the final five by strangulation, so it would be pointless for them to search for the remaining four.
I found the decision to leave technology behind a daring and fitting end. They were already being decimated in their dealings with the Cylons, so even without technology they would have a better chance of survival in the place of their choosing on Earth.
As for leaving "some" technology in reserve behind for whatever purpose would have un-done the entire justification for abandoning the technology to begin with. It would have allowed some group from a future generation to destroy or enslave everyone else.
As for flying all the ships into the Sun, I would have put them in orbit around one of the outer planets, where they would not be discovered until humanity (re)gained significant spaceflight capabilities.
Maybe that magic was just a technology that you can't explain.
I've had an application pending for some time now. I submitted (by fax, how 20th century) some corporate documents, and later I received a couple of unintelligible voice mail messages from Apple. They were sent at odd hours, and the all had the same characteristics: low volume, very high background noise, and a heavily-accented voice, which rendered the messages incomprehensible. Then I get an email telling me that I haven't submitted the documents that I had indeed submitted, and to reply as soon as possible. The return address for he email? do-not-reply@apple.com.
I've used Dreamweaver for a few years, and I've found it's a great tool as long as you don't get too attached to the WYSIWYG mode and its automatic style sheet generation. WYSIWYG editing generally creates horribly wrong HTML, and the automatic style sheet generation works as long as you change your style thinking from CSS to Dreamweaver's proprietary methods.
The figure comes from a government site, based on location but assuming no blockage from trees or other objects. It takes into account cloudy days (based on historical observations) as well. The location is just north of NYC - not exactly the Arctic Circle.
The 2.5 figure is not the number of hours of full sun - it's the total average per-day output of a panel, expressed as full-sun-hours. It's also based on fixed panels, positioned at the optimal angle. Tracking panels would generate somewhat more.
The other figure often neglected is the amount of power (in kWH) generated based on your locale. Obviously, solar panels generate nothing at night, but depending upon your longitude and other factors, the average power generated is substantially less than 1/2 the rated output. For me, the figure is 2.5 full sun hours, which means that the daily average output is the rated output of the panel for 2.5 hours. So, a 10 kW array, which would generate 10 kW under full sun conditions will only generate 25 kWH on the average day vs. the intuitive thinking that you'd get 12 hours of full power output per day (240 kWH). That's almost a 10:1 discrepancy.