I am sure glad to see that Malaysia has made a/. headline! -sarcasm- Malaysia Boleh! -sarcasm-
Anyway, being a Malaysian, I can give a bit of history about this stuff.
Malaysia is a prudish country. To illustrate, let me list out the movies _we_ have banned : Austin Powers, Prince of Egypt, Schindler's list, Saving Private Ryan, countless others.
We also banned kissing scenes in American TV movies : they are always hilariously cut/bleeped off.
We banned Ellen Degeneres' appearance in David Letterman.
etc.. You get the Picture.
BUT...
The banning of Video Arcades, however, is not exactly a BadThing(tm), though. Have you ever seen some of these "video arcades" in Malaysia? They are not Dave and Busters' nice, clean stuff. But they are like gloomy, full of smoke, and lots of unsavoury characters.
Basically, if I have kids (I don't), I won't even let them -near- that place. If my kids want video games, I'll happily buy a Athlon and QuakeIII for him.
So, please/.-ters, don't judge too hastily. It's the knee-jerk reaction that, unfortunately, permeates too many people (including/. people) nowadays.
(As a point of history, video arcades were banned for the same reasons some years back. But the licenses were reinstated a few year back.)
Which is confusing terminology, so people call the shorter period Cepheid (Pop II I think) W Virginis stars instead.
It is believed (note the disclaimer), that Long-Period cepheids pulsates at the fundamental mode, because of the location of the "unstable" layer (more jargon : partial ionization layers) deep inside. Shorter-period WW Virg stars are believed to pulsate at higher overtones. The location of the unstable layer depends on the mass/luminosity of the star. Cepheids are more massive which translate (after lots of maths) into longer period etc.
Yes, astronomers are REALLY lousy at giving names.
The article I think refer to the "Classical" (long period") Cepheids, which are brighter than the W Virg types.
Getting
Re:How does this affect the Hubble Constant?
on
Stellar Distances
·
· Score: 1
Hipparcos has measured parallaxes to the nearest cepheids at about 100pc.
The next post after yours answered your question succintly. Provided of course, we believe that the planck scale puts limits on "information".
Seriously, I doubt if we can actually answer the question, until we figured out what quantum gravity is : then we can make conjectures about whether or not we can store information at planck scale physics.
You are correct.....except that it is known that space-time _should_ also be quantized, so there is no such thing as "continuous eigenstates" , that's because QM is incomplete : we have not figured out quantum gravity yet (i.e. where it is believed that space-time curvature is also quantized).
I know..I know, all QM books say there are continuous eigenstates. But that's because QM works on the Minkowski flat space-time metric which is perceived as "background-fixed", i.e. not a dynamic metric like General Relativity's metric. The goal of physicists is to find a way to make QM "background-free", i.e. does not rely on a fixed-metric, or put it another way, to "quantize gravity" (which nobody really knows what it means, but people believed it means quantizing the dynamic metric, or "quantizing Space-Time").
So the people is pursuing a dream that is not viable.
It's not as impossible as you think it is to get 20 nanometers precision.
Deep Space 3, nasa's light interferometer mission is looking at micrometers precision already.
The point is that in space, there is no friction, so it's almost your dream "inertial" frame. It's ironic that it is easier to control the attitude (i.e. orientation) of something in space than on Earth.
The trick is to know where things are relatively to each other. The way to do this is for the spacecraft to "ping" each other with pulses of x-ray (to get the smallest wavelength possible)
and then figure out the relative orientation from the "out-of-phase-ness" of the pings. Each S/C must have a precisely calibrated atomic clock of course.
Also, the spacecraft must be extremely stiff (since sloshing will fsck-up the attitude control responses), which is not hard since they are essentially mirrors with thrusters strapped in. I'll imagine they will use plasma thrusters, which can be controlled for extreme small thrust bursts, and uses solid fuel so there will be no sloshing in the tanks.
Other than the "western" languages, there is also:
(a) Malay/Indon : spoken by 300M people of Malaysia,Indonesia,and Singapore
(b) Mandarin : spoken by, say, 800M?
(c) Iban : spoken by about 1M people in the jungle of Borneo
(d)+(e) Cantonese and Hokkien : Spoken by southern Chinese (including Hong Kong).
(f) English.
The point is that most people elsewhere, by virtue of being non-native English speakers, speak more than 1 language if they want to communicate with other people in the world.
As for single-language speakers, the worst offenders are Americans and English (and French hehe), just because they don't need to speak another.
Lest you forget, their software controls nearly eighty percent of the desktops outthere. It doesn't take a genius to leverage that out for at least twenty more years.
Uhh....I must not be a genius then.
Can you kindly show this dumb-ass how to "leverage" 80% productshare in a volatile marketspace to 20 years?
Last I remembered, Apple has a 80% market share on PCs about 15 years ago, and they died 10 years ago.
Imagine a leak. Imagine happily driving, and then feeling very very drowsy....without knowing that you have a leak. You don't smell it, it won't kill you. But it will slowly suffocate you without you knowing it.
(a) "Low Cost." Liquid nitrogen is >-200F. That's cold enough to crystalize most metals (remember Arnold and Hasta La Vista Baby?). What kind of container is needed to hold it and can stand a collision so that it does not shatter into bits? Plastic probably. Composite highly likely. That's not to mention the plumbing, the compressors. Doh!
(b) "Pollution Free." To freeze something takes energy. To free somthing to >-200F takes LOT of energy. How do you get the energy? You burn fuel. So you put in an extra efficiency factor in your fuel chain. You make the City Mayors happy, but you make the people around power plants Extremely Unhappy.
(c) "Safe". Things take can crystalize metal is more dangerous than things that burn. A 3rd degree burns may be survivable. A crystalized head is not.
The "small town engineer"'s nitrogen powered car is a paper design (with all due respects). I remembered doing something like that (N2 powered motor) in a thermo problemset back in school. It's nothing new.
Yes. Those are great stuff. I love flourescent bulbs, got them in my toilets. Flickering is a lousy excuse : a good tube does not flicker because there is such thing call a "capacitor".
This place is running full of incandescent-skewed people. My karma has taken a load of beating for being pro-flourescent and fighting losing battles (which is funny, so much for moderating w/o personal prejudice). But at least I post without being an AC:).
Well, I am now in a country where fluorescence is NOT the norm:). So I have been in both places.
I do not disagree that lighting is important in workplaces. The place I used to work in has atrocious (yes fluorescence) lighting. We had an open office,with rows of cubicles. The problem is that the ceiling tubes are not arranged "in sync" with the cubicles, so some cubes are overbright and some are too dark. People complain all the time.
But the fault is not the fluorescent. I have also worked in a factory as a line engineer running production of LEDS (irony). The whole plant is lit by fluorescence and the lighting is well-designed. There are "rest areas" of semi-brightness (for people to rest eyes), and bright areas for work, and dark areas for LED testing. The point is that flurorescence works, and runs at lower wattage.
The "flickering" of fluorescence is usually caused by (a) bad tube (b) bad power supply (running lower than 50/60Hz required). It's nothing to do with fluorescence.
Now when I work at a desk, and the lighting is not good enough, I flipped on my desk lamp. Fluorescent of course.
(oh yeah, I share your disagreements with halogen. Those are bloody dangerous things, and over bright for the eyes.)
I wondered why DS1 tout the ion drive as "new".
It's being used on Geosync Communication satellites as attitude thrusters for years (which due to the high efficiency, extend the life of Geosynchs by a factor of 2).
There is this myth about "mental health" and "computer power" (I switched off my monitor when I am not working)....
I come from a country where fluorescence is norm, and I have not seen people complaining about "dizziness" blah etc.
It's all a fixation with light bulbs (a 60W light bulb emits less than 10% irradiation than a 40W fluorescence). That's not good.
Slashdot Mirror
I am sure glad to see that Malaysia has made a /. headline! -sarcasm- Malaysia Boleh! -sarcasm-
/.-ters, don't judge too hastily. It's the knee-jerk reaction that, unfortunately, permeates too many people (including /. people) nowadays.
Anyway, being a Malaysian, I can give a bit of history about this stuff.
Malaysia is a prudish country. To illustrate, let me list out the movies _we_ have banned : Austin Powers, Prince of Egypt, Schindler's list, Saving Private Ryan, countless others.
We also banned kissing scenes in American TV movies : they are always hilariously cut/bleeped off.
We banned Ellen Degeneres' appearance in David Letterman.
etc.. You get the Picture.
BUT...
The banning of Video Arcades, however, is not exactly a BadThing(tm), though. Have you ever seen some of these "video arcades" in Malaysia? They are not Dave and Busters' nice, clean stuff. But they are like gloomy, full of smoke, and lots of unsavoury characters.
Basically, if I have kids (I don't), I won't even let them -near- that place. If my kids want video games, I'll happily buy a Athlon and QuakeIII for him.
So, please
(As a point of history, video arcades were banned for the same reasons some years back. But the licenses were reinstated a few year back.)
This is not blue-nosed attitude : you may have a wrong opinion of what the Ig is all about.
To correct that, I suggest you read this.
Make no mistake about it - this is not about a shortage of programmers
uh...have you ever tried to put up a resume in the internet looking for a programming job?
A: its 'a' damned furriner
Not when I am zooming on the keyboard to get in first post, it's not!
Because I am damned foreigner!
for C and Unixes in general.
You mus tbe refering to Cepheids Pop I and II.
Which is confusing terminology, so people call the shorter period Cepheid (Pop II I think) W Virginis stars instead.
It is believed (note the disclaimer), that Long-Period cepheids pulsates at the fundamental mode, because of the location of the "unstable" layer (more jargon : partial ionization layers) deep inside. Shorter-period WW Virg stars are believed to pulsate at higher overtones. The location of the unstable layer depends on the mass/luminosity of the star. Cepheids are more massive which translate (after lots of maths) into longer period etc.
Yes, astronomers are REALLY lousy at giving names.
The article I think refer to the "Classical" (long period") Cepheids, which are brighter than the W Virg types.
Getting
Hipparcos has measured parallaxes to the nearest cepheids at about 100pc.
Who needs email! Just post a link to /. and /.-em! The /. effect should take care of business.
The next post after yours answered your question succintly. Provided of course, we believe that the planck scale puts limits on "information".
Seriously, I doubt if we can actually answer the question, until we figured out what quantum gravity is : then we can make conjectures about whether or not we can store information at planck scale physics.
sadly, that's about the only thing I have time left to do :)
So the people is pursuing a dream that is not viable. Uhh...I mean the people IN THE ARTICLE is pursuing a dream that is not viable.
You are correct.....except that it is known that space-time _should_ also be quantized, so there is no such thing as "continuous eigenstates" , that's because QM is incomplete : we have not figured out quantum gravity yet (i.e. where it is believed that space-time curvature is also quantized).
I know..I know, all QM books say there are continuous eigenstates. But that's because QM works on the Minkowski flat space-time metric which is perceived as "background-fixed", i.e. not a dynamic metric like General Relativity's metric. The goal of physicists is to find a way to make QM "background-free", i.e. does not rely on a fixed-metric, or put it another way, to "quantize gravity" (which nobody really knows what it means, but people believed it means quantizing the dynamic metric, or "quantizing Space-Time").
So the people is pursuing a dream that is not viable.
It's not as impossible as you think it is to get 20 nanometers precision.
Deep Space 3, nasa's light interferometer mission is looking at micrometers precision already.
The point is that in space, there is no friction, so it's almost your dream "inertial" frame. It's ironic that it is easier to control the attitude (i.e. orientation) of something in space than on Earth.
The trick is to know where things are relatively to each other. The way to do this is for the spacecraft to "ping" each other with pulses of x-ray (to get the smallest wavelength possible)
and then figure out the relative orientation from the "out-of-phase-ness" of the pings. Each S/C must have a precisely calibrated atomic clock of course.
Also, the spacecraft must be extremely stiff (since sloshing will fsck-up the attitude control responses), which is not hard since they are essentially mirrors with thrusters strapped in. I'll imagine they will use plasma thrusters, which can be controlled for extreme small thrust bursts, and uses solid fuel so there will be no sloshing in the tanks.
If your conscience cannot take it, leave and work elsewhere.
If you cannot afford to leave, then sign it. They after all pay your bills.
(a) Ooi! Jangan tindak begitu kasar loh!
(b) Aye! Pu yau che' yang mah...
(c) Hai! Anang nuan pahit angat!
(d) Aya! Lei moh kam yong mah!
(e) Ooi! Mai ane kuan lah!
(f) Hey! Don't be so harsh!
Other than the "western" languages, there is also:
(a) Malay/Indon : spoken by 300M people of Malaysia,Indonesia,and Singapore
(b) Mandarin : spoken by, say, 800M?
(c) Iban : spoken by about 1M people in the jungle of Borneo
(d)+(e) Cantonese and Hokkien : Spoken by southern Chinese (including Hong Kong).
(f) English.
The point is that most people elsewhere, by virtue of being non-native English speakers, speak more than 1 language if they want to communicate with other people in the world.
As for single-language speakers, the worst offenders are Americans and English (and French hehe), just because they don't need to speak another.
Lest you forget, their software controls nearly eighty percent of the desktops outthere. It doesn't take a genius to leverage that out for at least twenty more years.
Uhh....I must not be a genius then.
Can you kindly show this dumb-ass how to "leverage" 80% productshare in a volatile marketspace to 20 years?
Last I remembered, Apple has a 80% market share on PCs about 15 years ago, and they died 10 years ago.
Imagine a leak. Imagine happily driving, and then feeling very very drowsy....without knowing that you have a leak. You don't smell it, it won't kill you. But it will slowly suffocate you without you knowing it.
That's a wild claim. Let's consider :
(a) "Low Cost." Liquid nitrogen is >-200F. That's cold enough to crystalize most metals (remember Arnold and Hasta La Vista Baby?). What kind of container is needed to hold it and can stand a collision so that it does not shatter into bits? Plastic probably. Composite highly likely. That's not to mention the plumbing, the compressors. Doh!
(b) "Pollution Free." To freeze something takes energy. To free somthing to >-200F takes LOT of energy. How do you get the energy? You burn fuel. So you put in an extra efficiency factor in your fuel chain. You make the City Mayors happy, but you make the people around power plants Extremely Unhappy.
(c) "Safe". Things take can crystalize metal is more dangerous than things that burn. A 3rd degree burns may be survivable. A crystalized head is not.
The "small town engineer"'s nitrogen powered car is a paper design (with all due respects). I remembered doing something like that (N2 powered motor) in a thermo problemset back in school. It's nothing new.
Yes. Those are great stuff. I love flourescent bulbs, got them in my toilets. Flickering is a lousy excuse : a good tube does not flicker because there is such thing call a "capacitor".
:).
This place is running full of incandescent-skewed people. My karma has taken a load of beating for being pro-flourescent and fighting losing battles (which is funny, so much for moderating w/o personal prejudice). But at least I post without being an AC
Sigh.
Well, I am now in a country where fluorescence is NOT the norm :). So I have been in both places.
I do not disagree that lighting is important in workplaces. The place I used to work in has atrocious (yes fluorescence) lighting. We had an open office,with rows of cubicles. The problem is that the ceiling tubes are not arranged "in sync" with the cubicles, so some cubes are overbright and some are too dark. People complain all the time.
But the fault is not the fluorescent. I have also worked in a factory as a line engineer running production of LEDS (irony). The whole plant is lit by fluorescence and the lighting is well-designed. There are "rest areas" of semi-brightness (for people to rest eyes), and bright areas for work, and dark areas for LED testing. The point is that flurorescence works, and runs at lower wattage.
The "flickering" of fluorescence is usually caused by (a) bad tube (b) bad power supply (running lower than 50/60Hz required). It's nothing to do with fluorescence.
Now when I work at a desk, and the lighting is not good enough, I flipped on my desk lamp. Fluorescent of course.
(oh yeah, I share your disagreements with halogen. Those are bloody dangerous things, and over bright for the eyes.)
I wondered why DS1 tout the ion drive as "new".
It's being used on Geosync Communication satellites as attitude thrusters for years (which due to the high efficiency, extend the life of Geosynchs by a factor of 2).
There is this myth about "mental health" and "computer power" (I switched off my monitor when I am not working)....
I come from a country where fluorescence is norm, and I have not seen people complaining about "dizziness" blah etc.
It's all a fixation with light bulbs (a 60W light bulb emits less than 10% irradiation than a 40W fluorescence). That's not good.
(a) Cubicle Fluff
(b) Free Beer
(c) SGI with 27" monitor and T3 connection
(d) More cubicle Fluff
(e) More Free Beer
(f) FLUORESCENT LIGHTS! (Take That)
(g) Cubicle fluff
(h) Free Beer
Right. But I was wondering whether or not I can hide a First Post without getting modded to death (which I was for a couple of time :P))