Yeap. GPS works as long as you can get a fix to the signal. If you are higher, and get Line of Sight to more sats, you can get a better fix. So it actually works better in space....
Last time, before the recent overturn of the "selective availability" by Clinton, you cannot get velocity info above a certain velocity (eg. so people can't use GPS to control a ballistic missile headed for D.C.). But now SA is dead, you can get velocity info in space too, which is great. Problem is that you have to buy/build GPS receivers capable of doing that.
There are a ton of sats up there using GPS as navigation tools.
The "SSTL" system of satellite classification is :
100-350 kg "MiniSat" 20-100 kg "MicroSat" 20 "NanoSat"
This is kinda becoming the "standard" since SSTL is the first company to go into commercial "small satellite" in a big way. But don't tell the Russians : their idea of a "microsat" is about 1000kg. Them Russkies built things BIG...
The problem with the US is that privacy laws are often dictated by big mega corporations (via their lobbies to your local congresspeople). Of course, the more the megacorps have info over your lives, the better!
In EU, it's harder for megacorps to exert such control because they have multiple govs to "lobby" (if even possible). So the privacy laws (or any laws) are often formed by consensus between govs, which is usually more pro-consumer (democratic govs have little to gain from knowing what the public fav. channels are...) than pro-business.
Snap-1 (actually an acronym for Surrey Nanosat Application Program) is probably not good for this de-orbit thing that they are talking about : it's all about the amount of deltaV/mass (change in velocity per mass) your thrusters can provide and this number is constrained by the amount of fuel and the efficiency of your thrusters in converting this fuel to thrust. (about 20% for the cold gas N2 thrusters snap probably has). So how they deorbit a Arianne IV spent booster with 0.5, which is unlikely given the stuff they are putting on board...
(Caveat : the size of thrusters is not a problem : one can always fire for a long time as long as fuel is available.)
What is this? See Mars from your backyard without a telescope?! See the future?
AO is great (in fact, there is this huge AO laser in the office next to mine right now). AO is cool. But AO is built for telescopes, and you need a calibrating star (or the said laser to mimic a star) so that your piezos can dynamically adjust your optics to "de-twinkle" the atmospheric turbulences. How do we use AO to "de-twinkle" our computer screens is beyond me...
And what's this about seeing Mars from backyard? How the hell are they going to overcome the Rayleigh's Limit of optics? (resolution = lambda/D) That's a HARD physical limit. As long as our eyes are 1 cm across, whatever sh*t you put it in front of our eyes, AO included, is not going to allow us to see the Mars other than a dot!
I don't even want to talk about the B&L seeing the future thing. U of Rochester has just bombed its reputation. (at least in my books.)
(10) John Travolta finally learned the "Evil Laugh" (Bwahahahahaha) (9) Confirmed that the Marines were right to buy British : them Brits made really good fighter jets (8) Critics reviews were hilarious and more entertaining than many movies....and you get to read them for free! (7) Has made all other cheesy B-grade sci-fi movies into a joy to watch. (6) Made Tom Cruise left the theatre in disgust, and vow to leave the Church of Scientology....to make the equally ridiculous MI2. (5) Scientologists who recycled Hubbard's books to push it into bestseller lists now HAVE to watch this godawful thing again and again to push it into the Box Office lists. (4) Made the next fashion statement : dreadlocks! (3) Will spawn the next Jane Fonda video "How to Train a Grunting Monkey into a Top Fighter Jock....in One Week!" (2) Reassure the people of the US that Fort Knox IS really secure. (1) Refer to Dianetics by L.Ron Hubbard, page 169.
....is to out-compete them with great technology, well-plan market strategies, and Great Bobs of Coolness.
That's what AOL/Gateway/Transmeta alliance will do. And good heavens, finally we at least some constructive action from the anti-M$ people (instead of whining about it and crying to Mama DOJ for help.)
But if it actually RECREATES the "entire" pulse at the other side, then speed of Light IS broken.
I think it's more likely that the "leading edge" is recreated, and as the incoming pulse is being "fed" into the cesium tube, more and more of the "pulse" is reproduced. A whole pulse is reproduced when the incoming pulse has been entirely absorbed.
This way, there is no paradox : since no info can be carried faster than light (recall that information is encoded in the entire pulse, not part of the pulse.)
Now, one can postulate that we can actually hide info in part of a wave-packet (i.e the pulse). But that is degenerate (read : multiple possibilities), so maybe we can send information on "probabilities". Which would be interesting.
Anyway, Dr Wang + gang probably can't measure single wave packets. What they do is to send billions of packets through, and measure the "click click" at the other end. Now, what they are saying is that they can get a "click" that violate the speed of light. But there is really no info sent, because the one has to have a series of "clicks" to encode information.....
(IMHO, it's probably just another funky variation of the EPR paradox..)
We have bootleg M$oft products everywhere at flee markets for $0.99 each! In addition, we also sell Linux distributions for $0.99each....and they are the only LEGAL piece of software in our Great Country! BWahahahaha(imitating a certain Scientologist in a certain movie...)
IF only he has held on to his proof of Fermat until they announce 1M bux for it... (Btw, all those problems also come attached a Fields Medal.) So now those Field Medalists can also say to the Nobelists "Ha! _I_ also got a Million Bucks!"
Kudos to NASA for bringing in commerce money. Columbus used public funds (i.e. Queen Isabella's tax coffers) to "explore the Final Frontier". But public funds did not colonize (and wiped out the indigenous folks...) America. The West was won because of there is commercial incentives to do so (gold). Similarly, Space will be conquered not by NASA, but by the East India Companies of the 21st Century.
That's not really a fair statement. "Principal Investigators" (PI) of NASA space projects gets "first cut" on the data, which they are allowed to keep for ONE year (propriety). However, once that one year is up, they HAVE to release the data. This is fair both ways : people who are PI put tons of time/money to bid and propose to NASA so they deserve a break, but NASA projects are funded by the public, so the public at the end should get the data. So this "big 20000 for free" thing is just another NASA twist on "how nice we are PR" despite being just a fact of life. Which they probably need after having the MPL/MCO f-u-c-k-u-p.
Interesting, but people have been trying to "extend" GR for years. Prof Yilmaz is probably not the only one around. Here is a summary of why GR is so troublesome to many people : (a) It is not a gauge theory. Which is irritating to physicists because the rest of the other forces (weak, strong, electromagnetism) is. Basically a gauge theory takes some form of "particles/fields" (field is the correct word, but people seem to be familiar with particle more), impose some "geometric" constraint on it (i.e. the curvature thing Cramer is talking about), and Walla! You get the equations of motions, eg. the Maxwell equations for EM etc.. The point is that all the other forces are DERIVABLE from some consideration, which led physicists to believe ALL forces must be a gauge theory. But GR is not. Now in a Gauge theory, one can derive the Stress-Energy tensor by using Noether's Theorem. Why is this S-E thing so crucial? Well because the S-E tensor basically says Energy/Momentum/What-have-you is conserved! Yes, another surprise : Conservation of Energy is DERIVABLE from a gauge theory. It is not some "fuzzy concept" we impose arbitrarily. But in GR, we can't do that. So we can't impose local conservation of energy. People are disturbed by this... That's why physicists wanted nice "gauge theories" . Now, having said all that, it is conceivable to "extend" GR, by basically adding more "terms" in the equations, take make GR a gauge theory. This is what probably Yilmaz has done (i've not seen his papers, but I will bet my library on this). OK, the get nice gauge theories and such....BUT why add more terms?? This question is begged to be asked. They say : so it's a nice Gauge Theory! But we say : but that's cheating! The solution : make observations. The observations : nah....Black Holes probably exist. (b) GR is not renormalizable. "Renormalization" is just a big term to indicate that we can "get rid of the infinities" by some trick. Now Renormalization is a big thing to physicists : it makes equations nice and "well behaved" (literally). Physicists/Mathematicians know how to renormalize Gauge Theories (a few Nobels have been awarded for this great breakthrough, Feynman/Schwinger/Tomonoga for QED, Wilson for renormalizable gauge theories, d'hooft and Veltman for non-abelian gauge theories). But GR is NOT a Gauge theory! And people still don't know how to renormalize it. But instead of screaming "no!", physicists embraced the resulting Infinities as "hey that's cool! Look Ma, a Black Hole!". Why? I don't know, probably historical. But IT'S BLOODY HARD TO RENORMALIZE A NON-GAUGE THEORY!!!!! (c) It is not Quantizable. Now, we know how to quantize a renormalizable gauge theory (see : I cleverly organized this article such that everything falls into place:)). But GR is NOT a renormalizable gauge theory! So we don't know how to quantize it! Thus we are in a time in the history of Science that we are stuck. Unless we do things like Yilmaz, by arbitrarily adding terms to the equations (for those physicists out there : we add extra couplings to the Lagrangian), we are left with either accepting that GR is just DIFFERENT from the rest of the world, OR, that we just have an incomplete theory. Physicists, of course, to protect their jobs and grants, say "We have an INCOMPLETE THEORY! GIve us more money!" The current "hot" thing is Superstring. A marvellous piece of beautiful mathematical theory that "may" unify GR and the rest (the so call Super Unified Theory, as opposed to Grand Unified Theory w/o GR). The only problem is, as Cramer said, "it's under construction". He did not mention something more sinister : "Superstrings predict crazy things!!!!" Yeah, like 10^16 GeV particles (an accelerator the size of the Milky Way is needed to make such particles). So SUPERSTRINGS has NO experimental evidence. Here thus, is the current situation in Physics. So, as a wanna-be theorist, I implore you, Slashdotters to : GIVE US MORE MONEY ! WE HAVE AN INCOMPLETE THEORY!
There comes a time, when the people's interests are not best served by the law (because the select few people who made the laws are people with special interests in their minds). Now, when a collective group of people feels outraged by an abuse of the law, then something must be wrong with the law. This people obviously don't feel best served by the law. So, they, instead of roll over and let the law step over them, decides to make a case and demand that the laws are changed. Are they being "illegal"? Of course not, because these laws (i.e DMCA) are not permanent 10 Commandments handed down by Mr Moses* : they are changeable to serve an interest. That's how DMCA came into being in the first place : new law replace old law. Therefore, Slashdot has everyright to challenge these laws. One can either (a) side the law : yes M$ sucks, but they are right (b) watch and take no sides (c) side the people who wanted the law changed : M$ sucks, but DMCA allows them to step over people, so let's fight it. You may choose. But to say that "Controversy is Fun" is almost an insult to those people who believe in (c) strongly enough to stick their necks out and battle it out, risking damage. "to be honest mean telling everything you know about the subject and then letting somebody make up his own mind about it." R.P.Feynman
Steve Meyer has taught you well.... But....they did not really "spot" Hydrogen. They implied it's existence by two arguments : (a) We see Oxygen lines (b) But if there is O, then there must be H since H is so much more abundant than O Kinda contorted, but since ionized H at 100000K emits nothing, we can't see it directly.
MS quits the OS business, adopts Linux and release MS Linux 2002. W2K becomes WinGames, an optimized OS for Games only using OpenGL. Sex...God's biggest mistake.
Slashdot Mirror
In a nutshell, yes and yes.
Yeap. GPS works as long as you can get a fix to the signal. If you are higher, and get Line of
Sight to more sats, you can get a better fix. So it actually works better in space....
Last time, before the recent overturn of the "selective availability" by Clinton, you cannot get velocity info above a certain velocity (eg. so people can't use GPS to control a ballistic missile headed for D.C.). But now SA is dead, you can get velocity info in space too, which is great. Problem is that you have to buy/build GPS receivers capable of doing that.
There are a ton of sats up there using GPS as navigation tools.
The "SSTL" system of satellite classification is :
100-350 kg "MiniSat"
20-100 kg "MicroSat"
20 "NanoSat"
This is kinda becoming the "standard" since SSTL is the first company to go into commercial "small satellite" in a big way. But don't tell the Russians : their idea of a "microsat" is about 1000kg. Them Russkies built things BIG...
while EU is multiple governments.
The problem with the US is that privacy laws are often dictated by big mega corporations (via their lobbies to your local congresspeople). Of course, the more the megacorps have info over your lives, the better!
In EU, it's harder for megacorps to exert such control because they have multiple govs to "lobby" (if even possible). So the privacy laws (or any laws) are often formed by consensus between govs, which is usually more pro-consumer (democratic govs have little to gain from knowing what the public fav. channels are...) than pro-business.
Deorbit junk? Come on Craig....
Snap-1 (actually an acronym for Surrey Nanosat Application Program) is probably
not good for this de-orbit thing that they are talking about : it's all about the amount of deltaV/mass (change in velocity per mass) your thrusters can provide and this number is constrained by the amount of fuel and the efficiency of your thrusters in converting this fuel to thrust. (about 20% for the cold gas N2 thrusters snap probably has). So how they deorbit a Arianne IV spent booster with 0.5, which is unlikely given the stuff they are putting on board...
(Caveat : the size of thrusters is not a problem : one can always fire for a long time as long as fuel is available.)
But way to go SSTL!
What is this? See Mars from your backyard without
a telescope?! See the future?
AO is great (in fact, there is this huge AO laser
in the office next to mine right now). AO is cool.
But AO is built for telescopes, and you need a
calibrating star (or the said laser to mimic a star) so that your piezos can dynamically adjust
your optics to "de-twinkle" the atmospheric turbulences. How do we use AO to "de-twinkle" our computer screens is beyond me...
And what's this about seeing Mars from backyard? How the hell are they going to overcome the Rayleigh's Limit of optics? (resolution = lambda/D) That's a HARD physical limit. As long as our eyes are 1 cm across, whatever sh*t you put it in front of our eyes, AO included, is not going to allow us to see the Mars other than a dot!
I don't even want to talk about the B&L seeing the future thing. U of Rochester has just bombed its reputation. (at least in my books.)
Rant Over.
(10) John Travolta finally learned the "Evil Laugh" (Bwahahahahaha)
(9) Confirmed that the Marines were right to buy British : them Brits made really good fighter jets
(8) Critics reviews were hilarious and more entertaining than many movies....and you get to read them for free!
(7) Has made all other cheesy B-grade sci-fi movies into a joy to watch.
(6) Made Tom Cruise left the theatre in disgust, and vow to leave the Church of Scientology....to make the equally ridiculous MI2.
(5) Scientologists who recycled Hubbard's books to push it into bestseller lists now HAVE to watch this godawful thing again and again to push it into the Box Office lists.
(4) Made the next fashion statement : dreadlocks!
(3) Will spawn the next Jane Fonda video "How to Train a Grunting Monkey into a Top Fighter Jock....in One Week!"
(2) Reassure the people of the US that Fort Knox IS really secure.
(1) Refer to Dianetics by L.Ron Hubbard, page 169.
As a Malaysian, I totally agree. We Malaysians are a bunch of street thugs who run around with choppers slashing anti-MPAA people!
:)
P.S. Wanna see my Chopper?
....is to out-compete them with great technology, well-plan market strategies, and Great Bobs of Coolness.
That's what AOL/Gateway/Transmeta alliance will do. And good heavens, finally we at least some constructive action from the anti-M$ people (instead of whining about it and crying to Mama DOJ for help.)
Kudos!
But if it actually RECREATES the "entire" pulse at the other side, then speed of Light IS broken.
I think it's more likely that the "leading edge" is recreated, and as the incoming pulse is being "fed" into the cesium tube, more and more of the "pulse" is reproduced. A whole pulse is reproduced when the incoming pulse has been entirely absorbed.
This way, there is no paradox : since no info can be carried faster than light (recall that information is encoded in the entire pulse, not part of the pulse.)
Now, one can postulate that we can actually hide info in part of a wave-packet (i.e the pulse). But that is degenerate (read : multiple possibilities), so maybe we can send information on "probabilities". Which would be interesting.
Anyway, Dr Wang + gang probably can't measure single wave packets. What they do is to send billions of packets through, and measure the "click click" at the other end. Now, what they are saying is that they can get a "click" that violate the speed of light. But there is really no info sent, because the one has to have a series of "clicks" to encode information.....
(IMHO, it's probably just another funky variation of the EPR paradox..)
We have bootleg M$oft products everywhere at flee markets for $0.99 each! In addition, we also sell Linux distributions for $0.99each....and they are the only LEGAL piece of software in our Great Country! BWahahahaha(imitating a certain Scientologist in a certain movie...)
IF only he has held on to his proof of Fermat until they announce 1M bux for it... (Btw, all those problems also come attached a Fields Medal.) So now those Field Medalists can also say to the Nobelists "Ha! _I_ also got a Million Bucks!"
Kudos to NASA for bringing in commerce money. Columbus used public funds (i.e. Queen Isabella's tax coffers) to "explore the Final Frontier". But public funds did not colonize (and wiped out the indigenous folks...) America. The West was won because of there is commercial incentives to do so (gold). Similarly, Space will be conquered not by NASA, but by the East India Companies of the 21st Century.
That's not really a fair statement. "Principal Investigators" (PI) of NASA space projects gets "first cut" on the data, which they are allowed to keep for ONE year (propriety). However, once that one year is up, they HAVE to release the data. This is fair both ways : people who are PI put tons of time/money to bid and propose to NASA so they deserve a break, but NASA projects are funded by the public, so the public at the end should get the data. So this "big 20000 for free" thing is just another NASA twist on "how nice we are PR" despite being just a fact of life. Which they probably need after having the MPL/MCO f-u-c-k-u-p.
Interesting, but people have been trying to "extend" GR for years. Prof Yilmaz is probably not the only one around. Here is a summary of why GR is so troublesome to many people : (a) It is not a gauge theory. Which is irritating to physicists because the rest of the other forces (weak, strong, electromagnetism) is. Basically a gauge theory takes some form of "particles/fields" (field is the correct word, but people seem to be familiar with particle more), impose some "geometric" constraint on it (i.e. the curvature thing Cramer is talking about), and Walla! You get the equations of motions, eg. the Maxwell equations for EM etc.. The point is that all the other forces are DERIVABLE from some consideration, which led physicists to believe ALL forces must be a gauge theory. But GR is not. Now in a Gauge theory, one can derive the Stress-Energy tensor by using Noether's Theorem. Why is this S-E thing so crucial? Well because the S-E tensor basically says Energy/Momentum/What-have-you is conserved! Yes, another surprise : Conservation of Energy is DERIVABLE from a gauge theory. It is not some "fuzzy concept" we impose arbitrarily. But in GR, we can't do that. So we can't impose local conservation of energy. People are disturbed by this... That's why physicists wanted nice "gauge theories" . Now, having said all that, it is conceivable to "extend" GR, by basically adding more "terms" in the equations, take make GR a gauge theory. This is what probably Yilmaz has done (i've not seen his papers, but I will bet my library on this). OK, the get nice gauge theories and such....BUT why add more terms?? This question is begged to be asked. They say : so it's a nice Gauge Theory! But we say : but that's cheating! The solution : make observations. The observations : nah....Black Holes probably exist. (b) GR is not renormalizable. "Renormalization" is just a big term to indicate that we can "get rid of the infinities" by some trick. Now Renormalization is a big thing to physicists : it makes equations nice and "well behaved" (literally). Physicists/Mathematicians know how to renormalize Gauge Theories (a few Nobels have been awarded for this great breakthrough, Feynman/Schwinger/Tomonoga for QED, Wilson for renormalizable gauge theories, d'hooft and Veltman for non-abelian gauge theories). But GR is NOT a Gauge theory! And people still don't know how to renormalize it. But instead of screaming "no!", physicists embraced the resulting Infinities as "hey that's cool! Look Ma, a Black Hole!". Why? I don't know, probably historical. But IT'S BLOODY HARD TO RENORMALIZE A NON-GAUGE THEORY!!!!! (c) It is not Quantizable. Now, we know how to quantize a renormalizable gauge theory (see : I cleverly organized this article such that everything falls into place :)). But GR is NOT a renormalizable gauge theory! So we don't know how to quantize it! Thus we are in a time in the history of Science that we are stuck. Unless we do things like Yilmaz, by arbitrarily adding terms to the equations (for those physicists out there : we add extra couplings to the Lagrangian), we are left with either accepting that GR is just DIFFERENT from the rest of the world, OR, that we just have an incomplete theory. Physicists, of course, to protect their jobs and grants, say "We have an INCOMPLETE THEORY! GIve us more money!" The current "hot" thing is Superstring. A marvellous piece of beautiful mathematical theory that "may" unify GR and the rest (the so call Super Unified Theory, as opposed to Grand Unified Theory w/o GR). The only problem is, as Cramer said, "it's under construction". He did not mention something more sinister : "Superstrings predict crazy things!!!!" Yeah, like 10^16 GeV particles (an accelerator the size of the Milky Way is needed to make such particles). So SUPERSTRINGS has NO experimental evidence. Here thus, is the current situation in Physics. So, as a wanna-be theorist, I implore you, Slashdotters to : GIVE US MORE MONEY ! WE HAVE AN INCOMPLETE THEORY!
There comes a time, when the people's interests are not best served by the law (because the select few people who made the laws are people with special interests in their minds). Now, when a collective group of people feels outraged by an abuse of the law, then something must be wrong with the law. This people obviously don't feel best served by the law. So, they, instead of roll over and let the law step over them, decides to make a case and demand that the laws are changed. Are they being "illegal"? Of course not, because these laws (i.e DMCA) are not permanent 10 Commandments handed down by Mr Moses* : they are changeable to serve an interest. That's how DMCA came into being in the first place : new law replace old law. Therefore, Slashdot has everyright to challenge these laws. One can either (a) side the law : yes M$ sucks, but they are right (b) watch and take no sides (c) side the people who wanted the law changed : M$ sucks, but DMCA allows them to step over people, so let's fight it. You may choose. But to say that "Controversy is Fun" is almost an insult to those people who believe in (c) strongly enough to stick their necks out and battle it out, risking damage. "to be honest mean telling everything you know about the subject and then letting somebody make up his own mind about it." R.P.Feynman
Steve Meyer has taught you well.... But....they did not really "spot" Hydrogen. They implied it's existence by two arguments : (a) We see Oxygen lines (b) But if there is O, then there must be H since H is so much more abundant than O Kinda contorted, but since ionized H at 100000K emits nothing, we can't see it directly.
MS quits the OS business, adopts Linux and release MS Linux 2002. W2K becomes WinGames, an optimized OS for Games only using OpenGL. Sex...God's biggest mistake.