Unless you can get light to go faster than light there's nothing you can do about that. You're not in Kansas playing Quake with someone on the moon, you're controlling robots with a hell of a lot less latency than controlling the Martian robots.
Well, satellites don't care much about latency; They aren't doing much that's time sensitive to begin with. Whether the pictures take 50ms or 50 minutes to beam back doesn't much matter for a surveyor. But others have indicated that this could be used for land-to-land communications (satellite being the bounce)... but bouncing something out to geosync orbit and then back down is a helluva lot of latency... and for something that can be gobbled up by atmospheric effects... it's just not reliable enough for that.
It's fine though for a satellite with a fat buffer and whose data isn't time sensitive, which is what NASA is using it for; My comments were directed towards people who think this could be used for something else. Achem... it could, but it'd be a bad idea.
This is not for communication between two points on earth. This is for communication with the satellite itself. With a direct Laser link, you should get the lowest latency physically possible.
There was a post earlier I was replying to suggesting this could be used for internet communications.... erm, no. This wasn't about sending back telemetry, etc., from a satellite... that can be lagged to hell and it doesn't matter much.
And remember that fiber optic runs at 2/3rds the speed of light;
Wrong.
Right. Light doesn't travel in a straight line through fiber optic. Sorry man, you and the mods are wrong on this. Physics FTW.
In what fucked-up case would you have 45deg incidence?
I suppose in the "fucked up case" where light bounces repeatedly along a very long tube at varying angles, and the sum average would, after a few dozen reflections, quickly start averaging out to... wait for it... 45 degrees. Sorry if you were asleep in science class.
When nitpicking, try to not make yourself look like a complete fucking idiot, but hey.
I got my prefix wrong. You got the whole theory wrong.
The latency will be absolute shit. Useless for most bandwidth-intensive internet applications. Imagine trying to play a game with twice the lag of a dialup modem. Not only that, but one cloud in the sky and it's game over, man.
Joking aside, it's a well-known fact dating back to well before the roman empire that family is a vulnerability that can be exploited in warfare. The NSA, like any good intelligence agency, keeps track of all exploitable weaknesses in both its own agents as well as the enemy's.
I don't think this is particularly newsworthy -- the problem with the NSA isn't their capabilities, but rather who they're using them on. Very often, it seems the NSA is being run more like the FBI; chasing down the political adversaries of the current majority party, doing DNA analysis on dog shit (true story -- Hoover did it), and investing an inordinate amount of resources in suppressing speech unpopular to the current majority party. The NSA may have once been a first-rate intelligence organization but nowadays they're looking more KGB-ish... overconfident and leaking like a mcdonald's coffee cup during morning rush hour. They really have only themselves to blame for this sorrid state of affairs.
Many transatlantic cables end in New York City, mostly because the stock market pays dearly for the few nanoseconds of lower latency.
Milliseconds, not nanoseconds. Otherwise though, spot on. And remember that fiber optic runs at 2/3rds the speed of light; the light bounces as it travels the plastic tube; sin(45) =.707 = about 2/3rds. If latency was such a huge deal, they'd be using copper links, as electricity does move at almost the speed of light, in millisecond differences over 1000+ mile links. A nanosecond is 1/1000th of a millisecond... soooo... you're off by an order of magnitude.
It does not make any sense whatsoever for the NSA to be slowing or otherwise blocking connectivity, as that is counterproductive to the acquisition of intelligence data.
That's generally true. The NSA is competent. But not all government agencies are... and not all of those agencies work for the United States either. So I can't conclusively tell you (nor can anyone else) that it isn't the result of some law enforcement action that's causing your internet connection to behave strangely. What I can tell you, is that it's pretty unlikely.
The more likely explanation is QoS being implimented that targets either based on IP, subnet, port, or content. Content-aware QoS is pretty rare, but it is out there. Alternatively, it could be a misconfigured router, or an oversaturated link. Traceroute and measuring the latency during TCP handshakes to various ports both to the destination of interest and elsewhere would help identify this. Lastly, it may not even be network-related; it could be the server itself that is slow, or the application it is running on. In today's 'cloud all the things!' service model, there are all kinds of weird performance glitches due to complex interactions within the cluster. For example... several data centers bought the (server) farm during the last addition of a leap second, as circuit breakers tripped out due to sudden load spikes.
The fact is, without a lot more information from the OP, this question simply can't be answered. It could be one of dozens of different things... all we can do is give odds on the likelihood of what it might be... and I'd put the NSA pretty far down the list. The 'NSA Effect' is the same thing happening now in the media that caused people to beat the crap out of random muslims out of 9/11, or jerkwads in Florida to shoot black kids -- perception and media attention creates a new social reality. Social reality is not based in actual reality, however... but it's stuff like this that gives rise to all kinds of prejudices -- racism, sexism, religious persecution... it's ironic that the NSA's surveillance policies are based on such faulty logic... and now they are the victim of it as well. Ah, but I digress... short answer: Your router doesn't need a tin foil hat.
are you always in the habit of referring to "girls" as "sir"?
Now now, be nice. He has to rationalize it somehow, otherwise... his male ego would be crushed by the thought that a guh... gu... a gurrrrrrl smacked him so hard on an internet forum his kids will be born dizzy. And so, to keep his idea of girls as subserviant little playthings for his penis... and him as the big and powerful penis owner... anyone who so completely and utterly destroys him as we have just done, simply can't be a..a... a girl.
In other news, my geek-fu is strong. Now, get lost, or (puts on a fez) I shall taunt you a second time!;)
I have you and your ilk to thank for the drek that is Starbucks. What made them big was their coffee is higher in caffeine than most.
Listen, you hipster wannabe geek... caffeine content is the only thing a true geek cares about. Geeks are devices for turning caffeine into code. Therefore, if you want lots of code, you need lots of caffeine. We don't care that it was made by the loving natives of... some country... brewed in a steamomaster 9000 with auto bean injectors, slow-roasted in an artistic clay pot. You care, because you're a wannabe. We only care about two things: That it's hot, and that it makes anyone who drinks it twitch like a politician being asked about his sexual misconduct.
It goes something like this. I go to the store. I take samples of everything, then bring them home. When I wake up in the morning, I try one. One of four things will happen:
a) It does nothing. Bad coffee. b) It gives me just enough juice to make it to the shower, where I fall asleep again. Bad coffee. c) It gives me a big jolt, and I say 'fuck work' and submit a new linux kernel patch. Okay coffee. d) ZOMFGThisIsThe GreatestCupOfCoffee InTheWorldCanIHave AnotherHolyShit EverythingIsSoClear IWantToDoAllTheThings RightNowHolyShit FuckOnAHeartAttack... Good coffee.
Look up the actual original specs of the blah blah arcseconds blah blah nanometers blah blah resolution blah blah detector blah
You're confusing two separate concepts. Angular resolution dictates how well an optical device can differentiate between two objects close together. It's a component of resolution, not resolution itself. Resolution is determined by a variety of things... and spatial resolution is what I'm interested in, not the number of gigamegasuperdoodapixel count. Magellan's an impressive piece of work, but it's not a replacement for putting a telescope in orbit. It's supplimentary, and that's what you and all the other anonymous coward/trolls bitching that "oh she doesn't know what she's talking about!" are continually and epicly failing to understanding.
And the fact that you try to associate adaptive optics as some software trick that fills in data with the same signal to noise ratio shows you fundamentally do not understand what it does.
Adaptive optics reduce wavefront distortions in the incoming signal... think 'funhouse mirror'... adaptive optics measures the distortions and then creates a reverse biased signal to put back together what the image might have looked like before it was warped. In terms of atmospheric distortions, these are continually changing, and adaptive optics relies on fixed points of reference to build a complex topological matrix which the input signal is rendered into and then a normalized output is produced which minimizes the distortion. Good enough of an explaination? Good.
Now let me explain a new concept to you: Heterodyning. Whenever you take two waves and smash them together into any receiver, be it optical, RF, magnetic, whatever... the two signals merge (heterodyne) to form a new signal. This is the fundamental basis that all radio communication is based on -- you create a carrier wave, and then modulate it (heterodyne) with a lower frequency secondary signal, which is then 'carried' by the first one. Radio waves and light waves run on similar physics.
You can do an impressive amount of signal analysis to create an approximation to the original signals (decoupled) but that's all it is: An approximation. Shannon's Law dictates the exact amount of information that can be extracted; it is an absolute theoretical limit that cannot be exceeded by any amount of 'adaptive' trickery.
A telescope in orbit will be capable of a greater degree of receiver sensitivity. Period. This is physics. You cannot argue your way out of this, no matter how hard you troll, or try to rationalize it, or inflate your own ego, or threaten me, or ridicule me, or whatever. Physics says no, ok? Now whether you can actualize that potential, whether it's practical, or eve necessary... those are good questions. But those are engineering questions. Physics dictates anything you put in orbit, all other things being equal, will give you a better image. The end.
I don't know how else to explain to the clueless hordes that have taken over slashdot... you think because you can google something that makes you a genius... but it doesn't. You say the words, but you do not understand. That's the difference between knowledge and wisdom.
The value of an education does not reside solely in earnings potential.
No, but given that the cost of it is vastly outpacing inflation and paying for it may very well eclipse the sub-prime mortgage crisis in terms of sheer economic damage, earnings potential by necessity tops the list of considerations. As well, the overwhelming majority of college applicants and programs are geared towards getting you into a new job... and one hopes, one that can at least pay the interest on all those loans you took out to land it. Worse, employers want more and more college degrees for everything from janitorial work to being the President of the Universe.
At the rate things are going, the only jobs that don't require a college education will be crime, and (my personal favorite) evil overlord.
From the looks of the article, it's 90x the repaired hubble's capabilities, which is probably 1/200th of what the Hubble would be able to do had it been launched with modern sensors today. The Hubble itself had 8 0.64MP CCDs to work with. Which at the time was quite good, but even if they used the CCD or CMOS from a low end dSLR, they could probably easily get 20x the pixels.
Correct. The original specifications of hubble, at the time it was put into orbit, would have achieved similar performance to what Magellan can do today. Considering the technological advances, Hubble could have kicked some serious ass. The fact is, no matter how good your technology, there is still some loss of quality from particulate matter in the atmosphere. Yeah, you can "content-aware fill" to remove the clouds... which is rather what Magellan does... but you can't get back the original pixels. You can't create a signal that isn't there.
This is like comparing a top of the line super computer made using parts from fifteen years ago, with a modern top of the line desktop today. Why yes... they manage to achieve much the same thing. But then... it had fifteen years to achieve that.
And that's what the previous poster didn't understand, and what the moderators didn't either: No amount of software can improve signal to noise ratio -- and making an apples to oranges comparison from different technical eras might cover up that basic reasoning flaw by comparing the results... but if Hubble 2.0 incorporated today's optic technology and didn't have a flaw in its optics... it would kick the everloving shit out of Magellan 2... because it wouldn't have to contend with atmospheric effects and particulate matter.
Hubble was sent into space with a major glitch in its primary mirror. While yes, we were able to give it, achem, corrective lenses for its near-sightedness, it was never able to perform to original specifications. This project, by comparison... doesn't have a defect in one of its most important components. So I don't know if this is an entirely fair comparison to make...
The fact is, they solve problems in two separate ways -- Hubble is a direct observation. There's no distortion, the light is the original and it's not smeared by atmospheric effect. Adaptive optics are amazing, but they're still additive in nature; You can photoshop, cut, and paste, but it'll never be quite as accurate as direct observation can be. That said, quite a lot can be done with it, and its a welcome addition especially in the age of limited scientific budgets for astronomy! I guess all I'm trying to say is... it's supplimentary, it is not a replacement for the kind of work Hubble did. We still need a replacement Hubble (obviously... with updated tech) for some observations.
Seized or destroyed makes little difference when your livelihood depends on it. You need replacement equipment now. Not in a week. Not in a month. Today. Or you can't make money. And with so many professions needing a computer... whether it's seized or destroyed you're still at the computer shop the next day buying a new one. And when you get your old one back... it's useless.
The difference between the two is pretty minor. This is also why you, like me and many others, should keep multiple off-site backups, not in banks, not at a friend's house, but buried under a tree in a public park or something... so you can always quickly recover.
Because whether it's the government that steals your shit, or a burglar... you're just as fucked.
Preferences are public knowledge. It was out in the open - how do you think people know about it? Investigative reporting? In Australia? Heh.
While I don't necessarily agree with Wikileaks, the fact is that when your opponents take the 'victory at any cost' approach -- as evidenced by the overreaction to Snowden, Manning, Assange, etc., then it's pretty much a given that you're going to have to make "questionable deals" at some point. Honor is a luxury in war; If your oppoents don't have it, then they'll just use yours against you.
Sometimes, you have to become the villain in order to achieve an even greater good.
Ordinarily, I wouldn't thread hijack so blatantly, but with over 600 comments, I don't think this'll get the attention it deserves otherwise.
Guys, in the 90s, a man named Philip Zimmerman foresaw the ease of which e-mail could be snooped on and the implications this would mean in the future and created PGP, a public-key encryption scheme designed to thwart such dragnets. There are open and free alternatives available, and public key cryptography is a mature and well-studied technology.
If you are concerned about your privacy, you need to start using encrypted e-mail and encouraging others to do the same for all communications. AES-256 and other algorithms also exist and can provide secure communications for everything from text messaging to full drive encryption.
You may recall that back in the 80s when RSA started releasing commercial-grade cryptographic solutions, the NSA was all over that. Many attempts to restrict PGP also occurred, resulting in MIT Press and others printing out the source code for distribution worldwide, as cryptography was classified as 'munitions'.
We've had the technology to stop the NSA's surveillance for over twenty years -- and instead of moving forward to address the threat that this, and other surveillance organizations worldwide pose not just to our own liberties and freedom, but also our economy and national security, we've sat on our asses and let corporations and governments slowly grow their surveillance to the point that they can't construct data centers fast enough to log our communications.
Everyone blames the NSA for these shut downs... but I blame you. Yes, YOU. You could be using secure e-mail today. It's not difficult. Hundreds of e-mail clients support this. Wikileaks proved we can securely exchange highly sensitive information using cryptography worldwide, and improves not just your own personal security, but that of the country you reside in, wherever you are.
Widespread use of cryptography is the single most important thing for us as a community of technology professionals to accomplish over the next decade. We've proven time and time again that it is trivial to do what the NSA is doing now -- anyone with a few grand, a fake ID card, and a pair of khakis can accomplish much the same. People are upset the NSA is spying on us.. but nobody considers that it's not just the NSA -- anyone who has spent more than a few grand on their car also has the same financial capability to spy on you. Not to the same degree, or with the same aim, but the technology itself is cheap. Dirt cheap.
The solution is even cheaper. Encrypt everything. Do it now. You have no excuse, and the threats in the world today can no longer be ignored. Do it for the NSA. Do it for the Russian hackers. Do it for the Indian malware authors. Do it for the guy across the street stealing your wifi. Do it because every tech professional is telling you to... because this is an easy problem to solve.
The internet is not safe anymore. Deal with it. Educate yourself.
Judging by the moderation on my comment... sarcasm is a quality the robots that have mod points don't understand. Maybe I should submit myself as a turing test...
I think a couple of Terabytes of 'Hello Kitty' videos placed on every bit of electronics that he owns should teach them the error of their ways.
If they insist on calling everyone and everything a terrorist, might as well turn everything into terrorism... I mean, if you're going to be treated like a criminal, what's there to hold you back from actually being a criminal then? Distribute SDcards that melt when connected to a computer, fill up harddrives with spyware and malware... encrypt everything with incriminating-sounding names and impossibly-long keys.
There's no deterrent to terrorism if everyone is treated like one -- it's criminal law theory 101. When everything results in the death penalty... the law effectively has zero deterrent value. Whether you steal a candy bar, or the moon, it all means the same. Zero tolerance leads to people concluding... hey, if you're gonna go at all, go big.
... you know, some of us use the term partner because we wish to emphasize our commitment to each other, instead of the sex of our lover. Especially considering that not everyone fits into the boxes of 'man' and 'woman', thus 'wife' and 'husband' are poor fits. This has nothing to do with Glenn Beck, who deserves to be tied up in a public square and everyone who wants to given a free punch to his face. Don't worry... we won't let him die. Doctors will be on hand to stitch him back together again... and we're happy to wait until he's healed up again before resuming using his face as a punching bag.
-_- It's less harsh of a punishment than anything he's advocated.
Is this guy claiming his way is better because he's tossing something the relative size of beach balls into his kiddie ball pit?
The word "believe" should have been a dead giveaway this is a scam. My mom has this special "vormag" water that has a sticker on the side that says "this vortex and magnetized water raises its energy to a higher level we believe is more beneficial." When you have the word 'believe' next to something that can be objectively measured, you should simply mentally add to the end "... according to the department of bullshit."
The majority of publicly traded shares out there are in the hands of large mutual funds and banks. These are absolutely long-term investors - they want as little volatility as possible and they have a strong interest in picking companies that match their investment profile ("growth companies," "low risk companies with dividends," whatever) and sticking with them.
Portfolios allow companies to mix high and low risk companies to create an aggregate. And that's what most of the mutual funds and banks you're talking about do, though the actual names and products are rather complicated mixtures. But your assertion that they only pick companies fitting a certain profile is incorrect; Or that they don't make short-term decisions. It is possible to achieve long term growth through a series of short-term actions. In fact... it's essential.
It is the difference between a tactic, and a strategy.
Making something for the government does not contribute to the economy unless its innovations flow back to the market, as the government is using tax money raised from the market to pay for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Posted way past my bedtime. That's my excuse.
I'm American. We don't use SI. That's mine. :)
Unless you can get light to go faster than light there's nothing you can do about that. You're not in Kansas playing Quake with someone on the moon, you're controlling robots with a hell of a lot less latency than controlling the Martian robots.
Well, satellites don't care much about latency; They aren't doing much that's time sensitive to begin with. Whether the pictures take 50ms or 50 minutes to beam back doesn't much matter for a surveyor. But others have indicated that this could be used for land-to-land communications (satellite being the bounce) ... but bouncing something out to geosync orbit and then back down is a helluva lot of latency... and for something that can be gobbled up by atmospheric effects... it's just not reliable enough for that.
It's fine though for a satellite with a fat buffer and whose data isn't time sensitive, which is what NASA is using it for; My comments were directed towards people who think this could be used for something else. Achem... it could, but it'd be a bad idea.
This is not for communication between two points on earth. This is for communication with the satellite itself. With a direct Laser link, you should get the lowest latency physically possible.
There was a post earlier I was replying to suggesting this could be used for internet communications.... erm, no. This wasn't about sending back telemetry, etc., from a satellite... that can be lagged to hell and it doesn't matter much.
And remember that fiber optic runs at 2/3rds the speed of light;
Wrong.
Right. Light doesn't travel in a straight line through fiber optic. Sorry man, you and the mods are wrong on this. Physics FTW.
In what fucked-up case would you have 45deg incidence?
I suppose in the "fucked up case" where light bounces repeatedly along a very long tube at varying angles, and the sum average would, after a few dozen reflections, quickly start averaging out to... wait for it... 45 degrees. Sorry if you were asleep in science class.
When nitpicking, try to not make yourself look like a complete fucking idiot, but hey.
I got my prefix wrong. You got the whole theory wrong.
That is 18.6 ms. That is 18,602 usec. That is 55,806,006 cycles on a 3 Ghz machine.
18.6 versus 26.3 ms. Not nanoseconds.
The latency will be absolute shit. Useless for most bandwidth-intensive internet applications. Imagine trying to play a game with twice the lag of a dialup modem. Not only that, but one cloud in the sky and it's game over, man.
Not reliable at all.
I had to do a SIGINT on previous girlfriends too.
Joking aside, it's a well-known fact dating back to well before the roman empire that family is a vulnerability that can be exploited in warfare. The NSA, like any good intelligence agency, keeps track of all exploitable weaknesses in both its own agents as well as the enemy's.
I don't think this is particularly newsworthy -- the problem with the NSA isn't their capabilities, but rather who they're using them on. Very often, it seems the NSA is being run more like the FBI; chasing down the political adversaries of the current majority party, doing DNA analysis on dog shit (true story -- Hoover did it), and investing an inordinate amount of resources in suppressing speech unpopular to the current majority party. The NSA may have once been a first-rate intelligence organization but nowadays they're looking more KGB-ish... overconfident and leaking like a mcdonald's coffee cup during morning rush hour. They really have only themselves to blame for this sorrid state of affairs.
Many transatlantic cables end in New York City, mostly because the stock market pays dearly for the few nanoseconds of lower latency.
Milliseconds, not nanoseconds. Otherwise though, spot on. And remember that fiber optic runs at 2/3rds the speed of light; the light bounces as it travels the plastic tube; sin(45) = .707 = about 2/3rds. If latency was such a huge deal, they'd be using copper links, as electricity does move at almost the speed of light, in millisecond differences over 1000+ mile links. A nanosecond is 1/1000th of a millisecond... soooo... you're off by an order of magnitude.
Anyway... nitpicking, but hey.
It does not make any sense whatsoever for the NSA to be slowing or otherwise blocking connectivity, as that is counterproductive to the acquisition of intelligence data.
That's generally true. The NSA is competent. But not all government agencies are... and not all of those agencies work for the United States either. So I can't conclusively tell you (nor can anyone else) that it isn't the result of some law enforcement action that's causing your internet connection to behave strangely. What I can tell you, is that it's pretty unlikely.
The more likely explanation is QoS being implimented that targets either based on IP, subnet, port, or content. Content-aware QoS is pretty rare, but it is out there. Alternatively, it could be a misconfigured router, or an oversaturated link. Traceroute and measuring the latency during TCP handshakes to various ports both to the destination of interest and elsewhere would help identify this. Lastly, it may not even be network-related; it could be the server itself that is slow, or the application it is running on. In today's 'cloud all the things!' service model, there are all kinds of weird performance glitches due to complex interactions within the cluster. For example... several data centers bought the (server) farm during the last addition of a leap second, as circuit breakers tripped out due to sudden load spikes.
The fact is, without a lot more information from the OP, this question simply can't be answered. It could be one of dozens of different things... all we can do is give odds on the likelihood of what it might be... and I'd put the NSA pretty far down the list. The 'NSA Effect' is the same thing happening now in the media that caused people to beat the crap out of random muslims out of 9/11, or jerkwads in Florida to shoot black kids -- perception and media attention creates a new social reality. Social reality is not based in actual reality, however... but it's stuff like this that gives rise to all kinds of prejudices -- racism, sexism, religious persecution... it's ironic that the NSA's surveillance policies are based on such faulty logic ... and now they are the victim of it as well. Ah, but I digress... short answer: Your router doesn't need a tin foil hat.
are you always in the habit of referring to "girls" as "sir"?
Now now, be nice. He has to rationalize it somehow, otherwise... his male ego would be crushed by the thought that a guh... gu... a gurrrrrrl smacked him so hard on an internet forum his kids will be born dizzy. And so, to keep his idea of girls as subserviant little playthings for his penis... and him as the big and powerful penis owner... anyone who so completely and utterly destroys him as we have just done, simply can't be a..a... a girl.
In other news, my geek-fu is strong. Now, get lost, or (puts on a fez) I shall taunt you a second time! ;)
I have you and your ilk to thank for the drek that is Starbucks. What made them big was their coffee is higher in caffeine than most.
Listen, you hipster wannabe geek... caffeine content is the only thing a true geek cares about. Geeks are devices for turning caffeine into code. Therefore, if you want lots of code, you need lots of caffeine. We don't care that it was made by the loving natives of... some country... brewed in a steamomaster 9000 with auto bean injectors, slow-roasted in an artistic clay pot. You care, because you're a wannabe. We only care about two things: That it's hot, and that it makes anyone who drinks it twitch like a politician being asked about his sexual misconduct.
It goes something like this. I go to the store. I take samples of everything, then bring them home. When I wake up in the morning, I try one. One of four things will happen:
a) It does nothing. Bad coffee.
b) It gives me just enough juice to make it to the shower, where I fall asleep again. Bad coffee.
c) It gives me a big jolt, and I say 'fuck work' and submit a new linux kernel patch. Okay coffee.
d) ZOMFGThisIsThe GreatestCupOfCoffee InTheWorldCanIHave AnotherHolyShit EverythingIsSoClear IWantToDoAllTheThings RightNowHolyShit FuckOnAHeartAttack... Good coffee.
Look up the actual original specs of the blah blah arcseconds blah blah nanometers blah blah resolution blah blah detector blah
You're confusing two separate concepts. Angular resolution dictates how well an optical device can differentiate between two objects close together. It's a component of resolution, not resolution itself. Resolution is determined by a variety of things... and spatial resolution is what I'm interested in, not the number of gigamegasuperdoodapixel count. Magellan's an impressive piece of work, but it's not a replacement for putting a telescope in orbit. It's supplimentary, and that's what you and all the other anonymous coward/trolls bitching that "oh she doesn't know what she's talking about!" are continually and epicly failing to understanding.
And the fact that you try to associate adaptive optics as some software trick that fills in data with the same signal to noise ratio shows you fundamentally do not understand what it does.
Adaptive optics reduce wavefront distortions in the incoming signal... think 'funhouse mirror'... adaptive optics measures the distortions and then creates a reverse biased signal to put back together what the image might have looked like before it was warped. In terms of atmospheric distortions, these are continually changing, and adaptive optics relies on fixed points of reference to build a complex topological matrix which the input signal is rendered into and then a normalized output is produced which minimizes the distortion. Good enough of an explaination? Good.
Now let me explain a new concept to you: Heterodyning. Whenever you take two waves and smash them together into any receiver, be it optical, RF, magnetic, whatever... the two signals merge (heterodyne) to form a new signal. This is the fundamental basis that all radio communication is based on -- you create a carrier wave, and then modulate it (heterodyne) with a lower frequency secondary signal, which is then 'carried' by the first one. Radio waves and light waves run on similar physics.
You can do an impressive amount of signal analysis to create an approximation to the original signals (decoupled) but that's all it is: An approximation. Shannon's Law dictates the exact amount of information that can be extracted; it is an absolute theoretical limit that cannot be exceeded by any amount of 'adaptive' trickery.
A telescope in orbit will be capable of a greater degree of receiver sensitivity. Period. This is physics. You cannot argue your way out of this, no matter how hard you troll, or try to rationalize it, or inflate your own ego, or threaten me, or ridicule me, or whatever. Physics says no, ok? Now whether you can actualize that potential, whether it's practical, or eve necessary... those are good questions. But those are engineering questions. Physics dictates anything you put in orbit, all other things being equal, will give you a better image. The end.
I don't know how else to explain to the clueless hordes that have taken over slashdot... you think because you can google something that makes you a genius... but it doesn't. You say the words, but you do not understand. That's the difference between knowledge and wisdom.
The value of an education does not reside solely in earnings potential.
No, but given that the cost of it is vastly outpacing inflation and paying for it may very well eclipse the sub-prime mortgage crisis in terms of sheer economic damage, earnings potential by necessity tops the list of considerations. As well, the overwhelming majority of college applicants and programs are geared towards getting you into a new job... and one hopes, one that can at least pay the interest on all those loans you took out to land it. Worse, employers want more and more college degrees for everything from janitorial work to being the President of the Universe.
At the rate things are going, the only jobs that don't require a college education will be crime, and (my personal favorite) evil overlord.
From the looks of the article, it's 90x the repaired hubble's capabilities, which is probably 1/200th of what the Hubble would be able to do had it been launched with modern sensors today. The Hubble itself had 8 0.64MP CCDs to work with. Which at the time was quite good, but even if they used the CCD or CMOS from a low end dSLR, they could probably easily get 20x the pixels.
Correct. The original specifications of hubble, at the time it was put into orbit, would have achieved similar performance to what Magellan can do today. Considering the technological advances, Hubble could have kicked some serious ass. The fact is, no matter how good your technology, there is still some loss of quality from particulate matter in the atmosphere. Yeah, you can "content-aware fill" to remove the clouds... which is rather what Magellan does... but you can't get back the original pixels. You can't create a signal that isn't there.
This is like comparing a top of the line super computer made using parts from fifteen years ago, with a modern top of the line desktop today. Why yes... they manage to achieve much the same thing. But then... it had fifteen years to achieve that.
And that's what the previous poster didn't understand, and what the moderators didn't either: No amount of software can improve signal to noise ratio -- and making an apples to oranges comparison from different technical eras might cover up that basic reasoning flaw by comparing the results... but if Hubble 2.0 incorporated today's optic technology and didn't have a flaw in its optics... it would kick the everloving shit out of Magellan 2... because it wouldn't have to contend with atmospheric effects and particulate matter.
End of story.
Hubble was sent into space with a major glitch in its primary mirror. While yes, we were able to give it, achem, corrective lenses for its near-sightedness, it was never able to perform to original specifications. This project, by comparison... doesn't have a defect in one of its most important components. So I don't know if this is an entirely fair comparison to make...
The fact is, they solve problems in two separate ways -- Hubble is a direct observation. There's no distortion, the light is the original and it's not smeared by atmospheric effect. Adaptive optics are amazing, but they're still additive in nature; You can photoshop, cut, and paste, but it'll never be quite as accurate as direct observation can be. That said, quite a lot can be done with it, and its a welcome addition especially in the age of limited scientific budgets for astronomy! I guess all I'm trying to say is... it's supplimentary, it is not a replacement for the kind of work Hubble did. We still need a replacement Hubble (obviously... with updated tech) for some observations.
Seized or destroyed makes little difference when your livelihood depends on it. You need replacement equipment now. Not in a week. Not in a month. Today. Or you can't make money. And with so many professions needing a computer... whether it's seized or destroyed you're still at the computer shop the next day buying a new one. And when you get your old one back... it's useless.
The difference between the two is pretty minor. This is also why you, like me and many others, should keep multiple off-site backups, not in banks, not at a friend's house, but buried under a tree in a public park or something... so you can always quickly recover.
Because whether it's the government that steals your shit, or a burglar... you're just as fucked.
Preferences are public knowledge. It was out in the open - how do you think people know about it? Investigative reporting? In Australia? Heh.
While I don't necessarily agree with Wikileaks, the fact is that when your opponents take the 'victory at any cost' approach -- as evidenced by the overreaction to Snowden, Manning, Assange, etc., then it's pretty much a given that you're going to have to make "questionable deals" at some point. Honor is a luxury in war; If your oppoents don't have it, then they'll just use yours against you.
Sometimes, you have to become the villain in order to achieve an even greater good.
Ordinarily, I wouldn't thread hijack so blatantly, but with over 600 comments, I don't think this'll get the attention it deserves otherwise.
Guys, in the 90s, a man named Philip Zimmerman foresaw the ease of which e-mail could be snooped on and the implications this would mean in the future and created PGP, a public-key encryption scheme designed to thwart such dragnets. There are open and free alternatives available, and public key cryptography is a mature and well-studied technology.
If you are concerned about your privacy, you need to start using encrypted e-mail and encouraging others to do the same for all communications. AES-256 and other algorithms also exist and can provide secure communications for everything from text messaging to full drive encryption.
You may recall that back in the 80s when RSA started releasing commercial-grade cryptographic solutions, the NSA was all over that. Many attempts to restrict PGP also occurred, resulting in MIT Press and others printing out the source code for distribution worldwide, as cryptography was classified as 'munitions'.
We've had the technology to stop the NSA's surveillance for over twenty years -- and instead of moving forward to address the threat that this, and other surveillance organizations worldwide pose not just to our own liberties and freedom, but also our economy and national security, we've sat on our asses and let corporations and governments slowly grow their surveillance to the point that they can't construct data centers fast enough to log our communications.
Everyone blames the NSA for these shut downs... but I blame you. Yes, YOU. You could be using secure e-mail today. It's not difficult. Hundreds of e-mail clients support this. Wikileaks proved we can securely exchange highly sensitive information using cryptography worldwide, and improves not just your own personal security, but that of the country you reside in, wherever you are.
Widespread use of cryptography is the single most important thing for us as a community of technology professionals to accomplish over the next decade. We've proven time and time again that it is trivial to do what the NSA is doing now -- anyone with a few grand, a fake ID card, and a pair of khakis can accomplish much the same. People are upset the NSA is spying on us.. but nobody considers that it's not just the NSA -- anyone who has spent more than a few grand on their car also has the same financial capability to spy on you. Not to the same degree, or with the same aim, but the technology itself is cheap. Dirt cheap.
The solution is even cheaper. Encrypt everything. Do it now. You have no excuse, and the threats in the world today can no longer be ignored. Do it for the NSA. Do it for the Russian hackers. Do it for the Indian malware authors. Do it for the guy across the street stealing your wifi. Do it because every tech professional is telling you to... because this is an easy problem to solve.
The internet is not safe anymore. Deal with it. Educate yourself.
Judging by the moderation on my comment... sarcasm is a quality the robots that have mod points don't understand. Maybe I should submit myself as a turing test...
I think a couple of Terabytes of 'Hello Kitty' videos placed on every bit of electronics that he owns should teach them the error of their ways.
If they insist on calling everyone and everything a terrorist, might as well turn everything into terrorism... I mean, if you're going to be treated like a criminal, what's there to hold you back from actually being a criminal then? Distribute SDcards that melt when connected to a computer, fill up harddrives with spyware and malware... encrypt everything with incriminating-sounding names and impossibly-long keys.
There's no deterrent to terrorism if everyone is treated like one -- it's criminal law theory 101. When everything results in the death penalty... the law effectively has zero deterrent value. Whether you steal a candy bar, or the moon, it all means the same. Zero tolerance leads to people concluding... hey, if you're gonna go at all, go big.
... you know, some of us use the term partner because we wish to emphasize our commitment to each other, instead of the sex of our lover. Especially considering that not everyone fits into the boxes of 'man' and 'woman', thus 'wife' and 'husband' are poor fits. This has nothing to do with Glenn Beck, who deserves to be tied up in a public square and everyone who wants to given a free punch to his face. Don't worry... we won't let him die. Doctors will be on hand to stitch him back together again... and we're happy to wait until he's healed up again before resuming using his face as a punching bag.
-_- It's less harsh of a punishment than anything he's advocated.
Is this guy claiming his way is better because he's tossing something the relative size of beach balls into his kiddie ball pit?
The word "believe" should have been a dead giveaway this is a scam. My mom has this special "vormag" water that has a sticker on the side that says "this vortex and magnetized water raises its energy to a higher level we believe is more beneficial." When you have the word 'believe' next to something that can be objectively measured, you should simply mentally add to the end "... according to the department of bullshit."
The majority of publicly traded shares out there are in the hands of large mutual funds and banks. These are absolutely long-term investors - they want as little volatility as possible and they have a strong interest in picking companies that match their investment profile ("growth companies," "low risk companies with dividends," whatever) and sticking with them.
Portfolios allow companies to mix high and low risk companies to create an aggregate. And that's what most of the mutual funds and banks you're talking about do, though the actual names and products are rather complicated mixtures. But your assertion that they only pick companies fitting a certain profile is incorrect; Or that they don't make short-term decisions. It is possible to achieve long term growth through a series of short-term actions. In fact... it's essential.
It is the difference between a tactic, and a strategy.
Making something for the government does not contribute to the economy unless its innovations flow back to the market, as the government is using tax money raised from the market to pay for it.
You mean like, The Internet ?