It is almost inevitable that any incoming rock will be rotating on all 3 axes.
That's physically impossible. In the absence of torque, a rotating object will rotate about precisely one axis. It is possible for objects to "tumble," i.e., continually change the direction of their angular momentum vector, but this only occurs if there is a similarly complex external torque. If the external torque is constant, the resulting effect is called "nutation" or "precession," but it is not tumbling.
For an example, consider the Saturnian moon Hyperion, which is irregularly shaped and thus tumbles chaotically under the influence of the gravity of Saturn and the nearby moon Titan. However, if we removed Hyperion from the vicinity of Saturn and put it out in space far from any external forces, it would rotate quite simply around one axis only.
Asteroids do not "tumble" unless they are A) very irregularly shaped and B) extremely close to a massive body, which can supply a tidal torque.
Why do you begrudge someone who wants to support OSS but also wants to be able to make a living? Do you just dislike any company who wants to market a product and make money? Geez.
Didn't you get the memo? We're supposed to be living in little communes where we each take turns pruning the banana bushes. I hear the next step is nudism (well, at least in summer) and I think I heard someone mention that we all get to gangbang the farmer's daughter tonight...
What about statistics on unreported or covert attacks?
The SIPS database and EVEDA do not contain any specific information on attacks that are covert, not reported, validated or witnessed by any reliable source. We do, however, often receive notification on individual security breaches from our partners and clients across the globe, which are included.
In other words, the sample they are using is self-selecting: only the attacks that have been systematically reported and verified are included. The problems associated with a self-selecting sample are obvious.
What if Linux attacks far outweigh Windows attacks, because Linux administrators tend to report the attacks more often, whereas Windows and other OS administrators do not report attacks so often because it makes them look bad? I'm not trying to troll, I'm merely pointing out why the results of this study are absolutely meaningless.
It is not a static magnetic field. A 60 Hz magnetic field is also a 60 Hz electric field.
Right, however, imagine a 60 Hz EM source in the form of a closed copper ring (that somehow happens to have a 60 Hz AC current flowing within it). The magnetic field of this ring is varying coaxially with the ring, thus, the direction in which the magnetic field is pointing is precisely the direction that the EM radiation is not going. Remember that EM waves are transverse.
That doesn't stop the magnetic field from influencing the inside of your skull, however, because the varying B field in your skull will induce an emf, and it is this emf which (presumably) wreaks havok in your skull as it interacts with ions and free radicals.
A point source? Please, tell me where to find this mythical magnetic point source (a.k.a. a monopole).
For a line source, it drops proportional to the distance.
Again, please tell me where to find a "line source" of magnetic field? You seem to be thinking of the electric field, which is quite different from a magnetic field. It's physically impossible to have a monopolar magnetic source. To put it in terms of Maxwell's Laws, the divergence of the magnetic field is always zero.
Maybe I should connect a ground wire to my tinfoil hat.
As I've said elsewhere, your tinfoil hat won't do a damn thing to block a magnetic field, grounded or not. Come on, you can surely find a magnet and piece of foil somewhere in your house and perform the extremely simple and obvious experiment that proves this...
That would be nice, except that a Faraday cage (or a slab of lead, for that matter) doesn't do anything to stop a magnetic field.
The reason a Faraday cage works to stop electromagnetic radiation is that it does affect the electric field component of the EM wave. Without the electric field component, the wave can't continue to exist.
Take a magnet and prove to yourself that a piece of aluminum foil doesn't do anything at all to block the field.
There is very little you can do to stop a magnetic field, other than cancel it out with an opposite magnetic field.
The US is setting itself up to be an invincible power. If the government goes even more batshit than it already is, we'll be unable to do anything about it.
We're hurtling toward the end of the human race, and all people seem to care about is who got fired on last night's "The Apprentice."
No. The problem is that it is socially acceptable to perform these behaviors. Illegal, maybe, but still socially acceptable.
What we need are not new laws. Nobody respects the government. Getting caught doing something just makes a person into a rebel. They'll hate the government even more, when they get out of jail.
What we need is to bring back the good old Western Smackdown. Somebody is being socially asinine? Kick his ass. Make it clear that as a society we will not tolerate this shit. Make people feel shame. Make them feel like everybody around them is looking down on them, going "Tsk tsk tsk."
Why do people drive drunk? It's the same reason they are rude, obnoxious assholes, who cut in line, and yap on phones in restaurants, and bring little screaming babies to the movies. It's because there's no social consequence for it. Legal consequences are much less effective deterrents than social ones. More laws aren't going to change anything, when you've drunk 6 beers and are about to drive to 7-11, and all your friends say is "Hahah, don't get pulled over!"
Your friends should be saying "Bring me your keys or I'll break your arm and take them. Then I'll kick the shit out of you just for thinking about doing that."
Ballmer: "Hey, Bill. Some intern from down in engineering came up with this great idea. No, don't worry, I fired him -- how dare he propose such a thing "
Gates: "Interesting Steve... What's this idea?"
Ballmer: "Well, suppose we leaked the 2K and NT4 sources on the Internet."
Gates: "I'm not sure I follow."
Ballmer: "Think about it. We've got stagnating revenue streams from companies who are still using NT4 and 2000. We've got people continually hacking our software. Are you seeing the connection here?"
Gates: "Sure, I get you: release the source code, so hackers can analyze it to find all the holes. We get free QA, and in the meantime, we can pressure our customers to upgrade to XP, because it's not vulnerable to these source code attacks. Thus, getting more money for us, from people who wouldn't have otherwise upgraded. Brilliant!"
Ballmer: "You're catching on. And hey, I just thought of an extra bonus! We can track down people who actually download the source code and sue them. That way, we get another auxiliary revenue stream from court, make ourselves look good by appearing to 'fight hackers,' and strengthen the hostile attitudes held toward open source software by linking them to our stolen source code! Another inch closer to having a lock-hold on the Supreme Court when they finally make the big decisions about the validity of intellectual property!"
Gates: "Why, this could have a favorable impact on the outcome of the SCO case, could it not?"
Ballmer: "Sure. Those stupid Linux fanboys and their 'take over the world' nonsense. They don't understand who they're playing ball with."
President Bush could earn some quick-and-easy votes if he would pardon everyone being sued by the RIAA. I'm not a huge fan of the man, but I'd vote for him if he did this for music-likers.
So in other words, you're equivalent to the run-of-the-mill scumbag lobbyist who whores his vote for special interests?
Great, another four years of the worst international policy we've seen for a century, but hey, at least you can keep pirating music...
Another scenario then, which hits close to home with me, because I'm (sort of) a mountaineering type:
Deadly scenario 4: You're up on a mountain in September. A sudden fall storm forces you down below timberline. On the way down the trail, you slip and break both ankles. Luckily, you've got a radio, so you radio for help to your friend, who is 5 miles away with his truck, camping at a camp site. He says he'll come pick you up. Unfortunately, your friend has had two beers. He's not legally drunk, and even if he were, it wouldn't matter because it's a remote, deserted road after the summer season -- nobody to hurt, except himself. Too bad, he still can't start the truck. You end up stuck on the mountain all night. The next morning your friend comes to retrieve your frozen corpse.
And the world would be a better place because of it. Removing irresponsible idiots from the gene pool (hopefully before they can reproduce) can only help the human race in the long run.
Sure, that sounds like a great idea. Until several people decide that you are an irresponsible idiot. Which I think you are. Luckily, I'm not evil like you, so I won't have you killed.
Stalin's followers gleefully carried out his orders, until he got tired of them and decided to have them shot.
Keep up with your ruthless hatemongering. It makes it quite clear to everyone what sort of dangerous individual you are.
First: it's ambiguous. You can interpret a particular series of da/dit in multiple ways. Sure, a human can figure out from context, but what about a computer?
Second: it's inefficient. It's a binary code (dit and da) and yet it's redundant. The Shannon entropy for English is lower than the calculated average message length for Morse. They should be using a Huffman code.
Suggestion: Create a Huffman code from well-known English letter frequencies. When constructing this code, always put the more-common subtree on the left side of the new Huffman node. Then, when translating to das and dits, always use dit for a left-going branch and da for a right-going branch (dit = 0, da = 1). This accounts for the fact that the "da" symbol takes longer to transmit than "dit".
The result won't be Morse code, but we could name it something else... "Huffman-Morsoid," or say, "Horse code."
Morse code gets @, but I still have to use the shift key to type an email address?
You don't think you use '!' and '?' even more often than '@'? How about '$'? Starting your complaint with '@' doesn't make sense.
For that matter, you need to hit shift at least once per sentence (at least, if you're writing correctly). Are you suggesting we should have a double-high keyboard with both cases, just to avoid pressing shift?
Others' lives aren't worth enough to you to be sober while driving? Fine - your life might as well be held at the same value.
Ever toss rocks over a cliff just to be a dork? You might have hit someone. That's reckless endangerment. So you think people should be executed for that?
Ever drive and talk on a cell phone? You could be distracted and kill someone. Negligence, or reckless endangerment -- there's arguments either way. You think people should be executed for that?
Ever get drunk at a party and hang out on a balcony? You could trip and push someone over. Happens all the time. You think people who drink on balconies deserve to die?
Your "solution" is idiotic. Under your system, a person driving drunk who kills nobody would be executed, while a perfectly sober person who deliberately rams into another car and kills people would be sentenced for murder and just end up going to prison for a while. Yeah, that makes a lot of fucking sense.
Get your head screwed on straight. Among people who have driven a car and who drink alcohol, 99% have driven while intoxicated at some point. The difference between drunk drivers and you, is that they kill accidentally (although they are still responsible for the consequences), but you... you would kill out of cold blooded hatred.
Deadly scenario 1: You're driving down a city street, perfectly legitimately. Your car buzzer sounds. It's now time to prove to your own property that you have the right to use it. You reach down for the breath tube, taking your eyes off the road. At this moment, a four year old runs into your path. You splatter her all over the asphalt because you were distracted by having to blow into a fucking tube in order to keep your car working.
Deadly scenario 2: You're parked at a rest stop. A runaway truck comes careening into the parking lot, hurtling straight toward your car. You need to start your car and drive out of the way before he gets there. Too bad, it takes 30 seconds to start your car because you need to blow into a fucking tube. You get splattered all over the inside of your car.
Deadly scenario 3: A cranked up carjacker jumps into your passenger seat in the Costco parking lot and holds you at gunpoint. You take off down the road. Suddenly your car starts honking the horn and flashing its lights. His mind clouded by being awake for the past 72 hours, and panicking because of the lights and horn drawing attention, the carjacker blows your head off and takes off on foot.
I could list reasons why this is idiotic all day long.
Well, technically there's no such thing as centrifugal force, it's just an expression of angular momentum.
I always wonder whether it's worth it to mention this. As a physics minor (I took enough to be dangerous), I had this drilled in early, but once it's understood, people go back to referring to "centrifugal force." It's a convenient way to refer to a well-known phenomenon.
I don't think the term is confusing if it's sufficiently explained. People also refer to "Coriolis force" which is similarly fictitious -- the result of being in an accelerating reference frame.
At any rate, I was referring to the phenomenon whereby a quickly rotating mass becomes oblate, much like a ball of pizza dough flattens into a disk as the pizza maker spins it in the air.
Hawking radiation is a real phenomenon, but that's not what is happening here. The amount of Hawking radiation actually decreases as a black hole gets bigger. A black hole of this scale -- 100 million times the Sun's mass -- is going to be emitting essentially no Hawking radiation.
As I said in another reply, the X-rays are emitted from superhot gas spiraling around the black hole.
Your description of the Hawking radiation theory is (mostly) correct, however. Virtual particles are constantly created/annihilated all throughout space, not just near black holes.
The X-rays are not emitted from the center. They are emitted from outside the event horizon by hot gas (millions of degrees) orbiting at huge velocities. Centrifugal force spins the gas out into an "accretion disk" and superheats it as it slowly spirals into the black hole.
They've been examining RX J1242-11 for over a decade. Check out this paper which describes X-ray observations made in 1999, and mentions investigations of this "non-active" galaxy going back to 1990 at least.
The phenomenon is termed "large-amplitude X-ray variability." It appears that they've finally advanced their models and observation techniques to the point where they are willing to state publicly that this is indeed caused by a black hole. But it's been suspected for years and years.
i thought black holes were not proven to exist, or am i living in the past?
So, what you're saying is, when somebody finds proof of phenomenon XYZ, that doesn't mean anything, because nobody has ever found proof of phenomenon XYZ?
Can't work from your home country nickel and diming some other countries natives out of their jobs anymore.
Let me get this straight: some American companies approach some Indians and say "Hey, we need this work done, it's too expensive here, we'll pay you $XXX to do it."
And you're blaming the Indians for accepting a job offer? People offer them money, and they take it! How dare they! Of course, you would do different.
Let's place the blame, if there indeed is any to be placed, on the right spot, shall we?
Slashdot Mirror
That's physically impossible. In the absence of torque, a rotating object will rotate about precisely one axis. It is possible for objects to "tumble," i.e., continually change the direction of their angular momentum vector, but this only occurs if there is a similarly complex external torque. If the external torque is constant, the resulting effect is called "nutation" or "precession," but it is not tumbling.
For an example, consider the Saturnian moon Hyperion, which is irregularly shaped and thus tumbles chaotically under the influence of the gravity of Saturn and the nearby moon Titan. However, if we removed Hyperion from the vicinity of Saturn and put it out in space far from any external forces, it would rotate quite simply around one axis only.
Asteroids do not "tumble" unless they are A) very irregularly shaped and B) extremely close to a massive body, which can supply a tidal torque.
What does it mean, when you're going for "Funny" but get "Troll" instead?
Didn't you get the memo? We're supposed to be living in little communes where we each take turns pruning the banana bushes. I hear the next step is nudism (well, at least in summer) and I think I heard someone mention that we all get to gangbang the farmer's daughter tonight...
Comdrade, are you listening?
What about statistics on unreported or covert attacks?
The SIPS database and EVEDA do not contain any specific information on attacks that are covert, not reported, validated or witnessed by any reliable source. We do, however, often receive notification on individual security breaches from our partners and clients across the globe, which are included.
In other words, the sample they are using is self-selecting: only the attacks that have been systematically reported and verified are included. The problems associated with a self-selecting sample are obvious.
What if Linux attacks far outweigh Windows attacks, because Linux administrators tend to report the attacks more often, whereas Windows and other OS administrators do not report attacks so often because it makes them look bad? I'm not trying to troll, I'm merely pointing out why the results of this study are absolutely meaningless.
I haven't noticed -- I use a phonograph, myself.
Right, however, imagine a 60 Hz EM source in the form of a closed copper ring (that somehow happens to have a 60 Hz AC current flowing within it). The magnetic field of this ring is varying coaxially with the ring, thus, the direction in which the magnetic field is pointing is precisely the direction that the EM radiation is not going. Remember that EM waves are transverse.
That doesn't stop the magnetic field from influencing the inside of your skull, however, because the varying B field in your skull will induce an emf, and it is this emf which (presumably) wreaks havok in your skull as it interacts with ions and free radicals.
A point source? Please, tell me where to find this mythical magnetic point source (a.k.a. a monopole).
For a line source, it drops proportional to the distance.
Again, please tell me where to find a "line source" of magnetic field? You seem to be thinking of the electric field, which is quite different from a magnetic field. It's physically impossible to have a monopolar magnetic source. To put it in terms of Maxwell's Laws, the divergence of the magnetic field is always zero.
Maybe I should connect a ground wire to my tinfoil hat.
As I've said elsewhere, your tinfoil hat won't do a damn thing to block a magnetic field, grounded or not. Come on, you can surely find a magnet and piece of foil somewhere in your house and perform the extremely simple and obvious experiment that proves this...
The reason a Faraday cage works to stop electromagnetic radiation is that it does affect the electric field component of the EM wave. Without the electric field component, the wave can't continue to exist.
Take a magnet and prove to yourself that a piece of aluminum foil doesn't do anything at all to block the field.
There is very little you can do to stop a magnetic field, other than cancel it out with an opposite magnetic field.
We're hurtling toward the end of the human race, and all people seem to care about is who got fired on last night's "The Apprentice."
Yeah, that was more of what I was going for, but whatever gets it up above the mass of crap, I guess...
No. The problem is that it is socially acceptable to perform these behaviors. Illegal, maybe, but still socially acceptable.
What we need are not new laws. Nobody respects the government. Getting caught doing something just makes a person into a rebel. They'll hate the government even more, when they get out of jail.
What we need is to bring back the good old Western Smackdown. Somebody is being socially asinine? Kick his ass. Make it clear that as a society we will not tolerate this shit. Make people feel shame. Make them feel like everybody around them is looking down on them, going "Tsk tsk tsk."
Why do people drive drunk? It's the same reason they are rude, obnoxious assholes, who cut in line, and yap on phones in restaurants, and bring little screaming babies to the movies. It's because there's no social consequence for it. Legal consequences are much less effective deterrents than social ones. More laws aren't going to change anything, when you've drunk 6 beers and are about to drive to 7-11, and all your friends say is "Hahah, don't get pulled over!"
Your friends should be saying "Bring me your keys or I'll break your arm and take them. Then I'll kick the shit out of you just for thinking about doing that."
Gates: "Interesting Steve... What's this idea?"
Ballmer: "Well, suppose we leaked the 2K and NT4 sources on the Internet."
Gates: "I'm not sure I follow."
Ballmer: "Think about it. We've got stagnating revenue streams from companies who are still using NT4 and 2000. We've got people continually hacking our software. Are you seeing the connection here?"
Gates: "Sure, I get you: release the source code, so hackers can analyze it to find all the holes. We get free QA, and in the meantime, we can pressure our customers to upgrade to XP, because it's not vulnerable to these source code attacks. Thus, getting more money for us, from people who wouldn't have otherwise upgraded. Brilliant!"
Ballmer: "You're catching on. And hey, I just thought of an extra bonus! We can track down people who actually download the source code and sue them. That way, we get another auxiliary revenue stream from court, make ourselves look good by appearing to 'fight hackers,' and strengthen the hostile attitudes held toward open source software by linking them to our stolen source code! Another inch closer to having a lock-hold on the Supreme Court when they finally make the big decisions about the validity of intellectual property!"
Gates: "Why, this could have a favorable impact on the outcome of the SCO case, could it not?"
Ballmer: "Sure. Those stupid Linux fanboys and their 'take over the world' nonsense. They don't understand who they're playing ball with."
So in other words, you're equivalent to the run-of-the-mill scumbag lobbyist who whores his vote for special interests?
Great, another four years of the worst international policy we've seen for a century, but hey, at least you can keep pirating music...
Deadly scenario 4: You're up on a mountain in September. A sudden fall storm forces you down below timberline. On the way down the trail, you slip and break both ankles. Luckily, you've got a radio, so you radio for help to your friend, who is 5 miles away with his truck, camping at a camp site. He says he'll come pick you up. Unfortunately, your friend has had two beers. He's not legally drunk, and even if he were, it wouldn't matter because it's a remote, deserted road after the summer season -- nobody to hurt, except himself. Too bad, he still can't start the truck. You end up stuck on the mountain all night. The next morning your friend comes to retrieve your frozen corpse.
Sure, that sounds like a great idea. Until several people decide that you are an irresponsible idiot. Which I think you are. Luckily, I'm not evil like you, so I won't have you killed.
Stalin's followers gleefully carried out his orders, until he got tired of them and decided to have them shot.
Keep up with your ruthless hatemongering. It makes it quite clear to everyone what sort of dangerous individual you are.
Second: it's inefficient. It's a binary code (dit and da) and yet it's redundant. The Shannon entropy for English is lower than the calculated average message length for Morse. They should be using a Huffman code.
Suggestion: Create a Huffman code from well-known English letter frequencies. When constructing this code, always put the more-common subtree on the left side of the new Huffman node. Then, when translating to das and dits, always use dit for a left-going branch and da for a right-going branch (dit = 0, da = 1). This accounts for the fact that the "da" symbol takes longer to transmit than "dit".
The result won't be Morse code, but we could name it something else... "Huffman-Morsoid," or say, "Horse code."
You don't think you use '!' and '?' even more often than '@'? How about '$'? Starting your complaint with '@' doesn't make sense.
For that matter, you need to hit shift at least once per sentence (at least, if you're writing correctly). Are you suggesting we should have a double-high keyboard with both cases, just to avoid pressing shift?
Ever toss rocks over a cliff just to be a dork? You might have hit someone. That's reckless endangerment. So you think people should be executed for that?
Ever drive and talk on a cell phone? You could be distracted and kill someone. Negligence, or reckless endangerment -- there's arguments either way. You think people should be executed for that?
Ever get drunk at a party and hang out on a balcony? You could trip and push someone over. Happens all the time. You think people who drink on balconies deserve to die?
Your "solution" is idiotic. Under your system, a person driving drunk who kills nobody would be executed, while a perfectly sober person who deliberately rams into another car and kills people would be sentenced for murder and just end up going to prison for a while. Yeah, that makes a lot of fucking sense.
Get your head screwed on straight. Among people who have driven a car and who drink alcohol, 99% have driven while intoxicated at some point. The difference between drunk drivers and you, is that they kill accidentally (although they are still responsible for the consequences), but you... you would kill out of cold blooded hatred.
Deadly scenario 2: You're parked at a rest stop. A runaway truck comes careening into the parking lot, hurtling straight toward your car. You need to start your car and drive out of the way before he gets there. Too bad, it takes 30 seconds to start your car because you need to blow into a fucking tube. You get splattered all over the inside of your car.
Deadly scenario 3: A cranked up carjacker jumps into your passenger seat in the Costco parking lot and holds you at gunpoint. You take off down the road. Suddenly your car starts honking the horn and flashing its lights. His mind clouded by being awake for the past 72 hours, and panicking because of the lights and horn drawing attention, the carjacker blows your head off and takes off on foot.
I could list reasons why this is idiotic all day long.
I always wonder whether it's worth it to mention this. As a physics minor (I took enough to be dangerous), I had this drilled in early, but once it's understood, people go back to referring to "centrifugal force." It's a convenient way to refer to a well-known phenomenon.
I don't think the term is confusing if it's sufficiently explained. People also refer to "Coriolis force" which is similarly fictitious -- the result of being in an accelerating reference frame.
At any rate, I was referring to the phenomenon whereby a quickly rotating mass becomes oblate, much like a ball of pizza dough flattens into a disk as the pizza maker spins it in the air.
As I said in another reply, the X-rays are emitted from superhot gas spiraling around the black hole. Your description of the Hawking radiation theory is (mostly) correct, however. Virtual particles are constantly created/annihilated all throughout space, not just near black holes.
The X-rays are not emitted from the center. They are emitted from outside the event horizon by hot gas (millions of degrees) orbiting at huge velocities. Centrifugal force spins the gas out into an "accretion disk" and superheats it as it slowly spirals into the black hole.
The phenomenon is termed "large-amplitude X-ray variability." It appears that they've finally advanced their models and observation techniques to the point where they are willing to state publicly that this is indeed caused by a black hole. But it's been suspected for years and years.
So, what you're saying is, when somebody finds proof of phenomenon XYZ, that doesn't mean anything, because nobody has ever found proof of phenomenon XYZ?
Let me get this straight: some American companies approach some Indians and say "Hey, we need this work done, it's too expensive here, we'll pay you $XXX to do it."
And you're blaming the Indians for accepting a job offer? People offer them money, and they take it! How dare they! Of course, you would do different.
Let's place the blame, if there indeed is any to be placed, on the right spot, shall we?