I was not aware that reporting the news counts as bashing. I suppose if the President of the U.S. was arrested for drunk driving and CNN decided to report on it, that that would be "pathetic" and "anti-Bush?"
I don't know why he renewed it this time, but back in 1999 when this happened before, Michael Chaney renewed it because he had a Hotmail email account and dammit, he needed to check his email!
Yeah, right. In this country we aren't free to drive around in a truck full of fucking hazardous waste without being tracked! I think I'm going to call my senator.
As a citizen who uses the freeways every day, I simply can't WAIT until all these hazmat trucks go totally deregulated!
Terrorists might be evil but generally they're NOT stupid.
I really disagree with that. We can sit around here all day and concoct all kinds of things a terrorist MIGHT do, that would probably actually work damn well if someone did do them. Yet they don't do anything.
I'm NOT talking about what's happening in Iraq. Can anyone name a single terrorist event in this country that happened since September 11th? The idiot who UNSUCCESSFULLY tried to blow up his shoes doesn't count. Can't think of anything? I didn't think so. There's been a lot of threats but no one is putting their money on the table.
I submit that the terrorists are fucking idiots who don't know anything about causing mass confusion and terror. They seem to restrict their thinking to bombs. As Spock would say in Star Trek II, "He displays two dimensional thinking."
The Caldera logo clearly infringes upon Disney's trademarks. Hasn't anyone else noticed that it's just a big red globe with a blue Mickey Mouse logo on it that just happens to be rotated 45 degrees counterclockwise?
I'm sort of joking, but in all honesty that's actually how I've always interpretted that logo. It wasn't until this morning that I realized the red part of the logo is actually a big letter C. If I can make the mistake, so can others.
Well, you just described exactly how a nuclear reactor works:-) Except that in a reactor the decay is artificially enhanced by concentrating a lot of material in a small space so that the neutrons can cause a chain reaction.
Radioactive waste definitely still has a lot of energy in it, but the efficiency of a nuclear plant (or any system to harness energy for that matter) depends on the temperature differential. The hotter you can make the reactants the more efficient the conversion to useful energy is going to be. When the fuel has decayed to the point where a nuclear chain reaction can't be sustained anymore, it becomes impossible to maintain a thermal differential large enough for any appreciable efficiency.
You could definitely get power out of residual radioactive decay but it's probably not going to be enough to justify the effort. With Voyager it was worth it because it was a multimillion dollar spacecraft and the efficiency wasn't really the focus.
I still don't understand why we need to have crypto standardized in the wireless protocol itself. If you are actually concerned about security, why not:
1. Use IPSec, or
2. Restrict the access point so that no connections can be made anywhere except to a VPN server
I'm currently planning something along the lines of (2) at home. I plan to use the hostap driver for Linux and firewall the wireless interface off from everything except for a single port which goes through to a VPN server. In order to talk to ANYBODY the client will have to log in through the VPN.
This way if/when a weakness is discovered in the crypto I just upgrade the software on the server/client instead of blowing money on new hardware every time they standardize on something else.
The only problem is that users can still DOS each other wirelessly, but there's nothing that can be done about that.
If it were me, I would encode the actual web content using SpamMimic, so that the entire page appears to be a giant advertisement until decrypted. That way there is absolutely no way to view the real content WITHOUT downloading the advertisement.
Or alternatively, encode the content in such a way: "Go out a buy a bottle of Salon Selectives. The 6th letter of the 14th word on the ingredients list is the first letter of this web page's content. Now, go out and buy a Ford Taurus. Take the seventh digit of the VIN number, square it, add 16, and treat the resulting number as the ASCII code for the second letter of this web page's content..."
I don't know of any UNIX commands that require accented characters. The only reason you'd require those characters is if you're actually WRITING something, which I can't imagine you'd want to do on an 80x25 screen. That is unless you want to feel like you're using Wordperfect 5.1 on a 286, or something...
I'd say running in the console is itself a jump back of several years.
The spacecraft in question wasn't Voyager, but PIONEER 10. My point stands however, that having probes in the far reaches of space away from the solar system will be extremely valuable in the study of theories of gravity. Here's a link to a good place to start. A good Google search is "pioneer anomalous acceleration"
Near the end of the article I linked, they explain that this effect is not observed with Voyager because of the way Voyager is stabilized by boosters (as opposed to spin-stabilization for Pioneer). If the effect is occurring with Voyager it is completely swamped by the booster accelerations. They also indicate that (obviously) the best way to continue studying this is to launch another probe outside of the solar system.
If you spend any time researching this, you'll find groups of people all over the place who claim to have explained it. But none of them agree with each other. I think it's accurate to say that nobody REALLY knows what's happening.
First, isn't the SCIENTISTS' first reaction supposed to be to DOUBT THE SCIENTISTS?
Doubt doesn't mean "disbelieve them even if they're right." It isn't cutting edge science to suggest that space isn't totally empty, or that sound can thus travel through it. A minute's research would have answered the question, but the original poster instead chose to make a defiant, sarcastic quip.
I realize that it's hard to believe, but university-level introductory physics books don't give you the whole picture, and in fact commit some pretty grievous simplifications for the sake of presentation. This is okay, but I just wish people were aware of it. I can't count the number of times I've heard somebody trying to argue with a seasoned scientist based on some simplification they read in an undergraduate textbook twenty years ago.
In a sparse gas where interparticle interactions are uncommon (they don't hit each other frequently), the speed of sound depends only on temperature and not density.
(going from water to air is a speed increase, and I'm guessing its some function of density)
That's backward, sound travels much faster through water than through air. It does relate to density but not directly. The quantities that influence the speed of sound are the temperature and something called "bulk modulus" which describes how the material density changes as the pressure changes. Temperature is more important at very low densities. At higher densities as in solids the bulk modulus is the primary factor.
You sure have very little faith in the ability of space physicists to come up with obvious theories...
As I said, all of these things have been checked and rejected as potential causes.
Indeed, science can be distilled down to a set of little sound-bite facts that are easily repeatable. "There is no sound in space" is one of them. However what most people for some reason do not understand is that this is a SOUND BITE.
It is far too common for Slashdot readers to immediately object to something because it clashes with their boiled down kiddy version of science.
Here's some news for you: the space surrounding the sun is far from empty, in fact it is filled with atoms, electrons, and ionized gas. Its density is low enough that a human would not perceive it without an instrument. But sound can quite easily travel through gas, no matter how thin. Clearly the sound cannot travel any faster than the individual particles themselves are moving. Hence it is very easy to define the speed of sound in a gas.
No, I'm not claiming to be a scientist or above anyone else in terms of scientific knowledge, but it really pisses me off when people's first reaction is to DOUBT THE SCIENTISTS. Sure, they can be wrong sometimes, but I think it would be respectful to go do a little research before claiming, as if you are some kind of expert, that they are wrong.
Well, there's a difference between being correct and being accurate. Yes, clearly our current theory of gravity is not CORRECT because it doesn't play well with QM. However it is a very ACCURATE theory in the sense that it gives answers which match reality exceedingly well (unless you take things to the quantum scale).
What we're talking about here is a new situation, where the current theories of gravity aren't giving the right numbers even at a macroscopic scale. That is, if there isn't some other hidden force that we can't observe.
I would personally rather believe that our theories of gravity are wrong, as opposed to thinking the universe is magically permeated with huge amounts of massive stuff that we quite inconveniently cannot detect.
Your right, but the real value in the Google calculator is that you have a single text entry widget where you can solve all your problems:-) After all, which do you use more often: Google search, or typing URLs into the address bar?
The address bar is quickly going obsolete because of Google. I can type a URL into it and it links me to the site. If I don't know the URL I can type a keyword. I can use it as a calculator. I can do unit conversion. And it even knows the answer to life, the universe, and everything.
It's having it all there unified in one spot that makes it cool.
Voyager has been moving through space in ways unexplainable by physics. There is a small acceleration that can't be accounted for using known laws. It's almost like gravity doesn't work quite the way we think it does.
Of course, there is always the possibility that we just can't see the source of the acceleration, and it'll turn out to be something simple. However so far, all proposals put forth to explain it have been shown to be incorrect.
There is a deeper connection to very important issues in physics. For decades we have been studying the fabled "dark matter" which is supposed to be the cause of the anomalous rotation of the galaxy. The galaxy does not move in ways predicted by the laws of gravity. It is as if there is a huge amount of hidden mass which is influencing its rotation. So far we have not found any of this "dark matter."
But imagine the possibility. What if dark matter doesn't really exist? What if it's our understanding of gravity that is wrong? This would have profound implications throughout physics. After all our only direct experience of gravity is what happens here on Earth and within the bounds of the solar system. Except that today, we have a probe that has crossed that limit.
Perhaps the anomalous motion of Voyager will shed light on the situation. I for one would be utterly elated if it turns out we have to rewrite our physics books.
Like all the other probes of that era it runs on a thermal nuclear battery. It doesn't use a fission chain reaction, but merely the heat released by gradual radioactive breakdown of plutonium.
That's really awesome. Would it be very hard to alter it to build and run under KDE 2? I don't want to download the entire thing just to run a single app. Why do toolkit designers always insist on sprinkling a thousand new APIs that break backward compatibility into every major release, forcing me to download and compile hundreds of MEGABYTES of stuff just to run a single application If you can just give me a hint what might have to be modified, I'll do my own "backport."
I apologise for the plug; usually I'm quite good and wait for at least on-topic opportunities! I'm sure I'll still get the usual ac death threats etc. nothertheless I hope to have interested some people.
Isn't it funny how people react that way... The software is FREE, dammit, it isn't like you're making a profit because you plugged it!
I was speaking extreme-third-person there, even though I used the first person tense. Reading back over it I guess my wording was cold.
However I stand by the statement that the U.S. government acts politically and not morally. If we were actually morally concerned with the plight of the Iraqis and even our own troops, we wouldn't be having an armed conflict at all. I can't see any moral difference between "Killing a whole lot of people" (which we have) and "Killing an enormous number of people" (which is what I was talking about).
Slashdot Mirror
BTW, I am not John Corrigan (my boss, cofounder of the company, and purchaser of the check). I'm merely a drone :-)
I was not aware that reporting the news counts as bashing. I suppose if the President of the U.S. was arrested for drunk driving and CNN decided to report on it, that that would be "pathetic" and "anti-Bush?"
You're an idiot.
Makes sense to me!
As a citizen who uses the freeways every day, I simply can't WAIT until all these hazmat trucks go totally deregulated!
I really disagree with that. We can sit around here all day and concoct all kinds of things a terrorist MIGHT do, that would probably actually work damn well if someone did do them. Yet they don't do anything.
I'm NOT talking about what's happening in Iraq. Can anyone name a single terrorist event in this country that happened since September 11th? The idiot who UNSUCCESSFULLY tried to blow up his shoes doesn't count. Can't think of anything? I didn't think so. There's been a lot of threats but no one is putting their money on the table.
I submit that the terrorists are fucking idiots who don't know anything about causing mass confusion and terror. They seem to restrict their thinking to bombs. As Spock would say in Star Trek II, "He displays two dimensional thinking."
I'm sort of joking, but in all honesty that's actually how I've always interpretted that logo. It wasn't until this morning that I realized the red part of the logo is actually a big letter C. If I can make the mistake, so can others.
Radioactive waste definitely still has a lot of energy in it, but the efficiency of a nuclear plant (or any system to harness energy for that matter) depends on the temperature differential. The hotter you can make the reactants the more efficient the conversion to useful energy is going to be. When the fuel has decayed to the point where a nuclear chain reaction can't be sustained anymore, it becomes impossible to maintain a thermal differential large enough for any appreciable efficiency.
You could definitely get power out of residual radioactive decay but it's probably not going to be enough to justify the effort. With Voyager it was worth it because it was a multimillion dollar spacecraft and the efficiency wasn't really the focus.
1. Use IPSec, or
2. Restrict the access point so that no connections can be made anywhere except to a VPN server
I'm currently planning something along the lines of (2) at home. I plan to use the hostap driver for Linux and firewall the wireless interface off from everything except for a single port which goes through to a VPN server. In order to talk to ANYBODY the client will have to log in through the VPN.
This way if/when a weakness is discovered in the crypto I just upgrade the software on the server/client instead of blowing money on new hardware every time they standardize on something else.
The only problem is that users can still DOS each other wirelessly, but there's nothing that can be done about that.
Or alternatively, encode the content in such a way: "Go out a buy a bottle of Salon Selectives. The 6th letter of the 14th word on the ingredients list is the first letter of this web page's content. Now, go out and buy a Ford Taurus. Take the seventh digit of the VIN number, square it, add 16, and treat the resulting number as the ASCII code for the second letter of this web page's content..."
I'd say running in the console is itself a jump back of several years.
The spacecraft in question wasn't Voyager, but PIONEER 10. My point stands however, that having probes in the far reaches of space away from the solar system will be extremely valuable in the study of theories of gravity. Here's a link to a good place to start. A good Google search is "pioneer anomalous acceleration"
Near the end of the article I linked, they explain that this effect is not observed with Voyager because of the way Voyager is stabilized by boosters (as opposed to spin-stabilization for Pioneer). If the effect is occurring with Voyager it is completely swamped by the booster accelerations. They also indicate that (obviously) the best way to continue studying this is to launch another probe outside of the solar system.
If you spend any time researching this, you'll find groups of people all over the place who claim to have explained it. But none of them agree with each other. I think it's accurate to say that nobody REALLY knows what's happening.
Doubt doesn't mean "disbelieve them even if they're right." It isn't cutting edge science to suggest that space isn't totally empty, or that sound can thus travel through it. A minute's research would have answered the question, but the original poster instead chose to make a defiant, sarcastic quip.
I realize that it's hard to believe, but university-level introductory physics books don't give you the whole picture, and in fact commit some pretty grievous simplifications for the sake of presentation. This is okay, but I just wish people were aware of it. I can't count the number of times I've heard somebody trying to argue with a seasoned scientist based on some simplification they read in an undergraduate textbook twenty years ago.
(going from water to air is a speed increase, and I'm guessing its some function of density)
That's backward, sound travels much faster through water than through air. It does relate to density but not directly. The quantities that influence the speed of sound are the temperature and something called "bulk modulus" which describes how the material density changes as the pressure changes. Temperature is more important at very low densities. At higher densities as in solids the bulk modulus is the primary factor.
You sure have very little faith in the ability of space physicists to come up with obvious theories... As I said, all of these things have been checked and rejected as potential causes.
Indeed, science can be distilled down to a set of little sound-bite facts that are easily repeatable. "There is no sound in space" is one of them. However what most people for some reason do not understand is that this is a SOUND BITE.
It is far too common for Slashdot readers to immediately object to something because it clashes with their boiled down kiddy version of science.
Here's some news for you: the space surrounding the sun is far from empty, in fact it is filled with atoms, electrons, and ionized gas. Its density is low enough that a human would not perceive it without an instrument. But sound can quite easily travel through gas, no matter how thin. Clearly the sound cannot travel any faster than the individual particles themselves are moving. Hence it is very easy to define the speed of sound in a gas.
No, I'm not claiming to be a scientist or above anyone else in terms of scientific knowledge, but it really pisses me off when people's first reaction is to DOUBT THE SCIENTISTS. Sure, they can be wrong sometimes, but I think it would be respectful to go do a little research before claiming, as if you are some kind of expert, that they are wrong.
Bah, serves me right posting a comment before checking to see if someone else already thought of it... Hey, at least my link was CLICKABLE ;-)
Obviously, they'll use a scanner.
There are many star systems, but only one Solar System, since there's only one star called Sol.
What we're talking about here is a new situation, where the current theories of gravity aren't giving the right numbers even at a macroscopic scale. That is, if there isn't some other hidden force that we can't observe.
I would personally rather believe that our theories of gravity are wrong, as opposed to thinking the universe is magically permeated with huge amounts of massive stuff that we quite inconveniently cannot detect.
The address bar is quickly going obsolete because of Google. I can type a URL into it and it links me to the site. If I don't know the URL I can type a keyword. I can use it as a calculator. I can do unit conversion. And it even knows the answer to life, the universe, and everything.
It's having it all there unified in one spot that makes it cool.
Voyager has been moving through space in ways unexplainable by physics. There is a small acceleration that can't be accounted for using known laws. It's almost like gravity doesn't work quite the way we think it does.
Of course, there is always the possibility that we just can't see the source of the acceleration, and it'll turn out to be something simple. However so far, all proposals put forth to explain it have been shown to be incorrect.
There is a deeper connection to very important issues in physics. For decades we have been studying the fabled "dark matter" which is supposed to be the cause of the anomalous rotation of the galaxy. The galaxy does not move in ways predicted by the laws of gravity. It is as if there is a huge amount of hidden mass which is influencing its rotation. So far we have not found any of this "dark matter."
But imagine the possibility. What if dark matter doesn't really exist? What if it's our understanding of gravity that is wrong? This would have profound implications throughout physics. After all our only direct experience of gravity is what happens here on Earth and within the bounds of the solar system. Except that today, we have a probe that has crossed that limit.
Perhaps the anomalous motion of Voyager will shed light on the situation. I for one would be utterly elated if it turns out we have to rewrite our physics books.
Voyager isn't useless yet!
Like all the other probes of that era it runs on a thermal nuclear battery. It doesn't use a fission chain reaction, but merely the heat released by gradual radioactive breakdown of plutonium.
Isn't that spiff? :-)
I apologise for the plug; usually I'm quite good and wait for at least on-topic opportunities! I'm sure I'll still get the usual ac death threats etc. nothertheless I hope to have interested some people.
Isn't it funny how people react that way... The software is FREE, dammit, it isn't like you're making a profit because you plugged it!
However I stand by the statement that the U.S. government acts politically and not morally. If we were actually morally concerned with the plight of the Iraqis and even our own troops, we wouldn't be having an armed conflict at all. I can't see any moral difference between "Killing a whole lot of people" (which we have) and "Killing an enormous number of people" (which is what I was talking about).