I considered it but, I'm going to go the other way. I find his "Nazional Republican Party" just as distasteful as my ad hominem may be to others. He did go to DeVry. I am a Republican and don't enjoy being called a Nazi. I'd say he went a little farther, too bad your views are too biased to see that.
You know nothing about my views, friend, so I'll thank you not to tell me how biased I am. Also, there's nothing, to my knowledge, inherently shameful about going to a technical school. You seem to imply that this means his opinion is somehow less valuable or insightful than your own. Please don't further the elitist stereotype that many already have of the venerable GOP.
I'm sorry, did we read the same post? Or did the GOP change their official name to the Nazional Republican Party, and was President replaced with Reichsfuhrer in the Constitution?
Well, but of course an ad hominem is a more direct attack on the author. Calling the president "Reichsführer" isn't an ad hominem, unless you're writing to the president. And I misread "national" for "nazional", so I missed that one. Old age, etc. etc.
Kurt thanks for the post, I had a good laugh. With clear thought and wit like this I'm suprised you went to DeVry.
And yet I note that the previous poster was able to express his views clearly and concisely, irrespective of whether or not one agrees with him. And bonus points to him for leaving out the facile ad hominem, something you may want to consider for your own writing.
Now that being said, I don't know how they intend to "stabilize" the black holes... because as you noticed, anything that touches it *will* be sucked into it, so what comes to my mind is a black hole the size of an atom free falling all the way to the core of the earth, and starting to consume everything that touches it until it eats up everything...
It can be stabilised by placing the hole in a magnetic containment field, which is all a particle collider really is anyhow. Black holes do have charge, and so can be held indefinitely. At typical containment velocities, any failure in the field would simply result in the black hole being ejected into deep space---the interaction radius of these objects is quite small indeed, and no one would likely notice the event, unless you got lucky in detecting a pion decay cascade or something as it passed through the atmosphere. Not sure if there would be enough energy to make that happen, though.
I've got a bag of SIMM sticks I wanna sell ya. And if they aren't considered valuable in one thousand years, I'll double your money back!
Ha! Touché. Well, I've plenty of those floating around already, though I don't plan on being around to cash them in a thousand years hence, either...really, they'll only become valuable if there are only a few around anyway, so maybe I should hoard them;-)
2. A museum should contain items that are interesting to others. How many would venture into a junkyard of mold computers to look at the "exhibits?"
I just took a postdoctoral position in the Netherlands, and my office is one floor above this Computer Museum, as I discovered only a couple weeks ago (and now I realise why my network connection has been slow for much of the day...). I think the exhibits are quite fascinating, and give enormous insight into how computing was done thirty years ago. It really gives one an appreciation for how much computing has changed---not merely the technology, but the approach to doing computer science. So there's one person anyway, though I didn't come to look at the mold in particular.
3. Perserving crap serves no purpose. Why not start a museum of Gremlins, Pintos, Festivas, Yugos... (See my other posts)
Well there's a brilliant argument. By that measure, historical (as opposed to artistic or natural) museums would be largely empty, precisely because most of the artifacts therein were perfectly ordinary, everyday items. What you call crap, may well be a priceless treasure for an archaeologist ten centuries hence, attempting to glean some insight into the dawn of the machine era. It seems laughable now, as it no doubt would if you had told a potter in the early Bronze age that is work would be considered a valuable treasure thousands of years hence.
The prospect of space travel does not fill me with happy visions of the future. Let's grow up a little first.
Given that the colonisation of the Galaxy would take millions of years at the very least, it would seem we have plenty of time for growing up on the way.
I would fear for a world that didn't have an American superpower in it, especially in the age of WMD. I find it quite distressing that America isn't actually Imperialistic as its critics claim. There would be no bullshit dictatorships in the world if it were.
I don't think these foriegners should even be allowed to attend school (any school) here. A lot of them just take what they learned back to their home country, and eventually take jobs away from Americans (with exceptions like Doctors who take the their skills back to their countries to provide a helpful service). I don't think it's wrong to discriminate against foriegn students when they are taking places that could have gone to American students who are equally qualified.
Well, that's a brilliant statement. I assume you believe it is similarly wrong for an American to study abroad, then? In fact, no university is turning away "equally qualified" Americans in place of foreign nationals. This is a patently ridiculous statement, given that American university enrollment is at an all-time high.
As several posters have tried to tell you before, the reason so many foreign nationals can be found in the nation's graduate schools is because we can't find enough Americans, competent or not! My department has done all but beg American undergrads to sign up, to little avail. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that you will actually read this post, given that you have ignored what no less than three other people have tried to tell you already. I'm sorry this is at odds with your desperate belief that thousands of qualified American students are being turned away in favour of feral foreign barbarians, but it just ain't so.
I should also point out that while many foreign nationals return to their home country after study in the US, a large number remain here to become resident aliens and even citizens. It should also be pointed out that, even after leaving this country, many of these researchers continue to advance American science by being heavily involved with collaborations in this country. You claim that these scientists are taking away jobs from Americans, but you neglect to consider the American jobs that are made possible by the research work done by foreign nationals. This is not a zero-sum game, in other words.
But then listening doesn't appear to be your strong suit, so perhaps I am wasting my time.
All they want to do is mandate minimum security levels for Wi-Fi network operators so as to prevent intrusions.
There's a difference between intentionally limiting rights and establishing minimum standards of conduct. I suppose you guys never heard of speed limits on highways.
Argument by analogy is always a dicey proposition. It's not clear how speed limits are precisely the same as mandating a secure network. After all, the threat of bodily harm is far more readily apparent in the latter case. If you want to extend this analogy to its natural conclusion, you would be forced to agree that mandating secure wireless networks is wrong, because the government cannot establish a speed limit on private roads...oh sure, you can get to public roads (the internet) from your private road, but regulation does not apply until that threshold is crossed.
So let's drop the shallow analogy and argue the actual point at hand. Many home and business users would probably stand to gain from regulations of WiFi equipment. However, only a few business and institutions are actually in a position where a network compromise could prove dangerous. And these should clearly not be employing wireless technology (I would be concerned, for example, if the computer network controlling the local nuclear power plant were attached to a wireless network...) But for the average business, or home network, the real concern is not that vital computer systems are more vulnerable (since there is no shortage of systems hacked through the wire network), but the greater anonymity afforded the attacker.
I don't deny that this is a problem, and makes serious attacks that much harder to prosecute, but it does pose an important question for the general populace as this technology becomes ubiquitous. Namely, what are the responsibilities of a private citizen to monitor their own private network? I mean, whether the hole in security is due to faulty protocols implemented in the hardware or a clueless user (or an intentionally open network) is immaterial from the perspective of infrastructure security. I think this discussion needs to happen soon, and should not be one-sided (the government lecturing the public).
I also think it mildly amusing that the government is now incredibly concerned with the security of private home and small-business networks, given its own chequered past, with missing laptops and high-profile break-ins. Maybe the terrorists don't need much help:-) While the government threatens regulation, it might be useful to turn some questions around; like, why are any critical computer systems accessible via the internet, anyway? Instead of a mountain of terrorist fear-mongering, maybe we should ask the government to set a better example than they do presently.
Apologies for rambling...
Cheers,
The Mouser
Re:Check out Cato Funding
on
239 MPG Car
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· Score: 2
Hi,
You're overlooking the whole point of the report: that while increased mass increases the incidence and degree of injury to others, it decreases the incidence and fatality of injuries to occupants by a greater degree.
Well, ignoring the cynical "better you than me" attitude which seems to be the principal factor in spurring SUV sales (sort of taking "drive defensively" to the logical extreme:), there are a few other difficulties which I didn't see addressed in the report you mention. First, I didn't happen to see any error estimates attached to the quoted numbers of total lives saved. The two percent value given for multiple-vehicle collisions is not huge, and it would be interesting to see if the errors resulting from imperfect control groups (surely they weren't all identical?) exceed this figure, making the end result statistically dubious. Did they give an error analysis, and I just missed it?
Second, the report covers a period when SUVs were still relatively rare on the road, which is hardly the case today. This means that in a typical multi-vehicle collision involving an SUV at the time of the report, the other vehicles were most likely smaller cars, and so the protective value of the SUV outweighed the crushing destruction inflicted on the smaller vehicle. It would be interesting to see an updated study for the past couple of years, where SUV-SUV collisions are much more common. I imagine that the highly-touted protection of the SUV evaporates when hit by a similar behemoth, as no one vehicle holds the momentum advantage in that situation. And so it may be that fatalities drop with a slight increase in average vehicle mass (for the reasons stated in the report), but that the trend reverses itself with a much larger increase in average mass. In other words, you're safer in an SUV, until enough people are in SUVs! What's next? A bigger vehicle! And this of course only lasts until more people catch up...
The obvious question is whether those people who can't afford anything better than a compact are somehow less entitled to highway safety than those folks who can drop serious dosh on an Urban Assault Vehicle. It would be interesting to see the Cato study redone with casualties displayed as a function of economic class.
Well, I apparently missed the forum post when I first looked at the link in the story (how far down was it, anyway?) Unfortunately, the link is no longer responsive, so I can't check this. So, it appears that I do owe you an apology for my invective. I would say, however, that the post you quote appears to be from Ron second-hand, posted from another mailing list onto this board. "Ron" might feel rather different about circulating his phone number on a limited-distribution mailing list as opposed to publishing it on a web board like fatwallet, let alone a site like Slashdot! I'm curious just how far and wide he intended that to be disseminated.
Still, you appear to have acted in good faith, so I withdraw my comment and offer apologies for my perhaps overquick judgement.
Posting someone's phone number on a public site like Slashdot is *seriously* uncool. I understand your motivations, but soliciting phone calls on a site which regularly gets *tens* of *thousands* of eyeballs, even for "a quick call", an hour before deadline is possibly one of the most asinine things I have yet seen in a Slashdot posting; and, as you may infer from my Slash ID, I've seen a fair bit.
With friends like these, the DMCA needs no bloody help to stick its tendrils into every corner of American business.
Post your own damned phone number next time, fool.
Actually, I wonder now whether my answer isn't more correct than your 8.3 km/sec...I seem to be using more precise numbers, because you're using 7000 km, whereas 12756/2 is actually 6378 KM. (And the former number comes from NASA).
Yep, I was most definitely approximating. The farther along you go in science, the more you'll find that scientists like to do back of the envelope calculations with numbers that are right to something like a ten percent error.
I use R_earth = 7000 km because I can manipulate that in my head without having to trouble with a calculator, being terrifically lazy. If you're actually shooting rockets into space, or need the precision otherwise, draw your calculator and use the NASA figure:-) Also, I use g = 10 metres/sec^2, because 10 is a nice number for mental manipulation. This habit also helps one resist the temptation to quote large numbers of significant figures in an answer, beyond any reasonable expectation of precision (a disorder most common in first-year physics students, and non-scientists in lab courses). The equation is exact, though...
In other words: Our methods produce an equally correct result.
Well, they had better! I didn't say anything was wrong with your method (quite the opposite, I tried to convey that I thought it was a nice geometrical solution). I merely quibbled about one detail. Also, your method is strictly true only if g is much less than r (so that a second-order term can be ignored), but that extremely minor problem can be fixed using differentials.
I do wonder though why you say something like "not a bad way to do the calculation, without access to calculus." I'm in calculus 1 now, and it might be helpful if you told me what in calculus would have helped me carry out the calculations.
Oh, because you can derive the centripetal acceleration a priori with a bit of differential calculus, that's all. Or, just look it up.
Googling/sec instead of/s, I get a page [purdue.edu] at Purdue University reading "Thus for Earth,
vc = 7.9 km/sec (~ 5 miles/second)
(to achieve a circular orbit about the Earth)" and another [purdue.edu] (cache [216.239.51.100]) by a different professor carrying out the same calculations.
Both professors are physicists.
Being in astrophysics myself, I'm probably not as impressed as I would otherwise be with that statement, though their figures are quite correct!;-)
Thank you for your very thorough reply, and good luck in your further education!
Cheers,
The Mouser
Re:Yeah, lots of people don't use public transport
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Pipeline Mass Transit?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
C'mon....do the math. Total up the world's capacity of public transportation....and then compare it to the number of people in the world who commute....the two figures aren't even close. If the system worked well, and was economical, people would ditch their cars for it. My fiancee commutes to Jersey City, NJ every day. It costs her $400/mo for that privilage and it SUCKS.
I can't do the math, as I haven't the figures available. I suspect you can't do the math either, as you don't quote any figures.:-) What I can say is that I've been to a number of countries that run very efficient public transportation (I'm especially thinking of the Netherlands, and the Amsterdam trams). India, Japan, northern Europe all have at least adequate public transport systems. You don't say how far Jersey City is from your fiancee, so it's hard to say if the train cost is reasonable or not. The question to ask is how much it would cost her, considering fuel and maintenance to run a car for that same commute each month (and don't forget parking fees, of course).
Now, your crack about the middle east is low. I like driving my PERSONAL automobile. It is gas fueled, but it isn't a gas-guzzling SUV....it's a VW golf, and it gets great gas milage. I'd use an ethanol-gasoline mix if I could buy it somewhere near me.
Nice car, I'm a big fan of the Golf (my advisor runs one). While you have a point that personal transportation is more useful in general than public transport (no schedules, service to everywhere there's a road, etc.), this doesn't preclude public transport at all. Most people put a large chunk (most?) of the miles on their vehicles going to work every day, and this ratio likely increases if one works in a city one can't afford to live in (working in NYC, living in Jersey). Use public transport during the week, drive to your vacation paradise in your gas-electric hybrid on the weekend...
Public transport, when properly executed, doesn't just cut on gas usage, but also smog, noise and traffic. It puts less strain on a city's infrastructure (bridges, tunnels, parking ramps, &cet.) And it also encourages slightly more walking, which is vastly better for the population for other reasons.
Your point about Amtrak is well-taken, but I don't see it as particularly relevant. Do most roads pay for their own maintenance? Isn't that what part of a state's gas tax goes towards? Aren't there Federal highway subsidies? Toll roads may mitigate the cost of upkeep, but I hardly think they are self-sustaining. Why should public transport networks be less worthy of tax dollars? Why a different standard, especially given the health and environmental bonus?
For examples, New York has an adequate public transport network, and Washington D.C.'s is absolutely first-rate. So, it can be done, at least on an intra-city level. Most of America's public transport problems come from attitude, not because the concept is inherently unworkable.
This number is 15.972. In other words, by MY calculation (I'm fresh out of high school though, so YMMV), orbiting at sea level requires you to go 15.972 miles in a single second.
Not a bad way to do this calculation, if you don't have access to calculus and the like. Unfortunately, your answer is wrong, because the radius of the Earth is a touch under 7000 kilometers, not 13000 as you claim.
An easier way to do this would be to remember that the centripetal force required to keep an object with mass m moving in a circular orbit of radius r and speed v is just m*v^2/r. Equate that to the force of gravity at sea level and you have that:
v^2 = g*r
Just think of gravity as being the "string" that keeps the satellite in its circular path. At sea level, this works out to 8.3 km/sec or thereabouts. Incidentally, it can be shown that the minimum escape velocity is just this number multiplied by the square root of two.
Well, that's true for parts of northern Africa, but sub-Saharan Africa contains some of the most arable land on the planet, and that situation is unlikely to change anytime soon. Effective use of this land is the real problem, and is hardly the desert's fault:-)
I suppose I should have added eliminating contagious diseases as well. I'm not some left-wing fruitcake; these are all problems we have the power to solve, but the money is being wasted on things like crop subsidies and space travel.
It would be naive indeed to think that eliminating infectious disease is something we can completely conquer at the present time. This is not simply a matter of throwing sufficient money at the NIH, and then getting out a cure for every strain of influenza, dengue fever, West Nile, hantavirus, HIV, and every other godforsaken pest that troubles us today. Funding is obviously important, but it can hardly be argued that this is the principal obstacle to progress here. I also think that it's interesting that you mention eliminating crop subsidies and space travel, but neglect much larger burdens such as our incredible defense budget, which is presently about twenty-five times larger than the entire NASA budget (which includes not just space exploration, but an enormous amount of life sciences and astronomical research).
So here's a solution I think we can both agree on: cut our military expenditures by about ten percent or so, and split the money down the middle, half for NASA, half for the NIH. I'll get more real space exploration, you'll get more diseases licked, and we'll build a few less cruise missiles this year. Sound good? Now if only one of us can get elected...:-)
Invading small countries doesn't bug me one bit, as long as it's not to install US-friendly dictators again.
Not even a little bit? As long as it's somebody else fighting?:-)
Maybe a quick review of your old physics text book would be in order;)
Hardly, but many thanks for the patronisation.:-) I was specifically referring to the burns that take place in October, December, March and April, that have a noticeable time-to-rise that is easily visible on the chart. Whether this is due to a slow, elongated burn, or multiple short bursts that can't be clearly made out at the plot's resolution, I can't say. Perhaps I should have been clearer and said that I didn't realise the series of burns took so long to commence.
An object in motion tends to remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force
Yes, but the orbit-averaged height doesn't bloody well increase unless acted upon by an external force, now does it? Turn off the engine, and your orbit is fixed (sans atmospheric intereference).
But talking about the satellite and orbits issue, it may be interesting but bear in mind that orbital elements or ephemeredes are only valid for a certain amount of time after they are issued (up to a few weeks); this is due to the effects of things like atmospheric drag, orbital corrections and the alike.
Well, of course. I don't mean to suggest that they gave the mission profile a green light, and then forgot about it. The anticipated trajectory will be tracked until the launch, presumably, and if a satellite should approach the exit corridor too closely, I'm sure they'll make the phone call. But they need to register a flight plan with a US agency so that this can be done.
Many thanks for the ISS orbital height plot. It is interesting to see the dramatic changes during boost, though even these seem to develop over a couple of days (I didn't realise the burns lasted that long).
Why does this company need to get approval of the US Gov?
Consider that there are literally thousands of satellites presently in low-earth orbit, some functional, some merely centimeter-sized pieces of debris. Much of this is being tracked by US Air Defense, and orbital elements for spy sats are not generally made public, for obvious reasons.
So, it is likely that these folks submitted a mission plan and trajectory to the US, which then returned it to them and said "that should work fine, have fun". They were not "getting permission to leave the planet", they were getting a go-ahead to help keep their moon shuttle from an accidental collision with either an unregistered spysat or the odd bit of space junk as they pass through LEO. This has been common practice for many years now.
I think you're leaving out the gratuitous, "optimised viewing angle" shots of a certain curvaceous Vulcan science officer. I don't know where that fits in your overall seven-part synopsis, though (I guess maybe as parts 1a, 2a, 3a, etc.:)
Not that I mind, though. The growing sexual tension between T'Pal and the Archer is kind of interesting, though often overdone. The actress actually has a wonderfully sensual voice, which goes a long way towards making this tension work without seeming ridiculous (like most Trek portrayals of sexual innuendo). And, she has the "quizzical raised eyebrow" thing down pat:-).
I'm a scientist who cut his teeth on FORTRAN, and still use it for a variety of reasons, including the richness an quality of the numeric code available for use with the language, and the most excellent optimizing compilers that can be used.
Perl has none of that.
Perl is fine for weeding through a lot of data that has been generated using automated D/A systems, but that is text processing which Perl is very strong at.
But for computationally intensive tasks, Perl is just wrong.
This may be changing soon. Check out the Perl Data Language, which is designed to allow rapid calculations on large matrices using Perl syntax (and, of course, allowing use of Perl's text manipulation facilities directly). I don't imagine it's as fast as Fortran, most especially if you're using HPF or the like, but it's fast enough for a large array of applications. I'm an astronomer and use it fairly regularly for image analysis, statistical and visualisation tasks. Not yet as mature as IDL, but that seems to be where it's headed.
Hey Genius, we're talking about minors here, doing illegal things. It's one thing if you want to try and make a point about the futility of the war on drugs among adults, and the government's assault on civil liberties by trying to regulate activites exclusive to one or more consenting grown ups, but geez, kid, get your head out of your ass and use some common sense. We're talking about kids here. I know in your little fantasy world it's the 10-year-olds who are hacking out the planet-saving patches keeping this fragile society together, while the Ph.d educated engineers at Microsoft scratch their heads in awe
I think the original posters' point is that children should be allowed to mistakes. Even dangerous ones, on occasion. A sterile, overprotective environment is anathema to a child's intellectual development. Indeed, this is observed in all primates, not just humans. The idea, I think, is to equip the child as best you can; to instill judgement and sense into their inchoate minds. Yes, punish them when they screw up. Yes, instill a healthy (not iron-fisted) discipline so they can grow up respecting themselves, and make intelligent choices. And, yes, sadly, you have to let them fall down once in a while. The risk you take in doing so is an investment in the child's psyche. Growing up is dangerous---it has to be, I think.
But where did you pull that 10-year-old hacker thing from, anyway? That was quite the non sequitur...
And, to borrow a phrase from my father, as long as you're living under my roof, eating my food, and using my phone, you're going to follow MY RULES
Well, that's fine. However, if you've done a proper job, one day your child will ask you where those rules come from, and their justification. You owe it to them to have a thought-out answer.
Ahhh very informative.. if you don't mind me probing a little deeper.. what exactly is it that causes these two values to be the same? is it a gravitational thing? The rotation and revolution of celestial bodies always seem to be unrelated.
The phenomenon arises from the gravitational tidal forces that the Moon and the Earth exert on each other. On Earth, the tidal forces from the Moon (and Sun) give us our ocean tides (hence the name). The energy dissipated is slowing the rotation of both the Earth and the Moon; the effect on the Moon being more pronounced due to its lower moment of inertia. There is the lunar libation, which allows us to see slightly more than half of the Moon (as a wobbling motion), but that's all we can see from here. But of course, it's not "dark", and gets just as much sunlight as the face we see (when we have a New Moon).
The Earth-Moon system isn't the only place this is seen, by the way. Some of the companion moons of the outer Gas Giant planets are tide-locked, and the effect is also seen (or at least inferred) in some closely-orbiting binary star systems.
Sheesh, perhaps because Linux is useless for classrooms, and the schools don't want it?
Why so? Just about every software function available under Windows is also available under Linux. Web browsers, office suites, mathematics programs like Octave and PDL, photo and image creation/manipulation. Really, what's missing? Even knowledge of the command line is not strictly necessary, with a properly configured GUI (and presumably the Red Hat ladz will do a proper job with this, given its visibility). And even if they had to learn a bit of the command line; well, it is a school after all, so an argument that choosing Windows because it's more familiar or "easier" is perhaps a bit specious---it may be the wrong choice for precisely those reasons.
Screw what the schools actually want, we'll just force Linux down their throat and make them like it, right?
I think you're badly misrepresenting what is going on here. The schools in question have few or no computers now. They are in poor districts, and would welcome any influx of computer resources, and literally cannot afford to be OS-bigots as you can. If Red Hat's offer (whatever its real intent) will allow them to field several times more computers than they could if obliged to use Microsoft's "donations", that seems like a very good solution indeed. And given that the source code is accessible, it might even make the perfect learning tool for some poor, bright children who are looking for a challenge. There's a much greater capacity for tinkering with an OS like Linux or *BSD. The tools are there, the code is there, waiting to be discovered by some clever, slightly bored kid. I just don't see Windows offering that same spark (are they planning on including development tools in this package?)
Slashdot Mirror
I considered it but, I'm going to go the other way. I find his "Nazional Republican Party" just as distasteful as my ad hominem may be to others. He did go to DeVry. I am a Republican and don't enjoy being called a Nazi. I'd say he went a little farther, too bad your views are too biased to see that.
You know nothing about my views, friend, so I'll thank you not to tell me how biased I am. Also, there's nothing, to my knowledge, inherently shameful about going to a technical school. You seem to imply that this means his opinion is somehow less valuable or insightful than your own. Please don't further the elitist stereotype that many already have of the venerable GOP.
Cheers,
Mouser
I'm sorry, did we read the same post? Or did the GOP change their official name to the Nazional Republican Party, and was President replaced with Reichsfuhrer in the Constitution?
Well, but of course an ad hominem is a more direct attack on the author. Calling the president "Reichsführer" isn't an ad hominem, unless you're writing to the president. And I misread "national" for "nazional", so I missed that one. Old age, etc. etc.
Cheers,
Mouser
Kurt thanks for the post, I had a good laugh. With clear thought and wit like this I'm suprised you went to DeVry.
And yet I note that the previous poster was able to express his views clearly and concisely, irrespective of whether or not one agrees with him. And bonus points to him for leaving out the facile ad hominem, something you may want to consider for your own writing.
Mouser
Now that being said, I don't know how they intend to "stabilize" the black holes... because as you noticed, anything that touches it *will* be sucked into it, so what comes to my mind is a black hole the size of an atom free falling all the way to the core of the earth, and starting to consume everything that touches it until it eats up everything...
It can be stabilised by placing the hole in a magnetic containment field, which is all a particle collider really is anyhow. Black holes do have charge, and so can be held indefinitely. At typical containment velocities, any failure in the field would simply result in the black hole being ejected into deep space---the interaction radius of these objects is quite small indeed, and no one would likely notice the event, unless you got lucky in detecting a pion decay cascade or something as it passed through the atmosphere. Not sure if there would be enough energy to make that happen, though.
Cheers,
Mouser
I've got a bag of SIMM sticks I wanna sell ya. And if they aren't considered valuable in one thousand years, I'll double your money back!
;-)
Ha! Touché. Well, I've plenty of those floating around already, though I don't plan on being around to cash them in a thousand years hence, either...really, they'll only become valuable if there are only a few around anyway, so maybe I should hoard them
Cheers,
Mouser
2. A museum should contain items that are interesting to others. How many would venture into a junkyard of mold computers to look at the "exhibits?"
I just took a postdoctoral position in the Netherlands, and my office is one floor above this Computer Museum, as I discovered only a couple weeks ago (and now I realise why my network connection has been slow for much of the day...). I think the exhibits are quite fascinating, and give enormous insight into how computing was done thirty years ago. It really gives one an appreciation for how much computing has changed---not merely the technology, but the approach to doing computer science. So there's one person anyway, though I didn't come to look at the mold in particular.
3. Perserving crap serves no purpose. Why not start a museum of Gremlins, Pintos, Festivas, Yugos... (See my other posts)
Well there's a brilliant argument. By that measure, historical (as opposed to artistic or natural) museums would be largely empty, precisely because most of the artifacts therein were perfectly ordinary, everyday items. What you call crap, may well be a priceless treasure for an archaeologist ten centuries hence, attempting to glean some insight into the dawn of the machine era. It seems laughable now, as it no doubt would if you had told a potter in the early Bronze age that is work would be considered a valuable treasure thousands of years hence.
Mouser
The prospect of space travel does not fill me with happy visions of the future. Let's grow up a little first.
Given that the colonisation of the Galaxy would take millions of years at the very least, it would seem we have plenty of time for growing up on the way.
Mouser
I would fear for a world that didn't have an American superpower in it, especially in the age of WMD. I find it quite distressing that America isn't actually Imperialistic as its critics claim. There would be no bullshit dictatorships in the world if it were.
Well, there would be precisely one, actually.
I don't think these foriegners should even be allowed to attend school (any school) here. A lot of them just take what they learned back to their home country, and eventually take jobs away from Americans (with exceptions like Doctors who take the their skills back to their countries to provide a helpful service). I don't think it's wrong to discriminate against foriegn students when they are taking places that could have gone to American students who are equally qualified.
Well, that's a brilliant statement. I assume you believe it is similarly wrong for an American to study abroad, then? In fact, no university is turning away "equally qualified" Americans in place of foreign nationals. This is a patently ridiculous statement, given that American university enrollment is at an all-time high.
As several posters have tried to tell you before, the reason so many foreign nationals can be found in the nation's graduate schools is because we can't find enough Americans, competent or not! My department has done all but beg American undergrads to sign up, to little avail. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that you will actually read this post, given that you have ignored what no less than three other people have tried to tell you already. I'm sorry this is at odds with your desperate belief that thousands of qualified American students are being turned away in favour of feral foreign barbarians, but it just ain't so.
I should also point out that while many foreign nationals return to their home country after study in the US, a large number remain here to become resident aliens and even citizens. It should also be pointed out that, even after leaving this country, many of these researchers continue to advance American science by being heavily involved with collaborations in this country. You claim that these scientists are taking away jobs from Americans, but you neglect to consider the American jobs that are made possible by the research work done by foreign nationals. This is not a zero-sum game, in other words.
But then listening doesn't appear to be your strong suit, so perhaps I am wasting my time.
The Mouser
All they want to do is mandate minimum security levels for Wi-Fi network operators so as to prevent intrusions.
There's a difference between intentionally limiting rights and establishing minimum standards of conduct. I suppose you guys never heard of speed limits on highways.
Argument by analogy is always a dicey proposition. It's not clear how speed limits are precisely the same as mandating a secure network. After all, the threat of bodily harm is far more readily apparent in the latter case. If you want to extend this analogy to its natural conclusion, you would be forced to agree that mandating secure wireless networks is wrong, because the government cannot establish a speed limit on private roads...oh sure, you can get to public roads (the internet) from your private road, but regulation does not apply until that threshold is crossed.
So let's drop the shallow analogy and argue the actual point at hand. Many home and business users would probably stand to gain from regulations of WiFi equipment. However, only a few business and institutions are actually in a position where a network compromise could prove dangerous. And these should clearly not be employing wireless technology (I would be concerned, for example, if the computer network controlling the local nuclear power plant were attached to a wireless network...) But for the average business, or home network, the real concern is not that vital computer systems are more vulnerable (since there is no shortage of systems hacked through the wire network), but the greater anonymity afforded the attacker.
I don't deny that this is a problem, and makes serious attacks that much harder to prosecute, but it does pose an important question for the general populace as this technology becomes ubiquitous. Namely, what are the responsibilities of a private citizen to monitor their own private network? I mean, whether the hole in security is due to faulty protocols implemented in the hardware or a clueless user (or an intentionally open network) is immaterial from the perspective of infrastructure security. I think this discussion needs to happen soon, and should not be one-sided (the government lecturing the public).
I also think it mildly amusing that the government is now incredibly concerned with the security of private home and small-business networks, given its own chequered past, with missing laptops and high-profile break-ins. Maybe the terrorists don't need much help
Apologies for rambling...
Cheers,
The Mouser
Hi,
:), there are a few other difficulties which I didn't see addressed in the report you mention. First, I didn't happen to see any error estimates attached to the quoted numbers of total lives saved. The two percent value given for multiple-vehicle collisions is not huge, and it would be interesting to see if the errors resulting from imperfect control groups (surely they weren't all identical?) exceed this figure, making the end result statistically dubious. Did they give an error analysis, and I just missed it?
You're overlooking the whole point of the report: that while increased mass increases the incidence and degree of injury to others, it decreases the incidence and fatality of injuries to occupants by a greater degree.
Well, ignoring the cynical "better you than me" attitude which seems to be the principal factor in spurring SUV sales (sort of taking "drive defensively" to the logical extreme
Second, the report covers a period when SUVs were still relatively rare on the road, which is hardly the case today. This means that in a typical multi-vehicle collision involving an SUV at the time of the report, the other vehicles were most likely smaller cars, and so the protective value of the SUV outweighed the crushing destruction inflicted on the smaller vehicle. It would be interesting to see an updated study for the past couple of years, where SUV-SUV collisions are much more common. I imagine that the highly-touted protection of the SUV evaporates when hit by a similar behemoth, as no one vehicle holds the momentum advantage in that situation. And so it may be that fatalities drop with a slight increase in average vehicle mass (for the reasons stated in the report), but that the trend reverses itself with a much larger increase in average mass. In other words, you're safer in an SUV, until enough people are in SUVs! What's next? A bigger vehicle! And this of course only lasts until more people catch up...
The obvious question is whether those people who can't afford anything better than a compact are somehow less entitled to highway safety than those folks who can drop serious dosh on an Urban Assault Vehicle. It would be interesting to see the Cato study redone with casualties displayed as a function of economic class.
Cheers,
Mouser
Hi coryboehne,
Well, I apparently missed the forum post when I first looked at the link in the story (how far down was it, anyway?) Unfortunately, the link is no longer responsive, so I can't check this. So, it appears that I do owe you an apology for my invective. I would say, however, that the post you quote appears to be from Ron second-hand, posted from another mailing list onto this board. "Ron" might feel rather different about circulating his phone number on a limited-distribution mailing list as opposed to publishing it on a web board like fatwallet, let alone a site like Slashdot! I'm curious just how far and wide he intended that to be disseminated.
Still, you appear to have acted in good faith, so I withdraw my comment and offer apologies for my perhaps overquick judgement.
Cheers,
Mouser
Posting someone's phone number on a public site like Slashdot is *seriously* uncool. I understand your motivations, but soliciting phone calls on a site which regularly gets *tens* of *thousands* of eyeballs, even for "a quick call", an hour before deadline is possibly one of the most asinine things I have yet seen in a Slashdot posting; and, as you may infer from my Slash ID, I've seen a fair bit.
With friends like these, the DMCA needs no bloody help to stick its tendrils into every corner of American business.
Post your own damned phone number next time, fool.
Mouser
Yep, I was most definitely approximating. The farther along you go in science, the more you'll find that scientists like to do back of the envelope calculations with numbers that are right to something like a ten percent error. I use R_earth = 7000 km because I can manipulate that in my head without having to trouble with a calculator, being terrifically lazy. If you're actually shooting rockets into space, or need the precision otherwise, draw your calculator and use the NASA figure :-) Also, I use g = 10 metres/sec^2, because 10 is a nice number for mental manipulation. This habit also helps one resist the temptation to quote large numbers of significant figures in an answer, beyond any reasonable expectation of precision (a disorder most common in first-year physics students, and non-scientists in lab courses). The equation is exact, though...
In other words: Our methods produce an equally correct result.
Well, they had better! I didn't say anything was wrong with your method (quite the opposite, I tried to convey that I thought it was a nice geometrical solution). I merely quibbled about one detail. Also, your method is strictly true only if g is much less than r (so that a second-order term can be ignored), but that extremely minor problem can be fixed using differentials.
I do wonder though why you say something like "not a bad way to do the calculation, without access to calculus." I'm in calculus 1 now, and it might be helpful if you told me what in calculus would have helped me carry out the calculations.
Oh, because you can derive the centripetal acceleration a priori with a bit of differential calculus, that's all. Or, just look it up.
Googling /sec instead of /s, I get a page [purdue.edu] at Purdue University reading "Thus for Earth,
vc = 7.9 km/sec (~ 5 miles/second)
(to achieve a circular orbit about the Earth)" and another [purdue.edu] (cache [216.239.51.100]) by a different professor carrying out the same calculations.
Both professors are physicists.
Being in astrophysics myself, I'm probably not as impressed as I would otherwise be with that statement, though their figures are quite correct! ;-)
Thank you for your very thorough reply, and good luck in your further education!
Cheers,
The Mouser
I can't do the math, as I haven't the figures available. I suspect you can't do the math either, as you don't quote any figures. :-) What I can say is that I've been to a number of countries that run very efficient public transportation (I'm especially thinking of the Netherlands, and the Amsterdam trams). India, Japan, northern Europe all have at least adequate public transport systems. You don't say how far Jersey City is from your fiancee, so it's hard to say if the train cost is reasonable or not. The question to ask is how much it would cost her, considering fuel and maintenance to run a car for that same commute each month (and don't forget parking fees, of course).
Now, your crack about the middle east is low. I like driving my PERSONAL automobile. It is gas fueled, but it isn't a gas-guzzling SUV....it's a VW golf, and it gets great gas milage. I'd use an ethanol-gasoline mix if I could buy it somewhere near me.
Nice car, I'm a big fan of the Golf (my advisor runs one). While you have a point that personal transportation is more useful in general than public transport (no schedules, service to everywhere there's a road, etc.), this doesn't preclude public transport at all. Most people put a large chunk (most?) of the miles on their vehicles going to work every day, and this ratio likely increases if one works in a city one can't afford to live in (working in NYC, living in Jersey). Use public transport during the week, drive to your vacation paradise in your gas-electric hybrid on the weekend...
Public transport, when properly executed, doesn't just cut on gas usage, but also smog, noise and traffic. It puts less strain on a city's infrastructure (bridges, tunnels, parking ramps, &cet.) And it also encourages slightly more walking, which is vastly better for the population for other reasons.
Your point about Amtrak is well-taken, but I don't see it as particularly relevant. Do most roads pay for their own maintenance? Isn't that what part of a state's gas tax goes towards? Aren't there Federal highway subsidies? Toll roads may mitigate the cost of upkeep, but I hardly think they are self-sustaining. Why should public transport networks be less worthy of tax dollars? Why a different standard, especially given the health and environmental bonus?
For examples, New York has an adequate public transport network, and Washington D.C.'s is absolutely first-rate. So, it can be done, at least on an intra-city level. Most of America's public transport problems come from attitude, not because the concept is inherently unworkable.
Cheers,
The Mouser
Not a bad way to do this calculation, if you don't have access to calculus and the like. Unfortunately, your answer is wrong, because the radius of the Earth is a touch under 7000 kilometers, not 13000 as you claim.
An easier way to do this would be to remember that the centripetal force required to keep an object with mass m moving in a circular orbit of radius r and speed v is just m*v^2/r. Equate that to the force of gravity at sea level and you have that:
v^2 = g*r
Just think of gravity as being the "string" that keeps the satellite in its circular path. At sea level, this works out to 8.3 km/sec or thereabouts. Incidentally, it can be shown that the minimum escape velocity is just this number multiplied by the square root of two.
Cheers,
Mouser
Well, that's true for parts of northern Africa, but sub-Saharan Africa contains some of the most arable land on the planet, and that situation is unlikely to change anytime soon. Effective use of this land is the real problem, and is hardly the desert's fault
I suppose I should have added eliminating contagious diseases as well. I'm not some left-wing fruitcake; these are all problems we have the power to solve, but the money is being wasted on things like crop subsidies and space travel.
It would be naive indeed to think that eliminating infectious disease is something we can completely conquer at the present time. This is not simply a matter of throwing sufficient money at the NIH, and then getting out a cure for every strain of influenza, dengue fever, West Nile, hantavirus, HIV, and every other godforsaken pest that troubles us today. Funding is obviously important, but it can hardly be argued that this is the principal obstacle to progress here. I also think that it's interesting that you mention eliminating crop subsidies and space travel, but neglect much larger burdens such as our incredible defense budget, which is presently about twenty-five times larger than the entire NASA budget (which includes not just space exploration, but an enormous amount of life sciences and astronomical research).
So here's a solution I think we can both agree on: cut our military expenditures by about ten percent or so, and split the money down the middle, half for NASA, half for the NIH. I'll get more real space exploration, you'll get more diseases licked, and we'll build a few less cruise missiles this year. Sound good? Now if only one of us can get elected...:-)
Invading small countries doesn't bug me one bit, as long as it's not to install US-friendly dictators again.
Not even a little bit? As long as it's somebody else fighting?
Cheers,
Mouser
Maybe a quick review of your old physics text book would be in order ;)
:-) I was specifically referring to the burns that take place in October, December, March and April, that have a noticeable time-to-rise that is easily visible on the chart. Whether this is due to a slow, elongated burn, or multiple short bursts that can't be clearly made out at the plot's resolution, I can't say. Perhaps I should have been clearer and said that I didn't realise the series of burns took so long to commence.
Hardly, but many thanks for the patronisation.
An object in motion tends to remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force
Yes, but the orbit-averaged height doesn't bloody well increase unless acted upon by an external force, now does it? Turn off the engine, and your orbit is fixed (sans atmospheric intereference).
Cheers,
Mouser
Well, of course. I don't mean to suggest that they gave the mission profile a green light, and then forgot about it. The anticipated trajectory will be tracked until the launch, presumably, and if a satellite should approach the exit corridor too closely, I'm sure they'll make the phone call. But they need to register a flight plan with a US agency so that this can be done.
Many thanks for the ISS orbital height plot. It is interesting to see the dramatic changes during boost, though even these seem to develop over a couple of days (I didn't realise the burns lasted that long).
Cheers,
Mouser
Consider that there are literally thousands of satellites presently in low-earth orbit, some functional, some merely centimeter-sized pieces of debris. Much of this is being tracked by US Air Defense, and orbital elements for spy sats are not generally made public, for obvious reasons.
So, it is likely that these folks submitted a mission plan and trajectory to the US, which then returned it to them and said "that should work fine, have fun". They were not "getting permission to leave the planet", they were getting a go-ahead to help keep their moon shuttle from an accidental collision with either an unregistered spysat or the odd bit of space junk as they pass through LEO. This has been common practice for many years now.
Cheers,
Mouser
Not that I mind, though. The growing sexual tension between T'Pal and the Archer is kind of interesting, though often overdone. The actress actually has a wonderfully sensual voice, which goes a long way towards making this tension work without seeming ridiculous (like most Trek portrayals of sexual innuendo). And, she has the "quizzical raised eyebrow" thing down pat :-).
Cheers,
Michael
Perl has none of that.
Perl is fine for weeding through a lot of data that has been generated using automated D/A systems, but that is text processing which Perl is very strong at.
But for computationally intensive tasks, Perl is just wrong.
This may be changing soon. Check out the Perl Data Language, which is designed to allow rapid calculations on large matrices using Perl syntax (and, of course, allowing use of Perl's text manipulation facilities directly). I don't imagine it's as fast as Fortran, most especially if you're using HPF or the like, but it's fast enough for a large array of applications. I'm an astronomer and use it fairly regularly for image analysis, statistical and visualisation tasks. Not yet as mature as IDL, but that seems to be where it's headed.
Cheers,
Michael
Hey Genius, we're talking about minors here, doing illegal things. It's one thing if you want to try and make a point about the futility of the war on drugs among adults, and the government's assault on civil liberties by trying to regulate activites exclusive to one or more consenting grown ups, but geez, kid, get your head out of your ass and use some common sense. We're talking about kids here. I know in your little fantasy world it's the 10-year-olds who are hacking out the planet-saving patches keeping this fragile society together, while the Ph.d educated engineers at Microsoft scratch their heads in awe
I think the original posters' point is that children should be allowed to mistakes. Even dangerous ones, on occasion. A sterile, overprotective environment is anathema to a child's intellectual development. Indeed, this is observed in all primates, not just humans. The idea, I think, is to equip the child as best you can; to instill judgement and sense into their inchoate minds. Yes, punish them when they screw up. Yes, instill a healthy (not iron-fisted) discipline so they can grow up respecting themselves, and make intelligent choices. And, yes, sadly, you have to let them fall down once in a while. The risk you take in doing so is an investment in the child's psyche. Growing up is dangerous---it has to be, I think.
But where did you pull that 10-year-old hacker thing from, anyway? That was quite the non sequitur...
And, to borrow a phrase from my father, as long as you're living under my roof, eating my food, and using my phone, you're going to follow MY RULES
Well, that's fine. However, if you've done a proper job, one day your child will ask you where those rules come from, and their justification. You owe it to them to have a thought-out answer.
Cheers,
Michael
Ahhh very informative.. if you don't mind me probing a little deeper.. what exactly is it that causes these two values to be the same? is it a gravitational thing? The rotation and revolution of celestial bodies always seem to be unrelated.
The phenomenon arises from the gravitational tidal forces that the Moon and the Earth exert on each other. On Earth, the tidal forces from the Moon (and Sun) give us our ocean tides (hence the name). The energy dissipated is slowing the rotation of both the Earth and the Moon; the effect on the Moon being more pronounced due to its lower moment of inertia. There is the lunar libation, which allows us to see slightly more than half of the Moon (as a wobbling motion), but that's all we can see from here. But of course, it's not "dark", and gets just as much sunlight as the face we see (when we have a New Moon).
The Earth-Moon system isn't the only place this is seen, by the way. Some of the companion moons of the outer Gas Giant planets are tide-locked, and the effect is also seen (or at least inferred) in some closely-orbiting binary star systems.
Cheers,
Michael
Sheesh, perhaps because Linux is useless for classrooms, and the schools don't want it?
Why so? Just about every software function available under Windows is also available under Linux. Web browsers, office suites, mathematics programs like Octave and PDL, photo and image creation/manipulation. Really, what's missing? Even knowledge of the command line is not strictly necessary, with a properly configured GUI (and presumably the Red Hat ladz will do a proper job with this, given its visibility). And even if they had to learn a bit of the command line; well, it is a school after all, so an argument that choosing Windows because it's more familiar or "easier" is perhaps a bit specious---it may be the wrong choice for precisely those reasons.
Screw what the schools actually want, we'll just force Linux down their throat and make them like it, right?
I think you're badly misrepresenting what is going on here. The schools in question have few or no computers now. They are in poor districts, and would welcome any influx of computer resources, and literally cannot afford to be OS-bigots as you can. If Red Hat's offer (whatever its real intent) will allow them to field several times more computers than they could if obliged to use Microsoft's "donations", that seems like a very good solution indeed. And given that the source code is accessible, it might even make the perfect learning tool for some poor, bright children who are looking for a challenge. There's a much greater capacity for tinkering with an OS like Linux or *BSD. The tools are there, the code is there, waiting to be discovered by some clever, slightly bored kid. I just don't see Windows offering that same spark (are they planning on including development tools in this package?)
Regards,
Michael