Measurement inaccuracies in the observations of its current trajectory. It's not like we can hold a tape measure up to it and figure out its precise position, or put it on a scale to check its mass.
The more it moves, however, the higher the precision of the measurements can be. So as time progresses, the astronomers will be able to reduce the circle of uncertainty.
C'mon, people, it's our duty as annoying geeks to raise paranoia amongst our friends and family.
Tell them that if the asteroid just barely misses Mars that its gravitational pull could actually slingshot the rock straight towards earth! You just don't have to tell them what the chances of that are (astronomical would be an accurate value.)
Lets see how many people who failed math we can get to go hide in caves till it passes.:-)
Identify domain squatters. Should be easy, they're the ones holding the domains.
Become a "taste tester." Use the squatters' DNS servers to taste thousands of random names daily, both directly and via unethical ISPs or search engines.
Exchange your list of random names with other taste testers.
Attempt to access all the random names from everyone's lists, at least daily for the next 91 days.
Once the domain squatters identify the taste testers, the squatters will be forced to exclude the taste testers from their automated harvesting, or will be spending millions of dollars registering utter crap.
The taste tester network could offer "safe testing services" for legitimate searchers.
This could all be automated in a series of fairly simple scripts. What would be needed would be the widespread distribution and coordination of the random lists.
The nice thing about the scheme is that squatters could be aware of and even secretly participate in it and it would still work. They'd have no better chance of identifying legitimate queries from random queries. And they can't exactly poison random data.
This sounds like a lesson in the "bullying style" of authority. "I am the teacher, you shall do my bidding unquestioningly or face my punishment" is a lesson where it doesn't matter if it's over browsers, flavor of soda, or color of socks.
Not that I don't universally find that sort of "authority figure" to be an abominable example of humanity. There are much better ways to teach, and many better lessons to learn. But sometimes a butt-head teacher will think he's doing the student a favor by "teaching" the lesson of not questioning authority. (They are always wrong.)
2GB / 5MB == About 1/400th of your phone's memory would fit in that drive.
Oh, you mean how many physical cards could you fit in that space?:-)
Well, according to IBM, "Assembled with covers, the 350 was 60 inches long, 68 inches high and 29 inches deep." Pausing to convert to metric, that's 1524mm x 1727mm x 737mm, for a total volume of 1,939,745,676 mm^3. A MicroSD card is 11 x 15 x 1mm (LWD), or 165 mm^3. So you could fit 11,756,034 cards in the space occupied by that cabinet, and they would hold 25,245,890,780,332,032 bytes (22 petabytes.)
Since you're spending all the money, though, why not go for SanDisk's 8GB MicroSD, which would yield almost a hundred petabytes? That's a storage density 11 orders of magnitude higher than the original, in only 50 years.
As long as we're going along with the '80s "edu-movie" theme, I always liked Real Genius. Iced stairwells, auditorium beach parties, disassembled-and-reassembled-in-the-dorm-room vehicles (oh, wait, I already did that one) and Big Fscking Lasers.
Yes, I'm at 45 degrees north latitude. My home weather station reports that on the brightest day this year, it saw 1358 W/m^2. Of course now as we approach the winter solstice it saw a max of 380 W/m^2 today (even though it's bright and sunny) just two hours ago, and now it's already down to 260 W/m^2. The efficiency of the panels becomes less important than the non-existence of the sunlight!:-)
Almost. Efficiency is directly related to initial cost. If I decide to install 1kWh worth of solar panels, and they're only 1% efficient that'd be 100 square meters I'd have to pay for and install. (I don't think my entire roof is that big, including the north face!) Even if the panels were free, the electricity would need to generate for the rest of my life just to recover the installation cost. But give me a 50% efficient panel, and I only need to hang 2 square meters worth. Now we're talking about installation costs closer to a few hundred dollars (plus the cost of the panels,) and a payback period of maybe only a few years.
What you're saying is that (solar costs < grid prices) ==> profit. I'm only saying there's a minimum efficiency required to achieve that, and it's going to be substantially higher than 1%.
There are other ways to increase energy input to offset converter inefficiency. Mounting the panels on motor-driven mounts that track the sun will keep the panels at their optimum output. Mirrors that track the sun (a la "The Man With the Golden Gun") are another way, but they'll require many complex mountings (not to mention a Persian cat.:-) Non-moving mirror arrangements, such as parabolic sections, require more space. But all those complexities come at a price, and coal-fired electricity is still cheap enough that it's not worth it yet.
Sure, your explanation is plausible, but not nearly as entertaining.:-) But I still claim that dog was clever. It knew how to open refrigerator doors with his nose, and after my friend installed a hook-and-eye latch on their refrigerator door, the dog learned how to unhook the latch with his nose, and then open the door.
And dogs can learn how to "predict" future events. I had a dog that learned to predict trajectories.
I used to throw a soft playground ball onto our sloped garage roof, and let it roll back down for the dog to fetch. The dog was too close to the garage to see the ball on the roof. If I threw it at an angle (not perpendicular to the face of the garage), the dog learned to anticipate where the ball would land, and would go wait for it at that spot. I'm not sure what cues she was using to base her estimate on, but she was good at finding just the right spot to wait for it. I liked to claim she could do calculus.
But sending laptops into these places may give people communication skills they were lacking before. Oppressive governments are not above using hunger as a weapon, as hungry people are too busy trying to feed themselves to be a threat. But access to the web is going to show these people that opposition can make a difference. And hungry people who can orchestrate their actions with each other can produce an organized opposition. And an opposition with internet access can get word of oppression and injustice to the rest of the planet instantaneously, hopefully attracting international attention and possibly bringing help.
Any oppressive government has a lot of reasons to fear the OLPC project. They'd be far better off to start distributing food now, and claim there's no reason to hand out laptops as they're doing just fine. Even that would be a great result of the OLPC project.
My friend's dog outsmarted his mother. She was making a sandwich in the kitchen, and the dog wanted the sandwich in the worst way. He finally ran to the out-of-sight front door, barking like there was someone approaching. When she went to investigate, the dog circled back into the kitchen from the other way and stole the sandwich from the countertop.
So there's a dog who demonstrated an understanding of strategy, tactics, and deception. He lured her away from the food under false pretenses. He knew the back route into the kitchen was unguarded. Most importantly, he put a multi-step plan together in his little canine brain before executing it.
Humans don't have a monopoly on thought. We just have all the components of intelligence wrapped up in a meat package that can orchestrate them. If that dog had had opposable thumbs, there's no telling where it would have stopped!
It was really a toy implementation that tried to interpret dog barks as being one of six emotions: happy, sad, frustrated, on-guard, assertive and needy. And most dog owners can already identify them from the barks of their own dogs. For example, I can tell when my dogs think there's someone at the door, or if they want to play, or if they're mad at each other. (They also sometimes greet me at the door by howling "Hello!" when I get home, but I had to teach them that.)
I think before we get to recognizing the dog's voices, we've got a long way to go on voice recognition technology for humans. Today's implementations seem to fall into one of two categories: either end-user-training is required, or they have a very limited vocabulary specific to their problem's domain, such as digit entry, yes, no, and cancel. Even so, the no-training-required systems still have a hard time with accents, speed, and handicaps, and most voice-based IVRs still allow the users to fall back to DTMF entry from their number pads. "I can wreck a nice peach" is still far too common a result from this technology.
Given the entire existence of the "sub-prime" mortgage market, I'd say that the screwings were always intended to go the other way, and hard. The people who signed up for those loans were handed a gold-plated pack of bullshit and were deliberately taken advantage of as a part of a long-term plan.
These rapacious lenders have been telling risky homebuyers that they'll get a 5% ARM, and there's this 'balloon' in a few years tied to this 3% rate, and the Fed historically hasn't raised it... blah blah blah... 15 minutes of econ-technobabble... blah blah... get you in a new home for $800 a month today! Stupefied victim: "$800? I can afford that! Yay, new home!" Lender: [under his breath] Yay, another stupid sucker! He'll never make it, so I figure I can foreclose on his place in about 5 years; after appreciation I should have a nice $500,000 property to sell!
The people who are currently busy trying not to default on their about-to-inflate loans should never have been extended credit in the first place. Sorry, but if you have no assets and only make $8.00 an hour at a McJob, a $300,000 home is simply out of your reach; even if your house appreciates to $500,000 over the next five years, you'll never be able to afford the new payments. Anyone who told you different was intentionally misleading you.
The only bright light I've seen in this mess is the list of the people opposed to Bush's plan to freeze rates on the upcoming balloons. They're the investors who recently sold short in the sub-prime holdings. If the sub-prime market doesn't collapse completely, they'll be forced to pay up on these short sales, and their money will actually go to help these poor people!:-)
I have no love for the business practices of any of the predators involved in creating or prolonging the current mess. They're destroying the American economy, ruining families and neighborhoods; and the evidence suggests they did it with malice aforethought. There's a special hell reserved for vultures like these, and they deserve to lose every penny they invested.
For every great thing you can name about the code, I can name another mode that does it better.
Only because you brought it up, I will point out that packet transmitters will likely not survive an EMP. Digital transmitters, receivers, and decoders will be useless from that moment forward. Even transistor-based analog radios will be destroyed. The induced current will cause semiconductors to fry themselves out in everything from mainframes to iPods, and cars to refrigerators, regardless of their power state at the time of the blast. But vacuum tube radios will continue to work, and I am unaware of any valve-based PSK decoders.
And that's the kind of old-school reliability that old-school hams hang on to Morse for. Ask any 55-year-old if they remember classroom drills taking shelter under their desks from the fallout in case the Russkies "drop the big one". Terrorists with their wimpy box cutters are nothing but punks compared to the threat of armies of commies sending us real atom bombs. Whether or not you or I still consider nuclear war to be an actual threat isn't relevant. The lessons associated with that kind of fear stay with you forever.
But that's not what the hobby is about.
I totally agree. The spirit of hams is in the "can-do" attitude, and most of the hams I know savor their ability to communicate three different ways in otherwise impossible conditions.
Actually, it does! People who are expert at Morse code develop a distinctive keying rhythm or style, which an experienced receiver can identify. Hams refer to this as recognizing their "fist."
For a fairly well documented account, check out some of the histories of code breaking that was going on in WWII. The Allied radio operators who were intercepting German messages were able to recognize many individual German radio officers just by the pattern of their dits and dahs. This was especially helpful in identifying which ship was transmitting, as the same operators continued to work from the same boats. It also was reportedly used to recognize when a spy had been captured. The spy was forced to reveal their transmission frequencies, times, and code words, and the Germans kept up a phony conversation, trying to feed the Allies misinformation. But if anyone but the spy sent the message, the Allied radio operator might recognize the difference in the fist.
While I agree with you (mostly) that ham shouldn't just be about the Morse code, Morse has a huge advantage in reception -- a weak signal may be useless for voice, but tones can still be recognized.
Also, disasters strike in many different ways. It's conceivable that there might be an occasion where the only viable communications medium you have is boolean (a carrier wave with no microphone or modulator circuit, or hammers and pipes in a cave-in, or whatever.) If that's the case, it's Morse or nothing.
Ham radio operators pride themselves on being able to communicate when absolutely nothing else works, and the world is crashing down (or blowing up) around them. Morse is another tool in the toolbox.
Well, I am glad that they've improved the electrolytes. I knew they used to be extremely flammable, but it makes sense that researchers have been improving safety over time.
But I believe that they can still rupture if the power limiting circuitry is damaged (certainly not a likely scenario), and even if the electrolyte is less flammable, I'm reasonably sure it's not inert. Not that I'm particularly concerned. My three most recent phones and my last two Palm devices have used Li-ion batteries, and I've worn them constantly for many years.
One did cause me to freak out in the car a couple months ago. I had the phone on the car charger sitting in the central armrest, and I suddenly heard a tiny high-pitched, high-pressure gas-escaping-whistle coming from under my elbow! Since I was driving fast in the middle lane of a very busy freeway, I panicked and had my wife quickly check the phone to see if it was extremely hot or venting. I was going to have her throw it out the window. It took a few seconds to figure out that it was just her bottle of soda in the cupholder with the cap partially loosened.:-/ Oh, well, at least it didn't cost me a new phone.
All lithium-ion batteries are highly flammable, not just these. It's just that Shentech batteries are apparently more prone to spontaneous ignition than others.
They released a lot more than some data: they published the algorithm. Anyone is free to write their own implementation of it. And anyone who is participating in the Netflix prize already has a copy of the database.
However, I do agree with you that they went about it in a responsible manner. They revealed it. Without their insight, we might have continued living in ignorance that some "unknown adversary" (external to Netflix) is already correlating our movie rental habits, or our book-buying habits on Amazon, or our posts on Slashdot... hey, wait a minute!
That was the reference flying right over your head, just above hairline level.
A few weeks ago,/. had a front-page story called Cell Phone Jamming on the Rise, talking about how establishments are jamming cell phone frequencies so their customers can have an evening in peace without some idiot yapping away on his cell phone. The sarcasm above was a parody of many of the comments.
Slashdot Mirror
The more it moves, however, the higher the precision of the measurements can be. So as time progresses, the astronomers will be able to reduce the circle of uncertainty.
Tell them that if the asteroid just barely misses Mars that its gravitational pull could actually slingshot the rock straight towards earth! You just don't have to tell them what the chances of that are (astronomical would be an accurate value.)
Lets see how many people who failed math we can get to go hide in caves till it passes. :-)
These are the steps that should be taken:
- Identify domain squatters. Should be easy, they're the ones holding the domains.
- Become a "taste tester." Use the squatters' DNS servers to taste thousands of random names daily, both directly and via unethical ISPs or search engines.
- Exchange your list of random names with other taste testers.
- Attempt to access all the random names from everyone's lists, at least daily for the next 91 days.
- Once the domain squatters identify the taste testers, the squatters will be forced to exclude the taste testers from their automated harvesting, or will be spending millions of dollars registering utter crap.
- The taste tester network could offer "safe testing services" for legitimate searchers.
This could all be automated in a series of fairly simple scripts. What would be needed would be the widespread distribution and coordination of the random lists.The nice thing about the scheme is that squatters could be aware of and even secretly participate in it and it would still work. They'd have no better chance of identifying legitimate queries from random queries. And they can't exactly poison random data.
You're not the only one to notice the trend. xkcd made me laugh with this one a few weeks ago.
Not that I don't universally find that sort of "authority figure" to be an abominable example of humanity. There are much better ways to teach, and many better lessons to learn. But sometimes a butt-head teacher will think he's doing the student a favor by "teaching" the lesson of not questioning authority. (They are always wrong.)
Oh, you mean how many physical cards could you fit in that space? :-)
Well, according to IBM, "Assembled with covers, the 350 was 60 inches long, 68 inches high and 29 inches deep." Pausing to convert to metric, that's 1524mm x 1727mm x 737mm, for a total volume of 1,939,745,676 mm^3. A MicroSD card is 11 x 15 x 1mm (LWD), or 165 mm^3. So you could fit 11,756,034 cards in the space occupied by that cabinet, and they would hold 25,245,890,780,332,032 bytes (22 petabytes.)
Since you're spending all the money, though, why not go for SanDisk's 8GB MicroSD, which would yield almost a hundred petabytes? That's a storage density 11 orders of magnitude higher than the original, in only 50 years.
Moore's Law, you rock!
And popcorn. LOTS of popcorn!
Yes, I'm at 45 degrees north latitude. My home weather station reports that on the brightest day this year, it saw 1358 W/m^2. Of course now as we approach the winter solstice it saw a max of 380 W/m^2 today (even though it's bright and sunny) just two hours ago, and now it's already down to 260 W/m^2. The efficiency of the panels becomes less important than the non-existence of the sunlight! :-)
What you're saying is that (solar costs < grid prices) ==> profit. I'm only saying there's a minimum efficiency required to achieve that, and it's going to be substantially higher than 1%.
There are other ways to increase energy input to offset converter inefficiency. Mounting the panels on motor-driven mounts that track the sun will keep the panels at their optimum output. Mirrors that track the sun (a la "The Man With the Golden Gun") are another way, but they'll require many complex mountings (not to mention a Persian cat. :-) Non-moving mirror arrangements, such as parabolic sections, require more space. But all those complexities come at a price, and coal-fired electricity is still cheap enough that it's not worth it yet.
And dogs can learn how to "predict" future events. I had a dog that learned to predict trajectories.
I used to throw a soft playground ball onto our sloped garage roof, and let it roll back down for the dog to fetch. The dog was too close to the garage to see the ball on the roof. If I threw it at an angle (not perpendicular to the face of the garage), the dog learned to anticipate where the ball would land, and would go wait for it at that spot. I'm not sure what cues she was using to base her estimate on, but she was good at finding just the right spot to wait for it. I liked to claim she could do calculus.
Any oppressive government has a lot of reasons to fear the OLPC project. They'd be far better off to start distributing food now, and claim there's no reason to hand out laptops as they're doing just fine. Even that would be a great result of the OLPC project.
So there's a dog who demonstrated an understanding of strategy, tactics, and deception. He lured her away from the food under false pretenses. He knew the back route into the kitchen was unguarded. Most importantly, he put a multi-step plan together in his little canine brain before executing it.
Humans don't have a monopoly on thought. We just have all the components of intelligence wrapped up in a meat package that can orchestrate them. If that dog had had opposable thumbs, there's no telling where it would have stopped!
Good boy. Good boy. Don't tase me, boy. Good boy.
It was really a toy implementation that tried to interpret dog barks as being one of six emotions: happy, sad, frustrated, on-guard, assertive and needy. And most dog owners can already identify them from the barks of their own dogs. For example, I can tell when my dogs think there's someone at the door, or if they want to play, or if they're mad at each other. (They also sometimes greet me at the door by howling "Hello!" when I get home, but I had to teach them that.)
I think before we get to recognizing the dog's voices, we've got a long way to go on voice recognition technology for humans. Today's implementations seem to fall into one of two categories: either end-user-training is required, or they have a very limited vocabulary specific to their problem's domain, such as digit entry, yes, no, and cancel. Even so, the no-training-required systems still have a hard time with accents, speed, and handicaps, and most voice-based IVRs still allow the users to fall back to DTMF entry from their number pads. "I can wreck a nice peach" is still far too common a result from this technology.
Given the entire existence of the "sub-prime" mortgage market, I'd say that the screwings were always intended to go the other way, and hard. The people who signed up for those loans were handed a gold-plated pack of bullshit and were deliberately taken advantage of as a part of a long-term plan.
These rapacious lenders have been telling risky homebuyers that they'll get a 5% ARM, and there's this 'balloon' in a few years tied to this 3% rate, and the Fed historically hasn't raised it ... blah blah blah ... 15 minutes of econ-technobabble ... blah blah ... get you in a new home for $800 a month today! Stupefied victim: "$800? I can afford that! Yay, new home!" Lender: [under his breath] Yay, another stupid sucker! He'll never make it, so I figure I can foreclose on his place in about 5 years; after appreciation I should have a nice $500,000 property to sell!
The people who are currently busy trying not to default on their about-to-inflate loans should never have been extended credit in the first place. Sorry, but if you have no assets and only make $8.00 an hour at a McJob, a $300,000 home is simply out of your reach; even if your house appreciates to $500,000 over the next five years, you'll never be able to afford the new payments. Anyone who told you different was intentionally misleading you.
The only bright light I've seen in this mess is the list of the people opposed to Bush's plan to freeze rates on the upcoming balloons. They're the investors who recently sold short in the sub-prime holdings. If the sub-prime market doesn't collapse completely, they'll be forced to pay up on these short sales, and their money will actually go to help these poor people! :-)
I have no love for the business practices of any of the predators involved in creating or prolonging the current mess. They're destroying the American economy, ruining families and neighborhoods; and the evidence suggests they did it with malice aforethought. There's a special hell reserved for vultures like these, and they deserve to lose every penny they invested.
and then they'll eat our medicines for fuel!
Oh, man, those things are everywhere! I sure wish I could get insurance against a robot attack! But where?
Only because you brought it up, I will point out that packet transmitters will likely not survive an EMP. Digital transmitters, receivers, and decoders will be useless from that moment forward. Even transistor-based analog radios will be destroyed. The induced current will cause semiconductors to fry themselves out in everything from mainframes to iPods, and cars to refrigerators, regardless of their power state at the time of the blast. But vacuum tube radios will continue to work, and I am unaware of any valve-based PSK decoders.
And that's the kind of old-school reliability that old-school hams hang on to Morse for. Ask any 55-year-old if they remember classroom drills taking shelter under their desks from the fallout in case the Russkies "drop the big one". Terrorists with their wimpy box cutters are nothing but punks compared to the threat of armies of commies sending us real atom bombs. Whether or not you or I still consider nuclear war to be an actual threat isn't relevant. The lessons associated with that kind of fear stay with you forever.
I totally agree. The spirit of hams is in the "can-do" attitude, and most of the hams I know savor their ability to communicate three different ways in otherwise impossible conditions.
For a fairly well documented account, check out some of the histories of code breaking that was going on in WWII. The Allied radio operators who were intercepting German messages were able to recognize many individual German radio officers just by the pattern of their dits and dahs. This was especially helpful in identifying which ship was transmitting, as the same operators continued to work from the same boats. It also was reportedly used to recognize when a spy had been captured. The spy was forced to reveal their transmission frequencies, times, and code words, and the Germans kept up a phony conversation, trying to feed the Allies misinformation. But if anyone but the spy sent the message, the Allied radio operator might recognize the difference in the fist.
Also, disasters strike in many different ways. It's conceivable that there might be an occasion where the only viable communications medium you have is boolean (a carrier wave with no microphone or modulator circuit, or hammers and pipes in a cave-in, or whatever.) If that's the case, it's Morse or nothing.
Ham radio operators pride themselves on being able to communicate when absolutely nothing else works, and the world is crashing down (or blowing up) around them. Morse is another tool in the toolbox.
But I believe that they can still rupture if the power limiting circuitry is damaged (certainly not a likely scenario), and even if the electrolyte is less flammable, I'm reasonably sure it's not inert. Not that I'm particularly concerned. My three most recent phones and my last two Palm devices have used Li-ion batteries, and I've worn them constantly for many years.
One did cause me to freak out in the car a couple months ago. I had the phone on the car charger sitting in the central armrest, and I suddenly heard a tiny high-pitched, high-pressure gas-escaping-whistle coming from under my elbow! Since I was driving fast in the middle lane of a very busy freeway, I panicked and had my wife quickly check the phone to see if it was extremely hot or venting. I was going to have her throw it out the window. It took a few seconds to figure out that it was just her bottle of soda in the cupholder with the cap partially loosened. :-/ Oh, well, at least it didn't cost me a new phone.
All lithium-ion batteries are highly flammable, not just these. It's just that Shentech batteries are apparently more prone to spontaneous ignition than others.
They released a lot more than some data: they published the algorithm. Anyone is free to write their own implementation of it. And anyone who is participating in the Netflix prize already has a copy of the database.
However, I do agree with you that they went about it in a responsible manner. They revealed it. Without their insight, we might have continued living in ignorance that some "unknown adversary" (external to Netflix) is already correlating our movie rental habits, or our book-buying habits on Amazon, or our posts on Slashdot ... hey, wait a minute!
That was the reference flying right over your head, just above hairline level.
A few weeks ago, /. had a front-page story called Cell Phone Jamming on the Rise, talking about how establishments are jamming cell phone frequencies so their customers can have an evening in peace without some idiot yapping away on his cell phone. The sarcasm above was a parody of many of the comments.
Hmm. All of the MPAA tools I can think of ran on liquor and steak (Jack Valenti)