The Iranian version would probably be PC LOAD A4
(only the USA and Canada use "Letter")
Canada uses that weird paper size? Why? I mean, unless they can get tons of cheap 8.5x11(units of 1/25.4mm) paper. But is it worth the hassle to use obsolete parochial equipment in the modern world?
Now I'm completely lost. How would YOU not know what song YOU are playing?
Er, how about if you're trying to listen to something other than music?
If there is song tag info, wouldn't your player display that for you?
Why would a song have any tag other than "song", to discriminate it from items that have tags "interesting", "worth paying attention to", etc. (BTW - by "player", do you mean one of those things for playing audiobooks on.)
Speaking as a Martian, I had actually heard of Last.fm ; I hadn't actually bothered to visit it's website, due to suspecting it being a music site. So, just to find out, I visited. Yes, it does seem to be a site that considers "radio" to be synonymous with "music", which of course is totally untrue.
Anyway - a good piece of advertising. It's successfully ensured that I'll not waste more electrons on it, or increase their bandwidth bills further without the intention of participating in their advertising.
Oh - hang on - I just thought of a use for it : their advertising is likely to be dominated by people trying to sell music. So I'll use their site to populate my AdBlock filters.
We were doing this sort of thing when I worked for Raytheon in the late 90s, using overlapping satellite imagery
I was taught to do this sort of thing in the mid-1980s, using aerial photography (this was before there was significant publicly available satellite imagery of any sort). The university lecturer who was teaching us had been taught himself in the late 1940s or early 1950s on his National Service (that's compulsory military service) as a part of photo-interpretation for surveillance and/ or bomb-damage assessment. He never used the skills for those jobs, but developed them for doing photographic interpretation of geology, which is how he ended up decades later as a tenured university lecturer without a degree.
(Some people seem to think that a degree is essential for getting a job in academia ; while it evidently helps, having a degree is neither necessary nor sufficient for demonstrating intelligence or useful skills. Anyone want to buy an MBA?)
The subject article - I'll read when I have time - but the claimant is likely to be on thin ice if he's looking for patents.
The UK police cars have a system that automatically checks every number plate in view, and flags up cars that have been reported as stolen, or without insurance, or belonging to a wanted criminal etc. It seems effective, and AIUI they don't keep the data of the innocent vehicles.
To continue the discussion on why there is no such thing as an "innocent vehicle"...
From this morning's news:
Inquiry after nurse found in bootThe nurse, [...] , had last been seen finishing a shift on 15 December at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.
Police believe her car had been driven in Airdrie and Glasgow in recent days.
A spokesman for Lothian and Borders Police said:
"we want to hear from anyone who has seen the red-coloured Vauxhall Astra, registration Y295 SRS, being driven in the central belt since Magdeline was last seen on December 15."
Officers believe the vehicle has been driven in the Chapelhall area of Airdrie and in Glasgow city centre since she went missing.
That, to me, has the fingerprints of the ANPR database spitting out the answers when probed several days after the event. It also suggests that the ANPR database is keeping lists of car numbers, the time of seeing the numbers, and (perhaps separately) a GPS-location-vs-time trace of the system's carrier vehicle. Put the two together and you get "the vehicle was seen in the vicinity of..." . If the records had come from "red light" cameras or speed cameras, then I'd expect the police to have a more precise location and probably a direction of travel.
Of course, it's perfectly possible that the police are restricting the information that they're releasing to allow suspects to display "guilty knowledge" when being interviewed. That's largely because the UK police are not allowed to lie to suspects under interview (I know, shocking, isn't it?) and not having an interview recorded is grounds for dismissal of that evidence, if not of the case. (I mention these shocking differences to common practice in other countries just to remind people not to assume that their mores apply here.)
[No, I don't have a particular interest in ANPR ; like I said earlier, I don't have a car, so it's irrelevant. But it is an interesting technology, with all sorts of wriggles in it's implementation, which makes it much more of a curates egg. Now, I wonder what the Police's response would be to me walking around town flashing a set of made-up number plate signs at their assorted cameras? It would probably involve lengths of rubber hose in a dark room.]
Imagine if you use a off the shelf monitor for a multi-million dollar imaging machine, and it failed to display a small cancerous anomaly correctly...
Imagine indeed... how much easier it is to point the finger of blame at an inanimate lump of machinery, instead of the training of the person who only used one view in one image of the suspect lesion.
I just drill holes in the ground for a living ; if I made a diagnosis (one way or another) on the basis of a single image viewed from a single perspective a single time... well I'd deserve the sack.
Man, why don't they just give y'all subdermal GPS beacons and be done with it?
Probably because the penetrating power of the signal is so low that it only works with any reliability when you're out of doors.
Replying to myself, because the wife was hurrying me out to shop when I posted that reply :
Caveat - that's what it was like the last time I had a GPS - which was pre-2003. Possibly receivers have got better now, but somehow I suspect that there isn't much room for improvement in hand-helds, because I was seeing the same complaints about ineffectiveness in rainy forests in 2001 (when I brought the toy) as I saw in 1997 when I first considered the idea.
Or maybe more recent members of the constellation have larger solar panels and stronger (more beamed?) signals. Possible, but again there's limited room for manoeuvre because of the low orbit and the non-zero orbital decay.
Having crazy young girls at 14 birthing kids has ramifications for families, for health care providers, for schools.
Just as a sanity check - if Juliet and Romeo had chosen Life not Drugs (of the 'suicidal overdose' variety), got their families permissions, got married in the manner approved of by their Church and State, and she'd fallen pregnant in their first month of fucking... she'd have given birth in the 3rd quarter of her 14th year, allowing a couple of weeks for uncertainty about the exact dates.
There are real problems about honestly using Bill the Shake for teaching English literature in some school environments.
The present-day mores and laws surrounding age of legal consent are just another set of mores, with all the logic one would expect. Biology, in a world brutally well aware of the likelihood of starvation, childbed fever, and the genetic death sentence that dieing childless is, makes it's own opinion on the appropriate age for human females to start breeding, and it makes that opinion abundantly obvious through patent menarche.
FWIW, in some western countries, Juliet would have been behaving within the law, and in others she'd have been exposing herself and Romeo to jail and a life on a register as a sex offender.
A "CAT scan" DID NOT reveal "inner workings of volcano island." A seismic survey did.
Quick check - what does the CAT in "CAT scan" mean? Computer Assisted (or Aided) Tomography
CAT is a series of techniques where sensor imaging taken from a number of different angles are deconvolved to try to work out a parsimonious solution to the internal arrangement of parts that would generate the images actually seen.
So, if the seismic survey(s) in question had been carried out along various different radii from the volcanic centre, or on different tangents (if they used for example a stationary geophone array and cruised a source past it on the other side of the volcano), then the description of the techniques as "Computer Assisted Tomography" would be quite appropriate. Unless, of course, the geophysicists in question had done all their data processing with an abacus. No, wait, an abacus is still a computer.
FWIW, the "CAT" terminology in seismic processing was being accepted by the editors of 'Nature' over a decade ago.
The UK police cars have a system that automatically checks every number plate in view
SOME police cars, and I don't think too many of them.
For starters, it's only going to work where they've got fairly good radio coverage (granted, that covers most of the places where most of the people are most of the time - towns, cities, main roads etc ; but the point is that it needs to query the databases. It doesn't carry even a recent dump of the database around with it.)
PLUS - it's quite a significant chunk of computing (real-time image analysis coupled to evidence-quality video recording), which is going to take significant weight, volume, and power. Someone else up-thread has described it as a "handheld" ; not from what I've seen - it's a laptop-size screen in the passenger-cop's side of the car with who-knows-how-much machinery racked-up in the boot (errr, "trunk" in Amerglish?). You're not going to see that in the hip pocket of your bicycle-riding beat bobby, at least not for a few years yet.
But more significantly:
It seems effective, and AIUI they don't keep the data of the innocent vehicles.
What is this "innocent vehicle" concept of which you speak? Every vehicle which operates on the public highway has a requirement to have paid a Road Fund Tax contribution appropriate to the vehicle AND to display the certificate of having paid that tax. (Note : the certificate is not the tax ; it is simply a low-tech way of providing quite weak evidence that the tax has been paid ; the only real evidence is in the database.) Therefore every vehicle, with it's appropriate unique registration mark and VIN (Vehicle Identification Number) must be in the database. Not being in the database, or being in the database with expired or overdue tax, is an offence. Full stop ; end of discussion. The tax expires every year, so you're never more than 6 months away from being out of compliance. (There may be a caveat for a newly-registered home-build or personally-imported vehicles. But you'd better have your paperwork totally straight.)
Since there is no such thing as an innocent vehicle, there's no problem with retaining the data that vehicle X was seen at location Y at time Z, apart from the practical one of maintaining a quite large database, and then searching it. So, if my memory serves me correctly, a couple of years ago a Humberside man was ANPR'd driving around in his home area one Xmas eve, and duly noted. His vehicle was properly taxed, registered, insured and driven, and he excited no attention. Until about 6 month later when he was in court for having murdered his girlfriend on the day in question, and the ANPR records were used as evidence to discredit his alibi and that he had actually been in the area where her body was found at an appropriate time. (I may have got reporting of 2 cases crossed ; I don't have the best of memories. But it was something like that.)
The ANPR system routinely flags up "this vehicle was ANPR'd 20 minutes ago at a location that is at least 60 minutes drive from here". That's grounds for a tug too. One or other vehicle may be on false plates. Both may be on false plates (of a third vehicle). But there's something funny going on. Funny-peculiar, not funny-haha.
I'm sure that ANPR can be freaked. But since I don't have a car, I've not given the question any serious thought.
(Oh, BTW, before anyone thinks of it - driving with a number plate that is of non-regulation size, lettering and clarity of lettering is also sufficient ground for a tug. As is "insecure load" (internally or externally), too many passengers, or pretty much anything else. Then the officers always have the option of noticeing that one of your brake lights is flickering, suggesting a loose bulb, "oh and while we're here, sir..."
The idea of letting such a machine near me with an (unopened) can of beer fills me with mild but slowly waning interest (unlike my Roomba, which is going to get let loose on the living room as I go out of the door this morning).
The idea of letting such a machine near me with a nice fresh pot of scalding hot tea fills me with an acute and strengthening desire to be somewhere else.
I suspect that naming it "Basil" is a sign that the inventors harbour such misgivings too. Have they tried to sell it to McDonalds yet?
Actually, Marx merely postulated that revolution to overthrow oppression was inevitable, and that a classless society would also be inevitable.
Hey - that's not fair! You're refuting the poster's claim by referring to the works in question, instead of simply making a knee-jerk, utterly uninformed ejaculation. That's debate, not invective! Why can't you bloody intellectuals stick with facts like the poster's assertion that the Iranian people would welcome an American invasion. They're practically certain to welcome such with blow-jobs and home-baked cookies, just like the Vietnamese did in the late 1950s, like the Afghanistanis have since 2001, and like the Iraqis have in succeeding years. If you keep up talking down the successes of American military interventions, then where are you going to be able to get your poor male population killed off?
Very old joke : Why do the Romanian Secret Police go around in 3s? One can read, one can write, and one is there to keep an eye on those two suspicious intellectuals.
Newer joke (3 weeks old, and which got a laugh from a New Orleans area crane operator, who'd been Tasered last time he was at home) : same joke, but it's the American police, they go around in 4s and the 4th officer is there to provide covering fire.
Remember, guys, for doctors, your symptoms are a matter of trial and error. The usual way to treat people is to go through every medication until you find one that helps.
I hope that your doctor, in concert with all the others in your area, chooses to help you with your resolve by denying any and all treatment to you and your dependants.
You want to insult people like that, that's fine ; but remember to live with the consequences.
Me - I hope that your car runs out of petrol this evening and that every tankful of petrol you buy for the rest of your life spontaneously rearranges itself to diesel and hydrogen to the wreck of your engine and the damage of your wallet. It's not quite impossible, just very, very unlikely. And you're obviously the sort of person who likes to bet on the unlikely.
(I pick on your dependants just to make you suffer more, not out of animosity to them. I pick on your car because I've had a bad night trying to drill an oil well which doesn't want to be drilled (I know - anthropomorphism. It's quicker than explaining the rock mechanics.) and just found out that our safety officer is one of those retard creationists! At least the medic is a down-to-earth Aussie. Oh well, one more night to go.)
Ptah!
No religion dare to be compared to the brain-warping reality of Intercal.
though I guess the depth to which ternary numbers are sunk into it might tempt one to start making Catholic jokes about it.
What was that Frank Zappa one about cows tongues? And more to the point, how did he know what a cow's tongue feels like? (You do have to have heard the song.)
Red Panda. Yes, definitely cute - I could live with the idea of one of them as a house pet, as could the wife. Unfortunately, I've also got no delusions ata ll about how destructive they'd be to the house, and a garden run is not on the agenda. Oh well, nice idea.
finally had to be given its own unique family, because no one was quite sure where to put the little bastard. And it's still debatable if it truly deserves its own family.
Define "family" ; what biological characteristic corresponds to the taxonomic division known as a "family"?
[Don't sweat too much - to the best of my knowledge, there isn't a consensus-accepted definition. "Species" has a reasonable working definition of mutual interbreeding to produce fertile offspring, but even that gets wobbly dealing with species that have geographic gradients such as "ring species" ; anything further down the tree of life is pretty much a matter of taxonomist's opinion. Which is where things start to get vocal. It gets a little bit clearer at the level of domains and/ or kingdoms (depending on whether you're a Wosian or not), but not hugely. As for "life" or "non-life"... well as a geologist I'd want to have notice of that question, and a couple of years worth of seminars to try to come up with a first-cut definition that wasn't hopelessly parochial.]
Why can't CEOs and such be satisfied with slow, even growth?
Because if they let things slow down even a little bit, then they might just possibly have time to get infected with the evil (but true) meme that "the world is a finite place ruled by an implacable law that you can't even break even" (second law of thermodynamics, in it's economic clothing) ; when a management type gets infected with that meme, they rapidly (or slowly, depending on native intelligence and mental flexibility) move on to realising that a global economy (and therefore no local economy) can continue to grow indefinitely. Shortly after, the spiral of consequences makes their head explode.
It's great fun to watch, like a game of Lemmings, but with blood and gore all over the place instead of arcing pixels and a pathetic squeak.
Too bad smileys are now trademarked, else you could have used one to indicate it was just humor.
Only some smileys have been trademarked so far, leaving you with a range of permissible emotions to choose from. You could, for example, have indicated that the post was =:+}====_-_- ("shocking and powerful enough to have stunned me for long enough to grow a knee-length beard while giving me a hairstyle the wife would disapprove of"). This emotion is available for use until midnight tonight when my patent application for it lands on the desk of Vanuatu's Patent Office.
(This message contains humour referenceing the silly concept of patenting emotions and methods for depicting the expression of emotions in messages. The latter is called "writing", there are books full of prior art concerning the technique going back as long as... well, books.)
Of course the school hasn't taught this yet. Because to teach anything that would imply the earth is not the center of the universe and more than 8000 years old would be contrary to the teachings of God and must of course be wrong. Welcome to church controlled schooling.
Maybe I was lucky in the schooling I received : the worst teacher for ramming religion down his charges throats (Chemistry, Dr. Blunt, I'm afraid) was totally ineffectual since he was trying to both teach chemistry (in which he had his PhD) and ram religion down people's throats, which just doesn't work. Meanwhile, the teacher whose job it was to ram religion down the throats of the unwilling ("Religious Education" classes, by methodist lay preacher Mr Verity) had to deal with the contradictions of having nominal Christians, a Jew, a JW (whose parents had astonishing faith in their faith and didn't ban him from attending R.E.), several Hindus, a couple of Muslims plus at least one vocal atheist [/self] all in the same class and all espousing what boils down to "I'm right, everyone else is wrong." Even the more clinically retarded of my classmates couldn't help but see that not everyone could be right.
I only just realised the appropriateness of those names, after 30 freaking years! and I swear to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem that I'm not making them up!
I think I've still got Verity's last school report on me somewhere : "Exam result : 98%. Comments : Top of the year! As an atheist, Karley should be ashamed of himself!" I laughed for a week. well, a couple of hours.
Well, let the religious take control of the schools. The worst they can do is bring technological society crashing to it's knees, and I doubt that people's self-interest will allow them to get very far down the road of starvation, power cuts and infectious diseases before some of the more prominent god-nuts get strung up from lamp posts and lit for illumination (pun intended).
I gather that the situation is far worse in the US than it is in the bulk of the world (though sitting here off the coast of Israel, I do wonder how far the canker has spread?), but I believe the US has laws requiring people to use semi-automatic hand guns in protection of their SUV-clad lifestyle, so you know what to do. "Pray to your god to stop the bullet, mutthafukka! Now put your faith in your prayers and your lips round this gun barrel."
How does macrolensing/microlensing end up magnifying an area in space? To my caveman-like mind, it seems like it would act more as an attenuating factor, reducing the signal to fuzz.
The macrolensing and microlensing both work in the same way as standard lensing.
do you remember Huyghens Construction showing how a change in the propagation (phase) velocity of a wave in one region compared to another region can lead to the laws of refraction and reflection of waves? And how this was used as evidence that the nature of light was wave-like? Back in the early 18th century it was, IIRC (before the likes of Young demonstrated that interference effects meant that light must have a wave nature rather than a corpuscular nature, and before Einstein won his Nobel for demonstrating that light must have a corpuscular nature rather than a wave nature, and then quantum happened and the sales of headache pills took off)
You don't remember? Your physics teacher wasted those hours splashing around with the ripple tank. Shame on you, wasting his/ her/ it's/ their efforts like that!
Well, given Huyghen's construction and a bounded, more or less spherical region of reduced phase velocity (by whatever means), then you get lensing. Again, those poor neglected physics teachers did try to impart this to you. It's not relevant what the source of the reduced regional phase velocity for light is - it could be the density of gases (cue : hot-air mirage) ; it could be gravitational fields (Eddington's famous demonstration of Special Relativity at the 1920 solar eclipse, or did you sleep through that physics lesson too?); it could be the diligent activity of maliciously trained Maxwellian Daemon (Hi Marijke, if you're listening) running around grabbing photons by the tail and slowing them down that way. The result is the same : slowing across a geometrically limited region brings waves to a focus. Not necessarily a good focus, but a focus nonetheless.
The optical centre of the lenses is nearer to us than it is to the quasars in question. As a matter of simple Euclidian geometry, this means that the image is magnified. That would probably have been in the physics lectures some weeks before the ones about the nature and behaviour of waves.
Of course, I suppose that it's possible that your school hasn't covered these topics yet ; if not, I'd suggest that you ask your parents for permission to get a science tutor, so that you can get up to speed on the basic knowledge necessary for a 14-year-old to get into senior school.
Sorry, this does sound rather catty, doesn't it. But this is fundamental school stuff, which I and possibly you pay good tax money to have inculcated into kids in time for them to go on to learn more complex stuff, like how to make crystal meth and fusion reactors. It's a while since I had to go back through it - hence checking that it was Huyghens' Construction above instead of Young's. But it shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes for the brain to bring it back from off-line storage.
I don't think that a thrust is necessary, because you may think of the moon too much as a satellite. Think of the earth and moon as a double-planet.
There's no difference between the two cases. In both cases (satellite and planet versus double planet) all the components orbit around their mutual centre of mass. That's one of the things that "centre of mass" means.
In the case of the Earth and Sputnik, the centre of mass of the system is in the order of 10^-18m from the centre of the Earth. In the case of Pluto and Charon, the most "double" double planet in the solar system, the centre of mass is about 2000km from the centre of Pluto or some 800km above the surface of Pluto. In the Earth-Moon case, the Earth's centre is some 2000km form the centre of mass of the system, making the centre of mass of the system still reside some thousands of km below the Earth's surface.
Where you drwa the line is, TTBOMK, a matter of personal choice ; there are no drastic effects when the separation of the two partners gets wide enough for the centre of mass ot move into the space between the two. But it'll always be closer to the heavier of the two. That's one of the things implicit in what a "centre of mass" is.
The pre-earth is rotating around its axis and has a centre of gravity. Now there is the explosion. Newton does its action-reaction thing and hence the new earth and moon move away from the center of gravity. Conservation of momentum requires that everything keeps spinning around the centre of gravity.
The frequency of each particle's orbit about the centre of mass is the same (this doesn't work for more than two particles. So, while each of the two separating particles (no matter what their sizes) will continue with their own amounts of angular momentum around the centre of mass, they'll also remain in phase. So when the smaller comes whipping back towards the larger, the larger will be in the right place to be impacted by the smaller. Unless you introduce a new source of angular momentum to one of the particles.
That's the "thrust" that the GP post referred to. It's as unavoidable as... well something that's more unavoidable than death and taxes combined. It's the law, as in "law of gravity", not as in "law of lawyers". When it comes to angular momentum, there are no free lunches.
2. As if a scammer will sue the CC companies, just get the visa corp to buy their products, install it, wreck havoc on their internal network, then counter sue for 10000x for damage to important US infrastructure.
I thought the standard punishment for that was bag over the head, a short flight out to sea, a long drop, and a few weeks swimming back home. Or was that some other country matching A*a ?
Mind you, for these terr'sts, that might not be such a bad thing.
And hey, if you're going to include a science fiction, why not include a couple biblical/religious predictions? I for one, welcome our 6-winged Seraphim overlords...
I have an appropriate amount of faith that the Flying Spaghetti Monster will shield us with his Noodly Appendages. Though he might drip a bit of sauce on our best shirt, but I think that's an acceptable risk to take.
Why six-wings on a seraphim? Insects know a lot about wingéd flight, and they don't go above 4 wings. Six wings on a seraphim - I foresee feathers getting knocked out of kilter and a rapid fluttering downwards. So, would seraphim be an example of Unintelligent Design, to counter the wonderfully bodged, Intelligent (But HungOver) Design performed by the Noodly Appendage.
Turning? TurNing?!
Woe be to us, for all is certainly lost.
Hold up there for a minute! don't go a-wailing and a-gnashing your teeth just yet - I haven't checked for the rest of the universe in the crack down the back of the sofa... [/self searches]... Nope all is not there, though I've found a joint's worth of hash, 35pence in change, and a lot of belly-button fluff.
But all is not there, so it's OK. Get back to your wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Slashdot Mirror
Move to the civilised world, if you think you'll measure up to the minimal requirements.
Canada uses that weird paper size?
Why?
I mean, unless they can get tons of cheap 8.5x11(units of 1/25.4mm) paper. But is it worth the hassle to use obsolete parochial equipment in the modern world?
Er, how about if you're trying to listen to something other than music?
Why would a song have any tag other than "song", to discriminate it from items that have tags "interesting", "worth paying attention to", etc. (BTW - by "player", do you mean one of those things for playing audiobooks on.)
Speaking as a Martian, I had actually heard of Last.fm ; I hadn't actually bothered to visit it's website, due to suspecting it being a music site. So, just to find out, I visited. Yes, it does seem to be a site that considers "radio" to be synonymous with "music", which of course is totally untrue.
Anyway - a good piece of advertising. It's successfully ensured that I'll not waste more electrons on it, or increase their bandwidth bills further without the intention of participating in their advertising.
Oh - hang on - I just thought of a use for it : their advertising is likely to be dominated by people trying to sell music. So I'll use their site to populate my AdBlock filters.
Something good out of the most useless site.
I was taught to do this sort of thing in the mid-1980s, using aerial photography (this was before there was significant publicly available satellite imagery of any sort). The university lecturer who was teaching us had been taught himself in the late 1940s or early 1950s on his National Service (that's compulsory military service) as a part of photo-interpretation for surveillance and/ or bomb-damage assessment. He never used the skills for those jobs, but developed them for doing photographic interpretation of geology, which is how he ended up decades later as a tenured university lecturer without a degree.
(Some people seem to think that a degree is essential for getting a job in academia ; while it evidently helps, having a degree is neither necessary nor sufficient for demonstrating intelligence or useful skills. Anyone want to buy an MBA?)
The subject article - I'll read when I have time - but the claimant is likely to be on thin ice if he's looking for patents.
To continue the discussion on why there is no such thing as an "innocent vehicle" ...
From this morning's news :
That, to me, has the fingerprints of the ANPR database spitting out the answers when probed several days after the event. It also suggests that the ANPR database is keeping lists of car numbers, the time of seeing the numbers, and (perhaps separately) a GPS-location-vs-time trace of the system's carrier vehicle. Put the two together and you get "the vehicle was seen in the vicinity of ..." . If the records had come from "red light" cameras or speed cameras, then I'd expect the police to have a more precise location and probably a direction of travel.
Of course, it's perfectly possible that the police are restricting the information that they're releasing to allow suspects to display "guilty knowledge" when being interviewed. That's largely because the UK police are not allowed to lie to suspects under interview (I know, shocking, isn't it?) and not having an interview recorded is grounds for dismissal of that evidence, if not of the case. (I mention these shocking differences to common practice in other countries just to remind people not to assume that their mores apply here.)
[No, I don't have a particular interest in ANPR ; like I said earlier, I don't have a car, so it's irrelevant. But it is an interesting technology, with all sorts of wriggles in it's implementation, which makes it much more of a curates egg.
Now, I wonder what the Police's response would be to me walking around town flashing a set of made-up number plate signs at their assorted cameras? It would probably involve lengths of rubber hose in a dark room.]
Imagine indeed ... how much easier it is to point the finger of blame at an inanimate lump of machinery, instead of the training of the person who only used one view in one image of the suspect lesion.
I just drill holes in the ground for a living ; if I made a diagnosis (one way or another) on the basis of a single image viewed from a single perspective a single time ... well I'd deserve the sack.
Replying to myself, because the wife was hurrying me out to shop when I posted that reply :
Caveat - that's what it was like the last time I had a GPS - which was pre-2003. Possibly receivers have got better now, but somehow I suspect that there isn't much room for improvement in hand-helds, because I was seeing the same complaints about ineffectiveness in rainy forests in 2001 (when I brought the toy) as I saw in 1997 when I first considered the idea.
Or maybe more recent members of the constellation have larger solar panels and stronger (more beamed?) signals. Possible, but again there's limited room for manoeuvre because of the low orbit and the non-zero orbital decay.
Just as a sanity check - if Juliet and Romeo had chosen Life not Drugs (of the 'suicidal overdose' variety), got their families permissions, got married in the manner approved of by their Church and State, and she'd fallen pregnant in their first month of fucking ... she'd have given birth in the 3rd quarter of her 14th year, allowing a couple of weeks for uncertainty about the exact dates.
There are real problems about honestly using Bill the Shake for teaching English literature in some school environments.
The present-day mores and laws surrounding age of legal consent are just another set of mores, with all the logic one would expect. Biology, in a world brutally well aware of the likelihood of starvation, childbed fever, and the genetic death sentence that dieing childless is, makes it's own opinion on the appropriate age for human females to start breeding, and it makes that opinion abundantly obvious through patent menarche.
FWIW, in some western countries, Juliet would have been behaving within the law, and in others she'd have been exposing herself and Romeo to jail and a life on a register as a sex offender.
Bog, am I glad that's all someone else's problem.
Probably because the penetrating power of the signal is so low that it only works with any reliability when you're out of doors.
Quick check - what does the CAT in "CAT scan" mean?
Computer
Assisted (or Aided)
Tomography
CAT is a series of techniques where sensor imaging taken from a number of different angles are deconvolved to try to work out a parsimonious solution to the internal arrangement of parts that would generate the images actually seen.
So, if the seismic survey(s) in question had been carried out along various different radii from the volcanic centre, or on different tangents (if they used for example a stationary geophone array and cruised a source past it on the other side of the volcano), then the description of the techniques as "Computer Assisted Tomography" would be quite appropriate. Unless, of course, the geophysicists in question had done all their data processing with an abacus. No, wait, an abacus is still a computer.
FWIW, the "CAT" terminology in seismic processing was being accepted by the editors of 'Nature' over a decade ago.
SOME police cars, and I don't think too many of them.
For starters, it's only going to work where they've got fairly good radio coverage (granted, that covers most of the places where most of the people are most of the time - towns, cities, main roads etc ; but the point is that it needs to query the databases. It doesn't carry even a recent dump of the database around with it.)
PLUS - it's quite a significant chunk of computing (real-time image analysis coupled to evidence-quality video recording), which is going to take significant weight, volume, and power. Someone else up-thread has described it as a "handheld" ; not from what I've seen - it's a laptop-size screen in the passenger-cop's side of the car with who-knows-how-much machinery racked-up in the boot (errr, "trunk" in Amerglish?). You're not going to see that in the hip pocket of your bicycle-riding beat bobby, at least not for a few years yet.
But more significantly :
What is this "innocent vehicle" concept of which you speak? Every vehicle which operates on the public highway has a requirement to have paid a Road Fund Tax contribution appropriate to the vehicle AND to display the certificate of having paid that tax. (Note : the certificate is not the tax ; it is simply a low-tech way of providing quite weak evidence that the tax has been paid ; the only real evidence is in the database.) Therefore every vehicle, with it's appropriate unique registration mark and VIN (Vehicle Identification Number) must be in the database. Not being in the database, or being in the database with expired or overdue tax, is an offence. Full stop ; end of discussion. The tax expires every year, so you're never more than 6 months away from being out of compliance.
(There may be a caveat for a newly-registered home-build or personally-imported vehicles. But you'd better have your paperwork totally straight.)
Since there is no such thing as an innocent vehicle, there's no problem with retaining the data that vehicle X was seen at location Y at time Z, apart from the practical one of maintaining a quite large database, and then searching it. So, if my memory serves me correctly, a couple of years ago a Humberside man was ANPR'd driving around in his home area one Xmas eve, and duly noted. His vehicle was properly taxed, registered, insured and driven, and he excited no attention. Until about 6 month later when he was in court for having murdered his girlfriend on the day in question, and the ANPR records were used as evidence to discredit his alibi and that he had actually been in the area where her body was found at an appropriate time. (I may have got reporting of 2 cases crossed ; I don't have the best of memories. But it was something like that.)
The ANPR system routinely flags up "this vehicle was ANPR'd 20 minutes ago at a location that is at least 60 minutes drive from here". That's grounds for a tug too. One or other vehicle may be on false plates. Both may be on false plates (of a third vehicle). But there's something funny going on. Funny-peculiar, not funny-haha.
I'm sure that ANPR can be freaked. But since I don't have a car, I've not given the question any serious thought.
(Oh, BTW, before anyone thinks of it - driving with a number plate that is of non-regulation size, lettering and clarity of lettering is also sufficient ground for a tug. As is "insecure load" (internally or externally), too many passengers, or pretty much anything else. Then the officers always have the option of noticeing that one of your brake lights is flickering, suggesting a loose bulb, "oh and while we're here, sir ..."
The idea of letting such a machine near me with a nice fresh pot of scalding hot tea fills me with an acute and strengthening desire to be somewhere else.
I suspect that naming it "Basil" is a sign that the inventors harbour such misgivings too. Have they tried to sell it to McDonalds yet?
Hey - that's not fair! You're refuting the poster's claim by referring to the works in question, instead of simply making a knee-jerk, utterly uninformed ejaculation. That's debate, not invective! Why can't you bloody intellectuals stick with facts like the poster's assertion that the Iranian people would welcome an American invasion. They're practically certain to welcome such with blow-jobs and home-baked cookies, just like the Vietnamese did in the late 1950s, like the Afghanistanis have since 2001, and like the Iraqis have in succeeding years. If you keep up talking down the successes of American military interventions, then where are you going to be able to get your poor male population killed off?
Very old joke : Why do the Romanian Secret Police go around in 3s? One can read, one can write, and one is there to keep an eye on those two suspicious intellectuals.
Newer joke (3 weeks old, and which got a laugh from a New Orleans area crane operator, who'd been Tasered last time he was at home) : same joke, but it's the American police, they go around in 4s and the 4th officer is there to provide covering fire.
I hope that your doctor, in concert with all the others in your area, chooses to help you with your resolve by denying any and all treatment to you and your dependants.
You want to insult people like that, that's fine ; but remember to live with the consequences.
Me - I hope that your car runs out of petrol this evening and that every tankful of petrol you buy for the rest of your life spontaneously rearranges itself to diesel and hydrogen to the wreck of your engine and the damage of your wallet. It's not quite impossible, just very, very unlikely. And you're obviously the sort of person who likes to bet on the unlikely.
(I pick on your dependants just to make you suffer more, not out of animosity to them. I pick on your car because I've had a bad night trying to drill an oil well which doesn't want to be drilled (I know - anthropomorphism. It's quicker than explaining the rock mechanics.) and just found out that our safety officer is one of those retard creationists! At least the medic is a down-to-earth Aussie. Oh well, one more night to go.)
Ptah! No religion dare to be compared to the brain-warping reality of Intercal. though I guess the depth to which ternary numbers are sunk into it might tempt one to start making Catholic jokes about it. What was that Frank Zappa one about cows tongues? And more to the point, how did he know what a cow's tongue feels like? (You do have to have heard the song.)
Red Panda. Yes, definitely cute - I could live with the idea of one of them as a house pet, as could the wife. Unfortunately, I've also got no delusions ata ll about how destructive they'd be to the house, and a garden run is not on the agenda. Oh well, nice idea.
Define "family" ; what biological characteristic corresponds to the taxonomic division known as a "family"?
[Don't sweat too much - to the best of my knowledge, there isn't a consensus-accepted definition. "Species" has a reasonable working definition of mutual interbreeding to produce fertile offspring, but even that gets wobbly dealing with species that have geographic gradients such as "ring species" ; anything further down the tree of life is pretty much a matter of taxonomist's opinion. Which is where things start to get vocal. ... well as a geologist I'd want to have notice of that question, and a couple of years worth of seminars to try to come up with a first-cut definition that wasn't hopelessly parochial.]
It gets a little bit clearer at the level of domains and/ or kingdoms (depending on whether you're a Wosian or not), but not hugely.
As for "life" or "non-life"
Because if they let things slow down even a little bit, then they might just possibly have time to get infected with the evil (but true) meme that "the world is a finite place ruled by an implacable law that you can't even break even" (second law of thermodynamics, in it's economic clothing) ; when a management type gets infected with that meme, they rapidly (or slowly, depending on native intelligence and mental flexibility) move on to realising that a global economy (and therefore no local economy) can continue to grow indefinitely. Shortly after, the spiral of consequences makes their head explode.
It's great fun to watch, like a game of Lemmings, but with blood and gore all over the place instead of arcing pixels and a pathetic squeak.
Too bad smileys are now trademarked, else you could have used one to indicate it was just humor.
Only some smileys have been trademarked so far, leaving you with a range of permissible emotions to choose from. You could, for example, have indicated that the post was =:+}====_-_- ("shocking and powerful enough to have stunned me for long enough to grow a knee-length beard while giving me a hairstyle the wife would disapprove of"). This emotion is available for use until midnight tonight when my patent application for it lands on the desk of Vanuatu's Patent Office.
(This message contains humour referenceing the silly concept of patenting emotions and methods for depicting the expression of emotions in messages. The latter is called "writing", there are books full of prior art concerning the technique going back as long as ... well, books.)
Maybe I was lucky in the schooling I received : the worst teacher for ramming religion down his charges throats (Chemistry, Dr. Blunt, I'm afraid) was totally ineffectual since he was trying to both teach chemistry (in which he had his PhD) and ram religion down people's throats, which just doesn't work. Meanwhile, the teacher whose job it was to ram religion down the throats of the unwilling ("Religious Education" classes, by methodist lay preacher Mr Verity) had to deal with the contradictions of having nominal Christians, a Jew, a JW (whose parents had astonishing faith in their faith and didn't ban him from attending R.E.), several Hindus, a couple of Muslims plus at least one vocal atheist [/self] all in the same class and all espousing what boils down to "I'm right, everyone else is wrong." Even the more clinically retarded of my classmates couldn't help but see that not everyone could be right.
I only just realised the appropriateness of those names, after 30 freaking years! and I swear to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem that I'm not making them up!
I think I've still got Verity's last school report on me somewhere : "Exam result : 98%. Comments : Top of the year! As an atheist, Karley should be ashamed of himself!" I laughed for a week. well, a couple of hours.
Well, let the religious take control of the schools. The worst they can do is bring technological society crashing to it's knees, and I doubt that people's self-interest will allow them to get very far down the road of starvation, power cuts and infectious diseases before some of the more prominent god-nuts get strung up from lamp posts and lit for illumination (pun intended).
I gather that the situation is far worse in the US than it is in the bulk of the world (though sitting here off the coast of Israel, I do wonder how far the canker has spread?), but I believe the US has laws requiring people to use semi-automatic hand guns in protection of their SUV-clad lifestyle, so you know what to do. "Pray to your god to stop the bullet, mutthafukka! Now put your faith in your prayers and your lips round this gun barrel."
Subtlty used to be my strong point. Used to be.
The macrolensing and microlensing both work in the same way as standard lensing.
do you remember Huyghens Construction showing how a change in the propagation (phase) velocity of a wave in one region compared to another region can lead to the laws of refraction and reflection of waves? And how this was used as evidence that the nature of light was wave-like? Back in the early 18th century it was, IIRC (before the likes of Young demonstrated that interference effects meant that light must have a wave nature rather than a corpuscular nature, and before Einstein won his Nobel for demonstrating that light must have a corpuscular nature rather than a wave nature, and then quantum happened and the sales of headache pills took off)
You don't remember? Your physics teacher wasted those hours splashing around with the ripple tank. Shame on you, wasting his/ her/ it's/ their efforts like that!
Well, given Huyghen's construction and a bounded, more or less spherical region of reduced phase velocity (by whatever means), then you get lensing. Again, those poor neglected physics teachers did try to impart this to you. It's not relevant what the source of the reduced regional phase velocity for light is - it could be the density of gases (cue : hot-air mirage) ; it could be gravitational fields (Eddington's famous demonstration of Special Relativity at the 1920 solar eclipse, or did you sleep through that physics lesson too?); it could be the diligent activity of maliciously trained Maxwellian Daemon (Hi Marijke, if you're listening) running around grabbing photons by the tail and slowing them down that way. The result is the same : slowing across a geometrically limited region brings waves to a focus. Not necessarily a good focus, but a focus nonetheless.
The optical centre of the lenses is nearer to us than it is to the quasars in question. As a matter of simple Euclidian geometry, this means that the image is magnified. That would probably have been in the physics lectures some weeks before the ones about the nature and behaviour of waves.
Of course, I suppose that it's possible that your school hasn't covered these topics yet ; if not, I'd suggest that you ask your parents for permission to get a science tutor, so that you can get up to speed on the basic knowledge necessary for a 14-year-old to get into senior school.
Sorry, this does sound rather catty, doesn't it. But this is fundamental school stuff, which I and possibly you pay good tax money to have inculcated into kids in time for them to go on to learn more complex stuff, like how to make crystal meth and fusion reactors. It's a while since I had to go back through it - hence checking that it was Huyghens' Construction above instead of Young's. But it shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes for the brain to bring it back from off-line storage.
More nerdily, try ERNIE?
There's no difference between the two cases. In both cases (satellite and planet versus double planet) all the components orbit around their mutual centre of mass. That's one of the things that "centre of mass" means.
In the case of the Earth and Sputnik, the centre of mass of the system is in the order of 10^-18m from the centre of the Earth. In the case of Pluto and Charon, the most "double" double planet in the solar system, the centre of mass is about 2000km from the centre of Pluto or some 800km above the surface of Pluto. In the Earth-Moon case, the Earth's centre is some 2000km form the centre of mass of the system, making the centre of mass of the system still reside some thousands of km below the Earth's surface.
Where you drwa the line is, TTBOMK, a matter of personal choice ; there are no drastic effects when the separation of the two partners gets wide enough for the centre of mass ot move into the space between the two. But it'll always be closer to the heavier of the two. That's one of the things implicit in what a "centre of mass" is.
The frequency of each particle's orbit about the centre of mass is the same (this doesn't work for more than two particles. So, while each of the two separating particles (no matter what their sizes) will continue with their own amounts of angular momentum around the centre of mass, they'll also remain in phase. So when the smaller comes whipping back towards the larger, the larger will be in the right place to be impacted by the smaller. Unless you introduce a new source of angular momentum to one of the particles.
That's the "thrust" that the GP post referred to. It's as unavoidable as ... well something that's more unavoidable than death and taxes combined. It's the law, as in "law of gravity", not as in "law of lawyers". When it comes to angular momentum, there are no free lunches.
I thought the standard punishment for that was bag over the head, a short flight out to sea, a long drop, and a few weeks swimming back home. Or was that some other country matching A*a ? Mind you, for these terr'sts, that might not be such a bad thing.
I have an appropriate amount of faith that the Flying Spaghetti Monster will shield us with his Noodly Appendages.
Though he might drip a bit of sauce on our best shirt, but I think that's an acceptable risk to take.
Why six-wings on a seraphim? Insects know a lot about wingéd flight, and they don't go above 4 wings. Six wings on a seraphim - I foresee feathers getting knocked out of kilter and a rapid fluttering downwards. So, would seraphim be an example of Unintelligent Design, to counter the wonderfully bodged, Intelligent (But HungOver) Design performed by the Noodly Appendage.