Yeah, we oughta go back to the Riverdale Malt Shoppe and pay a quarter for three selections like 'Murrica's s'posed to be. We should've been happy with those shiny Juke Boxes...
I concede the point, but we do have the luxury of designing a better global comm system to deal with a more-or-less known threat (seeing as how this example was limited to the topic of cell vs. land-line service). I totally agree that it is folly to worry about what stations one can receive on the car radio when the overpass just collapsed before you...
Slightly further OT, an incoming comet coming from behind the sun would give us meager warning of doomsday. Even considering we have only located a tiny fraction of the theoretically extant Near-Earth objects, the threat (with present evaluative tools) seems trivial for the purposes of this discussion.
(back to topic) - Further, those of us who have DSL get the phone service bundled. Oh, and the phone stays on during a power outage. DSL stays up too, if you plug the modem and router into a UPS, and of course, the battery of my laptop is fully charged.
I calculate that around 2012, nearly all folks will be using POTS, if this excerpt from Wikipedia is correct: "The last solar maximum was in 2001, and on 10 March 2006 NASA researchers announced that the next cycle would be the strongest since the historic maximum in 1958 in which northern lights could be seen as far south as Mexico."
Aren't we just one or two Coronal Mass Ejections from having all our satellites (and cell service among others) go kerflooey?
I read the whole entry, you insensitive clod! Don't "I dunno" *me* with your spurious comparison of abstract theoretical limits and their physical unattainability to dragonian flight. Don't forget that penguins can fly, too; they just do it underwater! To be fair, I was joking, maybe even subconsciously trolling. My bad... 8)
I'm "science-minded" but lack the formal mathematical language commonly understood by educated scientists. As an analogy, I play guitar but could never sight-read a page of musical score. Wikipedia is very nice to we Timothy Ferris, Brian Greene, Steven Pinker, Leonard Susskind, etc.-educated amateurs by making every new sub-concept also a link to a gloss on that reference. This is a plodding way to learn astrophysics or molecular biology, admittedly, but is very handy to "brush up" for those of us unable to hold in our heads an edifice of thought that spans three or eight disciplines like we used to (/exaggeration).
I very much agree that there should be a way for the most arcane technical discussion (a tab or button, perhaps?) to be easily accessed by professionals and very learned folks without sacrificing the flow of the basic entry.
[...] if it's just the old people sticking around.
What? Even if people don't, do you think AOL would want to give up all those eyes that you could target ads at? Being one, I can say 'old people' don't buy anything. I make a point to never purchase anything advertised on TV or the 'Net (Of course, AdBlock Plus takes good care of me online). The "gotta-have-it" crowd thins right out after double nickels.
I don't use ICQ, mostly because I prefer face-to-face contact, or the phone if I need to speak to a faraway friend. I wonder if I should turn in my Nerd credentials...
I'm so tired of people trying to outshout each other on most forums. When do the know-it-all's find time to learn anything new, anyway? Thanks for the warning, but all they can do is call me bad names (so what?) and toss F-bombs in garbled 1337. Plus, if you'd like more civility in the world, what better place to start than at home? I know this will gag the cynics, but "Do As Ye Would Be Done By" is powerful stuff if a critical mass is reached, I would suppose. Got my tinfoil dunce-cap in the event a Vibe/Shitstorm hits... I further promise not to wander so far OT in future.
Many thanks to you & the OP. You (both) are very tactful, as I skimmed right past the relevant Wiki section you noted so graciously. I'll try to do more exhaustive research before jumping in with questions next time.
"Actually, most of the radiation [from supernovae] comes out as neutrinos. Only 1% comes out in forms we can detect at all..."
Not pretending to be anything but an interested layperson, but how does your response square with this excerpt from Wikipedia?
Type I versus Type II
A fundamental difference between Type I and Type II supernovae is the source of energy for the radiation emitted near the peak of the light curve. The progenitors of Type II supernovae are stars with extended envelopes that can attain a degree of transparency with a relatively small amount of expansion. Most of the energy powering the emission at peak light is derived from the shock wave that heats and ejects the envelope.[57]
The progenitors of Type I supernovae, on the other hand, are compact objects, much smaller (but more massive) than the Sun, that must expand (and therefore cool) enormously before becoming transparent. Heat from the explosion is dissipated in the expansion and is not available for light production. The radiation emitted by Type I supernovae is thus entirely attributable to the decay of radionuclides produced in the explosion; principally nickel-56 (with a half-life of 6.1 days) and its daughter cobalt-56 (with a half-life of 77 days). Gamma rays emitted during this nuclear decay are absorbed by the ejected material, heating it to incandescence.
As the material ejected by a Type II supernova expands and cools, radioactive decay eventually takes over as the main energy source for light emission in this case also. A bright Type Ia supernova may expel 0.5-1.0 solar masses of nickel-56,[58] while a Type Ib, Ic or Type II supernova probably ejects closer to 0.1 solar mass of nickel-56. Thanks in advance for advancing my understanding. Apologies if there is anything akin to an apples/oranges misunderstanding at the base of my query...
Maybe, but my dear mom always counseled me that "Nothing is foolproof if you have a determined fool." If so (as I have found to be valid in my own experience), then that inconvenient factoid must fit into your framework somehow. Being a self-admitted fool from time to time, I would probably make it fit using a bigger hammer. B)
One point to make -/. moderators are from US mainly, and therefore moderation most likely will favor US citizens and opinions (aka it is BIASED). Here we go again... Just because slashdot is an American (yeah, we stole that from the two hemispheres, too) -based site and most users are from here, you would complain that views of commenters and moderators expose that statistical reality and call it bias, but I would point out that the citizens of the United States hold as varied a spectrum of beliefs as a semi-homogeneous sampling from elsewhere. If you simply note our last two Presidential elections, you'll see that we are as polarized as it gets...
Personally, I moderate on the merits of the post. I have stopped correcting spelling/grammar errors by followup comment as I've discovered that English is not the first language of many posters, although their point of view is as valid as mine. Please don't be misled by the fraction of slashdotters who are loud-mouthed assholes and swagger around like ultra-patriots. Since this is supposedly a free nation, all of us must suffer the inelegant employment of that freedom by some in order to justify our own. I repeat, we are not a monolithic nation, but I concede it could look that way from afar...
I have no idea how this particular issue will play out, but this court has had many decisions overturned, for reasons spelled out in the Wiki reference.
If the only upside to this episode is that more folks become more wary of what "protections" one assumes are in force whilst flitting about the Internet, it would be meager, but might even spill over into real life. (god what a tortured sentence...) This would be a Good Thing, imo.
I do not know much about this, but is it possible Mercury would always have a molten core just do the extremes it endures (gravity,...[snipped] I had the same thought regarding gravity. Since Mercury's orbit is not circular, isn't it subject to the same type of tidal forces that induces Jupiter's satellite Io's molten core? Is there a planetary poohbah among us who might enlighten we curious but lazy 'dotters? Thank you in advance.
I've never used a radar detector because I drive the speed limit, mostly. If I want to get someplace faster I leave sooner. In rural Vermont it is often pointless to pass someone because you just catch up to the next motorist. There are few passing lanes, and two-lane roads are our arteries, there being few freeways mostly for the benefit of flatlanders zipping from one side of the state to the other. These roads are so curvy for the most part that you are upon Smokey as you 'round the bend. Can detectors "see" around hills and woods?
I always let someone by if there's a turnout or breakdown lane. Good luck with(out) the tickets!
So true. It's like the feeling of satisfaction that burbles up when you see the driver who just passed you on a curvy two-lane road getting pulled over by the radar-cop a mile further. (Or, in the winter, seeing the SOB in a snowbank or ditch...) 8)
If you look at the new doo-hickey at the top of the comments (where you can move sliders for full, abbreviated, and hidden message preference) you'll see a low contrast (blue on gray on my plain vanilla Firefox/Ubuntu setup) menu. Reply (to article) is on the far right side. HTH.
Gee, I had the opposite experience. I migrated from SuSE (w/ KDE 3.2) to Ubuntu and I really like the Gnome desktop much better. Like they said in Rome, "De Gustibus Non Disputandum, I s'pose...
Ubuntu has a lot of things going for it, but since the upgrades to 6.10 and 7.04, it seems they are rushing things BADLY, but the community is just letting bugs sit over and over again. Old bugs don't get fixed handily, and the new releases are adding more bugs to the overall distro. From 6.02 to 6.10 or so, there were unresolve display and interface problems. Now, 6.10 to 7.04 is dropping straightforward support for previous supported cards.
Let's spin this another way for you--my present XP setup has less apparent, known bugs to me than my Ubuntu 6.10 box does. If you are only going to stay with support for major hardware, I might as well return to XP and Vista and get officially supported drivers than this aggravation. And yes, I can point out bugs not fixed from 6 to 6.10 that are documented and have just sat there, unfixed, despite clearly reported and demonstrable and repeatable. They're on the forums, documented, and have been mentioned on/. before. Although I am new to the Ubuntu crowd, I am still running 6.06 Dapper Drake. I have just downloaded the ISO image for 6.10 Edgy Eft in preparation for burning a CD. I want to install 7.04 Feisty Fawn, and have sent for the free media(6-8 weeks, they say). I have zero problems with my current setup and want your (or anyone's) advice on whether I should stay put until more thorough driver/interface issues are resolved? Since one has to migrate from distro version to the next one (no skipping releases), I don't want to get too far behind in installing the best stable release, but I don't need extra headaches in adopting not-ready-for-prime-time versions. Thank you in advance for helping a bumbling boomer stay one jump away from total irrelevancy...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, we oughta go back to the Riverdale Malt Shoppe and pay a quarter for three selections like 'Murrica's s'posed to be. We should've been happy with those shiny Juke Boxes...
I concede the point, but we do have the luxury of designing a better global comm system to deal with a more-or-less known threat (seeing as how this example was limited to the topic of cell vs. land-line service). I totally agree that it is folly to worry about what stations one can receive on the car radio when the overpass just collapsed before you...
Slightly further OT, an incoming comet coming from behind the sun would give us meager warning of doomsday. Even considering we have only located a tiny fraction of the theoretically extant Near-Earth objects, the threat (with present evaluative tools) seems trivial for the purposes of this discussion.
(back to topic) - Further, those of us who have DSL get the phone service bundled. Oh, and the phone stays on during a power outage. DSL stays up too, if you plug the modem and router into a UPS, and of course, the battery of my laptop is fully charged.
I calculate that around 2012, nearly all folks will be using POTS, if this excerpt from Wikipedia is correct:
"The last solar maximum was in 2001, and on 10 March 2006 NASA researchers announced that the next cycle would be the strongest since the historic maximum in 1958 in which northern lights could be seen as far south as Mexico."
Aren't we just one or two Coronal Mass Ejections from having all our satellites (and cell service among others) go kerflooey?
I read the whole entry, you insensitive clod! Don't "I dunno" *me* with your spurious comparison of abstract theoretical limits and their physical unattainability to dragonian flight.
Don't forget that penguins can fly, too; they just do it underwater!
To be fair, I was joking, maybe even subconsciously trolling. My bad... 8)
Would you grant an exception to 0 K (-273.15 C)?
(btw, my spell checker insists on "turbulent")
I'm "science-minded" but lack the formal mathematical language commonly understood by educated scientists. As an analogy, I play guitar but could never sight-read a page of musical score. Wikipedia is very nice to we Timothy Ferris, Brian Greene, Steven Pinker, Leonard Susskind, etc.-educated amateurs by making every new sub-concept also a link to a gloss on that reference. This is a plodding way to learn astrophysics or molecular biology, admittedly, but is very handy to "brush up" for those of us unable to hold in our heads an edifice of thought that spans three or eight disciplines like we used to (/exaggeration).
I very much agree that there should be a way for the most arcane technical discussion (a tab or button, perhaps?) to be easily accessed by professionals and very learned folks without sacrificing the flow of the basic entry.
What? Even if people don't, do you think AOL would want to give up all those eyes that you could target ads at? Being one, I can say 'old people' don't buy anything. I make a point to never purchase anything advertised on TV or the 'Net (Of course, AdBlock Plus takes good care of me online). The "gotta-have-it" crowd thins right out after double nickels.
I don't use ICQ, mostly because I prefer face-to-face contact, or the phone if I need to speak to a faraway friend. I wonder if I should turn in my Nerd credentials...
I'm so tired of people trying to outshout each other on most forums. When do the know-it-all's find time to learn anything new, anyway? Thanks for the warning, but all they can do is call me bad names (so what?) and toss F-bombs in garbled 1337. Plus, if you'd like more civility in the world, what better place to start than at home? I know this will gag the cynics, but "Do As Ye Would Be Done By" is powerful stuff if a critical mass is reached, I would suppose. Got my tinfoil dunce-cap in the event a Vibe/Shitstorm hits...
I further promise not to wander so far OT in future.
Many thanks to you & the OP. You (both) are very tactful, as I skimmed right past the relevant Wiki section you noted so graciously. I'll try to do more exhaustive research before jumping in with questions next time.
Not pretending to be anything but an interested layperson, but how does your response square with this excerpt from Wikipedia? Type I versus Type II
A fundamental difference between Type I and Type II supernovae is the source of energy for the radiation emitted near the peak of the light curve. The progenitors of Type II supernovae are stars with extended envelopes that can attain a degree of transparency with a relatively small amount of expansion. Most of the energy powering the emission at peak light is derived from the shock wave that heats and ejects the envelope.[57]
The progenitors of Type I supernovae, on the other hand, are compact objects, much smaller (but more massive) than the Sun, that must expand (and therefore cool) enormously before becoming transparent. Heat from the explosion is dissipated in the expansion and is not available for light production. The radiation emitted by Type I supernovae is thus entirely attributable to the decay of radionuclides produced in the explosion; principally nickel-56 (with a half-life of 6.1 days) and its daughter cobalt-56 (with a half-life of 77 days). Gamma rays emitted during this nuclear decay are absorbed by the ejected material, heating it to incandescence.
As the material ejected by a Type II supernova expands and cools, radioactive decay eventually takes over as the main energy source for light emission in this case also. A bright Type Ia supernova may expel 0.5-1.0 solar masses of nickel-56,[58] while a Type Ib, Ic or Type II supernova probably ejects closer to 0.1 solar mass of nickel-56. Thanks in advance for advancing my understanding. Apologies if there is anything akin to an apples/oranges misunderstanding at the base of my query...
Maybe, but my dear mom always counseled me that "Nothing is foolproof if you have a determined fool." If so (as I have found to be valid in my own experience), then that inconvenient factoid must fit into your framework somehow. Being a self-admitted fool from time to time, I would probably make it fit using a bigger hammer. B)
Personally, I moderate on the merits of the post. I have stopped correcting spelling/grammar errors by followup comment as I've discovered that English is not the first language of many posters, although their point of view is as valid as mine. Please don't be misled by the fraction of slashdotters who are loud-mouthed assholes and swagger around like ultra-patriots. Since this is supposedly a free nation, all of us must suffer the inelegant employment of that freedom by some in order to justify our own. I repeat, we are not a monolithic nation, but I concede it could look that way from afar...
I have no idea how this particular issue will play out, but this court has had many decisions overturned, for reasons spelled out in the Wiki reference.
If the only upside to this episode is that more folks become more wary of what "protections" one assumes are in force whilst flitting about the Internet, it would be meager, but might even spill over into real life. (god what a tortured sentence...) This would be a Good Thing, imo.
Do I read this correctly? Are fiber optic lines routed through storm drains? I had no idea...
from Hard-Lovin' Loser:
He's the kind of cowboy got a hot trigger finger
Shoots his boot 'cause he's drawing kind of slow...
'Course you gotta have gray hair (if any) to remember that ditty.
Ahh... Le malheur des uns fait le bonheur des autres. ("One person's misfortune is another's happiness.")
Thanks for prodding me into Wikipedia to read further on the reference.
I've never used a radar detector because I drive the speed limit, mostly. If I want to get someplace faster I leave sooner. In rural Vermont it is often pointless to pass someone because you just catch up to the next motorist. There are few passing lanes, and two-lane roads are our arteries, there being few freeways mostly for the benefit of flatlanders zipping from one side of the state to the other. These roads are so curvy for the most part that you are upon Smokey as you 'round the bend. Can detectors "see" around hills and woods?
I always let someone by if there's a turnout or breakdown lane. Good luck with(out) the tickets!
So true. It's like the feeling of satisfaction that burbles up when you see the driver who just passed you on a curvy two-lane road getting pulled over by the radar-cop a mile further. (Or, in the winter, seeing the SOB in a snowbank or ditch...) 8)
If you look at the new doo-hickey at the top of the comments (where you can move sliders for full, abbreviated, and hidden message preference) you'll see a low contrast (blue on gray on my plain vanilla Firefox/Ubuntu setup) menu. Reply (to article) is on the far right side. HTH.
Agreed. While we're at it, can we remove the slogan "war on (whatever)" and save war for its dismal-enough denotation?
Gee, I had the opposite experience. I migrated from SuSE (w/ KDE 3.2) to Ubuntu and I really like the Gnome desktop much better. Like they said in Rome, "De Gustibus Non Disputandum, I s'pose...
Let's spin this another way for you--my present XP setup has less apparent, known bugs to me than my Ubuntu 6.10 box does. If you are only going to stay with support for major hardware, I might as well return to XP and Vista and get officially supported drivers than this aggravation. And yes, I can point out bugs not fixed from 6 to 6.10 that are documented and have just sat there, unfixed, despite clearly reported and demonstrable and repeatable. They're on the forums, documented, and have been mentioned on