Ok, a 200 million year difference in estimated age, +/- 3 years, is a major result (shame on the submitter for not including this important fact). And, no, papers pass peer review all the time without having details sane, intelligent people would regard as essential. There's a lot of pressure to shake the peer review system up - it hasn't been done because nobody really knows what would be better, only what would be worse (which is just about anything anyone has thought of).
Ok, that's a useful piece of information, but I want to know the margin of error on their measurements and the significance level (the sigma) - ie: how likely this measurement occurred by chance alone. If the sum total of uncertainty means the result is +/- 200 million years or more, then they're not really saying what they seem to be saying at all. This is my biggest gripe with these kinds of announcements - they often miss off these two critical values, usually because in the modern academic marketplace it's more important to be published than to be right.
(I absolutely despise the publish-or-be-damned philosophy of modern academia, where money is handed to the most prolific writers and not to those doing the best work.)
Well, some lighter elements can be converted to other elements as a result of being bombarded by cosmic rays (it's one of the methods of telling how long rocks have been exposed to the surface on the Earth, as you can't exactly radiocarbondate rock). So stuff that's on the surface of the moon - even stuff that's nominally been there for 4 billion years - may not be the same as it was 4 billion years ago.
Compounds are more complicated. The updated theory for the moon's formation is that it is the gelling together of two smaller moons that formed when the Earth was struck by a planetoid about the size of Mars. Anything that dates back to the original two smaller moons will clearly be older than that material which formed due to the energy of the collision. Further, as smaller masses radiate heat faster than larger masses and the two original moons are theorized to have been different sizes, rocks from the larger original moon will show a younger age from rocks from the smaller original moon.
And, yes, there have been plenty of impacts from space debris. One was so massive that observers on Earth recorded that the moon appeared to have horns. Since that was in historic times, we can assume that similar-sized collisions have happened in times before observers. Energies large enough to create light visible from Earth are going to be great enough to change the date of the rock in the area.
Then there's another complication. Rock is not just one super-crystal but a solidified soup of many compounds - and, in some cases, a solidified mix of distinct rocks that got cemented together. The age of the compounds may be very different from the time of solidification. (Mudstone, for example, isn't considered as old as the mud from which it formed.)
Obviously, NASA isn't stupid. They are going to make sure that they use appropriate methods. After all, the wrong method would be just like mixing feet and meters, or wiring a magnetic sensor upside-down. (Seriously, even though they have done some stupid things, they probably are using the correct method here. However, because of the update to the theory on the moon's formation - having two precursor moons of different age colliding at slow speed, I am not necessarily convinced by their interpretation. I am not convinced the theorists are communicating as well as they need to.)
The moon's age depends on a great many variables. For example, what do you define as being "the moon"? There was a recently discussed theory that there were actually TWO moons originally that collided at relatively low speed to form one final mass. Assuming this to be true, then this could be from either of the two "original" moons or from rock that formed in consequence of the collision. (That gives you one very large body collision, right there.)
We know that the moon did indeed have a liquid core very early on, so volcanic activity and other rock-melting levels of energy were around. They might well have lasted a few hundred million years and it's just possible that something like that could disrupt whatever calculations are being made.
With silica (a major component of the moon's surface) you can establish how long the material has been on the surface, but I don't believe that dating technique is good for timescales of billions of years and it's useless if the silica is more than a millimeter or so below the surface, which you're going to get on an object bombarded by meteorites and assorted other solar system debris. There's a variety of other techniques for directly measuring the age of materials, but I honestly couldn't tell you any that are both staggeringly accurate AND work over unimaginable timescales. Hell, most direct measurements (thermofluorescence) are damn good but still not what I'd call "staggeringly accurate" and don't work well beyond timeframes a hundred thousand times smaller than this.
Yes, a static baseline is great for certification programs such as EAL and FAA approval, but it's not the only sort of "stable" that you want. Data centres want a "carrier-grade" OS (which means five nines reliability). They don't necessarily care if they have to patch, since you can now hot-patch the kernel without taking it down, but they absolutely do not want the software to show any unreliability whatsoever. They'd likely get upset at having to patch more than once a year, since in-situ patching isn't always safe, but if you're limited to a few minutes downtime a year on a server as an absolute maximum (this is ignoring failover, etc, that's a whole different issue than a specific physical or virtual server instance being five nines) then I could see it being tolerated a whole lot more than a blind kernel upgrade at year's end.
(This assumes that the hot upgrades can be made fault-tolerant enough that a brown-paper-bag release - you know they're going to happen on any tree eventually - can be backed out without violating five nines.)
Since the -longterm is going to have to be based off of a -stable release and be maintained off that branch, we end right back where we were, with four version numbers, each level denoting the number of rounds of fixes applied to the number to the left. Only there's now going to be increased stagger, since stable will lag behind the release and longterm will lag behind stable. (They have to.)
If we're going to have lots of version numbers, then going back to the odd/even minor digit makes more sense than to do rapid increments. Yes, this pushes us out to five digits, which is borderline insane, but it is then five digits that carry specific pieces of discrete information rather than four digits where two don't necessarily convey a whole lot.
It could be a study by a PC vendor involving 1,188 sites with Apple malware. (They have to include IE after all, and nobody likes looking like a fool.) Or it could be a genuine study by a really bad security guy (all the browsers support Selenium, so they could have automated tests against as many URLs as they liked - a mere thousand in an automated test is really not that many, given that they'll have been testing against similar attack vectors in many cases).
Not that it matters much. It's not like the most vulnerable users read studies and it's not like those who read studies will pay much attention to anything that advocates one browser over another since many geeks tend to be rather more passionate about what they're seen with than with instantaneous snapshots that won't be valid the next day anyway.
The periphery of knowledge grows to the nth power of the growth in knowledge where n is some arbitrarily large value greater than 1. In other words, what we are aware of as being borderline unknown grows exponentially.
Certainly not everything has been invented. The key point is that ideas shouldn't just be equal in number to the ideas in the 60s, there's more room for those ideas and there's more people to have them (and, in theory, there's more people with better education, but I'd question just how accurate that is in many countries). For every futurologist, garage inventor, sci-fi writer and ground-breaking theorist from earlier decades, there should be tens - if not hundreds - today.
That isn't happening.
The Guardian newspaper ran an interesting op-ed on the riots in the UK, observing that in the 70s punk made an effort to communicate the problems of the average person to the landed gentry and give them a voice, but that nothing comparable exists today. I'm not sure I entirely agree with that view on either era but I would agree that there seems to be much less creative energy today and much more blah.
Ah yes, the early 80s, when robotics fanatics were building micromice, garage enthusiasts were building home computers (still!), programmers were churning out demos and games of amazing complexity ("BBC Elite" is still the benchmark to beat in terms of software sophistication-to-machine sophistication), the market for board wargames and other tactical simulations was exploding, music was diversifying to a degree far beyond anything that had been seen before, Formula 1 was bleeding-edge and sci-fi was still good (The Tomorrow People, Blake's 7 and Sapphite & Steel).
No, no big ideas at all.
C'mon, yes money was bad in the 80s but nobody really gave a rat's arse, they were too busy putting ideas into practice. These days, money is also bad but there are no ideas and practice is a dirty word.
I'd argue that a four part version number (first three being the standard and the fourth being used for variants such as the stable series and the distro trees) is a Good Thing. A three part number doesn't gain you very much and won't be stuck to anyway.
The change in the major number was also a Good Thing. It revealed bugs in software that used hard-coded values, for example. This is the twenty-first century AD, guys, hard-coding stopped being useful when we stopped chiseling values into cave walls.
The idea that there may be neurons somewhere within the brain that are photosensitive is plausible enough. However, light shining in the ear won't ever reach them.
Frequency modulation would get mashed up some by a shift in frequency, so you'd expect amplitude modulation to work better, yes, at least from that perspective. Most space communication systems use pulse modulation for greater reliability over a highly unreliable and noisy environment. A final option, provided that the aircraft starts high enough up, is to have a black box-style recorder that can detect if it has been released from a functional aircraft or has fallen out of something breaking up at high speed. With much lower transmission rates required for a homing signal, more resources can be spent on collecting more data.
They'll sell it for what people think it's worth today, not what income was derived through it, say, last year or the year before. If it has no value now, then 6% of what they paid for it might actually be a very good deal no matter how much they made from it before.
There may be other reasons for the sale. News International is currently in VERY Hot Water in the UK (espionage against government officials, hacking into phones of celebrities, bugging, and may have been carrying out bribery or intimidation against senior officials in Scotland Yard) - cash from a fire sale will help keep the books in the black and avoid the shareholders getting cold feet.
NASA has reneged on its deal with the ESA in a move that cripples international space ventures, damages Mars exploration and inflicts severe damage on non-American engineering companies. This is blatant nationalism over and above science OR industry. This is NOT acceptable and given that this isn't the least bit unusual (NASA's failure to have a shuttle replacement reneges on ISS contractual obligations, for example), it would not surprise me if other nations stop cooperating with NASA at all. Why bother, if NASA is never going to come through on the deal?
Yes, this would be somewhat cynical - all national organizations are going to put those they call "their own" first, above any actual merit or any legal obligation to which they are tied. It's cronyism on a national scale rather than a familial one. Nonetheless, incidence by other nations have tended to not be as......expensive as NASA's.
It's also a bit unreasonable, given that NASA is pwned by corrupt politicians buying voters rather than being devolved and semi-autonomous, to actually give more of a damn about the science than it is about the views of those politicians who can kill NASA utterly any year they like by simply eliminating it as a budget item and transferring all GFE to the military. As I've said before, a BBC-like charter system (guaranteed income for X years no matter what in exchange for providing Y services with zero government interference on how those services are provided, with all ownership being by the organization and not the government and all profit thus derived being independent of the charter's fixed income) would be the superior system for NASA. It HAS to eliminate politics, not just in part but in whole, if it is to survive, let alone have even an iota of respect from anyone.
It's a bit more. Supercomputers push bus speeds and floating-point calculations to the limits. Much of the hardware, these days, is commodity and these two criteria are important in gaming, computer art (such as rendering). The former is also important in embedded computing (such as phones) since data streaming is limited by maximum sustained bus speed.
Very much so. When the team ran Thrust SSC, the supersonic shockwave was actaly etched into the landscape itself. The understanding of physics in
I've wondered why there's actually so much emphasis in the current design on ground-effect rather than opting for a waverider design. In aircraft, a waverider sits on the shockwave. My understanding is that this produces a much gentler experience for the aircraft with greatly reduced turbulence. Logically, since the reflection does cause extensive damage (as demonstrated by the examination of Thrust SSC later), it would seem to follow that a car that was also a waverider should fare better.
This is not the approach being used and I'm more than happy to trust that the engineers are far more knowledgable on the physics than I am and that they have run computer simulations for any serious candidates for design, picking the one that works best rather than the one that armchair commentators might assume would be best. This doesn't mean, however, that I don't want to know their reasoning. I'd love to know why they picked the methods they did.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, a 200 million year difference in estimated age, +/- 3 years, is a major result (shame on the submitter for not including this important fact). And, no, papers pass peer review all the time without having details sane, intelligent people would regard as essential. There's a lot of pressure to shake the peer review system up - it hasn't been done because nobody really knows what would be better, only what would be worse (which is just about anything anyone has thought of).
Ok, that's a useful piece of information, but I want to know the margin of error on their measurements and the significance level (the sigma) - ie: how likely this measurement occurred by chance alone. If the sum total of uncertainty means the result is +/- 200 million years or more, then they're not really saying what they seem to be saying at all. This is my biggest gripe with these kinds of announcements - they often miss off these two critical values, usually because in the modern academic marketplace it's more important to be published than to be right.
(I absolutely despise the publish-or-be-damned philosophy of modern academia, where money is handed to the most prolific writers and not to those doing the best work.)
Oh, the day is correct. Now, the month, on the other hand....
Well, some lighter elements can be converted to other elements as a result of being bombarded by cosmic rays (it's one of the methods of telling how long rocks have been exposed to the surface on the Earth, as you can't exactly radiocarbondate rock). So stuff that's on the surface of the moon - even stuff that's nominally been there for 4 billion years - may not be the same as it was 4 billion years ago.
Compounds are more complicated. The updated theory for the moon's formation is that it is the gelling together of two smaller moons that formed when the Earth was struck by a planetoid about the size of Mars. Anything that dates back to the original two smaller moons will clearly be older than that material which formed due to the energy of the collision. Further, as smaller masses radiate heat faster than larger masses and the two original moons are theorized to have been different sizes, rocks from the larger original moon will show a younger age from rocks from the smaller original moon.
And, yes, there have been plenty of impacts from space debris. One was so massive that observers on Earth recorded that the moon appeared to have horns. Since that was in historic times, we can assume that similar-sized collisions have happened in times before observers. Energies large enough to create light visible from Earth are going to be great enough to change the date of the rock in the area.
Then there's another complication. Rock is not just one super-crystal but a solidified soup of many compounds - and, in some cases, a solidified mix of distinct rocks that got cemented together. The age of the compounds may be very different from the time of solidification. (Mudstone, for example, isn't considered as old as the mud from which it formed.)
Obviously, NASA isn't stupid. They are going to make sure that they use appropriate methods. After all, the wrong method would be just like mixing feet and meters, or wiring a magnetic sensor upside-down. (Seriously, even though they have done some stupid things, they probably are using the correct method here. However, because of the update to the theory on the moon's formation - having two precursor moons of different age colliding at slow speed, I am not necessarily convinced by their interpretation. I am not convinced the theorists are communicating as well as they need to.)
The moon's age depends on a great many variables. For example, what do you define as being "the moon"? There was a recently discussed theory that there were actually TWO moons originally that collided at relatively low speed to form one final mass. Assuming this to be true, then this could be from either of the two "original" moons or from rock that formed in consequence of the collision. (That gives you one very large body collision, right there.)
We know that the moon did indeed have a liquid core very early on, so volcanic activity and other rock-melting levels of energy were around. They might well have lasted a few hundred million years and it's just possible that something like that could disrupt whatever calculations are being made.
With silica (a major component of the moon's surface) you can establish how long the material has been on the surface, but I don't believe that dating technique is good for timescales of billions of years and it's useless if the silica is more than a millimeter or so below the surface, which you're going to get on an object bombarded by meteorites and assorted other solar system debris. There's a variety of other techniques for directly measuring the age of materials, but I honestly couldn't tell you any that are both staggeringly accurate AND work over unimaginable timescales. Hell, most direct measurements (thermofluorescence) are damn good but still not what I'd call "staggeringly accurate" and don't work well beyond timeframes a hundred thousand times smaller than this.
Yes, a static baseline is great for certification programs such as EAL and FAA approval, but it's not the only sort of "stable" that you want. Data centres want a "carrier-grade" OS (which means five nines reliability). They don't necessarily care if they have to patch, since you can now hot-patch the kernel without taking it down, but they absolutely do not want the software to show any unreliability whatsoever. They'd likely get upset at having to patch more than once a year, since in-situ patching isn't always safe, but if you're limited to a few minutes downtime a year on a server as an absolute maximum (this is ignoring failover, etc, that's a whole different issue than a specific physical or virtual server instance being five nines) then I could see it being tolerated a whole lot more than a blind kernel upgrade at year's end.
(This assumes that the hot upgrades can be made fault-tolerant enough that a brown-paper-bag release - you know they're going to happen on any tree eventually - can be backed out without violating five nines.)
Since the -longterm is going to have to be based off of a -stable release and be maintained off that branch, we end right back where we were, with four version numbers, each level denoting the number of rounds of fixes applied to the number to the left. Only there's now going to be increased stagger, since stable will lag behind the release and longterm will lag behind stable. (They have to.)
If we're going to have lots of version numbers, then going back to the odd/even minor digit makes more sense than to do rapid increments. Yes, this pushes us out to five digits, which is borderline insane, but it is then five digits that carry specific pieces of discrete information rather than four digits where two don't necessarily convey a whole lot.
It could be a study by a PC vendor involving 1,188 sites with Apple malware. (They have to include IE after all, and nobody likes looking like a fool.) Or it could be a genuine study by a really bad security guy (all the browsers support Selenium, so they could have automated tests against as many URLs as they liked - a mere thousand in an automated test is really not that many, given that they'll have been testing against similar attack vectors in many cases).
Not that it matters much. It's not like the most vulnerable users read studies and it's not like those who read studies will pay much attention to anything that advocates one browser over another since many geeks tend to be rather more passionate about what they're seen with than with instantaneous snapshots that won't be valid the next day anyway.
Lynx is safer still. Some of the browsers for Emacs are fairly secure, too.
If we need cheaper, smaller, faster every 3 months then we're solving the wrong problems.
The periphery of knowledge grows to the nth power of the growth in knowledge where n is some arbitrarily large value greater than 1. In other words, what we are aware of as being borderline unknown grows exponentially.
Certainly not everything has been invented. The key point is that ideas shouldn't just be equal in number to the ideas in the 60s, there's more room for those ideas and there's more people to have them (and, in theory, there's more people with better education, but I'd question just how accurate that is in many countries). For every futurologist, garage inventor, sci-fi writer and ground-breaking theorist from earlier decades, there should be tens - if not hundreds - today.
That isn't happening.
The Guardian newspaper ran an interesting op-ed on the riots in the UK, observing that in the 70s punk made an effort to communicate the problems of the average person to the landed gentry and give them a voice, but that nothing comparable exists today. I'm not sure I entirely agree with that view on either era but I would agree that there seems to be much less creative energy today and much more blah.
Ah yes, the early 80s, when robotics fanatics were building micromice, garage enthusiasts were building home computers (still!), programmers were churning out demos and games of amazing complexity ("BBC Elite" is still the benchmark to beat in terms of software sophistication-to-machine sophistication), the market for board wargames and other tactical simulations was exploding, music was diversifying to a degree far beyond anything that had been seen before, Formula 1 was bleeding-edge and sci-fi was still good (The Tomorrow People, Blake's 7 and Sapphite & Steel).
No, no big ideas at all.
C'mon, yes money was bad in the 80s but nobody really gave a rat's arse, they were too busy putting ideas into practice. These days, money is also bad but there are no ideas and practice is a dirty word.
I'd argue that a four part version number (first three being the standard and the fourth being used for variants such as the stable series and the distro trees) is a Good Thing. A three part number doesn't gain you very much and won't be stuck to anyway.
The change in the major number was also a Good Thing. It revealed bugs in software that used hard-coded values, for example. This is the twenty-first century AD, guys, hard-coding stopped being useful when we stopped chiseling values into cave walls.
Not really. The EU is actually functional...ish... sometimes.
The idea that there may be neurons somewhere within the brain that are photosensitive is plausible enough. However, light shining in the ear won't ever reach them.
Did you remember to remove the self-destruct buttons on the transcievers?
Frequency modulation would get mashed up some by a shift in frequency, so you'd expect amplitude modulation to work better, yes, at least from that perspective. Most space communication systems use pulse modulation for greater reliability over a highly unreliable and noisy environment. A final option, provided that the aircraft starts high enough up, is to have a black box-style recorder that can detect if it has been released from a functional aircraft or has fallen out of something breaking up at high speed. With much lower transmission rates required for a homing signal, more resources can be spent on collecting more data.
Kim Possible has become Evil!
They'll sell it for what people think it's worth today, not what income was derived through it, say, last year or the year before. If it has no value now, then 6% of what they paid for it might actually be a very good deal no matter how much they made from it before.
There may be other reasons for the sale. News International is currently in VERY Hot Water in the UK (espionage against government officials, hacking into phones of celebrities, bugging, and may have been carrying out bribery or intimidation against senior officials in Scotland Yard) - cash from a fire sale will help keep the books in the black and avoid the shareholders getting cold feet.
NASA has reneged on its deal with the ESA in a move that cripples international space ventures, damages Mars exploration and inflicts severe damage on non-American engineering companies. This is blatant nationalism over and above science OR industry. This is NOT acceptable and given that this isn't the least bit unusual (NASA's failure to have a shuttle replacement reneges on ISS contractual obligations, for example), it would not surprise me if other nations stop cooperating with NASA at all. Why bother, if NASA is never going to come through on the deal?
Yes, this would be somewhat cynical - all national organizations are going to put those they call "their own" first, above any actual merit or any legal obligation to which they are tied. It's cronyism on a national scale rather than a familial one. Nonetheless, incidence by other nations have tended to not be as... ...expensive as NASA's.
It's also a bit unreasonable, given that NASA is pwned by corrupt politicians buying voters rather than being devolved and semi-autonomous, to actually give more of a damn about the science than it is about the views of those politicians who can kill NASA utterly any year they like by simply eliminating it as a budget item and transferring all GFE to the military. As I've said before, a BBC-like charter system (guaranteed income for X years no matter what in exchange for providing Y services with zero government interference on how those services are provided, with all ownership being by the organization and not the government and all profit thus derived being independent of the charter's fixed income) would be the superior system for NASA. It HAS to eliminate politics, not just in part but in whole, if it is to survive, let alone have even an iota of respect from anyone.
It's a bit more. Supercomputers push bus speeds and floating-point calculations to the limits. Much of the hardware, these days, is commodity and these two criteria are important in gaming, computer art (such as rendering). The former is also important in embedded computing (such as phones) since data streaming is limited by maximum sustained bus speed.
It's random if you're not into news for nerds. :)
No idea. SI specifies speed in meters per second, so hours aren't standard.
Perhaps, but I'm mysteriously not going to follow their lead. They might have patented the term.
Very much so. When the team ran Thrust SSC, the supersonic shockwave was actaly etched into the landscape itself. The understanding of physics in
I've wondered why there's actually so much emphasis in the current design on ground-effect rather than opting for a waverider design. In aircraft, a waverider sits on the shockwave. My understanding is that this produces a much gentler experience for the aircraft with greatly reduced turbulence. Logically, since the reflection does cause extensive damage (as demonstrated by the examination of Thrust SSC later), it would seem to follow that a car that was also a waverider should fare better.
This is not the approach being used and I'm more than happy to trust that the engineers are far more knowledgable on the physics than I am and that they have run computer simulations for any serious candidates for design, picking the one that works best rather than the one that armchair commentators might assume would be best. This doesn't mean, however, that I don't want to know their reasoning. I'd love to know why they picked the methods they did.