I guess that's a form of success. But there's probably a reason why everyone else is still doing ground tests.
They had already done ground tests. There comes a time in any successful flight program when it is time to fly. This thing has already had a factor of infinity more stable flight time than LockMart's $1Billion+ X-33.
What sort of radiation dose would an astronaut receive if he was located outside the Van Allen Belt?
I worked it out once. This particular SGR burst would have given an astronaut the equivalent of a dental X-ray. Pretty potent for half-way across the Galaxy, but not a health hazard. And the Van Allen Belts wouldn't have provided any shielding because the X-rays/gamma-rays are uncharged photons, which aren't affected by Earth's magnetosphere.
Solar flares are most deadly because of the proton flux, which would be blocked, but which travels much slower than lightspeed. If you see X-rays from a solar flare, it tells you that you have an hour or so to get into a shielded environment before the big storm hits.
In this case, the ionospheric disturbance was from the X-rays and gamma-rays (high energy photons, travelling at lightspeed) hitting the atmosphere. The main part of the pulse was a huge spike of gamma-rays, followed by bright tail of periodically varying gamma-rays (with the neutron star's ~5 second rotation period) decaying in the next few minutes.
If there were a pulse of sub-light particles coming from the SGR, they would be no longer be a short pulse when they reached Earth fro two reasons: The particles travelling at 90% of lightspeed would come many years before the particles travelling at 89.99% of lightspeed; And the tangled magnetic field of the Galaxy would bend their paths all over the place so they'd be travelling different distances.
i just want to note that USING something for an illegal, dangerous or terroristic activity is legal.. the ACTIVITY is illegal but not USING something FOR it. Semantics you may say.. but as far as i know you can't get hauled off into jail for USING a gun to kill someone, but for the actual ACT of killing someone.
Actually, in the US, there are laws that hit you with increased mandatory sentences if you USE a gun in a drug crime. In one case, a guy did a lot more hard time because he USED a gun by trading it for drugs. (Upheld on appeal.)
Just for perspective, there have been over 100,000 G5s ordered, so this cluster is about one percent of the backlog. In other words, assuming that Apple ships all pending orders in about a month, the G5 I ordered will be delayed by about 8 hours.
And 8 hours@12.4GFlops...damn you Virginia Tech, you owe me a third of a quadrilion floating point multiplies!
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is it with you with you G5 zealots? Ive been sitting at my 1100 CPU G5 supercomputer for 20 minutes as it computers a fast fourier transform of an 8Ghz guassian.
And what's with having only 1100 mouse buttons? At the price they're charging, why didn't Apple provide 2200 mouse buttons and 1100 scroll wheels. And why did they use a dead operating system like BSD anyway?
every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position
Thus, for example, it is not theft to con somebody into signing over their house and land to you, or acquire title to it by legal shenanigans or treaty violation.
That's why there are separate definitions for things like 'conversion by fraud' and 'copyright infringment'.
But just because something is not 'theft' doesn't mean it is not wrong. Rape, murder and jaywalking aren't theft either. I'm sure that those who walked the trail of tears are glad that they weren't the victims of theft of their land.
First, this is nothing like a hologram. (Reporter: This is shiny, holograms are shiny, this must be a hologram.)
When you print continuous tone images with specific ink colors, you have to lay down tiny dots that cover, e.g. 30% of the paper with cyan, 20% magenta, 10% yellow, 15% black. The inks are then fixed in some way: heating, rolling, burnishing or whatever--details vary based on printing technology.
If you put down the ink so that the cyan and yellow dots are: separated by a small gap; or touching each other; or piled up on top of each other; you will get different print characteristics.
It may be e.g., that when wax-based ink drops are piled on top of each other, the burnishing gives it a glossy texture, while the same amounts of inks distributed in separate dots gives a matte finish. (This is just an example based on absolutly no specific knowledge.)
Postscript and other printer control languages are sufficiently expressive that the software can control where the ink dots go. This lets the glossiness be controlled.
The current story is that it was originally called 'duck tape', named after 'cotton duck' which was its structural component, and its waterproof properties. It is not actually very good on ducts.
I am a physicist. The paper is wrong, in many ways.
Main point: he goes into the frame of reference of the light sail, notes that light_energy_in == light_energy_out, therefore no energy is transferred to the sail, and therefore there must not be any force on the sail.
But Energy is the dot-product of force . distance (likewise, power is force . velocity). 'No energy is transferred' is a different statement than 'there is no force' in the frame of reference of the sail (distance moved = 0, velocity = 0)
Radiation pressure has been successfully used by spacecraft for attitutde control and station-keeping.
No, it's just to reduce the flux from the beams of X-rays that just graze the periphery of the core sample. That way the detector doesn't have to be robust enough to accurately measure the full unattenuated X-ray beam while also being sensitive enough to measure the few photons that pass through the full diameter of the core.
Everything is straight-line optics without any refraction or reflection.
There is also PalmOS-based Dana Alpha Smart. There are transmeta notebooks I think, but I don't know if NoMoreNicksLeft considers them a different platform. Are there any ARM notebooks? Wasn't the C-64 luggable in Osborne sewing machine format rather than notebook? The SPARC tadpole of course, as someone else mentioned.
I (have to (it's a app made for the MS version of java)) use IE for inputting data to the web publishing system at work. I also like to have more than one window open and surf around while researching stories
Use MSIE for what you have to, but open all the other windows in a different browser.
How does struct member layout differ between little-endian and big-endian architectures?
The C++ spec states that the layout of bitfield elements is unspecified. (As is whether unmarked bitfield elements are signed or unsigned.)
In practice there is a strong correlation in endianness and bitfield order (e.g. gcc for PPC and Intel). But anyone who asserts that all little-endian compilers are one way and all big-endian compilers are the other way should be corrected, then shipped off to your competitor.
They had two photomultiplier tubes (PMTs): one was coupled to a scintillator (crystal that makes light when X-rays hit it), one wasn't. There was a hefty signal in the PMT that was coupled to the scintillator, the other showed a flatline.
In 1999 and 2001, I and other amateur astronomers recorded the flashes from Leonid Meteors hitting the Moon. These flashes were videorecorded and confirmed by multiple observers simultaneously.
The meteors in these cases were in probably in the 10 kg range, and the craters they produced were probably a few meters across (not large enough to see from the ground or any lunar orbiter we are likely to launch any time soon).
The test vehicle got a few hundred feet up before turning into the ground. That's a few hundred feet higher than the X-33 got with about $1 billion of funding.
Rocket engineering should be like that. 'Crash and learn' is a much more productive use of time and money than 'here are the viewgraphs that your last billion dollars bought.'
Actually there is a better candidate for who Pangloss is a caricature of.
Noël Antoine Pluche (1688-1761), the author of a highly popular work, Le Spectacle de la Nature (1732), took Leibnitz's ideas and ran with them, and ran, and ran, and ran.
This is one of four well-known Soft Gamma Repeaters (SGRs). These are neutron stars in or near our galaxy that produce intense blasts of X-ray and soft gamma-ray radiation. Normal neutron stars (e.g. the Crab pulsar) just put out a fairly steady pulsing signal.
It had been thought that SGRs are neutron stars with magnetic fields of ~1e14 Gauss (compared to the Crab's ~1e12 G or Earths ~1 G). This is a huge field that has enough energy (proportional to magnetic field squared) to power the huge blasts of radiation.
This new work by Samar Safi-Harb shows that the magnetic field is actually ~1e15 Gauss: 10x as strong and 100x the energy.
If you want to funnel huge quantities of money into the usual set of bloated aerospace companies, you build 'Oases in Space'.
In the '80's, President Bush said 'Let's go to Mars'. NASA said 'Gravy train!! The Space Exploration Initiative will give us a massive infrastructure, including a Moon base, all for less than a trillion dollars. And once we have that, we might go to Mars.'
Bush passed on that plan at that price. Perhaps he actually wanted people to go to Mars.
Zubrin's Mars Direct plan would cost $50 billion to get to Mars, but wouldn't build an empire. NASA has shown little interest.
Slashdot Mirror
Crash and learn.
Solar flares are most deadly because of the proton flux, which would be blocked, but which travels much slower than lightspeed. If you see X-rays from a solar flare, it tells you that you have an hour or so to get into a shielded environment before the big storm hits.
If there were a pulse of sub-light particles coming from the SGR, they would be no longer be a short pulse when they reached Earth fro two reasons: The particles travelling at 90% of lightspeed would come many years before the particles travelling at 89.99% of lightspeed; And the tangled magnetic field of the Galaxy would bend their paths all over the place so they'd be travelling different distances.
And 8 hours@12.4GFlops...damn you Virginia Tech, you owe me a third of a quadrilion floating point multiplies!
And what's with having only 1100 mouse buttons? At the price they're charging, why didn't Apple provide 2200 mouse buttons and 1100 scroll wheels. And why did they use a dead operating system like BSD anyway?
Thus, for example, it is not theft to con somebody into signing over their house and land to you, or acquire title to it by legal shenanigans or treaty violation.
That's why there are separate definitions for things like 'conversion by fraud' and 'copyright infringment'.
But just because something is not 'theft' doesn't mean it is not wrong. Rape, murder and jaywalking aren't theft either. I'm sure that those who walked the trail of tears are glad that they weren't the victims of theft of their land.
First, this is nothing like a hologram. (Reporter: This is shiny, holograms are shiny, this must be a hologram.)
When you print continuous tone images with specific ink colors, you have to lay down tiny dots that cover, e.g. 30% of the paper with cyan, 20% magenta, 10% yellow, 15% black. The inks are then fixed in some way: heating, rolling, burnishing or whatever--details vary based on printing technology.
If you put down the ink so that the cyan and yellow dots are: separated by a small gap; or touching each other; or piled up on top of each other; you will get different print characteristics.
It may be e.g., that when wax-based ink drops are piled on top of each other, the burnishing gives it a glossy texture, while the same amounts of inks distributed in separate dots gives a matte finish. (This is just an example based on absolutly no specific knowledge.)
Postscript and other printer control languages are sufficiently expressive that the software can control where the ink dots go. This lets the glossiness be controlled.
This posting is probably a DMCA violation.
The current story is that it was originally called 'duck tape', named after 'cotton duck' which was its structural component, and its waterproof properties. It is not actually very good on ducts.
Main point: he goes into the frame of reference of the light sail, notes that light_energy_in == light_energy_out, therefore no energy is transferred to the sail, and therefore there must not be any force on the sail.
But Energy is the dot-product of force . distance (likewise, power is force . velocity). 'No energy is transferred' is a different statement than 'there is no force' in the frame of reference of the sail (distance moved = 0, velocity = 0)
Radiation pressure has been successfully used by spacecraft for attitutde control and station-keeping.
Crookes radiometer does not turn due to radiation pressure.
He also has troubles with the concept of thermal equilibrium and inelastic collisions.
Live by the fraud, die by the fraud.
No, it's just to reduce the flux from the beams of X-rays that just graze the periphery of the core sample. That way the detector doesn't have to be robust enough to accurately measure the full unattenuated X-ray beam while also being sensitive enough to measure the few photons that pass through the full diameter of the core.
Everything is straight-line optics without any refraction or reflection.
There is also PalmOS-based Dana Alpha Smart.
There are transmeta notebooks I think, but I don't know if NoMoreNicksLeft considers them a different platform.
Are there any ARM notebooks?
Wasn't the C-64 luggable in Osborne sewing machine format rather than notebook?
The SPARC tadpole of course, as someone else mentioned.
Use MSIE for what you have to, but open all the other windows in a different browser.
I recommend Safari.
In practice there is a strong correlation in endianness and bitfield order (e.g. gcc for PPC and Intel). But anyone who asserts that all little-endian compilers are one way and all big-endian compilers are the other way should be corrected, then shipped off to your competitor.
They had two photomultiplier tubes (PMTs): one was coupled to a scintillator (crystal that makes light when X-rays hit it), one wasn't. There was a hefty signal in the PMT that was coupled to the scintillator, the other showed a flatline.
The meteors in these cases were in probably in the 10 kg range, and the craters they produced were probably a few meters across (not large enough to see from the ground or any lunar orbiter we are likely to launch any time soon).
The test vehicle got a few hundred feet up before turning into the ground. That's a few hundred feet higher than the X-33 got with about $1 billion of funding.
Rocket engineering should be like that. 'Crash and learn' is a much more productive use of time and money than 'here are the viewgraphs that your last billion dollars bought.'
Actually there is a better candidate for who Pangloss is a caricature of.
Noël Antoine Pluche (1688-1761), the author of a highly popular work, Le Spectacle de la Nature (1732), took Leibnitz's ideas and ran with them, and ran, and ran, and ran.
It had been thought that SGRs are neutron stars with magnetic fields of ~1e14 Gauss (compared to the Crab's ~1e12 G or Earths ~1 G). This is a huge field that has enough energy (proportional to magnetic field squared) to power the huge blasts of radiation.
This new work by Samar Safi-Harb shows that the magnetic field is actually ~1e15 Gauss: 10x as strong and 100x the energy.
Oasis \O"as*is\ n.;
pl. Oases
If you want to funnel huge quantities of money into the usual set of bloated aerospace companies, you build 'Oases in Space'.
In the '80's, President Bush said 'Let's go to Mars'. NASA said 'Gravy train!! The Space Exploration Initiative will give us a massive infrastructure, including a Moon base, all for less than a trillion dollars. And once we have that, we might go to Mars.'
Bush passed on that plan at that price. Perhaps he actually wanted people to go to Mars.
Zubrin's Mars Direct plan would cost $50 billion to get to Mars, but wouldn't build an empire. NASA has shown little interest.