Give the audience a puzzle. A really, really hard puzzle. The final solution is mainly an ad for a sponsor, but hopefully something a bit more rewarding than "Be sure to drink your ovaltine."
To make it easier, give out hints periodically, where the hints have to do with other sponsors. Or just embed them in the ads somehow.
The idea is to make your audience want to see the ads. I'm sure I'm not the only one to think of this, and maybe I've just been living under a rock and someone's already done it.
As a child/teenager, back in the 70's, I used to read my father's copy of Playboy. When they had stories about top executives, I used to think, "Wow! Those must be really intelligent guys, to be running a big company like that!"
1) The Galaxy Tab's camera cost a whopping $8. Development costs should be minimal, as the iPhone has a camera. 2) Have you seen how much wasted space there is in an iPad? You could put a HUGE camera on there with no effect on battery life. 3) Ahhh.... that sounds much better.
Leaving out a camera was not done for any technical or cost reason, but to give them something significant to add in the next version. And since their competition was nil, it made sense. No tablet could ever be released anymore without a camera, except maybe ultra-low budget tablets.
Cameras and USB ports aren't absolutely essential to a tablet, but their presence will still be missed by buyers and reviewers.
You just know the religious are going to go insane over this. They'll attack the scientists doing the studies. They'll work something into the laws or education system.
But in reality, they shouldn't even be thinking about genetics. For example, alcoholism has a very clear genetic factor. Does that mean that an alcoholism is "natural" and should be acceptable behavior? Of course not.
People, especially the religious, need to have a similar perspective on homosexuals. So what if there's a genetic factor? If you think that homosexuality is a sin, then leave it at that. "Hate the sin, not the sinner." Realize that (at least some) homosexuals didn't "choose" it. That doesn't mean that you have to accept it!
By the same token, it's also a poor argument to claim that homosexuality is acceptable behavior by claiming it's "genetic." And yet, that's exactly what I hear when people talk about gay rights.
Stupid people on both sides are using weak, ignorant arguments, if you ask me.
It's better because one blames an anonymous third party while the other blames the user.
Even if it really is Microsoft's fault in some way (such as a failure to test... boy does that sound familiar), at least they aren't blaming ME for their own mistakes.
Conversely, it's been my experience that Java programmers know more about the fundamentals than C# programmers do... because they've been forced to understand it.
Hahahaha!
Compared to a C/C++ programmer, most C# and Java programmers are so lacking in fundamentals it's appalling. Any differences between them are probably pretty minor in comparison.
Of course, some people think that's a good thing. But back in my day, we were forced to understand things... and we LIKED IT!
That comment made me do a double-take. Normally the argument is:
It's been my experience that C/C++ programmers know more about the fundamentals than Java programmers do... because they've been forced to understand it.
gravitational lensing that doesn't match the visible masses
This is a very interesting piece of evidence. It's not just that the gravity is stronger than we expect, is that the gravity is coming from locations where we don't see anything.
The obvious conclusion is that there is additional mass not producing any light for us to observe. But maybe our model for gravity is wrong. Occam's Razor points to the former, so let's start there with our investigations. If that doesn't pan out then we'll have to look for more exotic solutions.
Actually, they do form gravitational lenses, and we've measured this.
Basically, the process is to find a galaxy cluster, measure the lensing to determine where the mass is, and subtract out the mass of the individual galaxies. What you're left with is the location of the dark matter.
Where you're wrong is that there's no "central galaxy." Dark matter is still closely associated with normal matter (after all, they do attract each other gravitationally). I think maps like this have shown that most galaxies actually have a "halo" of dark matter surrounding them.
Of course, the shape of this halo can vary quite a bit:
Yeah, I debated on whether to include the "little or no" bit. We should probably ignore interactions due to "higher order loop effects"... but he threw it in there, so I did too. Probably a mistake.
But my point holds: there are two kinds of dark matter: ordinary matter that we normally deal with (but not emitting much light) or something a bit more "exotic" than that (which doesn't even interact with light, much less emit any). It's basically the difference between MACHOs and WIMPs.
To be fair, there's two definitions of dark matter. One is as you said -- matter that has little or no interaction with photons.
The other is baryonic dark matter which is simply normal matter that isn't emitting many photons, so we don't see it. And if we can't see it, we can't include it in our tally of mass.
But, it seems that baryonic dark matter can only account for a small percentage of the total dark matter in the universe, so it's usually ignored.
The calculated mass of this body is about 1% of the Milky Way, or about 7x10^9 solar masses. The event horizon of said black hole would be about 20 billion kilometers.
The actual distance is about 260,000 light years away, or 2.5x10^18 kilometers.
And... if I did the math right, the circle would be about.00165 arcsecond. Hubble is about.04 arcseconds for comparison. We need a telescope with about 25 times the angular resolution.
Feel free to check my math... I probably made a mistake in there somewhere.
The point is, this would have to be a MASSIVE black hole... but might actually be directly observable with future technology if we can manage a couple orders of magnitude improvement in angular resolution.
First off, the GPP has a decent question. The largest supermassive black holes are on the order of 10^9 solar masses, about the same mass as what was calculated for this satellite galaxy. So, I suppose it's at least plausible that it's a single black hole, if unlikely.
But remember and repeat after me: a black hole has no more gravity than any other object of the same mass. As long as you stay away from the event horizon, that is. You need to rethink your first paragraph with that in mind.
So, how would we tell the difference? Well, an X-ray source from the same location would be a good clue that it's a black hole, which says that it's feeding off of something. You should also be able to tell from the gravitational lensing -- dark matter is incredibly diffuse compared to a black hole. It would still bend light, but not quite in the same way, especially considering the distances involved.
But what about a black circle in the sky? Well, the even horizon for such a black hole has the same diameter as the orbit of Pluto, if I remember right. Detectable, maybe, under the right conditions (but not by Hubble -- you'd need something with about 20x better resolution... if I did the math right, which I probably didn't). But we have to capture it overlapping with some other body, such as a background galaxy. By then you'd be better off looking at the lensing effect, anyway. Here is a classic simulation of what I'm talking about.
The rationale there is usually to make sure they take care of the tools. My brother owned a house painting business. In that industry the workers buy their own brushes. And it makes sense: when he supplied the brushes, they got trashed within a job or two... leaving them out, not cleaning them properly, and so on. It was unsustainable. I think it even translated to the tools he did supply (paint sprayers, for example), where they took better care of those tools as well.
But I'm not sure this translates well to computers. I don't even trust my IT department to do the maintenance on my work computer properly. Having people maintain their own computers would be even worse.
Depends on your point of view. To an employer, the idea looks tempting on paper, but the ultimate result could be a disaster.
As an employee, I would love to have the option of bringing in my own computer to make up for my employer's tight purse strings. And there's very few downsides.
Not that there aren't potential problems, of course. See my original post, for example. But I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea from the employee's perspective.
Good idea: letting your employees bring in their own computers Bad idea: making your employees bring in their own computers
And I'm not even saying that it would become official company policy. Once a manager sees the savings, the upgrade cycle becomes even more drawn out and employees have to bring in their own stuff by default, just to get anything done.
But if I could charge my company a rental fee for bringing in my own computer... that might change things a bit.:)
If anything, C++0x simplifies the learning curve for C++. The "syntactic sugar" adds those things that I've always wanted to do naturally.
Move constructors let me return vectors from a function (instead of passing by reference). I can also initialize most anything with {}'s. Automatic type inference simplifies life, especially with templates. Members can be initialized where they're declared. Constructors can be inherited.
And possibly the most important of all, I no longer have to put an ugly space between >>'s.
In the U.S., Unclassified is indeed a classification. It is a marking/classification stating that the information has no need of protection or release restrictions.
So, to summarize: Atheism isn't a religion, not collecting stamps isn't a hobby, but Unclassified is a classification.
Slashdot Mirror
I take my inspiration from A Christmas Story.
Give the audience a puzzle. A really, really hard puzzle. The final solution is mainly an ad for a sponsor, but hopefully something a bit more rewarding than "Be sure to drink your ovaltine."
To make it easier, give out hints periodically, where the hints have to do with other sponsors. Or just embed them in the ads somehow.
The idea is to make your audience want to see the ads. I'm sure I'm not the only one to think of this, and maybe I've just been living under a rock and someone's already done it.
You'd think ... but whoosh moments still happen on even the most common jokes:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1779630&cid=33499654
If I had to pick a day when a bunch of nerds would be home with nothing to do but watch a computer compete on a game show, today would probably be it.
It does make me wonder what the normal viewing audience is, though.
That's amazing. I've got the same mother's maiden name on my luggage!
As a child/teenager, back in the 70's, I used to read my father's copy of Playboy. When they had stories about top executives, I used to think, "Wow! Those must be really intelligent guys, to be running a big company like that!"
There, fixed that for you.
Er, maybe. Kinda hard to tell sometimes.
1) The Galaxy Tab's camera cost a whopping $8. Development costs should be minimal, as the iPhone has a camera.
2) Have you seen how much wasted space there is in an iPad? You could put a HUGE camera on there with no effect on battery life.
3) Ahhh.... that sounds much better.
Leaving out a camera was not done for any technical or cost reason, but to give them something significant to add in the next version. And since their competition was nil, it made sense. No tablet could ever be released anymore without a camera, except maybe ultra-low budget tablets.
Cameras and USB ports aren't absolutely essential to a tablet, but their presence will still be missed by buyers and reviewers.
You just know the religious are going to go insane over this. They'll attack the scientists doing the studies. They'll work something into the laws or education system.
But in reality, they shouldn't even be thinking about genetics. For example, alcoholism has a very clear genetic factor. Does that mean that an alcoholism is "natural" and should be acceptable behavior? Of course not.
People, especially the religious, need to have a similar perspective on homosexuals. So what if there's a genetic factor? If you think that homosexuality is a sin, then leave it at that. "Hate the sin, not the sinner." Realize that (at least some) homosexuals didn't "choose" it. That doesn't mean that you have to accept it!
By the same token, it's also a poor argument to claim that homosexuality is acceptable behavior by claiming it's "genetic." And yet, that's exactly what I hear when people talk about gay rights.
Stupid people on both sides are using weak, ignorant arguments, if you ask me.
It's better because one blames an anonymous third party while the other blames the user.
Even if it really is Microsoft's fault in some way (such as a failure to test ... boy does that sound familiar), at least they aren't blaming ME for their own mistakes.
Conversely, it's been my experience that Java programmers know more about the fundamentals than C# programmers do... because they've been forced to understand it.
Hahahaha!
Compared to a C/C++ programmer, most C# and Java programmers are so lacking in fundamentals it's appalling. Any differences between them are probably pretty minor in comparison.
Of course, some people think that's a good thing. But back in my day, we were forced to understand things ... and we LIKED IT!
That comment made me do a double-take. Normally the argument is:
It's been my experience that C/C++ programmers know more about the fundamentals than Java programmers do... because they've been forced to understand it.
Saying that C#
Finally! A way to shut down the RIAA!
Oh, wait. Nevermind. I forgot who I was talking about.
gravitational lensing that doesn't match the visible masses
This is a very interesting piece of evidence. It's not just that the gravity is stronger than we expect, is that the gravity is coming from locations where we don't see anything.
The obvious conclusion is that there is additional mass not producing any light for us to observe. But maybe our model for gravity is wrong. Occam's Razor points to the former, so let's start there with our investigations. If that doesn't pan out then we'll have to look for more exotic solutions.
Actually, they do form gravitational lenses, and we've measured this.
Basically, the process is to find a galaxy cluster, measure the lensing to determine where the mass is, and subtract out the mass of the individual galaxies. What you're left with is the location of the dark matter.
http://news.discovery.com/space/hubble-3d-map-universe-dark-matter.html
Where you're wrong is that there's no "central galaxy." Dark matter is still closely associated with normal matter (after all, they do attract each other gravitationally). I think maps like this have shown that most galaxies actually have a "halo" of dark matter surrounding them.
Of course, the shape of this halo can vary quite a bit:
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2007/17/
Wow! Are those gorgeous pictures or what!
Yeah, I debated on whether to include the "little or no" bit. We should probably ignore interactions due to "higher order loop effects" ... but he threw it in there, so I did too. Probably a mistake.
But my point holds: there are two kinds of dark matter: ordinary matter that we normally deal with (but not emitting much light) or something a bit more "exotic" than that (which doesn't even interact with light, much less emit any). It's basically the difference between MACHOs and WIMPs.
Don't nitpick took much: it still makes more sense than most other SF.
To be fair, there's two definitions of dark matter. One is as you said -- matter that has little or no interaction with photons.
The other is baryonic dark matter which is simply normal matter that isn't emitting many photons, so we don't see it. And if we can't see it, we can't include it in our tally of mass.
But, it seems that baryonic dark matter can only account for a small percentage of the total dark matter in the universe, so it's usually ignored.
The calculated mass of this body is about 1% of the Milky Way, or about 7x10^9 solar masses. The event horizon of said black hole would be about 20 billion kilometers.
The actual distance is about 260,000 light years away, or 2.5x10^18 kilometers.
And ... if I did the math right, the circle would be about .00165 arcsecond. Hubble is about .04 arcseconds for comparison. We need a telescope with about 25 times the angular resolution.
Feel free to check my math ... I probably made a mistake in there somewhere.
The point is, this would have to be a MASSIVE black hole ... but might actually be directly observable with future technology if we can manage a couple orders of magnitude improvement in angular resolution.
Say what?
First off, the GPP has a decent question. The largest supermassive black holes are on the order of 10^9 solar masses, about the same mass as what was calculated for this satellite galaxy. So, I suppose it's at least plausible that it's a single black hole, if unlikely.
But remember and repeat after me: a black hole has no more gravity than any other object of the same mass. As long as you stay away from the event horizon, that is. You need to rethink your first paragraph with that in mind.
So, how would we tell the difference? Well, an X-ray source from the same location would be a good clue that it's a black hole, which says that it's feeding off of something. You should also be able to tell from the gravitational lensing -- dark matter is incredibly diffuse compared to a black hole. It would still bend light, but not quite in the same way, especially considering the distances involved.
But what about a black circle in the sky? Well, the even horizon for such a black hole has the same diameter as the orbit of Pluto, if I remember right. Detectable, maybe, under the right conditions (but not by Hubble -- you'd need something with about 20x better resolution ... if I did the math right, which I probably didn't). But we have to capture it overlapping with some other body, such as a background galaxy. By then you'd be better off looking at the lensing effect, anyway. Here is a classic simulation of what I'm talking about.
Which renders the whole thing moot anyway. Why mess with allowing personal computers ... just use the 10-yr-old ones you already have!
The rationale there is usually to make sure they take care of the tools. My brother owned a house painting business. In that industry the workers buy their own brushes. And it makes sense: when he supplied the brushes, they got trashed within a job or two ... leaving them out, not cleaning them properly, and so on. It was unsustainable. I think it even translated to the tools he did supply (paint sprayers, for example), where they took better care of those tools as well.
But I'm not sure this translates well to computers. I don't even trust my IT department to do the maintenance on my work computer properly. Having people maintain their own computers would be even worse.
Depends on your point of view. To an employer, the idea looks tempting on paper, but the ultimate result could be a disaster.
As an employee, I would love to have the option of bringing in my own computer to make up for my employer's tight purse strings. And there's very few downsides.
Not that there aren't potential problems, of course. See my original post, for example. But I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea from the employee's perspective.
Good idea: letting your employees bring in their own computers
Bad idea: making your employees bring in their own computers
And I'm not even saying that it would become official company policy. Once a manager sees the savings, the upgrade cycle becomes even more drawn out and employees have to bring in their own stuff by default, just to get anything done.
But if I could charge my company a rental fee for bringing in my own computer ... that might change things a bit. :)
My thoughts exactly.
If anything, C++0x simplifies the learning curve for C++. The "syntactic sugar" adds those things that I've always wanted to do naturally.
Move constructors let me return vectors from a function (instead of passing by reference). I can also initialize most anything with {}'s. Automatic type inference simplifies life, especially with templates. Members can be initialized where they're declared. Constructors can be inherited.
And possibly the most important of all, I no longer have to put an ugly space between >>'s.
gets was officially deprecated in C99.
My user name seems appropriate here.
In the U.S., Unclassified is indeed a classification. It is a marking/classification stating that the information has no need of protection or release restrictions.
So, to summarize: Atheism isn't a religion, not collecting stamps isn't a hobby, but Unclassified is a classification.
My head hurts.