The day we adopt a closed-source electronic voting system is the day that US democracy, sick after decades of fighting the two cancers of corporate influence and voter apathy, is finally murdered in its hospital bed.
Ahem, like I said, the definition of a Day I was using was the average interval between successive solar transits in 1820.
Where do you think they got the 9,192,631,770 periods from when defining the atomic second? That's right: it's the number of Cesium 133 periods that makes a second equal to the 1/84600th part of one Day (as defined in terms of the average interval between successive solar transits in 1820).
This is a good thing, considering that an Earth day is a bit less than 24 hours long.
Actually, the current interval between successive solar transits is a bit longer than 24 hours. Better read that USNO page again.
While useful for writing high school term papers, the definition from Merriam-Webster is not the ultimate source in science.
Ah, a thinly veiled insult. How nice. Can't we just exchange pedantries without stooping to such sophmoronics? Anyway, your insult is poorly motivated, seeing as I actually pointed you to the USNO link first, whose credentials should be more than adequate for the present conversation.
There's actually nothing wrong with saying "Earth hours". The fundamental unit of time is a "Day"; the time it takes between two successive transits of the Sun. (Actually, if you want to get technical, a Day is really defined as the average time between successive solar transits for a particular year: 1820). A second is *defined* to be the 1/86,400th part of a Day, a minute is *defined* to be 60 seconds, and an Hour is *defined* to be 60 minutes. The point is, they are all tied to the length of an Earth-Day, so using "Hours" on Mars is just as arbitrary as using "Days" on Mars.
Well, not quite. M 31 has stars that are just as old as our oldest stars, it just has the younger stars also in its halo, which we do not have. All of our younger stars (younger than say, 10 Gyr) are in the disk.
Many galaxy formation models basically assume this fact: that the halo formed first and all at once, and then the gas that would become the disk collapsed down and started forming stars later, and at a more continuous pace. These models will now need to be reconsidered.
Afraid I don't quite agree with your detective work, there:)
Your mistake is the assumption that this image is representative of the entire sky's stellar density. HST was pointed near the Andromeda Galaxy for this image; almost all of the stars you are seeing are in the Andromeda Galaxy. Most points on the sky will have a much lower density of stars. See, for example, the Hubble Deep Field, which was purposely pointed at an "empty" region of sky, and which contains only a handful of stars.
You're right, if you take deepest image to mean "image of most distant objects" instead of "faintest objects". However, the Universe is 13.7 Gyr old, not 20 Gyr.
Here's your deepest image then: http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_ig/020598/020598 _ilc_64 0.jpg
That's from the recent WMAP mission, which mapped the cosmic microwave background in exquisite detail, pinpointing the age of the Universe (and many other cosmological parameters) to high precision. You're looking at an all-sky image of the Universe as it looked when it was 100,000 years old, and became transparent for the first time. IOW, you are literally seeing the fires of creation.
Actually, the really unique thing about this image is the stellar populations. The stars you see in the image are almost all in the Andromeda galaxy (aka M 31), seen here.
M 31 is 2.2 million light-years away. This is the galaxy that Hubble originally resolved into stars, thereby settling the Shapley-Curtis debate on the true scale of the Universe. However, the stars Hubble saw were the very brightest supergiants in M 31. In this HST image, we see stars 2 magnitudes fainter than the ancient main-sequence turn-off; i.e., stars which are intrinsically fainter than our Sun! This lets us learn a lot about the ages and chemical composition of M 31's halo stars, which turn out to be quite different from the stars in our halo (our halo is entirely composed of ancient, metal-poor stars; M 31's halo contains stars that are only 6 Gyr old, and much more metal-rich than our halo).
I heard Tom Brown give a talk on this work last week; very cool stuff.
3.4 days is the effective exposure time, from stacking many shorter exposures. If HST integrated for 3.4 days without reading out the CCD, the entire chip would be saturated with cosmic rays, not to mention the fact that the Earth is typically in the way for half the orbit(*), limiting individual exposure times to about an hour or so.
(*) except for a small patch of sky called the CVZ: continuously visible zone
BTW, if you're keeping score at home, 30th magnitude is 1 trillion times fainter than the human eye can see!
[*shameless plug* Tom Brown is using my thesis code to analyze these data:) ]
You seem to be suffering from the misconception that Linux is some kind of business "product" which must be "marketed" to "customers". Please disabuse yourself of this notion. Linus chose the fat penguin logo because it was cute and funny. He doesn't give a dang if it makes the project seem less "professional", and neither do most of the rest of us penguinistas.
If some company (redhat, lindows, libranet, suse) wants to package and sell the work of the community to their customers, then the marketing of Linux is their problem; don't try to foist it off on us, because we could not care less.
In short, Linux is not a business! So don't expect us to behave like businesspeople.
writing software for free might be a coder pride thing, but folks, vanity don't pay the rent or the groceries. Unless you're independently wealthy, you have to be doing something to pay for the pork and beans.
Hobby: "An activity or interest pursued outside one's regular occupation and engaged in primarily for pleasure."
Nothing there about needing to be independently wealthy to have one;)
Aw, twitter, that hursts, man. Why stoop so low? You may be able to call my parent post a rant, but really, were my other two posts in any way rant-like? FYI, I did read the article (which you already knew of course; otherwise how would I know about the odd word-counting?), and I still don't see what the point is in counting how many words are spent on "users rights" in a license.
If you call me an ass again for no reason, I don't think we can be friends anymore.:( *sniff*
Hmm, the 'real' phrase is pretty ambiguous, especially for a license. Is the implication that MS is warning the user that the software isn't fit for those purposes? Or is it still meant as a restriction on what MS wants their software used for?
GPL'd software is much better than leasing. It's more like someone has an endless supply of self-replicating cars and is giving them away to anyone who will agree not to lock theirs up in a garage, and let anyone who asks get a copy of their car. Hmm, this illustrates the problems with equating software with material objects!
What's the deal with the study saying something like "43.9% of the MS EULA deals with restricting user's rights, while only 22.1% of the GPL is used for that topic". What is that based on, word count? Ridiculous(*)!
Why not just report what the licenses actually say; what is one supposed to glean from how many words they use saying it?
(*: Note, fellow slashdotters; this is the one and only way to spell the word 'ridiculous'. Thank you. Don't even get me started on 'loose'/'lose'...;)
Hmm, a lot of the posts seem to be missing a big point.
A good metric for "success" in an OSS project must be whether the developers have fun hacking on it. Even Linus has said repeatedly that he made the kernel "just for the fun of it".
Most of the projects are hobbies, and the point of a hobby is to provide an interesting diversion for the hobbyist. If thousands of people get to enjoy a web browser/OS kernel/game/whatever as a side effect of the hobby, well that's just dandy. But if it isn't a commercial product, then who cares about market share, step-3-Profit!, or any of that other nonsense?
I thought that the baseline of a telescope array was more important than the collecting area - or is that just when you work in the visible wavelenghts?
The baseline is more important if angular resolution is what you are after. If you just want to detect very faint signals, then you want the biggest collecting area that you can afford. In the case of SETI, angular resolution is not required, they just want to get the signal.
The wavelength doesn't enter into it, other than the fact that interferometry is insanely difficult for optical wavelengths (because you have to combine the optical paths from the different telescopes with a precision that is a small fraction of the photons' wavelength). We'll probably never see a working optical LB interferometer in our lifetimes; near infrared seems to be the practical limit.
Slashdot Mirror
The day we adopt a closed-source electronic voting system is the day that US democracy, sick after decades of fighting the two cancers of corporate influence and voter apathy, is finally murdered in its hospital bed.
Will anyone outside Fort Slashdot notice?
I think the party/rave scene was also meant to bbe a primal expression of the utter humanity of Zion, a kind of defiant anti-machinism.
How many times are you going to repost exact copies of other people's stuff? That's precisely the sort of karma whorism up with which I shall not put!
No, because most OSS developers are not in competition with Microsoft, or anyone else for that matter.
Celestia is extremely cool. :)
I haven't tried Stellarium, thanks for the tip.
ding, ding! we have a winner. :)
Ahem, like I said, the definition of a Day I was using was the average interval between successive solar transits in 1820.
Where do you think they got the 9,192,631,770 periods from when defining the atomic second? That's right: it's the number of Cesium 133 periods that makes a second equal to the 1/84600th part of one Day (as defined in terms of the average interval between successive solar transits in 1820).
This is a good thing, considering that an Earth day is a bit less than 24 hours long.
Actually, the current interval between successive solar transits is a bit longer than 24 hours. Better read that USNO page again.
While useful for writing high school term papers, the definition from Merriam-Webster is not the ultimate source in science.
Ah, a thinly veiled insult. How nice. Can't we just exchange pedantries without stooping to such sophmoronics? Anyway, your insult is poorly motivated, seeing as I actually pointed you to the USNO link first, whose credentials should be more than adequate for the present conversation.
There's actually nothing wrong with saying "Earth hours". The fundamental unit of time is a "Day"; the time it takes between two successive transits of the Sun. (Actually, if you want to get technical, a Day is really defined as the average time between successive solar transits for a particular year: 1820). A second is *defined* to be the 1/86,400th part of a Day, a minute is *defined* to be 60 seconds, and an Hour is *defined* to be 60 minutes. The point is, they are all tied to the length of an Earth-Day, so using "Hours" on Mars is just as arbitrary as using "Days" on Mars.
Still not convinced? Merriam-Webster defines Hour as "the 24th part of a day", as does dictionary.com.
Well, not quite. M 31 has stars that are just as old as our oldest stars, it just has the younger stars also in its halo, which we do not have. All of our younger stars (younger than say, 10 Gyr) are in the disk.
Many galaxy formation models basically assume this fact: that the halo formed first and all at once, and then the gas that would become the disk collapsed down and started forming stars later, and at a more continuous pace. These models will now need to be reconsidered.
Afraid I don't quite agree with your detective work, there :)
Your mistake is the assumption that this image is representative of the entire sky's stellar density. HST was pointed near the Andromeda Galaxy for this image; almost all of the stars you are seeing are in the Andromeda Galaxy. Most points on the sky will have a much lower density of stars. See, for example, the Hubble Deep Field, which was purposely pointed at an "empty" region of sky, and which contains only a handful of stars.
maybe she likes to listen to music while working.
You're right, if you take deepest image to mean "image of most distant objects" instead of "faintest objects". However, the Universe is 13.7 Gyr old, not 20 Gyr.
8 _ilc_64 0.jpg
Here's your deepest image then:
http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_ig/020598/02059
That's from the recent WMAP mission, which mapped the cosmic microwave background in exquisite detail, pinpointing the age of the Universe (and many other cosmological parameters) to high precision. You're looking at an all-sky image of the Universe as it looked when it was 100,000 years old, and became transparent for the first time. IOW, you are literally seeing the fires of creation.
Actually, the really unique thing about this image is the stellar populations. The stars you see in the image are almost all in the Andromeda galaxy (aka M 31), seen here.
M 31 is 2.2 million light-years away. This is the galaxy that Hubble originally resolved into stars, thereby settling the Shapley-Curtis debate on the true scale of the Universe. However, the stars Hubble saw were the very brightest supergiants in M 31. In this HST image, we see stars 2 magnitudes fainter than the ancient main-sequence turn-off; i.e., stars which are intrinsically fainter than our Sun! This lets us learn a lot about the ages and chemical composition of M 31's halo stars, which turn out to be quite different from the stars in our halo (our halo is entirely composed of ancient, metal-poor stars; M 31's halo contains stars that are only 6 Gyr old, and much more metal-rich than our halo).
I heard Tom Brown give a talk on this work last week; very cool stuff.
3.4 days is the effective exposure time, from stacking many shorter exposures. If HST integrated for 3.4 days without reading out the CCD, the entire chip would be saturated with cosmic rays, not to mention the fact that the Earth is typically in the way for half the orbit(*), limiting individual exposure times to about an hour or so.
:) ]
(*) except for a small patch of sky called the CVZ: continuously visible zone
BTW, if you're keeping score at home, 30th magnitude is 1 trillion times fainter than the human eye can see!
[*shameless plug* Tom Brown is using my thesis code to analyze these data
You seem to be suffering from the misconception that Linux is some kind of business "product" which must be "marketed" to "customers". Please disabuse yourself of this notion. Linus chose the fat penguin logo because it was cute and funny. He doesn't give a dang if it makes the project seem less "professional", and neither do most of the rest of us penguinistas.
If some company (redhat, lindows, libranet, suse) wants to package and sell the work of the community to their customers, then the marketing of Linux is their problem; don't try to foist it off on us, because we could not care less.
In short, Linux is not a business! So don't expect us to behave like businesspeople.
heh...DLoP, that's funny :)
here
Looks like this will bring a tighter focus on mac gaming too, finally! All you PC-ers, prepare to get fragged!!
writing software for free might be a coder pride thing, but folks, vanity don't pay the rent or the groceries. Unless you're independently wealthy, you have to be doing something to pay for the pork and beans.
;)
Hobby: "An activity or interest pursued outside one's regular occupation and engaged in primarily for pleasure."
Nothing there about needing to be independently wealthy to have one
Why not read the article and see, ass?
:( *sniff*
Aw, twitter, that hursts, man. Why stoop so low? You may be able to call my parent post a rant, but really, were my other two posts in any way rant-like? FYI, I did read the article (which you already knew of course; otherwise how would I know about the odd word-counting?), and I still don't see what the point is in counting how many words are spent on "users rights" in a license.
If you call me an ass again for no reason, I don't think we can be friends anymore.
Hmm, the 'real' phrase is pretty ambiguous, especially for a license. Is the implication that MS is warning the user that the software isn't fit for those purposes? Or is it still meant as a restriction on what MS wants their software used for?
Hey Anthony,
:)]
GPL'd software is much better than leasing. It's more like someone has an endless supply of self-replicating cars and is giving them away to anyone who will agree not to lock theirs up in a garage, and let anyone who asks get a copy of their car. Hmm, this illustrates the problems with equating software with material objects!
[This post somewhat inspired by Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line"...but his analogy is much better
What's the deal with the study saying something like "43.9% of the MS EULA deals with restricting user's rights, while only 22.1% of the GPL is used for that topic". What is that based on, word count? Ridiculous(*)!
;)
Why not just report what the licenses actually say; what is one supposed to glean from how many words they use
saying it?
(*: Note, fellow slashdotters; this is the one and only way to spell the word 'ridiculous'. Thank you. Don't even get me started on 'loose'/'lose'...
I tend to prefer neutral software (which invariably uses GTK2...)
so, neutral in what sense then?
Hmm, a lot of the posts seem to be missing a big point.
A good metric for "success" in an OSS project must be whether the developers have fun hacking on it. Even Linus has said repeatedly that he made the kernel "just for the fun of it".
Most of the projects are hobbies, and the point of a hobby is to provide an interesting diversion for the hobbyist. If thousands of people get to enjoy a web browser/OS kernel/game/whatever as a side effect of the hobby, well that's just dandy. But if it isn't a commercial product, then who cares about market share, step-3-Profit!, or any of that other nonsense?
I thought that the baseline of a telescope array was more important than the collecting area - or is that just when you work in the visible wavelenghts?
The baseline is more important if angular resolution is what you are after. If you just want to detect very faint signals, then you want the biggest collecting area that you can afford. In the case of SETI, angular resolution is not required, they just want to get the signal.
The wavelength doesn't enter into it, other than the fact that interferometry is insanely difficult for optical wavelengths (because you have to combine the optical paths from the different telescopes with a precision that is a small fraction of the photons' wavelength). We'll probably never see a working optical LB interferometer in our lifetimes; near infrared seems to be the practical limit.