"All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?!"
Ah, good one;) Don't forget the Milky Way's peculiar velocity with respect to the cosmic microwave background (~625 km/s), which means that we are actually moving about 18 light-hours per year.
Why is it embarassing to live in a vast Galaxy? I could understand your embarassment if we had the capability to travel 70,000 light-years (diameter of Milky Way) and simply chose not to. However, since it's physically impossible for us to do it, why should we feel embarassed that we haven't?
Besides, why stop at the scale of the Galaxy? The Local Group is a mere megaparsec across, yet we've never traversed it! For crying out loud, that's our galactic backyard. And how can we know for sure if that redshift=6 quasar is really a supermassive black hole, if we haven't actually gone to check it out? It's only a few billion light-years away. Come on, mankind, get on it already! [/sarcasm]
It's a triumph that we have traveled 1 light-second from Earth. 1 light-second is a very long distance, on the scale of human endeavors.
What I don't understand is how it is financially still possible. Someone has to pay the bill for the used bandwidth/server usage..
Well, that's entirely the point. The spammers don't have to pay for it, the recipients' ISPs do. That's why so many people regard spamming as a criminal activity, and not merely annoying antisocial behavior. They are literally stealing bandwidth.
What's your point? I said there are 50 recorded meteor falls per year. This is not wrong, no matter how much you sigh about it.
This discussion is about the detrimental effects that metoer falls may have on human life, and what should be done to prevent such falls from occuring. Grandpappy post was suggesting a trillion-dollar program to shoot down meteor falls of the class in the linked article (i.e., VW-sized rocks). I pointed out that this idea was ridiculous, since such meteor falls are extremely rare, and even when they do occur, they almost never cause significant damage.
So, I hope you can appreciate that it doesn't matter at all if the Earth's surface intercepts 100 billion pebble-sized rocks per month, as these objects are completely irrelevant to the discussion. If you want statistics on the number of meteor falls per year that have any effect at all on humans (much less a significant, detrimental effect), a good first step is looking at how many of the bloody things we actually notice. That number is about 50 per year.
Re:Meteor strikes not that uncommon
on
Meteor Over Midwest
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Sorry, DC, I'm afraid I don't quite agree with your detective work there...
Meteor strikes like these are not as uncommon as one may think, it's just that the information is rarely released in such a public fashion. Who wants to release news that may create mass hysteria?
Meteor falls are quite rare, actually. There are typically about 50 recorded per year for the entire planet.
Do you really think that stories on meteor falls are being suppressed by the media? Really? I just can't believe that anyone would think that the media would not pounce on such a story. And to give as justification that they are worried about causing mass hysteria is just laughable. (A) the news media lives and breathes by ratings, and disaster stories create high ratings; (B) where is the "mass hysteria" that this event (which the Chicago Tribune so foolishly refused to suppress) caused? There isn't any, because people understand that these are rare events. So when they occur, they are regarded as an interesting novelty, not as a portend of coming doom.
With more public acknowledgement of the problem, we could develop something like the Patriot missile defense system for extraterrestrial bodies so things like this would not happen.
God, what a phenomenal waste of effort and money that would be. Who gives a damn about this class of meteor fall? Are you truly suggesting the government invest trillions so that some dude's bedroom mirror doesn't get broken by a falling rock? Get some perspective, man, there are far more dangerous things to worry about than falling VW-sized rocks.
Here's the story. Gilliam made the movie his way. The studio got scared, and refused to release it. Gilliam showed it at a film festival without their permission (Sundance I think?) and it took the big prize, but the studio still didn't want to release it. TG took out a full page ad in Variety that said "Dear [studio executive], when are you going to release my film, Brazil?".
The studio recut an ending without TG's participation. Totally changed the ending to be all fuzzy and happy. Ripped out nearly an hour of footage. Completely sanitized it of whimsy, substance, subtlety and meaning.
Fortunately, Gilliam's version was already released overseas and doing well at this point, so the studio caved, and went with his version in the US too. Their "Love Conquers All" version was only shown on TV, and is now included on the DVD. the "LCA" version sucks, but it's interesting to see what studios think a good movie is.
Uh, not to get all CBG on you, but you *do* realize that Gilliam wrote and directed it too, right?!!!
Sorry, but TG is my favorite director, and I can't just sit by while his role in this masterpiece is reduced to Animation/graphics, fer chrissake. That's exactly the sort of thing up with which I shall not put!
Well, I knew it as Spaceship as a boy, but IMDB seems to think it's called Creature Wasn't Nice, The, which doesn't quite have the same ring to it. As far as I know, my friend Jake and I are the only people in the free world that have seen this movie.
Anyway, this film is both moronic spoof and brilliant parody at the same time.
Want to know what life would really be like on a spaceship far from home with a crew of only five? How about a crew talent show to stave off the boredom! Featuring a dramatic reading of the log by Captain Jameson: "Monday....had breakfast. [long pause] Synthetic flapjacks!"
Tired of the same old man-eating aliens? How about a big red man-eating pile of goo that can only communicate via song-and-dance numbers?
And who could forget Dr. Starke, the Science Officer obsessed with scientific discovery, to the exclusion of basic awareness of his surroundings. When offered a slice of pie for dessert, he snaps, "Science is my pie! Curiosity, my sweet tooth!". When the computer informs him that he's discovered a previously uncharted planet, he exclaims: "they'll have to call it...the Starke Planet!". A perfect parody of the 1950's-era B sci-fi movie scientist, right down to the lab coat.
One of the big strengths of Free Software is that you can leverage the community for rapid development and bugfixing. If you've already developed the code under a closed-source, proprietary model, and it's been released long enough to sell 10^6 units, then much of the development is (presumably) already done. Plus, if development was open from day 1, the final codebase would tend to be less messy and obfuscated, IMHO.
Not that I don't welcome such a "late release" model for proprietary code, just thinking out loud...
Re:I'm willing to bet $$$ it will never work
on
5595 Days and Counting
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
You should really read about the system, before you denounce it as impossible and ridiculous with statements that demonstrate clearly that you don't understand the concept.
you still have to accelerate to orbital velocity after the lift, unless they plan to build it all the way out to the distance of a geosynchronous orbit.
They are going way past the geosynchronous point; they *have* to because the lift's center-of-mass has to be at the geosynchronous altitude.
Nothing is strong enough to support that kind of weight. With today's best engineering, they haven't even managed to build a building 1/2 of a mile high.
You shouldn't think of it in terms of a weight-bearing structure like a building. The lift ribbon will not need to support the weight of the whole system; on the contrary, centrifugal force will hold it aloft (i.e., the whole thing is effectively in orbit).
So, the material needs tensile strength, not weight-bearing capacity. Think carbon nanotubes, not "diamond beams".
But right now it's ridiculous and any venture capitalist who gives them money would have to be borderline retarded.
According to POPFile only 18% of my email messages are spam, but it's 46% when you take the file sizes into account. The total memory fraction would seem to be a more relevant measurement if you're an ISP concerned about spam's costs.
So, when they say 40%, is that by number of messages or total size?
Um, no. RF interference is not the same thing as quantum interference a la Young's double-slit experiment.
RF interference is just the confusion of two radio transmissions over similar frequencies. It's a macroscopic phenomenon. Like the parent post said, if you have a green object on a green background, it's hard to see the object. That doesn't mean the photons coming from object and background are actually interfering with each other at the QM level.
it's a stretch
on
Opencroquet
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The OS is a 3D environment running through the Squeak environment on top of another operating system.
OK, I didn't RTFA, but...if it runs on top of another OS, it can't really be called an OS itself, can it? I mean, win95 jokes aside, isn't it just a fancy GUI then?
You are correct, time on large radio telescopes is a precious resource. The decision of who gets to use a telescope is almost always left to a panel of experts called a Time Allocation Committee (TAC). Astronomers write proposals to use the telescope, and the TAC weighs them by scientific merit, awarding time to the best of the proposed projects.
So, apparently the TAC at Arecibo also thinks that a few nights for SETI are resources well spent.
Too bad for the U.S. government, because they opted to discontinue funding SETI in the 1990s. It is now a private, non-profit corporation using donations from such tech luminaries as both Hewlett and Packard, and Paul Allen.
So, even if the gummint *wanted* to squelch a SETI discovery, they wouldn't be able to, because it's totally out of their hands now.
I was pissed when congress cut SETI spending (the way it happened was a total farce), but I have to admit in hindsight, it's about the best thing that ever happened to them.
Well, you will be glad to hear that no tax money goes to support SETI. Zero public resources are spent on it.
Everyone that contributes to SETI, from Paul Allen to Team Lambchop, is spending their own resources of their own free will. They obviously think it's not a waste.
Slashdot Mirror
"All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?!"
MaestroSartori (age 8): "Daddy, why is the sky blue?"
M's Dad: "Oh, son. The answer to that question has no practical applications. Ask me about the commodities market instead."
It's not too late, Maestro!
Ah, good one ;) Don't forget the Milky Way's peculiar velocity with respect to the cosmic microwave background (~625 km/s), which means that we are actually moving about 18 light-hours per year.
Why is it embarassing to live in a vast Galaxy? I could understand your embarassment if we had the capability to travel 70,000 light-years (diameter of Milky Way) and simply chose not to. However, since it's physically impossible for us to do it, why should we feel embarassed that we haven't?
Besides, why stop at the scale of the Galaxy? The Local Group is a mere megaparsec across, yet we've never traversed it! For crying out loud, that's our galactic backyard. And how can we know for sure if that redshift=6 quasar is really a supermassive black hole, if we haven't actually gone to check it out? It's only a few billion light-years away. Come on, mankind, get on it already!
[/sarcasm]
It's a triumph that we have traveled 1 light-second from Earth. 1 light-second is a very long distance, on the scale of human endeavors.
What I don't understand is how it is financially still possible. Someone has to pay the bill for the used bandwidth/server usage..
Well, that's entirely the point. The spammers don't have to pay for it, the recipients' ISPs do. That's why so many people regard spamming as a criminal activity, and not merely annoying antisocial behavior. They are literally stealing bandwidth.
you sure about that?
What's your point? I said there are 50 recorded meteor falls per year. This is not wrong, no matter how much you sigh about it.
This discussion is about the detrimental effects that metoer falls may have on human life, and what should be done to prevent such falls from occuring. Grandpappy post was suggesting a trillion-dollar program to shoot down meteor falls of the class in the linked article (i.e., VW-sized rocks). I pointed out that this idea was ridiculous, since such meteor falls are extremely rare, and even when they do occur, they almost never cause significant damage.
So, I hope you can appreciate that it doesn't matter at all if the Earth's surface intercepts 100 billion pebble-sized rocks per month, as these objects are completely irrelevant to the discussion. If you want statistics on the number of meteor falls per year that have any effect at all on humans (much less a significant, detrimental effect), a good first step is looking at how many of the bloody things we actually notice. That number is about 50 per year.
Sorry, DC, I'm afraid I don't quite agree with your detective work there...
Meteor strikes like these are not as uncommon as one may think, it's just that the information is rarely released in such a public fashion. Who wants to release news that may create mass hysteria?
Meteor falls are quite rare, actually. There are typically about 50 recorded per year for the entire planet.
Do you really think that stories on meteor falls are being suppressed by the media? Really? I just can't believe that anyone would think that the media would not pounce on such a story. And to give as justification that they are worried about causing mass hysteria is just laughable. (A) the news media lives and breathes by ratings, and disaster stories create high ratings; (B) where is the "mass hysteria" that this event (which the Chicago Tribune so foolishly refused to suppress) caused? There isn't any, because people understand that these are rare events. So when they occur, they are regarded as an interesting novelty, not as a portend of coming doom.
With more public acknowledgement of the problem, we could develop something like the Patriot missile defense system for extraterrestrial bodies so things like this would not happen.
God, what a phenomenal waste of effort and money that would be. Who gives a damn about this class of meteor fall? Are you truly suggesting the government invest trillions so that some dude's bedroom mirror doesn't get broken by a falling rock? Get some perspective, man, there are far more dangerous things to worry about than falling VW-sized rocks.
So much for their "you get what you pay for" argument for commercial software...
"You don't give a $500 tip to the housekeeping! That's inappropriate!"
"They'll never catch me... because I'm fucking innocent."
Great, great movie. I love the whole Wes Anderson triumvirate; can't wait for number 4.
Here's the story. Gilliam made the movie his way. The studio got scared, and refused to release it. Gilliam showed it at a film festival without their permission (Sundance I think?) and it took the big prize, but the studio still didn't want to release it. TG took out a full page ad in Variety that said "Dear [studio executive], when are you going to release my film, Brazil?".
The studio recut an ending without TG's participation. Totally changed the ending to be all fuzzy and happy. Ripped out nearly an hour of footage. Completely sanitized it of whimsy, substance, subtlety and meaning.
Fortunately, Gilliam's version was already released overseas and doing well at this point, so the studio caved, and went with his version in the US too. Their "Love Conquers All" version was only shown on TV, and is now included on the DVD. the "LCA" version sucks, but it's interesting to see what studios think a good movie is.
Animation/graphics by Terry Gilliam
Uh, not to get all CBG on you, but you *do* realize that Gilliam wrote and directed it too, right?!!!
Sorry, but TG is my favorite director, and I can't just sit by while his role in this masterpiece is reduced to Animation/graphics, fer chrissake. That's exactly the sort of thing up with which I shall not put!
Well, I knew it as Spaceship as a boy, but IMDB seems to think it's called Creature Wasn't Nice, The, which doesn't quite have the same ring to it. As far as I know, my friend Jake and I are the only people in the free world that have seen this movie.
Anyway, this film is both moronic spoof and brilliant parody at the same time.
Want to know what life would really be like on a spaceship far from home with a crew of only five? How about a crew talent show to stave off the boredom! Featuring a dramatic reading of the log by Captain Jameson: "Monday....had breakfast. [long pause] Synthetic flapjacks!"
Tired of the same old man-eating aliens? How about a big red man-eating pile of goo that can only communicate via song-and-dance numbers?
And who could forget Dr. Starke, the Science Officer obsessed with scientific discovery, to the exclusion of basic awareness of his surroundings. When offered a slice of pie for dessert, he snaps, "Science is my pie! Curiosity, my sweet tooth!". When the computer informs him that he's discovered a previously uncharted planet, he exclaims: "they'll have to call it...the Starke Planet!". A perfect parody of the 1950's-era B sci-fi movie scientist, right down to the lab coat.
Bravo, Bruce Kimmel. Bravo.
I just love how the sentence "this discovery transcends known laws of physics" is immediately followed up by "it could lead to smaller cell phones"!
Ok, I don't actually love it. Quite the opposite, really.
One of the big strengths of Free Software is that you can leverage the community for rapid development and bugfixing. If you've already developed the code under a closed-source, proprietary model, and it's been released long enough to sell 10^6 units, then much of the development is (presumably) already done. Plus, if development was open from day 1, the final codebase would tend to be less messy and obfuscated, IMHO.
Not that I don't welcome such a "late release" model for proprietary code, just thinking out loud...
You should really read about the system, before you denounce it as impossible and ridiculous with statements that demonstrate clearly that you don't understand the concept.
you still have to accelerate to orbital velocity after the lift, unless they plan to build it all the way out to the distance of a geosynchronous orbit.
They are going way past the geosynchronous point; they *have* to because the lift's center-of-mass has to be at the geosynchronous altitude.
Nothing is strong enough to support that kind of weight. With today's best engineering, they haven't even managed to build a building 1/2 of a mile high.
You shouldn't think of it in terms of a weight-bearing structure like a building. The lift ribbon will not need to support the weight of the whole system; on the contrary, centrifugal force will hold it aloft (i.e., the whole thing is effectively in orbit).
So, the material needs tensile strength, not weight-bearing capacity. Think carbon nanotubes, not "diamond beams".
But right now it's ridiculous and any venture capitalist who gives them money would have to be borderline retarded.
Ignorance has a cure: RTFA
According to POPFile only 18% of my email messages are spam, but it's 46% when you take the file sizes into account. The total memory fraction would seem to be a more relevant measurement if you're an ISP concerned about spam's costs.
So, when they say 40%, is that by number of messages or total size?
Um, no. RF interference is not the same thing as quantum interference a la Young's double-slit experiment.
RF interference is just the confusion of two radio transmissions over similar frequencies. It's a macroscopic phenomenon. Like the parent post said, if you have a green object on a green background, it's hard to see the object. That doesn't mean the photons coming from object and background are actually interfering with each other at the QM level.
The OS is a 3D environment running through the Squeak environment on top of another operating system.
OK, I didn't RTFA, but...if it runs on top of another OS, it can't really be called an OS itself, can it? I mean, win95 jokes aside, isn't it just a fancy GUI then?
Sometimes that is true, but in this case, they will be making targeted follow-up observations of their strongest SETI signal candidates.
You are correct, time on large radio telescopes is a precious resource. The decision of who gets to use a telescope is almost always left to a panel of experts called a Time Allocation Committee (TAC). Astronomers write proposals to use the telescope, and the TAC weighs them by scientific merit, awarding time to the best of the proposed projects.
So, apparently the TAC at Arecibo also thinks that a few nights for SETI are resources well spent.
Too bad for the U.S. government, because they opted to discontinue funding SETI in the 1990s. It is now a private, non-profit corporation using donations from such tech luminaries as both Hewlett and Packard, and Paul Allen.
So, even if the gummint *wanted* to squelch a SETI discovery, they wouldn't be able to, because it's totally out of their hands now.
I was pissed when congress cut SETI spending (the way it happened was a total farce), but I have to admit in hindsight, it's about the best thing that ever happened to them.
How about this? You spend your spare cycles on something you think is important, and I'll do the same.
Sound good? Alllllllllrighty then.
Well, you will be glad to hear that no tax money goes to support SETI. Zero public resources are spent on it.
Everyone that contributes to SETI, from Paul Allen to Team Lambchop, is spending their own resources of their own free will. They obviously think it's not a waste.
So, what exactly are you complaining about?
Run like your thong is on fire....
I am so very, very glad I was not drinking anything when I read that. Thanks!