The last time epicycles had a go
around, they were trying to use them as proof that the Earth was the center of
the universe...
No, that's a myth. The myth has been uncritcally accepted by a huge number of historians of science and scientists, including, and perhaps most importantly, by Thomas Kuhn. It's still a myth, and it was in fact completely debunked by Owen Gingerich 30 years ago. He has been fighting it ever since, but it dies slowly.
The point is, they never improved the observations, so there were no need to improve the model. Gingerich recomputed the Alfonsine Tables, and showed that they were based on a purely Ptolemaic model, even the input parameters were almost identical to the ones used by Ptolemy himself.
According to the article, this limit should be at about 13
Jupiter masses, and now there is a planet or a brown dwarf or something with 17
Jupiter masses,
As was pointed out to me in a different thread, this is wrong. Hope that taught you an important lesson, don't believe everything you read on/.!:-)
A body must be about 75 times as massive as Jupiter
for a star to be born.
Really? walking over to bookshelf, starting to look through notes, I'm sure I did this as an exercise years ago. Damn, you're right, my answer then was 84 Jupiter masses.
Why would it be frightening? I would say if it proves to be true it merely exposes
our current theories as being false.
I agree. It's very unfortunate to put it that way. But, what the heck, astronomers need media attention too, you know!;-)
or the
analysis on the way the bee flies is incorrect.
Yep. It's simply a matter (in this case), that you can't model a bumble bee with rigid wings.... If you do that, you come out with the wrong answer, not surprisingly....:-)
Well, yeah, but the distinction between a planet and a brown dwarf is among the many things in astronomy that is fuzzy.
So the question is not whether it is a planet or a brown dwarf or whatever, but why the hell fusion didn't start and form a star when you've got such a massive object? In other words, when you expect that the largest object that hasn't sustained fusion is 13 Jupiter masses, how come we see an object with 17 Jupiter masses that doesn't have sustained fusion.
Well, the problem is that when a body exceeds a certain mass, it should, according to current theories be so dense and so hot in the center, hydrogen "ignites" and fusion processes start, thus forming a star. If this doesn't happen, it becomes a socalled "brown dwarf". According to the article, this limit should be at about 13 Jupiter masses, and now there is a planet or a brown dwarf or something with 17 Jupiter masses, so something is wrong with our understanding.
In light of that dark matter is one of the most interesting subjects in astronomy, this could be interesting.
Does anybody remember how the first neutron starts got named LGM-number?
Astronomers heard the periodic radio source and thought that it was a
transmission from an alien source - hence, Little Green Men.
She never really thought it was an intelligent source, she was only hoping to be modded up as funny!:-)
Sickening. We won't have any real improvements in browsers for a couple years
yet at their snail's pace.
Waitaminute! SVG is a Candidate Recommendation, which means, they are actually waiting for implementations to be non-sucky. So you just write code instead of rant here!
Well, I'm not really a programmer, I do some coding once in a while, and had a course or two. Anyway, this guy seems to make a big point that OOP is difficult to learn. Well, I really never had a class without OOP, I attempted some hacking before I knew OOP, but really, it isn't more difficult to learn than any other style of programming, is it? At least, I found it pretty easy.
There is a lot of sucky OOP support out there. IDL is really bad. R on the other hand, has some very simple OOP support, but it is certainly very nice, and makes the job done very nicely. I haven't really gotten the hang of the Perl OOP stuff, but then, my Perl stuff isn't really sophiscated.
Sure, there is! Sound is just pressure waves in gas, so if there is a gas, and there are waves in it, there is sound. The only place there is no sound at all, is if you've got a perfect vacuum, but I haven't seen a lot of those lately.;-)
Now, audible sound is a completely different matter.:-)
I'm not quite sure what these guys have done. Apparently, they've converted radio waves, and you are right, it is not necessarily meaningful, and indeed in most cases it is completely meaningless,
to convert radio waves (electromagnetic radiation) to sound waves (pressure waves in gas) and call it the "Sound of Space". If it had been gravtiational radiation, it would have been more fun.
It could be meaningful (at least a bit), if the radio waves had been created by some pressure waves in gas, so that the radio waves resemble the original pressure waves, and many such processes are imagineable.
Now this is far from clear to me from the link, but isn't this the case here: That the radio waves have been created by pressure waves in the plasma, and so when the radio waves are converted to sound, it shares characteristics with the original pressure waves? It might not be that bad....:-)
C'mon, take yourself out of your shoes as submitter of this story and check out
the Slashdot home page.
OK. You know, given previous posts on/., I was pretty sure they were going to post this story, so I rushed too much. I was karma whoring, okay? Everybody does this!;-) Seriously, I'm going to take your critizism into account. Besides, I'm up to 50 now, so why should I be karma whoring anymore?:-)
pam logo, headline about spammers, saying they were
"jailed for two years after sending 50 e-mails." That's about as accurate as saying
they were "jailed for two years after eating at Denny's that morning" —
both are factually true, but neither shows any cause and effect: they were jailed
for two years because they were running a scam, not because they spammed
people.
OK, but it a bit more relevant than that. Quite a lot of my spam, and that's several a day,
are of the same nature, I'm pretty sure you would see a majority of spammers locked up.
Not that I like jails.
I don't like getting
spammed, but for people around here to applaud jailtime for someone just because
having to delete a few emails is an inconvenience, while bemoaning all these
other "freedoms" that they supposedly have taken away from them all the time,
well it just seems pretty hypocritical.
You have obviously not beern spammed very hard. At least you haven't seen spammers destroy communities that are easy to spam because they have to be open, that you have built with years of effort. It's not about deleting a few e-mails anymore, I have very reliable filters that can do that. If spammers have their way, they will make e-mail useless for everyone within a few years, that's what I'm fighting.
I mean, my parents have a very low net profile, contrary to me, but for them, the signal to noise ratio is allready approaching the level where e-mail is just about useless, and all they get is American spam, scams, porn, MLM, and so on.
I find the idea of very dark galaxies appealing. For instance you have the binary quasar 2345+007, which can be a gravitational lens. If it is a gravitational lens, the lensing object is very dark, and it is also very massive. There has been some reports that a lensing galaxy has been seen, but no generally accepted conclusion has been drawn as to the nature of this quasar. So, this is exciting stuff!
They keep the source closed so a few evil people don't figure out how to cheat and
start sending them crap data, ruining the scientific aspect of it.
Yep, that's the FAQ answer. So what happened in the real world? Some kid decided the client sucks, he writes his own client that's three times faster but othervice identical, so they can't see what results have been produced by their client and what's produced by his client.
So, there is really no difference in this aspect in keeping source open or closed.
It is however not very likely this would have happened if they opened the source, since anybody could produce optimized clients and sent it back to the project. Besides, any strong positives would have to be confirmed anyway, so it's no rational argument. The only real problem is if false clients would return a large number of false results (negative or positive, especially positives), but that may with closed source as well as open source, but I thought malicious users are more likely to attack closed source models?
Finally, science is supposed to be open, so before they publish, they should open.
Security through obscurity isn't very good either, but it does
discourage the script kiddies from trying more.
They do? Admittedly, I haven't done any research on th etopic, but aren't script kiddies more likely to attack closed models than open models?
Well, I'm Norwegian, and I was about to post a note saying the same thing....:-) I have never seen a really upset finn, it's "shit does happen, so there is no reason to be upset about it".:-)
Oh, actually, Bill has always liked standards, as long as he may dictate them and maintain a reasonable level of control of who is using them... At least that was the message of his recent bizniz book.
Yep, if I can't get the source and compile it myself, I'm not going to run it.
I can't really see any rational argument for keeping these sources closed, if those who work on them just realize that, I'm prefectly fine with it, and I'll join whatever project.
BTW, I crunched a lot fo units for SETI@home in the beginning, I think the idea is great. However, they obviously don't need my EV6 CPU, and they seem to have a hard time acquiring a clue about opening the source, so I quit.
Well, it was a story about this girl in Norway who got fired by a dotcom because she didn't want to go out and drink beer with the guys every night. She actually had a life, the rest of the firm obviously didn't, they were jealous of course, so they fired her. She got a new job instantly and they got some very bad press....
It's just capitalism. If there's no demand for an internet service with a rediculous
TOS, it will change or go out of business.
How many people will realize that they are being screwed and change ISP? 2? The point being that most consumers are completely ignorant about the services they buy, and that ignorance drives business. That ignorance makes every ISP design a TOS that enables them to suck as much as they can out of the consumers, and most consumers will never realize it. And since "most consumers" is the biggest market, your capitalism doesn't work.
I agree. All that's in the conventional help files are so obvious that it is of no help at all. If you've got any real trouble, I have seldom found any good help there.
You're missing the point entirely, as others have pointed out, XHTML Basic != XHTML.
As for two streams, it's a very Bad Idea [tm], because the number of possible User Agents and uses are infinite, so you would have an infinite number of streams. Or being constrained to a small number of streams like we now are. I hate it.
Can't say that I agree with the logic. I have a bottle of elephant repellant here in
my cube. There are no elephants around so it must be working.
No, you're right, it's bullshit.
You can try it for yourself, create a throwaway account (make sure it's hard-to-guess so that you won't have dictionary attacks) and reply to a "remove list". I can tell you, spammers won't care if you weren't on the list, they'll make sure you get spam. I tried this once, and got about 15 spams within a week.
This article is simply not very well written, I don't think it is a Lumber Cartel [tinlc] Agent behind it.
I'll just repeat: Never respond to any e-mail addresses you find in spam!. Either, it's someone you certainly don't want to give any details to, or it might well be an innocent third party, who you can bet is pretty deep into trouble allready. It has happened to me a few times. I even had to close a mailing list with a community that had taken my a few years to build.
There you have both examples of how it should be done and how it shouldn't be done.
Teachers should realize that when there is a bright kid in the class, they should be given responsibility and challenges. I was lucky enough to get it that way all through school, but it seems it's an exception rather than a rule.
Slashdot Mirror
No, that's a myth. The myth has been uncritcally accepted by a huge number of historians of science and scientists, including, and perhaps most importantly, by Thomas Kuhn. It's still a myth, and it was in fact completely debunked by Owen Gingerich 30 years ago. He has been fighting it ever since, but it dies slowly.
The point is, they never improved the observations, so there were no need to improve the model. Gingerich recomputed the Alfonsine Tables, and showed that they were based on a purely Ptolemaic model, even the input parameters were almost identical to the ones used by Ptolemy himself.
I wrote a paper titled "Some popular myths about the history of astronomy" (214 kB, gzipped Postscript) where I attempt to sum up debunking done of three popular myths.
As was pointed out to me in a different thread, this is wrong. Hope that taught you an important lesson, don't believe everything you read on /.! :-)
Really? walking over to bookshelf, starting to look through notes, I'm sure I did this as an exercise years ago. Damn, you're right, my answer then was 84 Jupiter masses.
I agree. It's very unfortunate to put it that way. But, what the heck, astronomers need media attention too, you know! ;-)
Yep. It's simply a matter (in this case), that you can't model a bumble bee with rigid wings.... If you do that, you come out with the wrong answer, not surprisingly.... :-)
So the question is not whether it is a planet or a brown dwarf or whatever, but why the hell fusion didn't start and form a star when you've got such a massive object? In other words, when you expect that the largest object that hasn't sustained fusion is 13 Jupiter masses, how come we see an object with 17 Jupiter masses that doesn't have sustained fusion.
In light of that dark matter is one of the most interesting subjects in astronomy, this could be interesting.
She never really thought it was an intelligent source, she was only hoping to be modded up as funny! :-)
Waitaminute! SVG is a Candidate Recommendation, which means, they are actually waiting for implementations to be non-sucky. So you just write code instead of rant here!
There is a lot of sucky OOP support out there. IDL is really bad. R on the other hand, has some very simple OOP support, but it is certainly very nice, and makes the job done very nicely. I haven't really gotten the hang of the Perl OOP stuff, but then, my Perl stuff isn't really sophiscated.
Well, they tried that once, and M$ and Netscape took over the lead making a bunch of crap. I think it is probably a good idea that W3C is moving fast.
Sure, there is! Sound is just pressure waves in gas, so if there is a gas, and there are waves in it, there is sound. The only place there is no sound at all, is if you've got a perfect vacuum, but I haven't seen a lot of those lately. ;-)
Now, audible sound is a completely different matter. :-)
I'm not quite sure what these guys have done. Apparently, they've converted radio waves, and you are right, it is not necessarily meaningful, and indeed in most cases it is completely meaningless, to convert radio waves (electromagnetic radiation) to sound waves (pressure waves in gas) and call it the "Sound of Space". If it had been gravtiational radiation, it would have been more fun.
It could be meaningful (at least a bit), if the radio waves had been created by some pressure waves in gas, so that the radio waves resemble the original pressure waves, and many such processes are imagineable.
Now this is far from clear to me from the link, but isn't this the case here: That the radio waves have been created by pressure waves in the plasma, and so when the radio waves are converted to sound, it shares characteristics with the original pressure waves? It might not be that bad.... :-)
OK. You know, given previous posts on /., I was pretty sure they were going to post this story, so I rushed too much. I was karma whoring, okay? Everybody does this! ;-) Seriously, I'm going to take your critizism into account. Besides, I'm up to 50 now, so why should I be karma whoring anymore? :-)
OK, but it a bit more relevant than that. Quite a lot of my spam, and that's several a day, are of the same nature, I'm pretty sure you would see a majority of spammers locked up.
Not that I like jails.
You have obviously not beern spammed very hard. At least you haven't seen spammers destroy communities that are easy to spam because they have to be open, that you have built with years of effort. It's not about deleting a few e-mails anymore, I have very reliable filters that can do that. If spammers have their way, they will make e-mail useless for everyone within a few years, that's what I'm fighting.
I mean, my parents have a very low net profile, contrary to me, but for them, the signal to noise ratio is allready approaching the level where e-mail is just about useless, and all they get is American spam, scams, porn, MLM, and so on.
I find the idea of very dark galaxies appealing. For instance you have the binary quasar 2345+007, which can be a gravitational lens. If it is a gravitational lens, the lensing object is very dark, and it is also very massive. There has been some reports that a lensing galaxy has been seen, but no generally accepted conclusion has been drawn as to the nature of this quasar. So, this is exciting stuff!
Yep, that's the FAQ answer. So what happened in the real world? Some kid decided the client sucks, he writes his own client that's three times faster but othervice identical, so they can't see what results have been produced by their client and what's produced by his client.
So, there is really no difference in this aspect in keeping source open or closed. It is however not very likely this would have happened if they opened the source, since anybody could produce optimized clients and sent it back to the project. Besides, any strong positives would have to be confirmed anyway, so it's no rational argument. The only real problem is if false clients would return a large number of false results (negative or positive, especially positives), but that may with closed source as well as open source, but I thought malicious users are more likely to attack closed source models? Finally, science is supposed to be open, so before they publish, they should open.
They do? Admittedly, I haven't done any research on th etopic, but aren't script kiddies more likely to attack closed models than open models?
Well, I'm Norwegian, and I was about to post a note saying the same thing.... :-) I have never seen a really upset finn, it's "shit does happen, so there is no reason to be upset about it". :-)
Oh, actually, Bill has always liked standards, as long as he may dictate them and maintain a reasonable level of control of who is using them... At least that was the message of his recent bizniz book.
I can't really see any rational argument for keeping these sources closed, if those who work on them just realize that, I'm prefectly fine with it, and I'll join whatever project.
BTW, I crunched a lot fo units for SETI@home in the beginning, I think the idea is great. However, they obviously don't need my EV6 CPU, and they seem to have a hard time acquiring a clue about opening the source, so I quit.
Well, it was a story about this girl in Norway who got fired by a dotcom because she didn't want to go out and drink beer with the guys every night. She actually had a life, the rest of the firm obviously didn't, they were jealous of course, so they fired her. She got a new job instantly and they got some very bad press....
OK, perhaps I should have posted what I posted in news.admin.net-abuse.email:
I'll nevertheless insist that what is relevant in this context is that they were spammers, and that they advertized their scam by mass e-mail.
True. And I never wrote they were jailed for spamming.
However, most of my spam is of the same sort these two spammers were pushing, so I'd say it is a big deal. Or at least a deal.
How many people will realize that they are being screwed and change ISP? 2? The point being that most consumers are completely ignorant about the services they buy, and that ignorance drives business. That ignorance makes every ISP design a TOS that enables them to suck as much as they can out of the consumers, and most consumers will never realize it. And since "most consumers" is the biggest market, your capitalism doesn't work.
I agree. All that's in the conventional help files are so obvious that it is of no help at all. If you've got any real trouble, I have seldom found any good help there.
As for two streams, it's a very Bad Idea [tm], because the number of possible User Agents and uses are infinite, so you would have an infinite number of streams. Or being constrained to a small number of streams like we now are. I hate it.
No, you're right, it's bullshit.
You can try it for yourself, create a throwaway account (make sure it's hard-to-guess so that you won't have dictionary attacks) and reply to a "remove list". I can tell you, spammers won't care if you weren't on the list, they'll make sure you get spam. I tried this once, and got about 15 spams within a week.
This article is simply not very well written, I don't think it is a Lumber Cartel [tinlc] Agent behind it.
I'll just repeat: Never respond to any e-mail addresses you find in spam!. Either, it's someone you certainly don't want to give any details to, or it might well be an innocent third party, who you can bet is pretty deep into trouble allready. It has happened to me a few times. I even had to close a mailing list with a community that had taken my a few years to build.
Teachers should realize that when there is a bright kid in the class, they should be given responsibility and challenges. I was lucky enough to get it that way all through school, but it seems it's an exception rather than a rule.