Summary (Sep 10, 2004): Faint, failed stars like brown dwarfs are borderline planets themselves, but the European Southern Observatory atop the Chilean mountains may have imaged what could be the first infrared view of an extrasolar planet.
Well, at least the news is only 8 months old... interesting nonetheless...
My question is, why shove everyone into the ISS? Why not just dock with it, and share the life support supplies between the two systems, instead of cramming everyone into the station?
Perhaps because the shuttle may be too damaged to safely sustain life. For instance, what if there is a slow oxygen leak, or a damaged fuel valve/line venting vapors into the shuttle? I'm sure they planned for many contingencies- after all, they are NASA scientists, and we're not...
Yes, when I am not "hassling minimum wage slaves," I am in fact one myself (when not in class or studying). I do the same thing they do, and don't understand why some people can't grasp the fact that $2 bills are real, spendable money like any other bill.
As stated in my response to Grey_14, I do not shop during the day, and would never be inconsiderate enough to hassle the people behind me. If I did shop during the day, and there was a line behind me (and I somehow would know the cashier has no idea that $2 bills are legal tender), I wouldn't hesitate to use my debit card and get out of there as soon as I can.
As a cashier myself, I know how frustrated people can get while waiting in line. I just don't understand how people do not accept that fact that $2 bills are just as good as two ones or 40% of a $5 bill.
Actually, I do often pay with Sacajawea dollar coins, as they are given in change at a stamp machine located in the store I work at. People, hating coins and such, spend them before leaving the store. When my shift is over, I "buy" the coins from my drawer. Also, I will occasionally get a roll or two at the bank, when they have them.
Most of the $2 notes I get have already been well-worn and in circulation. The problems arise when the teller is counting from twos starting with, say, $379 dollars (they always count the ones before the twos for some reason).
Yes, in fact that's how I pay for college, working 20-30 hours a week as a cashier (somewhat alluded to by my comment of putting the 2s under the drawer, though not explicitly).
Also, though it may inconvenience the store accepting odd or large bills, in many states not accepting tender is acknowledging that a debt is paid in full (as mentioned by another poster).
Additionally, it is beyond my comprehension that someone would not be familiar with a $2 note. Though not printed in large numbers, they are still just as much a currency as any other bill, and there is no reason to assume it would not be treated as such. I do not do this the be an ass; rather, I quite like $2 notes, and it disappoints me that they are not commonly in circulation. By spending the bills, I put them in back in circulation, and perhaps some people will realize they do not need to keep every $2 bill they encounter in a sealed envelope in their closet.
Lastly, I do not get to do much shopping during the day, and any time I go to Wal-Mart (where this all happened) is usually late-evening or nighttime. I would not be inconsiderate enough to delay people on purpose. If three separate cashiers do not know that $2 bills are legal tender, I would say the problem lies in the people and not the store. Why cannot I expect to walk into a major retail store and spend a legal tender note?
And no, I would never twist wordings in promos and sales for my advantage, even though the stores are doing it to us.
Like the guy in TFA, I ask for $2 bills all the time from the bank when I cash my paycheck. The bank is more than happy to give them to me, citing that they are a waste of space for other more common bills.
The first round of fun comes when the teller gives me the money- usually tellers count money very fast, but when they get to the $2 bills, they slow down significanty (it's funny to me, at least). Next comes when you try to spend them at Wal-Mart. Here are my favorite examples:
1) The cashier asks me to pay with "regular" money, as she somehow didn't realize $2 bills are legal tender.
2) Another cashier asks me if they are fake. When I tell her no, they are in fact real, she questions me again, and turns on her blinky-light to signal the manager to come over. The manager tells her they can accept them, but asks me not to use them next time. The manager leaves, and the cashier is confused as to where they put the bills, as there is no slot for them. She puts them with the $20s, instead of under the drawer like she should (probably because they both had "2"s on them).
3) Yet another cashier questions their validity about a week later. He says there are no slots for 2s in the drawer, so he can't take them. I tell him there are no slots for 50s and 100s either, which for some reason upsets him. There goes the blinky light, and over comes the manager. She recognizes me from last week, and asks why I continue to "make trouble." I tell her that $2 bills are legal tender, blah blah blah, yet she insists that I only do it to cause problems (well, she kinda has a point there... but I like $2 bills because they are prime, like $5 dollar bills). Basically, she told me I was not welcome to shop there if I continued to try to use $2 bills there. I called the Wal-Mart customer service number, left a complaint, and suprisingly, was rewarded with a $20 gift card. I later received a letter stating that the manager has been contacted, and there is no reason whatsoever that I shouldn't be allowed to spend $2 bills there. So now, every time I go, I make sure I use at least one of them.;)
Does the new CPU still have this bug? I know the old one did (PP5002), but does the PP5020 have the same problem? Again, I really haven't been following this stuff for quite a while.
I dunno about that. On my Sharp Zaurus 860 PDA, the libvorbisidec (a.k.a. the integer codec for ogg vorbis) gets much, much better performance than the MP3 codec (which I believe has to use emulated floating-point because the Zaurus lacks an FPU). Now granted the iPods have FPUs built-in, it still may be possible to write a fairly fast integer vorbis decoder to work on the hardware. Also, since the new CPUs are much faster in the newer iPods, perhaps they can write a good floating-point decoder.
Of course, I really don't know much about this stuff, but it's just my two cents.
Wow, this story and discussion must have the most mis-information of any story I've read on/. in a while...
I completely agree with what you have to say. Lasers do not follow the inverse square law when in a "beam," even if that "beam" spreads out. Instead, the radiant intensity decreases proportionately with the spread. For instance, if you shine a 1W laser at a target a distance away which produces a 1cm^2 spot, its intensity would be nearly 12.5kW/m^2. At a much further distance, its beam will be 1m^2, and now its intensity is 1W/m^2. Note that the total energy of the beam stays constant - 1W throughout.
This, of course, assumes everything is perfect. As noted in numerous other posts, the beam is not perfectly coherent, etc. etc. etc., but the laser the guy was using was a high quality communications-spec laser, NOT a laser pointer. The main loss of energy in this case would be atmospheric absorbtion, which is quite low but not insignificant.
Let's assume this guy's laser was 500mW with a beam dispersion of 0.001 (e.g., the beam will diverge 1mm every meter). Let's also assume the aircraft were about 2km from the laser source. Over this distance, lets say the beam loses 30% of its intensity to atmospheric absorbtion. That gives us an intensity of.175W/m^2. Assuming a 1cm^2 retinal area of the pilot's eye, there would be a total of about.0175mW of energy on the pilot's retinas. Compare this to a 100W high-beam of a car at 100m, which is around.00024mW of energy on the retina (about 1/100th of the energy). Also keep in mind the fact that when looking into a wide laser beam, you do not perceive it as just a spot in your vision- rather, your entire retina is stimulated, in effect completely filling your vision with the laser light. Though the flash may have been brief, it is hard not to notice when everything goes green for an instant and suddenly your eye is struggling to convert all-trans-retinal into 11-cis retinal - in effect, you are blinded for a short time.
A few years back while living in the dorms of Penn State, I noticed one of the Dell-branded Sony Trinitron (P780) monitors used in the computer labs was quite busted up (looks like it was dropped off of a desk) in the trash pile. Not wanting it to go to waste, I took it back to my room and plugged it in. Nothing (well, besides some smoke). I removed the rest of the plastic casing (it was in a few pieces), and did an inspection and found a busted fuse (the glass had broken, probably from the drop, and the filament was burned out, most likely from having current run through it while busted). Replaced that, plugged it in again, and it fired up. The red, green, and blue images were randomly spread out across the monitor (the yokes had been knocked out of alignment), but a few hours of adjustment got everything back on track (have you ever tried aligning a monitor? All of the yokes are reliant on each other, and if you get 3 of the 4 aligned right, moving the 4th will throw off the other 3). I've had it for 3 years now, and is probably one of the best monitors I've ever used. But my PS2 is another story all together... as said, Sony's quality is either hit or miss.
Well, why not use this plugin for Dragon NaturallySpeaking? Of course, you'd be condemned to Visual Studio... but of course, if you were paralysed and couldn't type, I'm sure this would be great if you wanted to write programs.
For anyone still reading this thread, I've decided to do another image comparing the difference between the photos. As you can see, the trail ends before it reaches the top-left of the image, meaning that the object must have been traveling from the lower-right to the top-left. Meteors wouldn't do that; case closed.
Definately. Check out this image of a bug, though in somewhat more focus. Notice the characteristic black streak as in the "meteor photo?" The "mystery" object is nothing more than a bug which just happens to be flying in the right place at the right time.
Also, I did some Photoshop work (inspired by a previous post), and despite the arguement that it is a perfectly straight line, I tend to disagree. IMHO, here is definately some deviation to it, as the parallel lines in my image show (though it's not very good). See it here.
What about an object 3 inches away (and thus out of focus) passing in front of the lens? It wouldn't have to be moving very fast at all. To me, it looks like a bug flying across the field of view; the "explosion" actually being the out-of-focus insect coincidentally lined up with the light post (as suggested in a previous post). Since there is no way to judge the depth of the object in the image, you cannot say exactly how fast it was going.
Look at the picture more closely. The bright "explosion" is the head of the insect, the "smoke" being its wings and thorax. Just my $0.02
IIRC, for single-beam holograms, image depth (how "deep" you can see into a hologram) is generally limited to about less than half of the laser's coherent beam length. One of the best websites there is for laser diode holography mentions image depths exceeding 8 inches with a $7.99 laser pointer- meaning that coherent lenght exceeds 16 inches. Mind you, he made sure he got the best pointer of the batch at the store, and also has spatial filter... and this was like 5 or 6 years ago. He also mentions that the laser pointer actually does a better job than his HeNe (they tend to "drift" a bit and thier beams actually tend to be less consistent, having hot spots in the middle of the images). I'm sure with a good diode (i.e., one more than $8), you can produce some stunningly good holograms.
First off, no USA on this device. Like the SL-CXXX series (I own an 860 myself), they will not be brought to America, though if you want one, you can import them from companies like Dynamism. Since it is essentially the same as the other Zaurus' hardware, I'm sure any of the kernels/ROMS currently available for it, but they are all Linux and all pretty good.
As for educational discounts, only in your dreams... or if you lived in Japan. Dynamism wants a cool $899 for it (I paid $850 for my SL-C860, and I think it's worth it).
Lastly, there are current VoIP for the Zaurus (KPhone comes to mind), so it should work with this model. The 4GB drive will come most in handy for the numerous emulators available (there are emulators for just about every pre-playstation console, and even a SCUMM emulator to play those classic LucasArts games [and rumors of a PS1 emulator abound]).
But you have to ask yourself if $900 is worth it for a PDA with very little support over here in the US. For most, it will be a "no," but for the true Linux-loving uber-geek, there is nothing better. Alternately, you can try the Zaurus SL-6000L (with full support here in the US). It's only $499 now at Amazon. Sure, it doesn't have the 4GB drive, but it works pretty much the same, except it lacks the cool clamshell design.
Using a slightly-modified version of Dasher, the patient would almost be able to use every function of a computer. The article states he can play pong fairly well, so it should not be a big leap to be able to use Dasher for text input. It's great to see this technology advancing this far so fast; just imagine 10 or 20 years in the future utilizing thousands of sensors and vastly more powerful computers.
The Rio Riot was the first HD unit by Rio. I own one myself, and it was a terrific audio device until a mishap with a homebrew car docking cradle fried the system board. I attempted to fix it, but when it was apart, I accidently tore the thin plastic LCD connector (which had its "grain" perpendicular to the conductors, and thus tore in a way I can't repair). I really miss it for music, but the good side is that I now have a decent battery for "projects" and a 20-GB harddrive which I am trying to mate with my Sharp Zaurus SL-C860 PDA.
Sonic Blue, however, is horrible with support. They released very few software updates, and the device only worked with MusicMatch Jukebox. But the interface was awesome, and the sound quality was quite good for a portable unit.
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Well, at least the news is only 8 months old... interesting nonetheless...
Perhaps because the shuttle may be too damaged to safely sustain life. For instance, what if there is a slow oxygen leak, or a damaged fuel valve/line venting vapors into the shuttle? I'm sure they planned for many contingencies- after all, they are NASA scientists, and we're not...
Yes, when I am not "hassling minimum wage slaves," I am in fact one myself (when not in class or studying). I do the same thing they do, and don't understand why some people can't grasp the fact that $2 bills are real, spendable money like any other bill.
Because one is not prime.
As stated in my response to Grey_14, I do not shop during the day, and would never be inconsiderate enough to hassle the people behind me. If I did shop during the day, and there was a line behind me (and I somehow would know the cashier has no idea that $2 bills are legal tender), I wouldn't hesitate to use my debit card and get out of there as soon as I can.
As a cashier myself, I know how frustrated people can get while waiting in line. I just don't understand how people do not accept that fact that $2 bills are just as good as two ones or 40% of a $5 bill.
Actually, I do often pay with Sacajawea dollar coins, as they are given in change at a stamp machine located in the store I work at. People, hating coins and such, spend them before leaving the store. When my shift is over, I "buy" the coins from my drawer. Also, I will occasionally get a roll or two at the bank, when they have them.
Most of the $2 notes I get have already been well-worn and in circulation. The problems arise when the teller is counting from twos starting with, say, $379 dollars (they always count the ones before the twos for some reason).
And yes, those foodstamps suck.
Ever worked retail? We hate you.
Yes, in fact that's how I pay for college, working 20-30 hours a week as a cashier (somewhat alluded to by my comment of putting the 2s under the drawer, though not explicitly).
Also, though it may inconvenience the store accepting odd or large bills, in many states not accepting tender is acknowledging that a debt is paid in full (as mentioned by another poster).
Additionally, it is beyond my comprehension that someone would not be familiar with a $2 note. Though not printed in large numbers, they are still just as much a currency as any other bill, and there is no reason to assume it would not be treated as such. I do not do this the be an ass; rather, I quite like $2 notes, and it disappoints me that they are not commonly in circulation. By spending the bills, I put them in back in circulation, and perhaps some people will realize they do not need to keep every $2 bill they encounter in a sealed envelope in their closet.
Lastly, I do not get to do much shopping during the day, and any time I go to Wal-Mart (where this all happened) is usually late-evening or nighttime. I would not be inconsiderate enough to delay people on purpose. If three separate cashiers do not know that $2 bills are legal tender, I would say the problem lies in the people and not the store. Why cannot I expect to walk into a major retail store and spend a legal tender note?
And no, I would never twist wordings in promos and sales for my advantage, even though the stores are doing it to us.
Like the guy in TFA, I ask for $2 bills all the time from the bank when I cash my paycheck. The bank is more than happy to give them to me, citing that they are a waste of space for other more common bills.
;)
The first round of fun comes when the teller gives me the money- usually tellers count money very fast, but when they get to the $2 bills, they slow down significanty (it's funny to me, at least). Next comes when you try to spend them at Wal-Mart. Here are my favorite examples:
1) The cashier asks me to pay with "regular" money, as she somehow didn't realize $2 bills are legal tender.
2) Another cashier asks me if they are fake. When I tell her no, they are in fact real, she questions me again, and turns on her blinky-light to signal the manager to come over. The manager tells her they can accept them, but asks me not to use them next time. The manager leaves, and the cashier is confused as to where they put the bills, as there is no slot for them. She puts them with the $20s, instead of under the drawer like she should (probably because they both had "2"s on them).
3) Yet another cashier questions their validity about a week later. He says there are no slots for 2s in the drawer, so he can't take them. I tell him there are no slots for 50s and 100s either, which for some reason upsets him. There goes the blinky light, and over comes the manager. She recognizes me from last week, and asks why I continue to "make trouble." I tell her that $2 bills are legal tender, blah blah blah, yet she insists that I only do it to cause problems (well, she kinda has a point there... but I like $2 bills because they are prime, like $5 dollar bills). Basically, she told me I was not welcome to shop there if I continued to try to use $2 bills there. I called the Wal-Mart customer service number, left a complaint, and suprisingly, was rewarded with a $20 gift card. I later received a letter stating that the manager has been contacted, and there is no reason whatsoever that I shouldn't be allowed to spend $2 bills there. So now, every time I go, I make sure I use at least one of them.
Probably with Dasher". Definately worth checking out, even if you are not disabled.
Do not watch the video after eating acid.
You've been warned.
"nucular, dummy. The 's' is silent."
Does the new CPU still have this bug? I know the old one did (PP5002), but does the PP5020 have the same problem? Again, I really haven't been following this stuff for quite a while.
I dunno about that. On my Sharp Zaurus 860 PDA, the libvorbisidec (a.k.a. the integer codec for ogg vorbis) gets much, much better performance than the MP3 codec (which I believe has to use emulated floating-point because the Zaurus lacks an FPU). Now granted the iPods have FPUs built-in, it still may be possible to write a fairly fast integer vorbis decoder to work on the hardware. Also, since the new CPUs are much faster in the newer iPods, perhaps they can write a good floating-point decoder.
Of course, I really don't know much about this stuff, but it's just my two cents.
Aren't most stories on Slashdot 15 years old to begin with?
Wow, this story and discussion must have the most mis-information of any story I've read on /. in a while...
.175W/m^2. Assuming a 1cm^2 retinal area of the pilot's eye, there would be a total of about .0175mW of energy on the pilot's retinas. Compare this to a 100W high-beam of a car at 100m, which is around .00024mW of energy on the retina (about 1/100th of the energy). Also keep in mind the fact that when looking into a wide laser beam, you do not perceive it as just a spot in your vision- rather, your entire retina is stimulated, in effect completely filling your vision with the laser light. Though the flash may have been brief, it is hard not to notice when everything goes green for an instant and suddenly your eye is struggling to convert all-trans-retinal into 11-cis retinal - in effect, you are blinded for a short time.
I completely agree with what you have to say. Lasers do not follow the inverse square law when in a "beam," even if that "beam" spreads out. Instead, the radiant intensity decreases proportionately with the spread. For instance, if you shine a 1W laser at a target a distance away which produces a 1cm^2 spot, its intensity would be nearly 12.5kW/m^2. At a much further distance, its beam will be 1m^2, and now its intensity is 1W/m^2. Note that the total energy of the beam stays constant - 1W throughout.
This, of course, assumes everything is perfect. As noted in numerous other posts, the beam is not perfectly coherent, etc. etc. etc., but the laser the guy was using was a high quality communications-spec laser, NOT a laser pointer. The main loss of energy in this case would be atmospheric absorbtion, which is quite low but not insignificant.
Let's assume this guy's laser was 500mW with a beam dispersion of 0.001 (e.g., the beam will diverge 1mm every meter). Let's also assume the aircraft were about 2km from the laser source. Over this distance, lets say the beam loses 30% of its intensity to atmospheric absorbtion. That gives us an intensity of
But then again, I could be wrong.
A few years back while living in the dorms of Penn State, I noticed one of the Dell-branded Sony Trinitron (P780) monitors used in the computer labs was quite busted up (looks like it was dropped off of a desk) in the trash pile. Not wanting it to go to waste, I took it back to my room and plugged it in. Nothing (well, besides some smoke). I removed the rest of the plastic casing (it was in a few pieces), and did an inspection and found a busted fuse (the glass had broken, probably from the drop, and the filament was burned out, most likely from having current run through it while busted). Replaced that, plugged it in again, and it fired up. The red, green, and blue images were randomly spread out across the monitor (the yokes had been knocked out of alignment), but a few hours of adjustment got everything back on track (have you ever tried aligning a monitor? All of the yokes are reliant on each other, and if you get 3 of the 4 aligned right, moving the 4th will throw off the other 3). I've had it for 3 years now, and is probably one of the best monitors I've ever used. But my PS2 is another story all together... as said, Sony's quality is either hit or miss.
Well, why not use this plugin for Dragon NaturallySpeaking? Of course, you'd be condemned to Visual Studio... but of course, if you were paralysed and couldn't type, I'm sure this would be great if you wanted to write programs.
For anyone still reading this thread, I've decided to do another image comparing the difference between the photos. As you can see, the trail ends before it reaches the top-left of the image, meaning that the object must have been traveling from the lower-right to the top-left. Meteors wouldn't do that; case closed.
Definately. Check out this image of a bug, though in somewhat more focus. Notice the characteristic black streak as in the "meteor photo?" The "mystery" object is nothing more than a bug which just happens to be flying in the right place at the right time.
Also, I did some Photoshop work (inspired by a previous post), and despite the arguement that it is a perfectly straight line, I tend to disagree. IMHO, here is definately some deviation to it, as the parallel lines in my image show (though it's not very good). See it here.
What about an object 3 inches away (and thus out of focus) passing in front of the lens? It wouldn't have to be moving very fast at all. To me, it looks like a bug flying across the field of view; the "explosion" actually being the out-of-focus insect coincidentally lined up with the light post (as suggested in a previous post). Since there is no way to judge the depth of the object in the image, you cannot say exactly how fast it was going.
Look at the picture more closely. The bright "explosion" is the head of the insect, the "smoke" being its wings and thorax. Just my $0.02
IIRC, for single-beam holograms, image depth (how "deep" you can see into a hologram) is generally limited to about less than half of the laser's coherent beam length. One of the best websites there is for laser diode holography mentions image depths exceeding 8 inches with a $7.99 laser pointer- meaning that coherent lenght exceeds 16 inches. Mind you, he made sure he got the best pointer of the batch at the store, and also has spatial filter... and this was like 5 or 6 years ago. He also mentions that the laser pointer actually does a better job than his HeNe (they tend to "drift" a bit and thier beams actually tend to be less consistent, having hot spots in the middle of the images). I'm sure with a good diode (i.e., one more than $8), you can produce some stunningly good holograms.
First off, no USA on this device. Like the SL-CXXX series (I own an 860 myself), they will not be brought to America, though if you want one, you can import them from companies like Dynamism. Since it is essentially the same as the other Zaurus' hardware, I'm sure any of the kernels/ROMS currently available for it, but they are all Linux and all pretty good.
As for educational discounts, only in your dreams... or if you lived in Japan. Dynamism wants a cool $899 for it (I paid $850 for my SL-C860, and I think it's worth it).
Lastly, there are current VoIP for the Zaurus (KPhone comes to mind), so it should work with this model. The 4GB drive will come most in handy for the numerous emulators available (there are emulators for just about every pre-playstation console, and even a SCUMM emulator to play those classic LucasArts games [and rumors of a PS1 emulator abound]).
But you have to ask yourself if $900 is worth it for a PDA with very little support over here in the US. For most, it will be a "no," but for the true Linux-loving uber-geek, there is nothing better. Alternately, you can try the Zaurus SL-6000L (with full support here in the US). It's only $499 now at Amazon. Sure, it doesn't have the 4GB drive, but it works pretty much the same, except it lacks the cool clamshell design.
Using a slightly-modified version of Dasher, the patient would almost be able to use every function of a computer. The article states he can play pong fairly well, so it should not be a big leap to be able to use Dasher for text input. It's great to see this technology advancing this far so fast; just imagine 10 or 20 years in the future utilizing thousands of sensors and vastly more powerful computers.
The Rio Riot was the first HD unit by Rio. I own one myself, and it was a terrific audio device until a mishap with a homebrew car docking cradle fried the system board. I attempted to fix it, but when it was apart, I accidently tore the thin plastic LCD connector (which had its "grain" perpendicular to the conductors, and thus tore in a way I can't repair). I really miss it for music, but the good side is that I now have a decent battery for "projects" and a 20-GB harddrive which I am trying to mate with my Sharp Zaurus SL-C860 PDA.
Sonic Blue, however, is horrible with support. They released very few software updates, and the device only worked with MusicMatch Jukebox. But the interface was awesome, and the sound quality was quite good for a portable unit.