What equipment and observing method are you going to use? Will you project an image of the Sun on a screen? Will you use a camera? Is it already available or will you have to build (buy) it?
I plan on buying a 12" Celestron and doing my observations *with my naked eye*, like a MAN! What kind of wuss would use a screen or a camera? Astronomers seem to have lost the direct feel of things these days, with all them modern equipments...
Course in physics by counter-examples, probably
on
Physics Goes To Hollywood
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Action movies are notorious for not respecting basic laws of physics. For example:
- A guy gets shot by a bullet, gets thrown backward 10 feet.
- A car jumps over something without a launching pad
- A car jumps over something and flies straight into the air, and lands flat (real cars tip forward when they do that)
- A computer hacker does something real quick on a computer because someone's coming, downloads or save something in half a second
- A woman drinks a tainted glass of wine, drops immediately after the first sip
- A red-caped, blue spandexed lunatic hoists busses, entire bridges into the air...etc...
Do you really want to fight Microsoft's war for them for free? they won't give you any money to plug their security holes you know...
Besides, the way I see it, the more viruses and worms floating around the better: it helps people realize how shitty Windows is as a platform, and how Microsoft just treats their customer like crap by selling them mediocre products at outrageous prices. I certainly don't to help Microsoft look better.
Paul Marino who compares machinima to garage bands.
How do you mean Paul? I didn't realize Machinima animation artists wore trashy clothes, made a lot of teeth-splintering noise, got famous for 6 months to a year, and eventually died of overdose.
I've been doing that with ALSA under Linux, and SoundBlaster Live! cards for a long time. No need to dowload anything. Here's how:
Start alsamixer
Set the capture source to "wave"
Jack up the "wave capture" setting
Capture the stream (or anything currently playing in fact) from/dev/dsp
Just think people have been bitching and moaning about the truly staggering number of ALSA settings for SB-Lives!, now see how it's useful?
Does NASA have too much money?
on
Our Man In Black
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Since 1998, the space agency's planetary protection officer, or PPO, has been John D. Rummel, an astrobiologist and a commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve. This is actually his second tour of duty at NASA
So, he's protecting which planet from the threat of contamination from whom exactly? Ok, I'm sure NASA would be wise to think of the consequences of landing man-made things on Mars, but as long as real flesh-and-blood humans don't set foot on the planet, isn't bathing probes in radiation enough to render their outer shells and innards sterile?
I mean, it's like if I hired a lawyer for when I plan to be very rich, but I'm not yet and yet I pay the lawyer right now. How bizarre, I say having a full time "planetary protection officer" is a feel-good-look-good measure that's just a waste of taxpayer's dollars in reality.
new rules that seem to specifically target IT workers and other white collar workers for exemption from overtime pay.
That "new" rule is as old as IT : if you do your legal 40 hours per week in an IT company, you're out of here faster than you can say "antidisestablishmentarianism".
In the last company I worked for, a minimum of 60 hours per week was expected, sort of like an unwritten rule, often a lot more during death marches. I was well paid of course, and bonuses were huge, but in reality I had a really shitty hourly wage.
So what's new here? just that it's now a written rule that IT workers are slave workers. The only thing this does is diminish even further the impression of "privileged workers" non-IT folks have of us, and that's too bad because that's about the only glamour of the job.
Microsoft too sometimes care to backport things. For example, IPP support in XP has been backported to Windows 95 and Windows 98 after many requests from companies like Brother and from users.
Unlike what Linus advocates though, Microsoft doesn't do that routinely and users have to bitch and moan pretty bad to get what they need.
When 2.4 wasn't stable, I was glad to take advantage of USB with my 2.2 kernels using the 2.2.16 USB backport (no longer available from linux-usb.org apparently).
although it seems like a lot of money to spend just for testing his theory
I think it's really a cheap experiment, considering the importance of the results. If there's something wrong or incomplete in Einstein's theory, we (as in humanity) should know about it, firstly because it's the human nature to try to know more all the time, and secondly because it could be very important in practical terms: you wouldn't want to take a plunge off a cliff with your SUV because your GPS receiver had a slight error, would you?
This is theorical science and experimentation at its best. The price is really cheap to advance mankind's knowledge. Compare this to the weekly cost of certain recent military activities that probably won't bring back much to mankind anytime soon...
The network link used to set the record spans from Los Angeles to Geneva, Switzerland
In other words, 2 of the, what, 1000?, 2000?, 10000? nodes on internet2 have exchange data super-fast.
Well okay, but I'm sure if you reduce the number of internet1-connected computers to the same number, you'll get really really good results too.
Comparing a semi-experimental network to a mature, heavily used one, is like comparing apples and oranges, and therefore I smell marketting under this speed record announcement.
The American space program is one of the safest in the world
Funny, I sort of remember that Soyuz capsules have a better safety record than space shuttles. Hell, they're even used as emergency reentry vehicles on the ISS...
Cars have been very hard to maintain for years, well before the avent of EFI, computers and all.
Engine bays are so small these days (either because the car is a compact or because the emphasis is put on the roomiest interior possible) that one often has to drop the entire engine to change things like a timing chain or an alternator.
I have an econobox here that I brought to a small garage because I have a sump gasket leak, and the guy said that he'd take so much time just getting the engine out and back in that it's just not worth fixing. (On a side note, modern cars are supposed to be environmentally friendly, but cars that are left leaking oil or plain junked because they're not economically worth fixing don't seem very green to me).
Anyway, the short is, on my old '69 Charger, I can pass full size regular tool around the engine and still have spare room to work, while I'd need very expensive, specialized tools, and very flexible cervicals to work on an econobox. And that's not counting the electronics at all...
Drug developers are looking at ways to cut costs of drug development as Americans and their employers are starting to constantly worry about the high price of prescription drugs.
Countries like Brazil have taken to producing drugs like tri-therapy drugs for AIDS without paying the license, to make them affordable for their population, as a matter of national emergency. Others, like India, have made an entire industry out of producing generic drugs.
These medicines are cheap, yes, but the cost is offset onto the newer meds, those that are still produced exclusively, or under license, that aren't in the public domain yet. That's why, when countries hurt the bottom line of pharmaceutical companies, said companies jack up the price of the top line.
Combine that with the cost of doing any sort of medical-related business in the US, due mainly to insurance costs, due in turn to ligitation-happy Americans, and you know why certain silly little pills can cost hundreds of dollars.
I'm not saying pharmaceutical labs aren't also part of their own problem (it's in great part their very greediness that made the generic knockoffs industry the huge success it is in the first place), but with their margins reduced all the time, it's not wonder they try to cut cost and practice off-shoring. And time has shown that it's not their sense of morals that will compel them to hire local workers...
you cant live you life under feer that terrorists are going to do something. If someone wanted to do something terrorist like blocking RFID tags would be pretty far down the list, knocking out the power to the airport would be a far more efective thing. RFID tags are a good idea for airports, yeah there will be bugs but there are also bugs in the barcode system least with rfid tags when the system come back online they know exactly ware your stuff is, and if its setup corectly could tell if you stuff got sent to another airport, notify who ever is in charge and have it sent to the right place rather fast as they dont have to search for it, they can just pick it up and throw it on a plane to ware it needs to be
Hmm, tell me: I have a nagging feeling someone forgot to properly tag the parcel containing the english grammar book and the OED you ordered several years ago, don't you think?
paying for it by firing the baggage handlers who could help you recover from problems if the system proves to have bugs
Baggage handlers would be fired if RFID is adopted? YAY RFID!! Can we put RFID everywhere please, so all baggage handlers are fired? please? I'm sick of constantly having to fight the airlines to get my suitcases and their contents replaced/payed for.
Maglev is extraordinarily expensive, noisy, and an engineering solution to what is a civil problem - commuting.
Maglevs are extraordinarily expensive to build and run, yes, but probably less so than (or on par with) conventional high-speed trains, otherwise nobody would fund such ventures.
But they are definitely not noisy compared to a conventional train. Have you ever lived near a TGV line? no, I didn't think so.
What about ordinary (cheap) trains, faster conventional trains (like Europe's TGVs)
TGVs aren't that much cheaper. About half the price in fact, mainly due to the reuse of existing technologies and French government subsidies. What they really have for them is the ability to roll on the pre-existing infrastructure, which Maglevs can't do.
or living closer to work, or working more via Internet
Yes, let's produce cars, baked bean cans, houses and pencil cases on the great Internet.
Fact: people who can work remotely are a minority.
or carpooling?
But you say below that road travel is an artificially low-cost mode of transportation? surely you don't mean to cram more people on the road...
The best way to avoid commuting is for people to move back into the cities
But you say below that you want to scale back the size of organizations and live on a human scale. Surely you don't mean to cram more people in the same tiny spot of land...
to walk to work
Make the cities big enough and people won't be able to walk to work. You contradict your arguments over and over.
to downsize the huge companies into smaller human-sized organizations, to live on a human scale. The best way to connect large countries is through high-speed trains that use conventional rail technology.
Yes that's true For now. I suspect if nobody looks for better solutions though, we'll still be stuck with conventional trains a hundred years from now though.
It does not happen today for one simple reason: the artificially low cost of travelling by car and by air (thanks to subsidies on roads and on fuel).
This is changing fast. Do you know how much gas costs in Europe these days? and it's still rising.
NOTE: before you take me for an overweight Californian who can't walk across the street without his car, or an oil-producing Texan, let me precise that I don't own a car and go around by bike and public transportation, including trains.
Slashdot Mirror
What equipment and observing method are you going to use? Will you project an image of the Sun on a screen? Will you use a camera? Is it already available or will you have to build (buy) it?
I plan on buying a 12" Celestron and doing my observations *with my naked eye*, like a MAN! What kind of wuss would use a screen or a camera? Astronomers seem to have lost the direct feel of things these days, with all them modern equipments...
Action movies are notorious for not respecting basic laws of physics. For example:
...etc...
- A guy gets shot by a bullet, gets thrown backward 10 feet.
- A car jumps over something without a launching pad
- A car jumps over something and flies straight into the air, and lands flat (real cars tip forward when they do that)
- A computer hacker does something real quick on a computer because someone's coming, downloads or save something in half a second
- A woman drinks a tainted glass of wine, drops immediately after the first sip
- A red-caped, blue spandexed lunatic hoists busses, entire bridges into the air
Do you really want to fight Microsoft's war for them for free? they won't give you any money to plug their security holes you know...
Besides, the way I see it, the more viruses and worms floating around the better: it helps people realize how shitty Windows is as a platform, and how Microsoft just treats their customer like crap by selling them mediocre products at outrageous prices. I certainly don't to help Microsoft look better.
I'm sorry, but who even uses BIND anymore? an article like that on 66.35.250.150 is truly News for Nerds...
"About every year or so they declare it complete, and then implementation begins and we discover that it's actually not complete," Vixie told
/bin/sh -c "echo it's complete" /bin/sh -c "echo nevermind..."
Given what Paul Vixie is famous for, I'd say the lines are:
0 0 1 1 *
5 0 1 1 *
Paul Marino who compares machinima to garage bands.
How do you mean Paul? I didn't realize Machinima animation artists wore trashy clothes, made a lot of teeth-splintering noise, got famous for 6 months to a year, and eventually died of overdose.
Start alsamixer
Set the capture source to "wave"
Jack up the "wave capture" setting
Capture the stream (or anything currently playing in fact) from /dev/dsp
Just think people have been bitching and moaning about the truly staggering number of ALSA settings for SB-Lives!, now see how it's useful?
Since 1998, the space agency's planetary protection officer, or PPO, has been John D. Rummel, an astrobiologist and a commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve. This is actually his second tour of duty at NASA
So, he's protecting which planet from the threat of contamination from whom exactly? Ok, I'm sure NASA would be wise to think of the consequences of landing man-made things on Mars, but as long as real flesh-and-blood humans don't set foot on the planet, isn't bathing probes in radiation enough to render their outer shells and innards sterile?
I mean, it's like if I hired a lawyer for when I plan to be very rich, but I'm not yet and yet I pay the lawyer right now. How bizarre, I say having a full time "planetary protection officer" is a feel-good-look-good measure that's just a waste of taxpayer's dollars in reality.
new rules that seem to specifically target IT workers and other white collar workers for exemption from overtime pay.
That "new" rule is as old as IT : if you do your legal 40 hours per week in an IT company, you're out of here faster than you can say "antidisestablishmentarianism".
In the last company I worked for, a minimum of 60 hours per week was expected, sort of like an unwritten rule, often a lot more during death marches. I was well paid of course, and bonuses were huge, but in reality I had a really shitty hourly wage.
So what's new here? just that it's now a written rule that IT workers are slave workers. The only thing this does is diminish even further the impression of "privileged workers" non-IT folks have of us, and that's too bad because that's about the only glamour of the job.
Here's the fix:
/usr/src/linux/ ./sco_ip.patch ./sco_ip.patch
cd
echo "" >
patch -p1 <
Do this and you'll have a kernel free of any SCO code.
Microsoft too sometimes care to backport things. For example, IPP support in XP has been backported to Windows 95 and Windows 98 after many requests from companies like Brother and from users.
Unlike what Linus advocates though, Microsoft doesn't do that routinely and users have to bitch and moan pretty bad to get what they need.
When 2.4 wasn't stable, I was glad to take advantage of USB with my 2.2 kernels using the 2.2.16 USB backport (no longer available from linux-usb.org apparently).
although it seems like a lot of money to spend just for testing his theory
I think it's really a cheap experiment, considering the importance of the results. If there's something wrong or incomplete in Einstein's theory, we (as in humanity) should know about it, firstly because it's the human nature to try to know more all the time, and secondly because it could be very important in practical terms: you wouldn't want to take a plunge off a cliff with your SUV because your GPS receiver had a slight error, would you?
This is theorical science and experimentation at its best. The price is really cheap to advance mankind's knowledge. Compare this to the weekly cost of certain recent military activities that probably won't bring back much to mankind anytime soon...
The experiment uses three key components: a spinning sphere, a telescope and a star.
One of these components can't be had from Sharper Image : can you guess which?
Microsoft calls it Internet#
The network link used to set the record spans from Los Angeles to Geneva, Switzerland
In other words, 2 of the, what, 1000?, 2000?, 10000? nodes on internet2 have exchange data super-fast.
Well okay, but I'm sure if you reduce the number of internet1-connected computers to the same number, you'll get really really good results too.
Comparing a semi-experimental network to a mature, heavily used one, is like comparing apples and oranges, and therefore I smell marketting under this speed record announcement.
The American space program is one of the safest in the world
Funny, I sort of remember that Soyuz capsules have a better safety record than space shuttles. Hell, they're even used as emergency reentry vehicles on the ISS...
because mission control couldn't verify the correct software had been loaded.
Man, I must have missed a career as NASA flight controller, because I feel exactly the same way each time XP goes to windowsupdate.microsoft.com...
Cars have been very hard to maintain for years, well before the avent of EFI, computers and all.
Engine bays are so small these days (either because the car is a compact or because the emphasis is put on the roomiest interior possible) that one often has to drop the entire engine to change things like a timing chain or an alternator.
I have an econobox here that I brought to a small garage because I have a sump gasket leak, and the guy said that he'd take so much time just getting the engine out and back in that it's just not worth fixing. (On a side note, modern cars are supposed to be environmentally friendly, but cars that are left leaking oil or plain junked because they're not economically worth fixing don't seem very green to me).
Anyway, the short is, on my old '69 Charger, I can pass full size regular tool around the engine and still have spare room to work, while I'd need very expensive, specialized tools, and very flexible cervicals to work on an econobox. And that's not counting the electronics at all...
The best people to find are those who have worked in the IT [information technology] industry.
Could it be that we're all going to ship our cars to India for maintenance and repair soon?
Drug developers are looking at ways to cut costs of drug development as Americans and their employers are starting to constantly worry about the high price of prescription drugs.
Countries like Brazil have taken to producing drugs like tri-therapy drugs for AIDS without paying the license, to make them affordable for their population, as a matter of national emergency. Others, like India, have made an entire industry out of producing generic drugs.
These medicines are cheap, yes, but the cost is offset onto the newer meds, those that are still produced exclusively, or under license, that aren't in the public domain yet. That's why, when countries hurt the bottom line of pharmaceutical companies, said companies jack up the price of the top line.
Combine that with the cost of doing any sort of medical-related business in the US, due mainly to insurance costs, due in turn to ligitation-happy Americans, and you know why certain silly little pills can cost hundreds of dollars.
I'm not saying pharmaceutical labs aren't also part of their own problem (it's in great part their very greediness that made the generic knockoffs industry the huge success it is in the first place), but with their margins reduced all the time, it's not wonder they try to cut cost and practice off-shoring. And time has shown that it's not their sense of morals that will compel them to hire local workers...
you cant live you life under feer that terrorists are going to do something. If someone wanted to do something terrorist like blocking RFID tags would be pretty far down the list, knocking out the power to the airport would be a far more efective thing. RFID tags are a good idea for airports, yeah there will be bugs but there are also bugs in the barcode system least with rfid tags when the system come back online they know exactly ware your stuff is, and if its setup corectly could tell if you stuff got sent to another airport, notify who ever is in charge and have it sent to the right place rather fast as they dont have to search for it, they can just pick it up and throw it on a plane to ware it needs to be
Hmm, tell me: I have a nagging feeling someone forgot to properly tag the parcel containing the english grammar book and the OED you ordered several years ago, don't you think?
paying for it by firing the baggage handlers who could help you recover from problems if the system proves to have bugs
Baggage handlers would be fired if RFID is adopted? YAY RFID!! Can we put RFID everywhere please, so all baggage handlers are fired? please? I'm sick of constantly having to fight the airlines to get my suitcases and their contents replaced/payed for.
Maglev is extraordinarily expensive, noisy, and an engineering solution to what is a civil problem - commuting.
Maglevs are extraordinarily expensive to build and run, yes, but probably less so than (or on par with) conventional high-speed trains, otherwise nobody would fund such ventures.
But they are definitely not noisy compared to a conventional train. Have you ever lived near a TGV line? no, I didn't think so.
What about ordinary (cheap) trains, faster conventional trains (like Europe's TGVs)
TGVs aren't that much cheaper. About half the price in fact, mainly due to the reuse of existing technologies and French government subsidies. What they really have for them is the ability to roll on the pre-existing infrastructure, which Maglevs can't do.
or living closer to work, or working more via Internet
Yes, let's produce cars, baked bean cans, houses and pencil cases on the great Internet.
Fact: people who can work remotely are a minority.
or carpooling?
But you say below that road travel is an artificially low-cost mode of transportation? surely you don't mean to cram more people on the road...
The best way to avoid commuting is for people to move back into the cities
But you say below that you want to scale back the size of organizations and live on a human scale. Surely you don't mean to cram more people in the same tiny spot of land...
to walk to work
Make the cities big enough and people won't be able to walk to work. You contradict your arguments over and over.
to downsize the huge companies into smaller human-sized organizations, to live on a human scale. The best way to connect large countries is through high-speed trains that use conventional rail technology.
Yes that's true For now. I suspect if nobody looks for better solutions though, we'll still be stuck with conventional trains a hundred years from now though.
It does not happen today for one simple reason: the artificially low cost of travelling by car and by air (thanks to subsidies on roads and on fuel).
This is changing fast. Do you know how much gas costs in Europe these days? and it's still rising.
NOTE: before you take me for an overweight Californian who can't walk across the street without his car, or an oil-producing Texan, let me precise that I don't own a car and go around by bike and public transportation, including trains.
For a yo-yo to sleep at all is a fairly modern development.
mmmm-yeeees, no doubt due to the great advances in the field of hypnotic drugs.