"What are the chances for life to live on this earth? If it were too cool, or too warm, all species would be extinct. A little closer- or farther from the sun, *poof*. A little more of this gas, or that, or different weights in the forces. This goes all through the atmosphere, ozone layer, green house effect, water-bed streams down to the tiniest organisms like bacteria, molecules, atomic-forces, quantuum states whisking in- and out of existance.. It is GRAND and then we haven't even begun to look towards the stars, bending of space-time and gravity yet!"
If you look at the geothermal vents in the deep oceans you find places where the water is hundreds of degrees in temperature and has extremely high concentrations of elements such as sulfur. That combined with the pressure at that depth would mean that it would be impossible for any of us to survive in such conditions. However, other types of live thrive there. They wouldn't anywhere else but they do there... in conditions similar to that you might find on other planets.
The argument that the Earth is Just Right and so must have been designed that way has a flaw. It is just right for us but if the conditions were slightly different life could still exist - it would merely have to adapt to the different conditions, which is more than possible.
No carbon/nitrogen etc? Try silicon/sulfur etc instead. No oxygen? How about helium. Too cold? Grow more fur. Too hot? Live underground out of the sun's rays or develop a protective skin.
It may not be life as we know it, but live could still evolve to survive in such conditions.
Once trick I have for my own laptop is I carry it around in a bag that doesn't look like a laptop bag.
Putting it in a laptop bag is equivalent wearing a neon sign that says "I have a laptop. Please steal it." Especially if it has the manufacturer on the site just to clear any doubts any potential thief has about the contents.
Some better ideas are: - Get a briefcase and fill it with foam padding - There are laptop rucksacks you can get, which are less obvious
Of course for this to work, the laptop'd need a working Internet connection.
If it's stolen, it probably won't get connected to the Internet...
Also because of the logon passwords, probably the first thing that'll happen to it is it'll be reinstalled off a pirated copy of Windows and it'll no longer have the software to phone home.
To legally use a TV in the UK you have to buy a TV license, currently for about £120 a year.
That money all goes to the BBC. The BBC has no commercial ads. The only adverts you'll see on the BBC channels are for other BBC programmes/channels. They also make some extra money by selling videos, DVDs, a weekly tv guide magazine etc.
All the other channels get no money from the TV license and have to sell advertising to pay for themselves.
I doubt it'll have the satellite communications running over the winter waiting for a wake up call, you're right - it'd use way too much power.
It's possible though that they have a timer which could count down over the winter and turn the machine back on some time in the spring.
That would take very little power, the batteries are certainly large enough for it to be possible (think of a battery clock which can last a year(s) on two AAAs, the power use would be similar).
The batteries can of course recharge in the spring.
---
My other thought is, the solar powers would still be working over the winter. It's possible that the machine's hibernation mode consists of shutting everything down except the power supply unit (which'll be more complex than usual as it'll be recharging the batteries when the solar panels are working - more like a UPS) and the circuits needed to run the satellite communications and wait for a wake up call.
The solar panels won't generate as much power in the winter, but they'd probably generate enough to wait for a wait up call.
Preventing HIV from killing the immune cells would allow the immune system to recover, potentially to the point where it could once again be able to defeat the second disease as a healthy immune system would be able to. Hence a treatment for aids.
Treatment, not cure I suppose - the second disease may prevent the immune system from recovering before the patient dies.
Take for example Blair's recent announcement(s) on the referendum on the EU constitution. First he decides to go ahead with it, despite public opposition.
Now the opinion polls are sliding, due to the many buggerups he and his parliament are making, he's been forced to rethink this.
So he came out with an announcement that there would be a referendum on whether or not we should sign up to it.
This sounded good for a change. Then he admitted that if the answer was No he would hold as many referendums as he liked, until the answer was Yes.
'You can have any final answer you want, just as long as the answer you want is the answer i want.'
He seems to have backtracked on this, after the media strangely actually picked up on this comment.
Sadly a true democracy wouldn't work... you wouldn't be able to have the entire country decide on everything, it'd take too long and no-one would have the time to do anything else like go to work or go out.
"combat terrorism" is currently a buzzword the government can currently use to justify any unpopular decisions that they've secretly been wanting for years.
if they wanted, they could even choose not to explain *why* due to the 'secrecy involved' or something similar.
you're not alone in your dislike of the ID cards. i know of only one person who agrees with them. my brother. even then he couldn't think of a reason why they were a good idea, just kept repeating that they were a Good Idea.
(i suspect this is related to his brainwashing at the local ATC squadron (RAF equivalent of scouts for those who didn't know). he thought invading Iraq was a good idea too, wouldn't believe me when i insisted it'd just create more terrorism and make the area unstable and still thinks that invading Iraq has been a complete success... he currently wants to become an RAF pilot. *groan*)
The article says this asteroid was about 8 meters in diameter. Anything below say 50-75m is just going to burn up - you do not get any real damage until around 100m (such as the tunguska asteroid you mentioned).
The only ones the astronomers are -really- worried about are the ones whose diameter can be measured in miles - these are the only ones that would become 'planet killers'.
Although we aren't seeing asteroids 8m across until just after it has passed, it is pretty amazing they are able to find an 8m wide dark object against a pitch black background 88000 miles away at all. These are not unusual, we are just seeing more of them now. They are no danger to us, so although we can see them we can ignore them if we like.
With their detection systems able to see these tiny objects at that distance, we are likely (in at least the very near future) to see the mile-wide-plus planet killers months and even years before they come anywhere near us - we would have plenty of warning.
All we would then need to do is sent a probe there equipped with rockets to push it aside. Exploding asteroids (as in the films) is the wrong idea, this just would send a lot of large fragments towards us (still large enough enough to do lots of damage and numerous enough to hit much of the earths surface, even if no longer massive enough to kill the planet).
A much better idea is over time to gently push it out of the way over the course of a few months. You don't need a lot of force if you do it over time, even a Robin Reliant could manage it. Since we will soon have the ability to detect these asteroids years before they arrive, this would give us plenty of time to do this.
Just place a few dozen ion engines on one side of the asteroid, hit the switch and a few months later it'll be passing a few thousand kilometers to the side of us, rather than hitting us.
Also, we're currently above the galactic disk and moving away. We aren't likely to see any increase in the number of asteroids any time soon for any reason other than our detection systems improving so we see more of the ones already out there.
One reason which another poster mentioned is the data transfer over the bus between the CPU and Main Memory, this is usually a few inches which means the signal can take more than 10ns to travel along the bus (which is a significant amount of time in chip design).
Another reason is that SRAM is used in a CPU for cache - its VERY fast but takes up more silicon per bit and is very expensive per bit.
Main memory is generally made of DRAM which is slower but also much smaller so you can get a much larger amount of memory onto a chip and much cheaper.
It's not that the latest technology isn't used in memory, it's just that its very expensive so it's used within the CPU as a cache while main memory will be slower in order to balance space vs cost for the machine to still be both affordable and usable.
Once the price drops, the cache technology gets put into main memory and a newer faster one replaces it in the cache.
The other big thing is that most of the advances in CPU speed are not due to the chip tecnology but due to design, especially pipelining.
CPUs go through a series of stages (eg fetch-read-execute) and the CPU can take advantage of this by running each stage while the next stage is still running.
This trick can't be taken advantage of in memory as memory does not contain several stages - hence pipelining increased cpu speed by something in the region of 5-10x while not increasing memory speed at all.
It's mainly new design tricks like this that have made most of the speed advances, which is why processor speed increases at such a larger rate than memory speed.
Slashdot Mirror
And get 17 along side each other each making a segment and it'd only take 1 year.
I expect it refers not to a weather station, but a central centre which collects weather information from all over the world and processes it.
Latin for 'Sewer' just to give a nice mental image...
S'ok. :o)
It's a common argument, so the reply wasn't neccessarily to you, but the world in general.
"What are the chances for life to live on this earth? If it were too cool, or too warm, all species would be extinct. A little closer- or farther from the sun, *poof*. A little more of this gas, or that, or different weights in the forces. This goes all through the atmosphere, ozone layer, green house effect, water-bed streams down to the tiniest organisms like bacteria, molecules, atomic-forces, quantuum states whisking in- and out of existance.. It is GRAND and then we haven't even begun to look towards the stars, bending of space-time and gravity yet!"
If you look at the geothermal vents in the deep oceans you find places where the water is hundreds of degrees in temperature and has extremely high concentrations of elements such as sulfur. That combined with the pressure at that depth would mean that it would be impossible for any of us to survive in such conditions. However, other types of live thrive there. They wouldn't anywhere else but they do there... in conditions similar to that you might find on other planets.
The argument that the Earth is Just Right and so must have been designed that way has a flaw. It is just right for us but if the conditions were slightly different life could still exist - it would merely have to adapt to the different conditions, which is more than possible.
No carbon/nitrogen etc? Try silicon/sulfur etc instead. No oxygen? How about helium. Too cold? Grow more fur. Too hot? Live underground out of the sun's rays or develop a protective skin.
It may not be life as we know it, but live could still evolve to survive in such conditions.
However, if someone else is wondering the same question and thinks they spotted it once before they probably wouldn't remember the typo.
That's fine for virtual hosts, but he was talking above two separate web servers on separate hardware.
Once trick I have for my own laptop is I carry it around in a bag that doesn't look like a laptop bag.
Putting it in a laptop bag is equivalent wearing a neon sign that says "I have a laptop. Please steal it." Especially if it has the manufacturer on the site just to clear any doubts any potential thief has about the contents.
Some better ideas are:
- Get a briefcase and fill it with foam padding
- There are laptop rucksacks you can get, which are less obvious
Of course for this to work, the laptop'd need a working Internet connection.
If it's stolen, it probably won't get connected to the Internet...
Also because of the logon passwords, probably the first thing that'll happen to it is it'll be reinstalled off a pirated copy of Windows and it'll no longer have the software to phone home.
Or you can download it here...
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/
http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/
A lot of the other *nix tools are there too...
To legally use a TV in the UK you have to buy a TV license, currently for about £120 a year.
That money all goes to the BBC.
The BBC has no commercial ads. The only adverts you'll see on the BBC channels are for other BBC programmes/channels.
They also make some extra money by selling videos, DVDs, a weekly tv guide magazine etc.
All the other channels get no money from the TV license and have to sell advertising to pay for themselves.
I doubt it'll have the satellite communications running over the winter waiting for a wake up call, you're right - it'd use way too much power.
It's possible though that they have a timer which could count down over the winter and turn the machine back on some time in the spring.
That would take very little power, the batteries are certainly large enough for it to be possible (think of a battery clock which can last a year(s) on two AAAs, the power use would be similar).
The batteries can of course recharge in the spring.
---
My other thought is, the solar powers would still be working over the winter. It's possible that the machine's hibernation mode consists of shutting everything down except the power supply unit (which'll be more complex than usual as it'll be recharging the batteries when the solar panels are working - more like a UPS) and the circuits needed to run the satellite communications and wait for a wake up call.
The solar panels won't generate as much power in the winter, but they'd probably generate enough to wait for a wait up call.
Actually, the ideas are always around.
It's just at those times the governments are willing to chuck as much money at any ideas that'll help them as they need to to get them to work.
In more peaceful times getting funding is like getting blood out of a stone.
Preventing HIV from killing the immune cells would allow the immune system to recover, potentially to the point where it could once again be able to defeat the second disease as a healthy immune system would be able to. Hence a treatment for aids.
Treatment, not cure I suppose - the second disease may prevent the immune system from recovering before the patient dies.
It's true.
Take for example Blair's recent announcement(s) on the referendum on the EU constitution. First he decides to go ahead with it, despite public opposition.
Now the opinion polls are sliding, due to the many buggerups he and his parliament are making, he's been forced to rethink this.
So he came out with an announcement that there would be a referendum on whether or not we should sign up to it.
This sounded good for a change.
Then he admitted that if the answer was No he would hold as many referendums as he liked, until the answer was Yes.
'You can have any final answer you want, just as long as the answer you want is the answer i want.'
He seems to have backtracked on this, after the media strangely actually picked up on this comment.
Sadly a true democracy wouldn't work... you wouldn't be able to have the entire country decide on everything, it'd take too long and no-one would have the time to do anything else like go to work or go out.
"combat terrorism" is currently a buzzword the government can currently use to justify any unpopular decisions that they've secretly been wanting for years.
if they wanted, they could even choose not to explain *why* due to the 'secrecy involved' or something similar.
you're not alone in your dislike of the ID cards. i know of only one person who agrees with them. my brother. even then he couldn't think of a reason why they were a good idea, just kept repeating that they were a Good Idea.
(i suspect this is related to his brainwashing at the local ATC squadron (RAF equivalent of scouts for those who didn't know). he thought invading Iraq was a good idea too, wouldn't believe me when i insisted it'd just create more terrorism and make the area unstable and still thinks that invading Iraq has been a complete success... he currently wants to become an RAF pilot. *groan*)
The article says this asteroid was about 8 meters in diameter. Anything below say 50-75m is just going to burn up - you do not get any real damage until around 100m (such as the tunguska asteroid you mentioned).
The only ones the astronomers are -really- worried about are the ones whose diameter can be measured in miles - these are the only ones that would become 'planet killers'.
Although we aren't seeing asteroids 8m across until just after it has passed, it is pretty amazing they are able to find an 8m wide dark object against a pitch black background 88000 miles away at all. These are not unusual, we are just seeing more of them now. They are no danger to us, so although we can see them we can ignore them if we like.
With their detection systems able to see these tiny objects at that distance, we are likely (in at least the very near future) to see the mile-wide-plus planet killers months and even years before they come anywhere near us - we would have plenty of warning.
All we would then need to do is sent a probe there equipped with rockets to push it aside. Exploding asteroids (as in the films) is the wrong idea, this just would send a lot of large fragments towards us (still large enough enough to do lots of damage and numerous enough to hit much of the earths surface, even if no longer massive enough to kill the planet).
A much better idea is over time to gently push it out of the way over the course of a few months. You don't need a lot of force if you do it over time, even a Robin Reliant could manage it. Since we will soon have the ability to detect these asteroids years before they arrive, this would give us plenty of time to do this.
Just place a few dozen ion engines on one side of the asteroid, hit the switch and a few months later it'll be passing a few thousand kilometers to the side of us, rather than hitting us.
Also, we're currently above the galactic disk and moving away. We aren't likely to see any increase in the number of asteroids any time soon for any reason other than our detection systems improving so we see more of the ones already out there.
One reason which another poster mentioned is the data transfer over the bus between the CPU and Main Memory, this is usually a few inches which means the signal can take more than 10ns to travel along the bus (which is a significant amount of time in chip design).
Another reason is that SRAM is used in a CPU for cache - its VERY fast but takes up more silicon per bit and is very expensive per bit.
Main memory is generally made of DRAM which is slower but also much smaller so you can get a much larger amount of memory onto a chip and much cheaper.
It's not that the latest technology isn't used in memory, it's just that its very expensive so it's used within the CPU as a cache while main memory will be slower in order to balance space vs cost for the machine to still be both affordable and usable.
Once the price drops, the cache technology gets put into main memory and a newer faster one replaces it in the cache.
The other big thing is that most of the advances in CPU speed are not due to the chip tecnology but due to design, especially pipelining.
CPUs go through a series of stages (eg fetch-read-execute) and the CPU can take advantage of this by running each stage while the next stage is still running.
This trick can't be taken advantage of in memory as memory does not contain several stages - hence pipelining increased cpu speed by something in the region of 5-10x while not increasing memory speed at all.
It's mainly new design tricks like this that have made most of the speed advances, which is why processor speed increases at such a larger rate than memory speed.