..I've always loved the idea of these things, though I imagine [living in Britian] that i'll never get to see one;o(
I know it's a little naive, but is anyone else suprised that this is happening in China? I know they've got a space program etc etc but I have a real problem thinging of it as a high tech nation.
I suppose the pint would be that we have been able to detect ligth signals wiht our eyes for many millenia, and those eyes are rather sensitive pieces of kit...
The counterpoint would be that this is just an evolutionary accident and that there isnt anything special about the 'light band' part of the EM spectrum anyway.
Given the latency time for any EM communication with anouther star system it is reasonable to imagine that any civilisation that invented anything better would abandon them, its also reasonable to assume that they wouldnt, or that something better cant be invented.
As for radio signals being the 'first' im not sure, there isnt really any reason to suppose that to be the case, there isnt really any reason to assume they have electricity....
See your up to +5 already, and you only posted 10 mins ago... I told you your comment was interesting.....
The thing is when I read the article I noticed the self same bit of the article, even copied the same paragraphs, but youd got there first. Now this show me several thing:
1)That there are other sensible (for which you can read similiar to me in there evaluation of thing if you want)people on/.
2)Im not even jealous of the 4 juicy karma points I could have had [how terribly noble/stoic of me]
3)There is something odd and, perhaps because of its oddness, fascinating about internet communication in general.
4)If someone had a site that just took the good stuff off/. it wouldnt make a terribly good news site, but it would include a wonderful expose on the nature of/.
5)Self reference is popular, which is why goat.cx links etc are so prominent i suppose.
Anyway enjoy the karma and they inherent rise in your moderation chances, it you reward
*eg* [evil grin]
Half the problem being that your comment IS interesting, and that the majority opinion seem to be that/. sucks (sux) anyway.
Yet every so often I actually learn something round here, and every so often I post a comment not in the hope of getting karma but in the hope that some one will come back with an inteligent debate/
What I think/. really needs is a Hobbsian 'altruistic moderator' who just gets rid of the obviously 'empty' comments. That would do for me.
They could even have a check box 'see really vacant comments' that the 3ll37 ones could check and have underground fun amoungst themselves...
I think the main think is to ensure your mailshots have relevant content, and are only sent out on a limited basis.
Since these people given you there addresses you can assume they have some vague interest in your products, but they still dont want to be harassed. I would go about it like this:....
A day or two after you got there name send them a email like...
Thanks for showing an interest in our company [products, service, whatever] at the recent [???] convention....
then just give them links to your catalogue, your main website etc AND a link to GENUINELY remove themselves from your database. [You can state that it isnt your policy to send a large amount of mail etc etc, but remember if they wear the t-shirt the branding is worth it, they dont owe you the right to spam them].
Assuming they dont unsubscribe send them only notifications of truely MAJOR releases, 1-2 a year at most, make sure these are strait text emails, with summary info and a link to the relavent web page, NOT huge HTML pages. [and of course include the option to remove themselves from your database]
If they actually buy one of your products feel free to send them info on that product's updates, and for very, very similiar goods. Also do them the service of informing them of FREE updates, patches, service packs, bug-fixes etc etc as well as the ones that make you money. DO NOT feel free to send them similiar info about other products.
Basically behave as you would want to be behaved towards, there will be people who will appriciate your mails, assuming you have a useful product.
This is my personal opinion about how I'd like a company i'd expresses some interest in to treat me, I realise a lot of it is mentioned in the comments above.
BTW: if your product is fairly revolutionary, and
it would have to be to solicite any response from spam, then it is fairly easy to get it marketed for free on the net,/. being a prime example.
PS do not sell those email addresses, do not buy any more either, its equally squallid
please remember that Im not advocating any of my points, just bouncing ideas....
where would the excess orbital energy
go?
Erm heating the fluid? Massive turbulance in the fluid? Red spotesque storms? Ludicrous internal electric currents (do gas giants have magnetic fields?)
We can understand collisions
between rocky planets, but what would a gas giant collision look like?Spectacular I imagine. My vision would be that (assuming it was a gental degeneration) they would get a nice gas umbilical cord. You might even imagine the cores not hiting but circulating each other incredibly fast at a close distance whilst surrounded by a clound of gas. Then again they might as you suggested have temporary fusion and then calm down. This is also a nice explaination, the planet who could say 'once I was a star':- I like it.
Finally, because of orbital dynamics there's no chance that any planet could have two large moons. Any
large moon will eject other moons over geological time. This effect can be clearly seen in Saturn's rings,
where even small moons have cleared band I cant agree this is necessarily so, you might as well say 'due to orbital dynamics no solar system could have two large planets...' unless the scale thing has an effect here?
Actually, I find relativistic cosmology to be fairly clear
Hmm then I salute you!
But seriously your probably right about 'being bounded by the light cone' being meaningless.
Since your being an AC can I ask what you do...?
NB ooi do you know what current thoughts are on the shape of the universe (Im using shape instead of topology because, to be fair, I dont think of he universe as a set of open sets..)
I realise all this, if you read the note I was replying to he says he doesnt know any cosmology. I am was more trying to point out that our usual concepts of distance etc break down at these levels. An the difficulties invovled.
I realise that i was playing fast and loose, and mixing relativistic newtonian and big bang type theories, but I still defend a lot of what I said.
1) when I say matter i mean matter/energy, i realise this isnt clear. I also say places that light cant get to not places wihtout matter. My point is that something (a point of space time) is in our universe if and only if there exists a light path between it and us. My real point is that the universe can be closed, bounded and still not inside anything.
2)a metric topology IS either closed and bounded OR open and bounded OR infinate (assuming it reasonably homogenous and smooth), the light rays coming from the 'center' are from the interior, aproaching what would be the boundary if the object that is the universe were embeded in a euclidean space of one dimesion higher (this obviously assumes it is such that you can do this, if not he idea still has some conceptual validity)
Now to be a real pedant you should really be thinking of a 4 dimesional static space with time represented by a metric along the 'time axis'. My understanding was that this shape is bound by the light cone, I realise this may be wrong.
My objective was to provide a neater conceptual framework, I admit it breaks at all sort of levels, so does cosmology, that half of my point really
Its like dismissing the..In an infinite universe everything that can happen will a happen.... boys by poining out that in a infinate set of distinct results the possiblility that any off them will happen at anyone time is 0. It may be wrong but it provokes thought and breaks these wolly misconceptions people have about the nature of topology/infinity/continuity etc etc.
the AC above captures most of it, but basically the real problem with all this 'whats outside the matter' stuff is a conceptual/philosophical one. You know that you've heard that relativity means matter 'curves' space, well to a large degree matter defines space as well. Basically it goes like this:
you can get from the standard equations of electricity an magnetism a equation for an 'electromagnetic wave' that travels at a fixed speed. (maxwells equations)
notice that this equation is true whatever speed you are traveling at etc, make a conceptual leap and realise that these 'light rays' define a metric on space. i.e. that space isnt cartesian/euclidian but the that the only sensible definition of a straight line is the path which light would take between two points.(thank einstien for this baby).
Realise that the 'distance' between two places is the length of the path light takes. Realise that therefore anywere that light cannot get is not any distance away, as there is no such path (you can view this as infinate distance if you want, but its truely outside the remit of the distance function).
realise that there is therefore nothing meaningful (in the sense of distance or matter or time, i.e. space) outside of the places were light can reach from the universe.
realise that as a space-time object the universe is bounded by the fact that after n years from the big bang it can be at most a 'sphere' of radius n light years.
now as light speeds heads outward from the center of the universe
- it keeps going for ever- infinate universe
-it slows down, but never quite reaches zero speed, it also never quite makes it past a certain distance away from the center- open finite universe, is finite, the is, as I said earlier --nothing-- outside it, it is a black hole.
--it slows bown, stops and 'falls' back towards the center- closed finite universe.
this last one includes the sphere-like possibility, the easiest way to think of this is that a satalite does this and reached a circular orbit. It may or my not collapse.
Now on a personal level i think the big bang theory is right(ish) I thing we live 'metauniverse' that periodically collapses., i think that its essentially the donut like, with the 'centre' of the universe being a black hole (i.e. the gap in the donut). (NB this is a 4-d donut (torus) im talking about)[it may actually be the surface of a 5-d donut im talking about, i cant do these thing in my head].
btw, thats not even a patch on how fucked up it really is.
disclaimer:I only really know some maths, In my opinion most of this is true, regardless of the actually physics involved, I may well be wrong.
hmm it doesnt really work like that. You see the big bang theory (which im not necessarily advocating) gives a finite amount of matter/energy in the universe. The big question is wether this will continue to expand indefinately...anouther way to look at is is to ask if the universe is a black whole, ie if a ray of light produced by the big bang can get arbitarily far, or whether it cannot escape the pull of the mass in the universe.....
hmm the statement that 'planets tend to be much bigger then their moons' is based upon a sample of 9 planets, of which pluto, as you mention, is a true exception and earth is well on the way to being one. I agree that they would usualy collapse, but i imagine it is possible uder present theories. I dont for a moment thing its true though.
hmm dont go about propagating this space is infinate malarky, we just dont know that....I dont mean it has any edge either. Space is big, this is true, and, at least on my definition of the term, it the biggest 'thing'there is; were 'thing' is viewed as that a thing that can be reached/seen/detected/effected from our pespective.
anyway, i rather suspect the whole things the surface of a 5 dimensional donut, but its probably best we dont go into that here.
Hmm couldnt the super big planet be a couple of 8 x jupiter size masses orbiting each other? Or a 10 times jupiter mass planet with a couple of 2 x jupiter size moons and some a heap of junk orbiting it? These scientist they always jump to conclusions....
As for the possibility of it being neither a planet or a brown dwarf..i dont get that, a mass is either caused by the compression of material (sunlike) of the fragmentation of material (planetlike)...hmm unless you got a very large planet expeled from a star in the early stages of formation...that could possibly 'steal' alot of the contracting gas and become a sort of hybrid.
I realise it's a vast oversimplification but look at the way moons orbit planets, or better the way saturn etc have a miniture 'asteriod belt' in the form of their rings..
My point is that its essentially perfectly plausible to have a small galaxy, with its stars all orbiting relative to its center orbitig around the central point of a large galaxy. In fact I find it hard to believe that galaxies arnt full of baby clusters of stars, orbiting common central point that in turn orbit the center....
..but then I havent studied cosmology since i was 18...
hmm..the post above mine is the frist[sic] one a weird feeling.
Anyway go china I say, it gives NASA some healthy competition, might just buck the EU into getting its act together, and well, we all love space flight
hmm cant really remember were I saw the 70% figure, Its was of registered Linux systems, which is probably overly corperately biased.
As for the list of BSDs yes I realise there are more than 3 but the Mac derived ones are new, and I doubt are installed as the main OS on many machines, as for BSD/OS I admit to be fairly ignorant of this, tell me more.......
This is true, Ive seen figures of 70% for redhat and 8% and 9% for debian and suse respectively. I suppose that you could say that redhat GNU/linux is THE biggest open source OS..... ....if you should be interested in these things.
On the other hand you could point out that the three BSDs are non-identical, so the 20% could be split in 3.
Perhaps overly influenced by Arthur C Clarke's tales I'm fascinated by Jupiter. A planet with 4 planet sized moons, which recieve more heat from it than from the sun, a solar system in miniture etc etc.
ANyway I cant wait to see the pictures, but when do we land on Europa??
Re:High cost n wonderful? or cheap n cheerful?
on
Wearable Displays?
·
· Score: 1
Clearly/. readers tend to be fairly savvy about spam protecting their email etc. An additional way to prevent SPAM is to directly get the spam accounts closed. The basic way is by extracting from the email header and a few pings/fingers which computer the SPAM actually came from and then getting its owner to shut down the spam account [there is a full acount of how to do this on Happy Hacker]{grrrh its down at the mo though;o( }.
It tends to take about 10 mins per account, and can feel hopeless, but remember that there are more spam victims than perpurtrators, and if everybody on/. did this then......
Anyway it beats simply moaning about the phenomenom.
If only in the spirit of Mallory and Shakleton. Pluto is about as far as we can reasonable go, at least in the forseable future. I cant imagine that there is any great scientific point in going, but we should, the human race is fairly starved of suitable 'reasons for life' at this moment in history, so why not just embrace the natural urge to explore.
Slashdot Mirror
..I've always loved the idea of these things, though I imagine [living in Britian] that i'll never get to see one ;o(
I know it's a little naive, but is anyone else suprised that this is happening in China? I know they've got a space program etc etc but I have a real problem thinging of it as a high tech nation.
What sort of speeds are we talking for this?
I suppose the pint would be that we have been able to detect ligth signals wiht our eyes for many millenia, and those eyes are rather sensitive pieces of kit...
The counterpoint would be that this is just an evolutionary accident and that there isnt anything special about the 'light band' part of the EM spectrum anyway.
Given the latency time for any EM communication with anouther star system it is reasonable to imagine that any civilisation that invented anything better would abandon them, its also reasonable to assume that they wouldnt, or that something better cant be invented.
As for radio signals being the 'first' im not sure, there isnt really any reason to suppose that to be the case, there isnt really any reason to assume they have electricity....
See your up to +5 already, and you only posted 10 mins ago... I told you your comment was interesting.....
/. /. it wouldnt make a terribly good news site, but it would include a wonderful expose on the nature of /.
The thing is when I read the article I noticed the self same bit of the article, even copied the same paragraphs, but youd got there first. Now this show me several thing:
1)That there are other sensible (for which you can read similiar to me in there evaluation of thing if you want)people on
2)Im not even jealous of the 4 juicy karma points I could have had [how terribly noble/stoic of me]
3)There is something odd and, perhaps because of its oddness, fascinating about internet communication in general.
4)If someone had a site that just took the good stuff off
5)Self reference is popular, which is why goat.cx links etc are so prominent i suppose.
Anyway enjoy the karma and they inherent rise in your moderation chances, it you reward
*eg* [evil grin]
Half the problem being that your comment IS interesting, and that the majority opinion seem to be that /. sucks (sux) anyway.
/. really needs is a Hobbsian 'altruistic moderator' who just gets rid of the obviously 'empty' comments. That would do for me.
Yet every so often I actually learn something round here, and every so often I post a comment not in the hope of getting karma but in the hope that some one will come back with an inteligent debate/
What I think
They could even have a check box 'see really vacant comments' that the 3ll37 ones could check and have underground fun amoungst themselves...
I think the main think is to ensure your mailshots have relevant content, and are only sent out on a limited basis.
/. being a prime example.
Since these people given you there addresses you can assume they have some vague interest in your products, but they still dont want to be harassed. I would go about it like this:....
A day or two after you got there name send them a email like...
Thanks for showing an interest in our company [products, service, whatever] at the recent [???] convention....
then just give them links to your catalogue, your main website etc AND a link to GENUINELY remove themselves from your database. [You can state that it isnt your policy to send a large amount of mail etc etc, but remember if they wear the t-shirt the branding is worth it, they dont owe you the right to spam them].
Assuming they dont unsubscribe send them only notifications of truely MAJOR releases, 1-2 a year at most, make sure these are strait text emails, with summary info and a link to the relavent web page, NOT huge HTML pages. [and of course include the option to remove themselves from your database]
If they actually buy one of your products feel free to send them info on that product's updates, and for very, very similiar goods. Also do them the service of informing them of FREE updates, patches, service packs, bug-fixes etc etc as well as the ones that make you money. DO NOT feel free to send them similiar info about other products.
Basically behave as you would want to be behaved towards, there will be people who will appriciate your mails, assuming you have a useful product.
This is my personal opinion about how I'd like a company i'd expresses some interest in to treat me, I realise a lot of it is mentioned in the comments above.
BTW: if your product is fairly revolutionary, and it would have to be to solicite any response from spam, then it is fairly easy to get it marketed for free on the net,
PS do not sell those email addresses, do not buy any more either, its equally squallid
Al Aho, Peter Weinberger & Brain Kernighan [as you mentioned], if you care...
please remember that Im not advocating any of my points, just bouncing ideas....
where would the excess orbital energy go?
Erm heating the fluid? Massive turbulance in the fluid? Red spotesque storms? Ludicrous internal electric currents (do gas giants have magnetic fields?)
We can understand collisions between rocky planets, but what would a gas giant collision look like?Spectacular I imagine. My vision would be that (assuming it was a gental degeneration) they would get a nice gas umbilical cord. You might even imagine the cores not hiting but circulating each other incredibly fast at a close distance whilst surrounded by a clound of gas. Then again they might as you suggested have temporary fusion and then calm down. This is also a nice explaination, the planet who could say 'once I was a star':- I like it.
Finally, because of orbital dynamics there's no chance that any planet could have two large moons. Any large moon will eject other moons over geological time. This effect can be clearly seen in Saturn's rings, where even small moons have cleared band I cant agree this is necessarily so, you might as well say 'due to orbital dynamics no solar system could have two large planets...' unless the scale thing has an effect here?
Actually, I find relativistic cosmology to be fairly clear
Hmm then I salute you!
But seriously your probably right about 'being bounded by the light cone' being meaningless.
Since your being an AC can I ask what you do...?
NB ooi do you know what current thoughts are on the shape of the universe (Im using shape instead of topology because, to be fair, I dont think of he universe as a set of open sets..)
I realise all this, if you read the note I was replying to he says he doesnt know any cosmology. I am was more trying to point out that our usual concepts of distance etc break down at these levels. An the difficulties invovled.
..In an infinite universe everything that can happen will a happen.... boys by poining out that in a infinate set of distinct results the possiblility that any off them will happen at anyone time is 0. It may be wrong but it provokes thought and breaks these wolly misconceptions people have about the nature of topology/infinity/continuity etc etc.
I realise that i was playing fast and loose, and mixing relativistic newtonian and big bang type theories, but I still defend a lot of what I said.
1) when I say matter i mean matter/energy, i realise this isnt clear. I also say places that light cant get to not places wihtout matter. My point is that something (a point of space time) is in our universe if and only if there exists a light path between it and us. My real point is that the universe can be closed, bounded and still not inside anything.
2)a metric topology IS either closed and bounded OR open and bounded OR infinate (assuming it reasonably homogenous and smooth), the light rays coming from the 'center' are from the interior, aproaching what would be the boundary if the object that is the universe were embeded in a euclidean space of one dimesion higher (this obviously assumes it is such that you can do this, if not he idea still has some conceptual validity)
Now to be a real pedant you should really be thinking of a 4 dimesional static space with time represented by a metric along the 'time axis'. My understanding was that this shape is bound by the light cone, I realise this may be wrong.
My objective was to provide a neater conceptual framework, I admit it breaks at all sort of levels, so does cosmology, that half of my point really
Its like dismissing the
btw like i said i only really know the maths.
the AC above captures most of it, but basically the real problem with all this 'whats outside the matter' stuff is a conceptual/philosophical one. You know that you've heard that relativity means matter 'curves' space, well to a large degree matter defines space as well. Basically it goes like this:
you can get from the standard equations of electricity an magnetism a equation for an 'electromagnetic wave' that travels at a fixed speed. (maxwells equations)
notice that this equation is true whatever speed you are traveling at etc, make a conceptual leap and realise that these 'light rays' define a metric on space. i.e. that space isnt cartesian/euclidian but the that the only sensible definition of a straight line is the path which light would take between two points.(thank einstien for this baby).
Realise that the 'distance' between two places is the length of the path light takes. Realise that therefore anywere that light cannot get is not any distance away, as there is no such path (you can view this as infinate distance if you want, but its truely outside the remit of the distance function).
realise that there is therefore nothing meaningful (in the sense of distance or matter or time, i.e. space) outside of the places were light can reach from the universe.
realise that as a space-time object the universe is bounded by the fact that after n years from the big bang it can be at most a 'sphere' of radius n light years.
now as light speeds heads outward from the center of the universe
- it keeps going for ever- infinate universe
-it slows down, but never quite reaches zero speed, it also never quite makes it past a certain distance away from the center- open finite universe, is finite, the is, as I said earlier --nothing-- outside it, it is a black hole.
--it slows bown, stops and 'falls' back towards the center- closed finite universe.
this last one includes the sphere-like possibility, the easiest way to think of this is that a satalite does this and reached a circular orbit. It may or my not collapse.
Now on a personal level i think the big bang theory is right(ish) I thing we live 'metauniverse' that periodically collapses., i think that its essentially the donut like, with the 'centre' of the universe being a black hole (i.e. the gap in the donut). (NB this is a 4-d donut (torus) im talking about)[it may actually be the surface of a 5-d donut im talking about, i cant do these thing in my head].
btw, thats not even a patch on how fucked up it really is.
disclaimer:I only really know some maths, In my opinion most of this is true, regardless of the actually physics involved, I may well be wrong.
hmm it doesnt really work like that. You see the big bang theory (which im not necessarily advocating) gives a finite amount of matter/energy in the universe. The big question is wether this will continue to expand indefinately...anouther way to look at is is to ask if the universe is a black whole, ie if a ray of light produced by the big bang can get arbitarily far, or whether it cannot escape the pull of the mass in the universe.....
hmm the statement that 'planets tend to be much bigger then their moons' is based upon a sample of 9 planets, of which pluto, as you mention, is a true exception and earth is well on the way to being one. I agree that they would usualy collapse, but i imagine it is possible uder present theories. I dont for a moment thing its true though.
hmm dont go about propagating this space is infinate malarky, we just dont know that....I dont mean it has any edge either. Space is big, this is true, and, at least on my definition of the term, it the biggest 'thing'there is; were 'thing' is viewed as that a thing that can be reached/seen/detected/effected from our pespective.
anyway, i rather suspect the whole things the surface of a 5 dimensional donut, but its probably best we dont go into that here.
Hmm couldnt the super big planet be a couple of 8 x jupiter size masses orbiting each other? Or a 10 times jupiter mass planet with a couple of 2 x jupiter size moons and some a heap of junk orbiting it? These scientist they always jump to conclusions....
As for the possibility of it being neither a planet or a brown dwarf..i dont get that, a mass is either caused by the compression of material (sunlike) of the fragmentation of material (planetlike)...hmm unless you got a very large planet expeled from a star in the early stages of formation...that could possibly 'steal' alot of the contracting gas and become a sort of hybrid.
I realise it's a vast oversimplification but look at the way moons orbit planets, or better the way saturn etc have a miniture 'asteriod belt' in the form of their rings..
..but then I havent studied cosmology since i was 18...
My point is that its essentially perfectly plausible to have a small galaxy, with its stars all orbiting relative to its center orbitig around the central point of a large galaxy. In fact I find it hard to believe that galaxies arnt full of baby clusters of stars, orbiting common central point that in turn orbit the center....
hmm..the post above mine is the frist[sic] one a weird feeling.
Anyway go china I say, it gives NASA some healthy competition, might just buck the EU into getting its act together, and well, we all love space flight
Have they choosen the lucky astronaut yet?
hmm cant really remember were I saw the 70% figure, Its was of registered Linux systems, which is probably overly corperately biased.
As for the list of BSDs yes I realise there are more than 3 but the Mac derived ones are new, and I doubt are installed as the main OS on many machines, as for BSD/OS I admit to be fairly ignorant of this, tell me more.......
This is true, Ive seen figures of 70% for redhat and 8% and 9% for debian and suse respectively. I suppose that you could say that redhat GNU/linux is THE biggest open source OS.....
....if you should be interested in these things.
On the other hand you could point out that the three BSDs are non-identical, so the 20% could be split in 3.
Perhaps overly influenced by Arthur C Clarke's tales I'm fascinated by Jupiter. A planet with 4 planet sized moons, which recieve more heat from it than from the sun, a solar system in miniture etc etc.
ANyway I cant wait to see the pictures, but when do we land on Europa??
Thank You
love the IRC and applets comments, and I was just about to go of and code O's and X's for my Dock to.....
Clearly /. readers tend to be fairly savvy about spam protecting their email etc. An additional way to prevent SPAM is to directly get the spam accounts closed. The basic way is by extracting from the email header and a few pings/fingers which computer the SPAM actually came from and then getting its owner to shut down the spam account [there is a full acount of how to do this on Happy Hacker]{grrrh its down at the mo though ;o( }.
/. did this then......
It tends to take about 10 mins per account, and can feel hopeless, but remember that there are more spam victims than perpurtrators, and if everybody on
Anyway it beats simply moaning about the phenomenom.
Hmm as I suspected this is slower than SCSI and so, given that technology's increasing affordability, rather begs the question:
Why are they developing it?
1)What are the current peak transfer rates for IDE and SCSI?
;o) )
2)What sort of transfer rate do other technologies like IBM solid state drive, Flash etc have?
(answers these and I can post inteligently (ish)
If only in the spirit of Mallory and Shakleton. Pluto is about as far as we can reasonable go, at least in the forseable future. I cant imagine that there is any great scientific point in going, but we should, the human race is fairly starved of suitable 'reasons for life' at this moment in history, so why not just embrace the natural urge to explore.
Plus the photo's might be pretty......