Regardless of whether the equipment actually wears out, Accounting principles dictate that it must be assigned a life span and depreciated. This book value of initial cost - depreciation is for accounting purposes the value of the equipment and the depreciation has to going into the loss. Resale value is irrelevant unless you're actually selling it.
Re:Where the hell did those figures come from?
on
Giant Black Hole Found
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Actuallly no, the majority of black holes are stellar black holes. These are created by the collapse of giant stars and are generally a few suns in mass. 1.4 being about the lower end for collapse, I believe. Take an astronomy course.
Still doesn't even provide enough information to even make a guess at variables, let alone the last couple. Any real attempt to use the Drake equation is still just pulling a number out of thin air. Or rather pulling several numbers out of thin air and multiplying them, which is far more scientific.:)
Regardless of whether we have publicly available proof for this particular attack, we certainly have his own words for a number of others, including the bombing of US Barracks in Saudi Arabia.
Hmmm....Product Activation, Digital Rights Management....Yeah, they're hard to crack, but once they're out in circulation it generally doesn't take long for them to be broken. The best people in the field aren't working for Microsoft - they're hacking these things for the sheer hell of it.
Since this principle is stated in the Declaration of Independence, it takes priority over the US Constitution; not even a constitutional ammendment can rescind it.
Not particularly sure where you got this idea, but you need to go back to an american government class. The Declaration of Independance is not law. It's just a bunch of guys saying "wouldn't it be nice if....". It has no legal weight whatsoever. The Consitution is the basis of our government, nothing overrides it.
No, no, you're thinking of the "Porn Critical Mass" the point at which theres so much pornography on the internet that every search returns only ads for things such as "The girl next door with a donkey!" and "Pamela Anderson does an entire boy scout troup!". This in combination with chain letters and spam will cause our minds to collapse, forcing civilization to start over with some more deserving species, like lemurs, who will have a flourizing culture until they invent their own packet switched networks, at which point its only a matter of time until "The lemur from the next whole over does it with humans!"
Re:This clockless thing must be caching on fast..
on
Clockless Chips
·
· Score: 1
Damn, you beat me to it.:) Still, the fact that there will be two posts with the link to the previous occurence inside of two minutes of the story being posted doesn't really speak for the Slashdot Editors, does it?
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/09/15/1332 35 &mode=nested
Ah. My first post ever bashing the editors. I am now a true slashdotter....
If ET doesn't understand mathematics, its unlikely ET progressed as far as building radios, either. Prime numbers are a fairly simple mathematical concept, one thats been found by every human society developing a complex system of mathematics. It's not simply some artifact of the decimal system. Prime numbers are prime in any base. Once you've got whole numbers and division you're pretty quickly going to come to the conclusion that some of them can't be divided by any of the others.
Right now, there are literally millions of people who are suffering on this earth, and the vast majority of those problems can be solved by science. We should be focusing our resources on curing disease, engineering more productive grains and vegatables, and discovering cleaner power sources rather than pissing away millions of years of CPU time trying to see who can come up with the biggest prime number.
And maybe you should donate the time and resources you use everyday reading slashdot to volunteer at the Red Cross or better yet - Join the Peace Corps! Also, I would argue that most of the problems with hunger and disease facing the planet are more social issues that technological. Anyway, thats not the point. Projects like this are an excellent way to work with distributed computing on a large scale and improve our knowledge of how it works and how it can be applied. Not everything has to be a great crusade to change the world.
Generally such messages are designed to illustrate mathematical concepts. As such, I highly doubt they only sent one particular prime. Really, there isn't much of anything that we can send that's guaranteed to be intelligeble to an alien culture. They may not even share our fascination with prime numbers - while eminently useful to us, they aren't nessecary for things like engineering.
we want to retain an overview, for example, of ocean water quality, of greenhouse gases or temperature distribution in the atmosphere, and to be able to establish the extent to which tropical forests are being cut down
I see statistics about this every day in the newspaper. Clearly, we can measure all these things from the ground - what does a satellite give us? Is it just there for the global view?
Actually, most of these things are already gathered from satellites in one form or another. This satellite gives more extensive, detailed data that many of the others that are already in existence. Nothing extremely groundbreaking but serious improvements in a number of areas.
Whatever gases get released into the atmosphere, stay in the atmosphere. Big news.
Actually, no, this is just plain wrong. Gases and materials are continually being added and removed from our atmosphere. Oxygen is removed by animal life and combustion. Carbon Dioxide is removed by plant life and the oceans, as well as various geological processes. Various emissions created by industrial processes are removed by rain (I.E, acid rain). CFC's work their way up into the upper atmosphere over time and destroy Ozone. Our understanding of all of these processes is incomplete. So we need more detailed data. This satellite gathers that data.
Once their presence is identified from space, poisonous algae can be prevented from spreading
Help me understand why anyone cares enough about poisonous algae to send a satellite into space.
Hmmm. Gee, I can't imagine why anyone would care about huge masses of poisonous algae. It kills of fish, it kills off other aquatic life. It affects fishing, which for many people is an extremely important source of food. It effects the chemical composition the ocean, and in turn how the ocean interacts with the atmosphere.
So in order to get some answers, I went to the satellite's web page [esa.int] and found myself overwhelmed by the amount of incomprehensible information. The page is basically a sales portal for scientists who want to buy the data, but doesn't give any information comprehensible to a little layman like me.
Incomprehensible? To you maybe. If you really want to know go do a little research on google for some of the topics mentioned in the article. Yes, the site you linked to is in fact designed for scientists. Why should everything be spoon fed to your level of ignorance? If you want to know, go educate yourself.
So, does anyone have a good source that will explain to me why I should care one snippet about this satellite, and not think that ESA just blew E2.3 billion on the world's biggest piece of space debris?
Yes, now that you mention it Micheal kindly provided a link to it at the top of the page. This satellite is exceptional only in it's size. If you can't logically reason out why those sorts of data might be useful, well google is your friend.
Hmmm...we couldn't possbily have an effect on global climate, could we? Hell, theres two guys on the planet who could change the climate in about half an hour if they wanted too.....
Why not? In some environments Sod is the most available building material, and Sod houses have a number of fairly useful qualities, thermal insulation being one of them. Use the correct tool for the job. For sysadmin type scripts and CGI, Perl is an excellent tool for the job. I wouldn't want to write a web browser in it, but that's what C is for, isn't it?
Also, Coke goes better with Alcohol. Rum and coke, whiskey and coke, whatever and coke. Rum and Pepsi tastes like bad cough syrup. I generally drink Pepsi, but no alcohol in it, please. (Please reserve any flames about who would put good Whiskey in coke. I don't, you shouldn't either)
With Microsoft actually improving its products recently(do I get modded down for saying this?) and actually appearing to do something about their historically pitiful security, I would think that the price disparity would become a larger and larger incentive to switch to Linux and *BSD in the server arena. Speaking on a somewhat smaller scale, I'm currently(attempting) to convert my P133 with it's 580M of hard drive space(split between two drives) and 16M of RAM into a router/firewall so I can share my DSL connection among the computers in my appartment. FreeBSD runs quite comfortably on this machine, both for hard drive space and RAM. I'd probably have to run Win3.1 to say the same about windows.
However, every time this is mentioned to Microsoft, they say "yeah, but they'll pay for it in the long run". Do they actually have anything to back this up? I'd like to hear how they think this is the case.
Actually, no it hasn't. In fact I believe the one just two stories down the front page about dark matter measurement...
Secondly - Of course every story you see is about some measurement that upsets our current theories about something. If they simply took yet another measurement that confirmed that yes, we pretty much understand this, it wouldn't be news, would it? Hence, we only hear about the ones that change things, cause it's more interesting to those outside the field.
Oh come on. I hate to break this to you, but
when the laser in your DVD player is on, its IN A CLOSED BOX. How exactly do you think you're going to get exposed to UV radiation from the laser in your DVD player?
As for the taser thing - yes, UV exposure in large doses over a long period of time can cause skin cancer. The second or so nessecary to create a current path and shock someone is NOT going to be a big deal here. Every go outside on a sunny day?(I know this is slashdot so there'll be a least a few no's here) Congrats, you're bathed in UV radiation. Better get around to suing whoever owns that big "sun" thing.
While it really sucks that they would promote a product as open source and then change their minds when it became less popular, there really isn't very much that can be done in such a situation, as from my understanding of the article the code was never actually released under an open source license, so there really isn't any legally binding commitment to open source on their part, just a lot of hot air from various executives.
Duplicity isn't exactly new among the human race, the lesson to be learned from this article is that just because someone claims to support open source doesn't mean that you shouldn't be skeptical of them, particularly when money is involved. Suspicions should have been raised when the code never showed up, none of it was ever released. Other than vigilence, all that can be really done is remembering who's shafted you in the past and try not to do business with them in the future.
Speak for yourself. As a current resident of Grand Forks, North Dakota(Motto: The Farthest north of the Rectangular States) and frankly I would kill for some decent radio. As it is, my choices are semi-ok classic rock station, Semi-modern rock station(sucks) and the every thing else thats not country station (Top 40, Backstreet and Britney). In addition to this we got lotsa country and western. It takes about 600 years for anything new to ever get played. Alternative? Don't make me laugh. Even in the Twin Cities, my hometown radio is beginning to suck more and more as everything becomes part of the Clear Channel and ABC corporate family.....The best market for this is out in the middle of nowhere where we're staving for some sort of real culture.
Yeah, but I'm wiling to be that Microsoft is willing to spend a lot more money on Lawyers than the state of California is. Remember the OJ Simpson case? Public Prosecutor vs the Shapiro and Cochrane? I'd say more has probably been spent on the defense side of this than the prosecution.
It's psychology. While most scientists tend to regard the first few studies on a topic as little more than a theory until its been confirmed by a few other people, the Media and general public tend to take these as absolute answers. "Well, then" they say "Thats taken care of". If the next study indicates the first one is wrong, then somethings changed. Thats news. If it simply confirms that yes, we are little more complex than your average nematode, thats not news. If suddenly we have way more, then the number of genes in the human genome has changed(well not really but you understand what I mean) thats news and shows up in the popular media. Slashdot works the same way. Taco and company aren't going to post 14 stories confirming the number of genes - it's not new, and (to most people) not exciting. But if it challenges current beliefs, its exciting and gets posted.
As for a health skepticism about science, you should be skeptical about science. Skepticism is (or should be) an integral part of science. Nothing should be taken for granted, nothing should be accepted as true until a good number of people have had a chance to kick it around in every way they can think of without finding a problem with the theory/study/whatever.
And when evidence does surface proving that the last theory was wrong, a new one should be created to fit the data and then that should be put under the microscope for flaws. This isn't religion. You don't take things on faith. Everything should be questioned and tested before acceptance.
Slashdot Mirror
Regardless of whether the equipment actually wears out, Accounting principles dictate that it must be assigned a life span and depreciated. This book value of initial cost - depreciation is for accounting purposes the value of the equipment and the depreciation has to going into the loss. Resale value is irrelevant unless you're actually selling it.
Actuallly no, the majority of black holes are stellar black holes. These are created by the collapse of giant stars and are generally a few suns in mass. 1.4 being about the lower end for collapse, I believe. Take an astronomy course.
Still doesn't even provide enough information to even make a guess at variables, let alone the last couple. Any real attempt to use the Drake equation is still just pulling a number out of thin air. Or rather pulling several numbers out of thin air and multiplying them, which is far more scientific. :)
Regardless of whether we have publicly available proof for this particular attack, we certainly have his own words for a number of others, including the bombing of US Barracks in Saudi Arabia.
Hmmm....Product Activation, Digital Rights Management....Yeah, they're hard to crack, but once they're out in circulation it generally doesn't take long for them to be broken. The best people in the field aren't working for Microsoft - they're hacking these things for the sheer hell of it.
Since this principle is stated in the Declaration of Independence, it takes priority over the US Constitution; not even a constitutional ammendment can rescind it.
Not particularly sure where you got this idea, but you need to go back to an american government class. The Declaration of Independance is not law. It's just a bunch of guys saying "wouldn't it be nice if....". It has no legal weight whatsoever. The Consitution is the basis of our government, nothing overrides it.
No, no, you're thinking of the "Porn Critical Mass" the point at which theres so much pornography on the internet that every search returns only ads for things such as "The girl next door with a donkey!" and "Pamela Anderson does an entire boy scout troup!". This in combination with chain letters and spam will cause our minds to collapse, forcing civilization to start over with some more deserving species, like lemurs, who will have a flourizing culture until they invent their own packet switched networks, at which point its only a matter of time until "The lemur from the next whole over does it with humans!"
Damn, you beat me to it. :) Still, the fact that there will be two posts with the link to the previous occurence inside of two minutes of the story being posted doesn't really speak for the Slashdot Editors, does it?
2 35 &mode=nested
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/09/15/133
Ah. My first post ever bashing the editors. I am now a true slashdotter....
If ET doesn't understand mathematics, its unlikely ET progressed as far as building radios, either. Prime numbers are a fairly simple mathematical concept, one thats been found by every human society developing a complex system of mathematics. It's not simply some artifact of the decimal system. Prime numbers are prime in any base. Once you've got whole numbers and division you're pretty quickly going to come to the conclusion that some of them can't be divided by any of the others.
Right now, there are literally millions of people who are suffering on this earth, and the vast majority of those problems can be solved by science. We should be focusing our resources on curing disease, engineering more productive grains and vegatables, and discovering cleaner power sources rather than pissing away millions of years of CPU time trying to see who can come up with the biggest prime number.
And maybe you should donate the time and resources you use everyday reading slashdot to volunteer at the Red Cross or better yet - Join the Peace Corps! Also, I would argue that most of the problems with hunger and disease facing the planet are more social issues that technological. Anyway, thats not the point. Projects like this are an excellent way to work with distributed computing on a large scale and improve our knowledge of how it works and how it can be applied. Not everything has to be a great crusade to change the world.
Generally such messages are designed to illustrate mathematical concepts. As such, I highly doubt they only sent one particular prime. Really, there isn't much of anything that we can send that's guaranteed to be intelligeble to an alien culture. They may not even share our fascination with prime numbers - while eminently useful to us, they aren't nessecary for things like engineering.
we want to retain an overview, for example, of ocean water quality, of greenhouse gases or temperature distribution in the atmosphere, and to be able to establish the extent to which tropical forests are being cut down
I see statistics about this every day in the newspaper. Clearly, we can measure all these things from the ground - what does a satellite give us? Is it just there for the global view?
Actually, most of these things are already gathered from satellites in one form or another. This satellite gives more extensive, detailed data that many of the others that are already in existence. Nothing extremely groundbreaking but serious improvements in a number of areas.
Whatever gases get released into the atmosphere, stay in the atmosphere. Big news.
Actually, no, this is just plain wrong. Gases and materials are continually being added and removed from our atmosphere. Oxygen is removed by animal life and combustion. Carbon Dioxide is removed by plant life and the oceans, as well as various geological processes. Various emissions created by industrial processes are removed by rain (I.E, acid rain). CFC's work their way up into the upper atmosphere over time and destroy Ozone. Our understanding of all of these processes is incomplete. So we need more detailed data. This satellite gathers that data.
Once their presence is identified from space, poisonous algae can be prevented from spreading
Help me understand why anyone cares enough about poisonous algae to send a satellite into space.
Hmmm. Gee, I can't imagine why anyone would care about huge masses of poisonous algae. It kills of fish, it kills off other aquatic life. It affects fishing, which for many people is an extremely important source of food. It effects the chemical composition the ocean, and in turn how the ocean interacts with the atmosphere.
So in order to get some answers, I went to the satellite's web page [esa.int] and found myself overwhelmed by the amount of incomprehensible information. The page is basically a sales portal for scientists who want to buy the data, but doesn't give any information comprehensible to a little layman like me.
Incomprehensible? To you maybe. If you really want to know go do a little research on google for some of the topics mentioned in the article. Yes, the site you linked to is in fact designed for scientists. Why should everything be spoon fed to your level of ignorance? If you want to know, go educate yourself.
So, does anyone have a good source that will explain to me why I should care one snippet about this satellite, and not think that ESA just blew E2.3 billion on the world's biggest piece of space debris?
Yes, now that you mention it Micheal kindly provided a link to it at the top of the page. This satellite is exceptional only in it's size. If you can't logically reason out why those sorts of data might be useful, well google is your friend.
Are you kidding? My program is currently having accreditation problems because our professors keep getting hired off for better paying positions!
Hmmm...we couldn't possbily have an effect on global climate, could we? Hell, theres two guys on the planet who could change the climate in about half an hour if they wanted too.....
Natalie Portman, Linus Torvalds, Cowboy Neal - Obviously, these are people who have died off in all other dimensions! Be glad you live in this one!
Why not? In some environments Sod is the most available building material, and Sod houses have a number of fairly useful qualities, thermal insulation being one of them. Use the correct tool for the job. For sysadmin type scripts and CGI, Perl is an excellent tool for the job. I wouldn't want to write a web browser in it, but that's what C is for, isn't it?
Also, Coke goes better with Alcohol. Rum and coke, whiskey and coke, whatever and coke. Rum and Pepsi tastes like bad cough syrup. I generally drink Pepsi, but no alcohol in it, please. (Please reserve any flames about who would put good Whiskey in coke. I don't, you shouldn't either)
With Microsoft actually improving its products recently(do I get modded down for saying this?) and actually appearing to do something about their historically pitiful security, I would think that the price disparity would become a larger and larger incentive to switch to Linux and *BSD in the server arena. Speaking on a somewhat smaller scale, I'm currently(attempting) to convert my P133 with it's 580M of hard drive space(split between two drives) and 16M of RAM into a router/firewall so I can share my DSL connection among the computers in my appartment. FreeBSD runs quite comfortably on this machine, both for hard drive space and RAM. I'd probably have to run Win3.1 to say the same about windows.
However, every time this is mentioned to Microsoft, they say "yeah, but they'll pay for it in the long run". Do they actually have anything to back this up? I'd like to hear how they think this is the case.
Actually, no it hasn't. In fact I believe the one just two stories down the front page about dark matter measurement...
Secondly - Of course every story you see is about some measurement that upsets our current theories about something. If they simply took yet another measurement that confirmed that yes, we pretty much understand this, it wouldn't be news, would it? Hence, we only hear about the ones that change things, cause it's more interesting to those outside the field.
Oh come on. I hate to break this to you, but
when the laser in your DVD player is on, its IN A CLOSED BOX. How exactly do you think you're going to get exposed to UV radiation from the laser in your DVD player?
As for the taser thing - yes, UV exposure in large doses over a long period of time can cause skin cancer. The second or so nessecary to create a current path and shock someone is NOT going to be a big deal here. Every go outside on a sunny day?(I know this is slashdot so there'll be a least a few no's here) Congrats, you're bathed in UV radiation. Better get around to suing whoever owns that big "sun" thing.
While it really sucks that they would promote a product as open source and then change their minds when it became less popular, there really isn't very much that can be done in such a situation, as from my understanding of the article the code was never actually released under an open source license, so there really isn't any legally binding commitment to open source on their part, just a lot of hot air from various executives.
Duplicity isn't exactly new among the human race, the lesson to be learned from this article is that just because someone claims to support open source doesn't mean that you shouldn't be skeptical of them, particularly when money is involved. Suspicions should have been raised when the code never showed up, none of it was ever released. Other than vigilence, all that can be really done is remembering who's shafted you in the past and try not to do business with them in the future.
Speak for yourself. As a current resident of Grand Forks, North Dakota(Motto: The Farthest north of the Rectangular States) and frankly I would kill for some decent radio. As it is, my choices are semi-ok classic rock station, Semi-modern rock station(sucks) and the every thing else thats not country station (Top 40, Backstreet and Britney). In addition to this we got lotsa country and western. It takes about 600 years for anything new to ever get played. Alternative? Don't make me laugh. Even in the Twin Cities, my hometown radio is beginning to suck more and more as everything becomes part of the Clear Channel and ABC corporate family.....The best market for this is out in the middle of nowhere where we're staving for some sort of real culture.
Yeah, but I'm wiling to be that Microsoft is willing to spend a lot more money on Lawyers than the state of California is. Remember the OJ Simpson case? Public Prosecutor vs the Shapiro and Cochrane? I'd say more has probably been spent on the defense side of this than the prosecution.
It's psychology. While most scientists tend to regard the first few studies on a topic as little more than a theory until its been confirmed by a few other people, the Media and general public tend to take these as absolute answers. "Well, then" they say "Thats taken care of". If the next study indicates the first one is wrong, then somethings changed. Thats news. If it simply confirms that yes, we are little more complex than your average nematode, thats not news. If suddenly we have way more, then the number of genes in the human genome has changed(well not really but you understand what I mean) thats news and shows up in the popular media. Slashdot works the same way. Taco and company aren't going to post 14 stories confirming the number of genes - it's not new, and (to most people) not exciting. But if it challenges current beliefs, its exciting and gets posted.
As for a health skepticism about science, you should be skeptical about science. Skepticism is (or should be) an integral part of science. Nothing should be taken for granted, nothing should be accepted as true until a good number of people have had a chance to kick it around in every way they can think of without finding a problem with the theory/study/whatever. And when evidence does surface proving that the last theory was wrong, a new one should be created to fit the data and then that should be put under the microscope for flaws. This isn't religion. You don't take things on faith. Everything should be questioned and tested before acceptance.
Both? Come on, theres me and John in the same buidling...theres gotta be at least one more. Well...maybe not.