You'd think so, wouldn't you? But it isn't hard to calculate the tidal stresses on particles with world-lines passing through the throat region (it's just differential acceleration, after all). I know nothing can pass through a Schwarzschild throat, but that's not true of a Kerr metric. Of course, that's assuming that the throat opens up in another location of the universe and that it's not behind a horizon there, but hey.
Not likely - there's really no commercial value in any of the parts. That, and the "facility" is actually 1600 square kilometers of desert/ranch: if the locals stormed it, they'd get attacked by an angry bull (trust me: it's not pleasant to stare at a bull defending a herd).
Please also realize that Argentina (media) = Buenos Aires, and Argentina (country) = a whole lot more. Malargue, the place where the observatory is located, is about as "politically unstable" as we are - not that that's saying a whole lot. Really don't trust the media as to what's going on in Argentina.
Also, who exactly would buy a PMT on the black market? They're useless commercially. The only thing of any value commercially in the entire project are the solar panels for power, and they'd be rather difficult to take (and not be noticed by the gauchos - a covert op into a ranch is not exactly easy).
Finally: SuperK is not downed at all. If you check their Web site, it's an absolute given that they're going to rebuild the observatory. $30M for one experiment that's proven and contributed massively to science is dirt friggin' cheap.
Not at all. The Argentine collaboration, while a large contributor to the project, is nowhere near the sole contributor. The largest contingent in the collaboration is (guess who) the US, and so our current guess is that if all hell breaks loose, and Argentina is no longer able to contribute one cent to the project, the US will probably shore up the Argentine portion simply because the investment is so high.
That, and for those in the cosmic ray research area, this observatory is so critical. At the last ICRC in Hamburg, the rappoteur (sp?) in the "Cosmic Rays >10^19 eV - Upcoming Projects" area said that the one thing that the recent data underscored most significantly is how much Auger is needed. I couldn't agree more - the two largest current observatories, AGASA and HiRes, both have markedly contradictory data, with no clear way to resolve this difference! Previous observatories tend to somewhat agree with HiRes (Haverah Park), but that's iffy at best, as AGASA has some fundamental advantages over the HiRes design. Therefore, it seems extremely unlikely that the international collaboration will let the project suffer for any troubles that the Argentines have.
It is a little unnerving, though, because for me, personally, the most promising people that I work with down there are the Argentines (and one Frenchman to be left unnamed) - the prospect of losing them due to lack of funding is really worrying. However, it should be noted that the beauty of international collaborations and a small field of study is that you get people moving cross countries to work on a project. There's already one Argentine who just got his PhD and is headed to Colorado, so we definitely won't lose him.:)
It should be noted - strongly! - that the observatory still is in the construction phase. 1600 autonomous water Cerenkov detectors are difficult - and expensive - to build! We're still working out a lot of the kinks in the design, so right now a lot of the work is being done off-site, though there is PLENTY of work being done on-site as well.
"Norteamericano" is the correct way of doing it - they're american down there too - South American. But, I digress...
Ezeiza's inspection really has never been anything at all to me - they don't even LOOK at anything non-Argentines bring in, because they don't care - all they're checking for is an excess of the import duty-free limit (which, I've been told, can easily be avoided, like all taxes in Argentina - which is one of their problems). No one has ever even spoken to me in that line - it's just hand over import form, smile, nod, and walk.
The Recoleta didn't really impress me. I was also extremely disturbed by the number of cats in that graveyard. That's just plain weird. The area was nice, but seemed a little too touristy. Just my opinion though. I love Malargue, though (where the project actually is - in the Mendoza province). It's like a jump back 50 years in time, and the people are all incredibly friendly. The only problem I have is that the geography is so incredibly boring, as Argentina, save for the Andes, is simply ridiculously flat.
It's mainly shape of the horizon and shape of the singularity that's affected due to charge/angular momentum. That, and the stability relation - too much charge/angular momentum, and everything goes to hell in a handbasket. If I had my copy of Misner, Thorn, and Wheeler here, I could expound a bit, but...
Schwarzschild metric: mass only
Kerr metric: mass+angular momentum
Reissner-Nordstrom metric: mass+charge
Kerr-Newman(sp? on second): mass+charge+angular momentum - i.e., real black holes.
J messes with the angular dependence and structure of the horizon. Not sure what charge does - it doesn't enter into the metric in many places other than the numerator. You'll note that a != 0 causes the metric to be nonsingular at the origin...
Charged/spinning black holes are interesting, because the Schwarzschild throat/Einstein-Rosen bridge may be passable in some geometries. For a standard Schwarzschild geometry, it's not - try to pass through the center of a nonspinning noncharged black hole, and you'll die, as it's not stable.
So, to explain: black holes have three properties. They're the universe's most massive particles in that respect.:) A black hole is completely described by its charge, mass, and angular momentum. It has no other properties (hence "black holes have no hair" - "hair" in this case is any other property).
Charge does affect the event horizon's properties, basically in the same way that angular momentum does - it alters it massively. You can get very weird black holes, including ring singularities instead of point singularities (black hole donuts!).
In reality, it's very difficult to charge up a black hole. Most of the matter falling in is neutral, and a buildup of one charge will result in a preferential draw of the other charge (opposites attract, y'know) and therefore, an overall neutral black hole. In falls an electron, and a proton is drawn preferentially over another electron. You also need a ton of charge to change the event horizon significantly - but in theory, it is possible to tell.
Unfortunately, this argument isn't very likely. The main problem we have is how to accelerate particles to such high energies - 10^20 and above is impossible by any stretch of the imagination, but the 3 x 10^20 particle that slammed into Dugway, Utah appeared to have a slightly better imagination than humans.
Empty-space acceleration would have to be massive to counteract the utterly huge deceleration caused by energy loss in galactic/extragalactic magnetic fields, interaction with the interstellar medium, and, most importantly for extreme high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs), the GZK effect - photopion production by interaction with the cosmic microwave background radiation. It's simply not possible to accelerate particles like this in empty space - we would've seen it already in particle accelerators.
Seriously, physicists right now have no idea how these particles are accelerated. Supernovae? Not nearly enough energy, by any stretch of the imagination - fundamental arguments like conservation of energy kill you far below the 10^20 eV limit. Gamma-ray bursts? Maybe, but the distribution of cosmic-rays doesn't agree with GRBs as a possible source. Extragalactic? Not unless you throw away basic physics and ignore the GZK effect - there's no way they could propagate that far.
Basically, the one question that there have been tons upon tons of papers in the recent literature for is "where is this gigantic particle accelerator nearby us?"
Actually, as I've stated elsewhere, the best information on the PAO is here, because this is the Argentine site, where we're actually doing things. Most of the stuff on auger.org is administrative and outreach stuff - if you want to find out what's actually going on, check out the Argentine page. If you notice, it's actually rather active! (Check under the CDAS page for a better list of the milestones we've reached).
Argentina didn't come up with this science project - the world did. It's an international collaboration of dozens of countries and about 300 scientists worldwide. Argentina was chosen as the southern site of the array due to the location - the array consists of a flourescence detector, which requires stable weather and clear air. The northern site is still under discussion, though it seems most likely to be in Utah (along with the dozen or so other cosmic ray observatories in Utah).
The Auger collaboration is then completely distinct from Argentina's government, so we don't really worry about the governmental problems except for the problems they cause our friends down there and the Argentine portion of the collaboration.
The media and the rest of the world is convinced that Argentina is synonomous with Buenos Aires. That, and they're perfectly happy to sensationalize everything as well.
The observatory is actually in a place along the Chilean border called Malargue (you'll never find it on a map - ever) which (according to all my friends there) is a little bit worried about the goings on in BA, but life, for the most part, seems normal.
Seriously, the government overhaul is the least of the Observatory's problems - the biggest problems we have are getting things in and out of the country. International customs is horrible. Ever try to explain to someone what a photomultiplier is? Or how something that looks like a very big light bulb is worth $1000?
Oh my God, I'm amazed - this is the observatory I actually WORK for, and it's on SLASHDOT, my God.
Forgive me for going completely crazy replying to everyone, but this is just too cool.
OK, so long as people promise not to Slashdot the server (heh, that was dumb) for anyone who wants more information, go to the main Auger website, or for even cooler information, go to the Auger site in Argentina.
Auger is actually a very interesting project, and it's not like anything you'd ever think of - it's a 1600 km^2 array of water Cerenkov detectors (10 cubic meters of water) spaced 1.5 km apart - the picture in the article is of the flourescence detector, which is more like what you think of for a standard detector, but due to the limitations of the flourescence method of detecting cosmic rays, its duty time is only 10%, as opposed to the 100% of the surface array.
The project is proceeding along... pretty well. We've basically finished the Engineering Array, a small-scale testbed to find all of the design flaws in the initial project (and boy, did we find them) and we've detected some cosmic rays which we believe to be ~10^19 eV. We've also demonstrated the hybrid design as well (events where the flourescence detector triggers as well as the surface detector).
The black hole stuff isn't the important goal of the project - the goal is to elucidate the spectrum of cosmic rays above 10^20 eV, because we have no idea where those particles come from - all of basic physics says they can't exist. This is one of the big questions in astrophysics in recent years, up there with gamma ray bursts and odd quantum states of matter.
It's way cool. And not just because I work on it...
Teletype would make a lot more sense, I agree, (or the kbd tag, as others have pointed out) but I don't enter Slashdot comments in HTML - I typically leave them in plain old text. It makes it feel more like email, I guess (and if anyone suggests HTML email, I will refer them to my secretary,/dev/null).
I've never been able to figure out single/double quotation marks, because I have literally seen entire BOOKS where they used single quotation marks instead of double quotation marks and vice versa.
Limited bandwidth - that's all I have to say. Most people don't need the ISOs.
Re: what Potato comes with
If you had looked around on Usenet for about 2 seconds - I believe it's the second or third post in response to a search for "XFree86 4 potato" you'd find out how to upgrade Potato to Woody (testing) in about 5 minutes.
Offtopic, yes, I know. Hence the reason I got rid of the Score +1 bonus, so I've effectively already modded myself down.:)
I was using the word "upgrade" out of its English context, and was using qualifiers to set it aside. As for the single-quote usage rather than a double-quote usage, I don't know what's more proper, to be honest, and I usually just use whatever I feel like.:) While "dist-upgrade" really isn't an English word, it makes sense that if "upgrade" is set off, so should "dist-upgrade".
Strangely enough, in the previous post, I should've offset "apt-get dist-upgrade" as well, since it's a multi-word phrase that is being treated as a single noun, therefore I should probably group it in some way. But that was a mistake.
Because in a cron job, you can shove "apt-get upgrade" (and some switch to get rid of the "Y/N") and all of the basic security stuff is done, good, kay, everything's great.
You can't do that in a cron job for "unstable".
Regarding the hand-securing thing, well, for the actual PURPOSE of the box, I agree with you - the mail should probably be configured by hand, etc., but not necessarily for EVERYTHING - especially for security holes, rather than stupid security issues. What if there's a security hole in wu-ftpd? (God, that never happens) In that case, "stable" is best, because "apt-get upgrade" will just fix that. Unstable you'd actually have to GO to each box, and make sure dependencies weren't screwed with.
Have you ever seen a sequel to a Final Fantasy game?
No - because they don't exist. FFX is not FFIX's sequel - it's a successor. FFX has nothing to do with FFIX, which had nothing to do with FFVIII, all the way back to FFI.
Final Fantasy is called "Final Fantasy" because it is the *world's* final fantasy - if you fail. The basic plot of every Final Fantasy is the same - somehow, something or someone is going to destroy the world, and you need to stop them.
Yah, yah, the original post was meant to be a joke, but really - the name *does* make sense. At least, more sense than the "Final" Friday the 13th, or the "Final" Nightmare on Elm Street.
No problem. Actually, the main difficulty understanding genetics is to get over the problem in my previous post - DNA is not like computer instructions - all DNA does is code for protein, and then the protein interacts in the body and 'does what it is supposed to do' (hopefully). The belief that genetic engineering can end all disease, make perfect humans, etc. is a common mistake, and definitely not true - many human diseases are completely agenetic (take cancer, for instance - everyone would probably eventually develop cancer, given enough time) and more importantly, many of the mechanisms in place in living systems are simply to fix or deal with things that break (again, cancer). To make humans immune to cancer, for instance, you'd have to make a better system than nature designed - good luck. You could, however, cure it, and that's the real benefit of genetic engineering, is that it may help us cure and treat diseases better.
The other point is that I do want to stress that the mouse/human comparison is not quite as useless as a first glance might make it seem. The fact is, if we know how a protein (and therefore a gene) behaves in a mouse, and we alter that gene, and see how that protein behaves, we've got a good guess that it will cause the same behavior in humans. It's not -guaranteed-, but it's better than doing the experiment blindly on humans (animal rights activists aside: from a purely practical standpoint, mice breed faster than humans and have a shorter lifespan, so from a completely amoral standpoint, it's better to do it on mice. It's also harder to control the environment). Wow I could still get flamed for that comment.
Humans have 23 chromosomes, but there are 24 different variants of the chromosomes, since you have X and Y. If you want to sequence the entire genome, you have to sequence the 22 normal chromosomes, then sequence XX, and then sequence XY (since they're paired, that means "sequence X", "sequence Y", and double as necessary).
All in all, you have to sequence 24 different objects. Read the article, and note the picture at the bottom, and you'll understand.
Actually, it's worse than that - chromosomes don't say "make hair like this" - they say "make this protein", and that's -all- they say. To paraphrase a great quote from Alpha Centuari (the game, yes) "You cannot take the gene for an elephant's trunk and put it onto a giraffe, and get a giraffe with an elephant's trunk, because there IS no gene for an elephant's trunk. What you can do with genes is chemistry, because genes code for chemicals."
That said, you don't know HOW a particular protein will interact in a given host unless you know the rest of the chemistry for that host. Stick human growth hormone in a fish, and it won't grow - thus, if you stuck the gene that codes for HGH into a fish, it won't get bigger either.
Then again, all of this is somewhat moot, because for the most part, they do understand a good deal of the biochemistry of animals (including mice) and it's very similar to that of humans.
Um, you may want to reread that quote- it's the 17th chromosome of *mice* that maps to the -11th- in humans, not the 17th.
Thus there is no reason to believe that mice chromosome #3 should be similar to human chromosome #3. My guess is that the 1117 connection is probably the best one in the micehuman comparison.
In addition, they meant "Chromosome 20 has been sequenced, making it the third human chromosome to be sequenced", not that chromosome #3 has been sequenced (which is much much larger than #20, I believe).
Read the article to see the depiction of the numbered chromosomes.
Re:Microwave
on
Lunar Lasers
·
· Score: 3, Informative
X-rays cause cancer due to a higher energy and shorter wavelength. They have rather powerful penetration depths (duh, otherwise they wouldn't be used in medical research). Microwaves don't have that problem (otherwise they wouldn't use them in cell phones/telephones - what do you think a 1.2GHz phone is?)
Microwaves are perfectly safe, in normal intensities, and since they don't refract, you don't have a worry about it spreading past the area you intend it to hit. They can't affect anything smaller than their wavelength, obviously, so you don't have the danger that X-rays have.
People are bombarded with radiation every day, and this wouldn't change anything, really. You're much more at risk from that giant 4 x 10^26 watt light bulb hovering over your head every day. So if you're really worried about these microwave lasers, go hide in a cave.
Huh? You seriously mean to tell me that you think the skills needed to do all of that merit $60/hour? You could write up a step by step guide how to do it (under Linux) in under 10 minutes! I mean, it's about four or five lines (dd rocks).
You don't need skills unless something goes wrong.
Seriously, I think you're massively overvaluing basic skills which almost all of the Linux community should have.
Also, the "My time is worth $X an hour, so I shouldn't do this..." is a bad argument, so you shouldn't bother using it. You shouldn't bother sleeping, then, as it's $480/day. Don't bother doing the laundry, as that's probably around $120. Better hire a maid, too, and you should probably hire someone to go shopping for you as well.
Of course, this assumes that you can work (and get paid) 24 hours a day. Which is of course, not true. So, if I save $60/hour in my spare time, terrific! That's an hour or two I've tacked onto my work day, and guess what - I had fun doing it.
Bottom line is, the "It isn't worth my time to pick up a penny" argument is junk. You don't work 24 hours a day, so if you can casually earn money (or save money) in the time when other people are doing nothing, you win out. Especially if it causes you no extra stress and no hardship.
Slashdot Mirror
You'd think so, wouldn't you? But it isn't hard to calculate the tidal stresses on particles with world-lines passing through the throat region (it's just differential acceleration, after all). I know nothing can pass through a Schwarzschild throat, but that's not true of a Kerr metric. Of course, that's assuming that the throat opens up in another location of the universe and that it's not behind a horizon there, but hey.
Not likely - there's really no commercial value in any of the parts. That, and the "facility" is actually 1600 square kilometers of desert/ranch: if the locals stormed it, they'd get attacked by an angry bull (trust me: it's not pleasant to stare at a bull defending a herd).
Please also realize that Argentina (media) = Buenos Aires, and Argentina (country) = a whole lot more. Malargue, the place where the observatory is located, is about as "politically unstable" as we are - not that that's saying a whole lot. Really don't trust the media as to what's going on in Argentina.
Also, who exactly would buy a PMT on the black market? They're useless commercially. The only thing of any value commercially in the entire project are the solar panels for power, and they'd be rather difficult to take (and not be noticed by the gauchos - a covert op into a ranch is not exactly easy).
Finally: SuperK is not downed at all. If you check their Web site, it's an absolute given that they're going to rebuild the observatory. $30M for one experiment that's proven and contributed massively to science is dirt friggin' cheap.
Not at all. The Argentine collaboration, while a large contributor to the project, is nowhere near the sole contributor. The largest contingent in the collaboration is (guess who) the US, and so our current guess is that if all hell breaks loose, and Argentina is no longer able to contribute one cent to the project, the US will probably shore up the Argentine portion simply because the investment is so high.
:)
That, and for those in the cosmic ray research area, this observatory is so critical. At the last ICRC in Hamburg, the rappoteur (sp?) in the "Cosmic Rays >10^19 eV - Upcoming Projects" area said that the one thing that the recent data underscored most significantly is how much Auger is needed. I couldn't agree more - the two largest current observatories, AGASA and HiRes, both have markedly contradictory data, with no clear way to resolve this difference! Previous observatories tend to somewhat agree with HiRes (Haverah Park), but that's iffy at best, as AGASA has some fundamental advantages over the HiRes design. Therefore, it seems extremely unlikely that the international collaboration will let the project suffer for any troubles that the Argentines have.
It is a little unnerving, though, because for me, personally, the most promising people that I work with down there are the Argentines (and one Frenchman to be left unnamed) - the prospect of losing them due to lack of funding is really worrying. However, it should be noted that the beauty of international collaborations and a small field of study is that you get people moving cross countries to work on a project. There's already one Argentine who just got his PhD and is headed to Colorado, so we definitely won't lose him.
It should be noted - strongly! - that the observatory still is in the construction phase. 1600 autonomous water Cerenkov detectors are difficult - and expensive - to build! We're still working out a lot of the kinks in the design, so right now a lot of the work is being done off-site, though there is PLENTY of work being done on-site as well.
"Norteamericano" is the correct way of doing it - they're american down there too - South American. But, I digress...
Ezeiza's inspection really has never been anything at all to me - they don't even LOOK at anything non-Argentines bring in, because they don't care - all they're checking for is an excess of the import duty-free limit (which, I've been told, can easily be avoided, like all taxes in Argentina - which is one of their problems). No one has ever even spoken to me in that line - it's just hand over import form, smile, nod, and walk.
The Recoleta didn't really impress me. I was also extremely disturbed by the number of cats in that graveyard. That's just plain weird. The area was nice, but seemed a little too touristy. Just my opinion though. I love Malargue, though (where the project actually is - in the Mendoza province). It's like a jump back 50 years in time, and the people are all incredibly friendly. The only problem I have is that the geography is so incredibly boring, as Argentina, save for the Andes, is simply ridiculously flat.
It's mainly shape of the horizon and shape of the singularity that's affected due to charge/angular momentum. That, and the stability relation - too much charge/angular momentum, and everything goes to hell in a handbasket. If I had my copy of Misner, Thorn, and Wheeler here, I could expound a bit, but...
Schwarzschild metric: mass only
Kerr metric: mass+angular momentum
Reissner-Nordstrom metric: mass+charge
Kerr-Newman(sp? on second): mass+charge+angular momentum - i.e., real black holes.
J messes with the angular dependence and structure of the horizon. Not sure what charge does - it doesn't enter into the metric in many places other than the numerator. You'll note that a != 0 causes the metric to be nonsingular at the origin...
Charged/spinning black holes are interesting, because the Schwarzschild throat/Einstein-Rosen bridge may be passable in some geometries. For a standard Schwarzschild geometry, it's not - try to pass through the center of a nonspinning noncharged black hole, and you'll die, as it's not stable.
You're right - they don't jive.
:) A black hole is completely described by its charge, mass, and angular momentum. It has no other properties (hence "black holes have no hair" - "hair" in this case is any other property).
So, to explain: black holes have three properties. They're the universe's most massive particles in that respect.
Charge does affect the event horizon's properties, basically in the same way that angular momentum does - it alters it massively. You can get very weird black holes, including ring singularities instead of point singularities (black hole donuts!).
In reality, it's very difficult to charge up a black hole. Most of the matter falling in is neutral, and a buildup of one charge will result in a preferential draw of the other charge (opposites attract, y'know) and therefore, an overall neutral black hole. In falls an electron, and a proton is drawn preferentially over another electron. You also need a ton of charge to change the event horizon significantly - but in theory, it is possible to tell.
Unfortunately, this argument isn't very likely. The main problem we have is how to accelerate particles to such high energies - 10^20 and above is impossible by any stretch of the imagination, but the 3 x 10^20 particle that slammed into Dugway, Utah appeared to have a slightly better imagination than humans.
Empty-space acceleration would have to be massive to counteract the utterly huge deceleration caused by energy loss in galactic/extragalactic magnetic fields, interaction with the interstellar medium, and, most importantly for extreme high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs), the GZK effect - photopion production by interaction with the cosmic microwave background radiation. It's simply not possible to accelerate particles like this in empty space - we would've seen it already in particle accelerators.
Seriously, physicists right now have no idea how these particles are accelerated. Supernovae? Not nearly enough energy, by any stretch of the imagination - fundamental arguments like conservation of energy kill you far below the 10^20 eV limit. Gamma-ray bursts? Maybe, but the distribution of cosmic-rays doesn't agree with GRBs as a possible source. Extragalactic? Not unless you throw away basic physics and ignore the GZK effect - there's no way they could propagate that far.
Basically, the one question that there have been tons upon tons of papers in the recent literature for is "where is this gigantic particle accelerator nearby us?"
Actually, as I've stated elsewhere, the best information on the PAO is here, because this is the Argentine site, where we're actually doing things. Most of the stuff on auger.org is administrative and outreach stuff - if you want to find out what's actually going on, check out the Argentine page. If you notice, it's actually rather active! (Check under the CDAS page for a better list of the milestones we've reached).
I do just want to clear things up -
Argentina didn't come up with this science project - the world did. It's an international collaboration of dozens of countries and about 300 scientists worldwide. Argentina was chosen as the southern site of the array due to the location - the array consists of a flourescence detector, which requires stable weather and clear air. The northern site is still under discussion, though it seems most likely to be in Utah (along with the dozen or so other cosmic ray observatories in Utah).
The Auger collaboration is then completely distinct from Argentina's government, so we don't really worry about the governmental problems except for the problems they cause our friends down there and the Argentine portion of the collaboration.
The media and the rest of the world is convinced that Argentina is synonomous with Buenos Aires. That, and they're perfectly happy to sensationalize everything as well.
The observatory is actually in a place along the Chilean border called Malargue (you'll never find it on a map - ever) which (according to all my friends there) is a little bit worried about the goings on in BA, but life, for the most part, seems normal.
Seriously, the government overhaul is the least of the Observatory's problems - the biggest problems we have are getting things in and out of the country. International customs is horrible. Ever try to explain to someone what a photomultiplier is? Or how something that looks like a very big light bulb is worth $1000?
Oh my God, I'm amazed - this is the observatory I actually WORK for, and it's on SLASHDOT, my God.
Forgive me for going completely crazy replying to everyone, but this is just too cool.
OK, so long as people promise not to Slashdot the server (heh, that was dumb) for anyone who wants more information, go to the main Auger website, or for even cooler information, go to the Auger site in Argentina.
Auger is actually a very interesting project, and it's not like anything you'd ever think of - it's a 1600 km^2 array of water Cerenkov detectors (10 cubic meters of water) spaced 1.5 km apart - the picture in the article is of the flourescence detector, which is more like what you think of for a standard detector, but due to the limitations of the flourescence method of detecting cosmic rays, its duty time is only 10%, as opposed to the 100% of the surface array.
The project is proceeding along... pretty well. We've basically finished the Engineering Array, a small-scale testbed to find all of the design flaws in the initial project (and boy, did we find them) and we've detected some cosmic rays which we believe to be ~10^19 eV. We've also demonstrated the hybrid design as well (events where the flourescence detector triggers as well as the surface detector).
The black hole stuff isn't the important goal of the project - the goal is to elucidate the spectrum of cosmic rays above 10^20 eV, because we have no idea where those particles come from - all of basic physics says they can't exist. This is one of the big questions in astrophysics in recent years, up there with gamma ray bursts and odd quantum states of matter.
It's way cool. And not just because I work on it...
Teletype would make a lot more sense, I agree, (or the kbd tag, as others have pointed out) but I don't enter Slashdot comments in HTML - I typically leave them in plain old text. It makes it feel more like email, I guess (and if anyone suggests HTML email, I will refer them to my secretary, /dev/null).
I've never been able to figure out single/double quotation marks, because I have literally seen entire BOOKS where they used single quotation marks instead of double quotation marks and vice versa.
Re: ISOs:
Limited bandwidth - that's all I have to say. Most people don't need the ISOs.
Re: what Potato comes with
If you had looked around on Usenet for about 2 seconds - I believe it's the second or third post in response to a search for "XFree86 4 potato" you'd find out how to upgrade Potato to Woody (testing) in about 5 minutes.
Edit sources.list, replace stable with Woody.
Apt-get update.
Apt-get dist-upgrade.
Wait, relax, enjoy.
Re: the kernel
Please. A 2.4 kernel isn't THAT necessary.
Debian will use alien to convert RPMs into .debs for the LSB requirement.
There's an old phrase regarding Debian - and that's that the installer is so bad because you only ever need to install once.
That being said, the Potato installer is not maintained anymore - there's a brand new installer for Woody (Debian 3.0).
Offtopic, yes, I know. Hence the reason I got rid of the Score +1 bonus, so I've effectively already modded myself down. :)
:) While "dist-upgrade" really isn't an English word, it makes sense that if "upgrade" is set off, so should "dist-upgrade".
I was using the word "upgrade" out of its English context, and was using qualifiers to set it aside. As for the single-quote usage rather than a double-quote usage, I don't know what's more proper, to be honest, and I usually just use whatever I feel like.
Strangely enough, in the previous post, I should've offset "apt-get dist-upgrade" as well, since it's a multi-word phrase that is being treated as a single noun, therefore I should probably group it in some way. But that was a mistake.
Actually, don't you have to do apt-get dist-upgrade for Woody from Potato? Not that I'm sure what 'dist-upgrade' does over 'upgrade'...
Because in a cron job, you can shove "apt-get upgrade" (and some switch to get rid of the "Y/N") and all of the basic security stuff is done, good, kay, everything's great.
You can't do that in a cron job for "unstable".
Regarding the hand-securing thing, well, for the actual PURPOSE of the box, I agree with you - the mail should probably be configured by hand, etc., but not necessarily for EVERYTHING - especially for security holes, rather than stupid security issues. What if there's a security hole in wu-ftpd? (God, that never happens) In that case, "stable" is best, because "apt-get upgrade" will just fix that. Unstable you'd actually have to GO to each box, and make sure dependencies weren't screwed with.
Actually, isn't "unstable" 'Sid'? I think 'Woody' is the "testing" release.
But it is the Final Fantasy.
Have you ever seen a sequel to a Final Fantasy game?
No - because they don't exist. FFX is not FFIX's sequel - it's a successor. FFX has nothing to do with FFIX, which had nothing to do with FFVIII, all the way back to FFI.
Final Fantasy is called "Final Fantasy" because it is the *world's* final fantasy - if you fail. The basic plot of every Final Fantasy is the same - somehow, something or someone is going to destroy the world, and you need to stop them.
Yah, yah, the original post was meant to be a joke, but really - the name *does* make sense. At least, more sense than the "Final" Friday the 13th, or the "Final" Nightmare on Elm Street.
No problem. Actually, the main difficulty understanding genetics is to get over the problem in my previous post - DNA is not like computer instructions - all DNA does is code for protein, and then the protein interacts in the body and 'does what it is supposed to do' (hopefully). The belief that genetic engineering can end all disease, make perfect humans, etc. is a common mistake, and definitely not true - many human diseases are completely agenetic (take cancer, for instance - everyone would probably eventually develop cancer, given enough time) and more importantly, many of the mechanisms in place in living systems are simply to fix or deal with things that break (again, cancer). To make humans immune to cancer, for instance, you'd have to make a better system than nature designed - good luck. You could, however, cure it, and that's the real benefit of genetic engineering, is that it may help us cure and treat diseases better.
The other point is that I do want to stress that the mouse/human comparison is not quite as useless as a first glance might make it seem. The fact is, if we know how a protein (and therefore a gene) behaves in a mouse, and we alter that gene, and see how that protein behaves, we've got a good guess that it will cause the same behavior in humans. It's not -guaranteed-, but it's better than doing the experiment blindly on humans (animal rights activists aside: from a purely practical standpoint, mice breed faster than humans and have a shorter lifespan, so from a completely amoral standpoint, it's better to do it on mice. It's also harder to control the environment). Wow I could still get flamed for that comment.
Humans have 23 chromosomes, but there are 24 different variants of the chromosomes, since you have X and Y. If you want to sequence the entire genome, you have to sequence the 22 normal chromosomes, then sequence XX, and then sequence XY (since they're paired, that means "sequence X", "sequence Y", and double as necessary).
All in all, you have to sequence 24 different objects. Read the article, and note the picture at the bottom, and you'll understand.
Actually, it's worse than that - chromosomes don't say "make hair like this" - they say "make this protein", and that's -all- they say. To paraphrase a great quote from Alpha Centuari (the game, yes) "You cannot take the gene for an elephant's trunk and put it onto a giraffe, and get a giraffe with an elephant's trunk, because there IS no gene for an elephant's trunk. What you can do with genes is chemistry, because genes code for chemicals."
That said, you don't know HOW a particular protein will interact in a given host unless you know the rest of the chemistry for that host. Stick human growth hormone in a fish, and it won't grow - thus, if you stuck the gene that codes for HGH into a fish, it won't get bigger either.
Then again, all of this is somewhat moot, because for the most part, they do understand a good deal of the biochemistry of animals (including mice) and it's very similar to that of humans.
Um, you may want to reread that quote- it's the 17th chromosome of *mice* that maps to the -11th- in humans, not the 17th.
Thus there is no reason to believe that mice chromosome #3 should be similar to human chromosome #3. My guess is that the 1117 connection is probably the best one in the micehuman comparison.
In addition, they meant "Chromosome 20 has been sequenced, making it the third human chromosome to be sequenced", not that chromosome #3 has been sequenced (which is much much larger than #20, I believe).
Read the article to see the depiction of the numbered chromosomes.
X-rays cause cancer due to a higher energy and shorter wavelength. They have rather powerful penetration depths (duh, otherwise they wouldn't be used in medical research). Microwaves don't have that problem (otherwise they wouldn't use them in cell phones/telephones - what do you think a 1.2GHz phone is?)
Microwaves are perfectly safe, in normal intensities, and since they don't refract, you don't have a worry about it spreading past the area you intend it to hit. They can't affect anything smaller than their wavelength, obviously, so you don't have the danger that X-rays have.
People are bombarded with radiation every day, and this wouldn't change anything, really. You're much more at risk from that giant 4 x 10^26 watt light bulb hovering over your head every day. So if you're really worried about these microwave lasers, go hide in a cave.
Um.
Huh? You seriously mean to tell me that you think the skills needed to do all of that merit $60/hour? You could write up a step by step guide how to do it (under Linux) in under 10 minutes! I mean, it's about four or five lines (dd rocks).
You don't need skills unless something goes wrong.
Seriously, I think you're massively overvaluing basic skills which almost all of the Linux community should have.
Also, the "My time is worth $X an hour, so I shouldn't do this..." is a bad argument, so you shouldn't bother using it. You shouldn't bother sleeping, then, as it's $480/day. Don't bother doing the laundry, as that's probably around $120. Better hire a maid, too, and you should probably hire someone to go shopping for you as well.
Of course, this assumes that you can work (and get paid) 24 hours a day. Which is of course, not true. So, if I save $60/hour in my spare time, terrific! That's an hour or two I've tacked onto my work day, and guess what - I had fun doing it.
Bottom line is, the "It isn't worth my time to pick up a penny" argument is junk. You don't work 24 hours a day, so if you can casually earn money (or save money) in the time when other people are doing nothing, you win out. Especially if it causes you no extra stress and no hardship.