use the instrument for interferometry? How far apart can two scopes be to establish an interferometry baseline. As I understand it if you have two scopes X distance apart you can combine them so you have an instrument with the resolution of a scope with diameter X. Note that this is only the resolution, you don't get the light gathering capacity of such a large scope, but you can use it to resolve very small objects. (Note: IANAA
{I Am Not An Astronomer})
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you. Thank you for posting that, I wish the U of A administrators had had the courage or insensitivity to say "Fuck You Tonto!" to the Apache.
Celeron, Athlon, Sempron, Opteron, Pentium. I want visceral names! I want manly names. I want names with teeth, names with balls, names with a serious tude. How cool would it be if Intel announced that they were going to call their next processor "The Vindicator" and then AMD could announce one called "The Eviscerator". I'd love to own a computer that had a sticker that read "Intel Bitchslapper 960 Inside".
a mirrored set of 120Gb drives on a Promise RAID controller, MusicMatch (later iTunes when he got an iPod) and a SliMP3Squeezebox. It's pretty simple to maintain, easy for him to use and the Squeezebox is the best MP3 streaming system out there. Software is available for Linux, WinXP and MacOSX and the box is simple to set up and works like a fucking charm. It is truly an awesome bit of kit.
I had thought about setting up a Linux system for him but I didn't want to have to train him how to use Linux and he didn't want to learn how to admin Linux. Since he already had one WinXP box setting up another wasn't too difficult. Admittedly the performance with WinXP on the box isn't as good as what I could have gotten with Linux, but it's more than adequate. I'd stick with the Linux solution if I were you, put in some kind of RAID (yes, it's extra money but do you really want to rip all of those CDs again?) and go with the Squeezebox. And when your parents want music somewhere else they can just get another Squeezebox and hook it up.
PLEASE NOTE: I don't work for SliMP3. I just really, really, really like the product, it's as brilliant as the iPod.
Actually if it's like some of the committees I've been on there will be six steering wheels but only one person will pedal and will have to carry everyone else along.
It would be a pretty bitchin launcher though. If you can get the energy for the first part of your trip from the launcher satellite and then use onboard fuel to decelerate at the end of the trip you still come out ahead versus carrying all of the fuel with you.
Purchase printer with cash. Do not register printer. Dispose of printer after a certain number of counterfeiting runs. Counterfeit more money to purchase more printers, repeat as necessary.
As far as those who are concerned about the government secretly tracking them down by the printer signatures in their anonymous manifestoes I think there are other things to worry about from the government.
Plutonium is extremely toxic. A grain of it in your bloodstream will eventually kill you by ionizing your tissues to the point where you die. It's called radiation poisoning.
No it won't. Read the encyclopedia entry.
I recall that the only treatment for radiation poisoning (from PL) during the Manhattan project was immediate high amputation, if possible. And the body of the dead bastard has to be sealed in lead, because IT was now dangerous.
Well if you can't produce an actual source for this then it's bullshit. Actually though I can produce a source for this bit of misinformation, I think you got it from the story The Long Watch by Robert Heinlein.
In Richard Rhodes The Making of the Atomic Bomb, the definitive history of the Manhattan project, there is no mention of any of these plutonium casualties who had their limbs lopped off. A bit of information on how this is bullshit can be found on wikipedia
the relevant section is below:
According to some accounts, the accepted first aid technique for tissue exposure to plutonium during the Manhattan Project was immediate high amputation of the exposed limb. This is unlikely, as the focus of the Manhatten Project was the wartime development of an important weapon and industrial safety was not a high priority. The dangers of other key materials, such as beryllium, were not researched and documented until many years afterwards.
Should probably be filed in the paper shredder right alongside scram being an acronym for safety control rod axe man. Pakaran. 00:02, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Pounds of plutonium, rendered into a powdered form and allowed to disperse would render large parts of the earth downwind dangerous to live near for centuries. It's a bloody weapon. Heinlein's first story of a nuclear weapon was about AEROSOL delivery of this stuff; he didn't think the Bomb was scary enough.
OK, I love Heinlein too, but using a story he wrote in the early 1940s, Solution Unsatisfactory (and later revised) as the basis for your knowledge of nuclear physics and plutonium toxicity is just plain stupid. You might as well use Red Planet and Podkayne of Mars as your source of information about Mars and Venus.
Note also that when radiological weapons were first designed in the late 1950s it was not plutonium that was the choice for a contaminant, it was cobalt. Pu 239 just isn't very radioactive, that's why it has that long half life and why the scientists at the Manhattan project amused themselves by passing around the nickel plated core to the Trinity bomb before it was tested.
Before you post next time try getting some information from sources other than the Weekly World News and 40's science fiction stories.
Typical approach, sate the demand rather than reduce it.
OK, we're going to reduce the demand for power starting with you. The government will be by later on today to confiscate all of your electrical and gas appliances. This will improve both the environment and the signal to noise ratio on/.. It might be a little rough on you when you're freezing in the dark this winter, but you'll be able to console yourself with warm thoughts about the good you are doing for the planetary environment.
The radioactivity is not the point. Plutonium is exeptional toxic (ie. poison).
BZZZZZZZT! Nuclear bullshit warning! Nuclear bullshit warning! Nuclear bullshit warning! The previous post may have contained bullshit that could be hazardous to your health!
Sorry, to bum your high, but while plutonium is a bad thing it is by no means as toxic as everyone seems to think it is. If you read the encyclopedia
entry on plutonium you find that the toxicity has been much exaggerated. The section on oral toxicity in the excerpt below is especially informative.
All isotopes and compounds of plutonium are toxic and radioactive. While plutonium is sometimes described in media reports as "the most toxic substance known to man", there is general agreement among experts in the field that this is incorrect. As of 2003, there has yet to be a single human death officially attributed to plutonium exposure. Naturally-occurring radium is about 200 times more radiotoxic than plutonium, and some organic toxins like botulism toxin are still more toxic. Botulism toxin, in particular, has a lethal dose in the hundreds of pg per kg, far less than the quantity of plutonium that poses a significant cancer risk. In addition, beta and gamma emitters (including the C-14 and K-40 in nearly all food) can cause cancer on casual contact, which alpha emitters cannot.
Orally, plutonium is less toxic than several common substances, including caffeine, acetominopnen, some vitamins, (pseudo)ephedrine, all narcotic pain killers (including codeine) and any number of plants and fungi. It is perhaps somewhat more toxic than absolute alcohol, but less so than tobacco and most illegal drugs (some such as LSD and marijuana are not or barely toxic). As such, it is debatable whether plutonium should even be classified as a poison. (emphasis mine)
That said, there is no doubt that plutonium may be extremely dangerous when handled incorrectly. The alpha radiation it emits does not penetrate the skin, but can irradiate internal organs when plutonium is inhaled or ingested; particularly at risk are the skeleton, which it is liable to be absorbed onto the surface of, and the liver, where it will collect and become concentrated. Extremely small particles of plutonium on the order of micrograms have a (small) chance to cause lung cancer if inhaled into the lungs.
Other substances including ricin, botulinum toxin and tetanus toxin are fatal in doses of (sometimes far) under one milligram, and others (the nerve agents, nutmeg by injection, the amanita toxin, the fugu toxin) are in the range of a few milligrams. As such, plutonium is not unusual in terms of toxicity, even by inhalation. In addition, those substances are fatal in hours to days, whereas plutonium (and other cancer-causing radioactives) give an increased chance of illness decades in the future. Considerably larger amounts may cause acute radiation poisoning and death if ingested or inhaled; however, so far, no human is known to have died because of inhaling or ingesting plutonium and many people have measurable amounts of plutonium in their bodies.
The chemical and radiological toxicity of plutonium should be distinguished from eachother and further, from the potential danger of a runaway fission reaction or "criticality". Many, both in the anti-nuclear movement and in the continuing green politics movement, refer to plutonium as the most dangerous substance known to man because of its use in nuclear power plants which are seen as inherently dangerous and its potential as a catalyst for nuclear weapons proliferation.
Possibly it is the confusion of these two issues that has led to sensational exaggerations of plutonium toxicity. A 1989 paper by Bernard L. Cohen states: Pu hazards are far better understood than [those from insecticides or food additives], and the one fatality per 300 years they may someday cause is truly trivial by comparis
Sounds like a really good terrorist target to me.. In fact anyone with an air rifle could do some damage!
If a terrorist has the know-how to build an air rifle that has a range of 14 to 16 miles then he's probably going to be going after some other targets.
I for one welcome our new blimp-borne overlords (There! I had to say it!).
is interesting, an online used car lot. Microsoft has a plug-in for IE that you can download if you use their Carpoint website. It allows you to select a model and then change the trim and options on it and get a price. I wonder if there is code in the plugin that relates to this patent.
Why Slashdot obesses over patent issuance I'll never understand. Just because some gets a patent doesn't mean that it will hold water in court.
The reason that patent issuance is such a big thing in cases such as this one is that Microsoft can do a lot of damage with bad patents. Let's say you write some code and Microsoft decides that it infringes on their shiny new patent and sends you a cease and desist letter. You can either a) cease and desist, or b) try to fight it in court. If you choose option b you get to go up against a team of highly trained and well paid lawyers with incredible resources. This will cost you a lot of money and take a lot of your time. Have fun in court and enjoy your ultimate victory after five or six years of appeals and spending all of your money on lawyers when the patent is ruled invalid. Meanwhile of course your life has gone into the shitter fighting this bad patent, but hey, why get upset about these things?
So the idea behind this password is basically input checking over the web, the twist on it appears to be that in order to get around bandwidth limitations the input checking code is downloaded to the client, this way the client can change the options around without having to communicate with the server every time an option is changed.
OK, perhaps there isn't prior art for this specific implementation but I remember learning about the concept of checking for valid user input and adjusting things accordingly back when I started to program in BASIC on a Vic 20. The fact that this got through is further proof that no one at the USPTO has a clue about computers, software, programming or indeed any piece of technology more complicated than a doorknob.
I thought for sure that jizz mopper at the porn store would rank up there.
Yeah, but you're forgetting about the benefits of being a jizz mopper. You get to keep all of the change that people drop on the floor and then refuse to pick up. It's like tipping, only not as sanitary.
Western Europe on the other hand has chosen to go after consumption, and driven up fuel efficiency at the cost of reducing these types of pollutants. Given that Europeans tend to live in smaller, more distributed communities than Americans, smog, while a problem in Urban areas, directly impacts fewer people on a day to day basis than it does here.
Western Europeans living in smaller, more distributed communities than Americans? I don't think so. Let's look at Germany as an example. Germany has a population of 82 million in an area of about 349,000 square kilometers, which, as the
CIA factbook helpfully points out, is somewhat smaller than Montana. When you put 82 million people into an area this size it doesn't matter what kind of community they live in, smog is going to affect them. And as far as living in "smaller, more distributed communities" goes where is this in Western Europe? While countries in Western Europe such as Germany and the Netherlands don't have US style sprawl they make up for it in population density. The Europeans I've seen don't live in smaller, more distributed communities, they live in denser, more distributed communities.
A class in the US. I drove one while I was in Germany and liked it
quite a bit. We could get four adults in it comfortably and five if
someone didn't mind riding bitch in the backseat. There was plenty of space in the back for a bunch of soft bags full of luggage or groceries. I really think that Daimler/Chrysler would figure out what they're missing by not selling this, a very practical and affordable car with the Mercedes nameplate. I'd buy one as a daily commuter.
They wouldn't be obliged to take down the server in a foreign country. Believe it or not, UK soil is subject to UK law, not American law.
I've got some bad news for you sunshine, Tony Blair, the British PM, is G.W's bitch. I don't know what Tony gets from sucking Bush's ass but it must be something good given the way he does it.
you purchase a French car, especially one with a fruity name like
"vel satis". Personally I'd like to see what the CAN bus on the car says, pity that cars don't come with CAN loggers as standard equipment.
One of the most common suggestions for Dilbert's house was to have two dishwashers. One machine accepts his dirty dishes and the other holds dishes that have already been cleaned. For daily use, this eliminates much of Dilbert's unnecessary loading and unloading of dishes to cupboards. And after entertaining, he might need to use both at the same time.
I don't know how many times I've heard people bring this up as a feature they wanted in their kitchen. However it has been brought up enough so that you can now purchase a fairly expensive dishwasher that has two separate wash compartments.
...I also couldn't take the way that you couldn't handle the traffic from/. readers when I posted one of my rants on the web. The whole point of posting these rants was to get noticed, but I couldn't do that since you were so easily slashdotted.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude. Haven't you been paying attention to /.? FreeBSD is dead.
I had thought about setting up a Linux system for him but I didn't want to have to train him how to use Linux and he didn't want to learn how to admin Linux. Since he already had one WinXP box setting up another wasn't too difficult. Admittedly the performance with WinXP on the box isn't as good as what I could have gotten with Linux, but it's more than adequate. I'd stick with the Linux solution if I were you, put in some kind of RAID (yes, it's extra money but do you really want to rip all of those CDs again?) and go with the Squeezebox. And when your parents want music somewhere else they can just get another Squeezebox and hook it up.
PLEASE NOTE: I don't work for SliMP3. I just really, really, really like the product, it's as brilliant as the iPod.
As far as those who are concerned about the government secretly tracking them down by the printer signatures in their anonymous manifestoes I think there are other things to worry about from the government.
No it won't. Read the encyclopedia entry.
I recall that the only treatment for radiation poisoning (from PL) during the Manhattan project was immediate high amputation, if possible. And the body of the dead bastard has to be sealed in lead, because IT was now dangerous.
Well if you can't produce an actual source for this then it's bullshit. Actually though I can produce a source for this bit of misinformation, I think you got it from the story The Long Watch by Robert Heinlein. In Richard Rhodes The Making of the Atomic Bomb , the definitive history of the Manhattan project, there is no mention of any of these plutonium casualties who had their limbs lopped off. A bit of information on how this is bullshit can be found on wikipedia the relevant section is below:
Pounds of plutonium, rendered into a powdered form and allowed to disperse would render large parts of the earth downwind dangerous to live near for centuries. It's a bloody weapon. Heinlein's first story of a nuclear weapon was about AEROSOL delivery of this stuff; he didn't think the Bomb was scary enough.
OK, I love Heinlein too, but using a story he wrote in the early 1940s, Solution Unsatisfactory (and later revised) as the basis for your knowledge of nuclear physics and plutonium toxicity is just plain stupid. You might as well use Red Planet and Podkayne of Mars as your source of information about Mars and Venus.
Note also that when radiological weapons were first designed in the late 1950s it was not plutonium that was the choice for a contaminant, it was cobalt. Pu 239 just isn't very radioactive, that's why it has that long half life and why the scientists at the Manhattan project amused themselves by passing around the nickel plated core to the Trinity bomb before it was tested.
Before you post next time try getting some information from sources other than the Weekly World News and 40's science fiction stories.
OK, we're going to reduce the demand for power starting with you. The government will be by later on today to confiscate all of your electrical and gas appliances. This will improve both the environment and the signal to noise ratio on /.. It might be a little rough on you when you're freezing in the dark this winter, but you'll be able to console yourself with warm thoughts about the good you are doing for the planetary environment.
BZZZZZZZT! Nuclear bullshit warning! Nuclear bullshit warning! Nuclear bullshit warning! The previous post may have contained bullshit that could be hazardous to your health!
Sorry, to bum your high, but while plutonium is a bad thing it is by no means as toxic as everyone seems to think it is. If you read the encyclopedia entry on plutonium you find that the toxicity has been much exaggerated. The section on oral toxicity in the excerpt below is especially informative.
If a terrorist has the know-how to build an air rifle that has a range of 14 to 16 miles then he's probably going to be going after some other targets.
I for one welcome our new blimp-borne overlords (There! I had to say it!).
The reason that patent issuance is such a big thing in cases such as this one is that Microsoft can do a lot of damage with bad patents. Let's say you write some code and Microsoft decides that it infringes on their shiny new patent and sends you a cease and desist letter. You can either a) cease and desist, or b) try to fight it in court. If you choose option b you get to go up against a team of highly trained and well paid lawyers with incredible resources. This will cost you a lot of money and take a lot of your time. Have fun in court and enjoy your ultimate victory after five or six years of appeals and spending all of your money on lawyers when the patent is ruled invalid. Meanwhile of course your life has gone into the shitter fighting this bad patent, but hey, why get upset about these things?
OK, perhaps there isn't prior art for this specific implementation but I remember learning about the concept of checking for valid user input and adjusting things accordingly back when I started to program in BASIC on a Vic 20. The fact that this got through is further proof that no one at the USPTO has a clue about computers, software, programming or indeed any piece of technology more complicated than a doorknob.
Yeah, but you're forgetting about the benefits of being a jizz mopper. You get to keep all of the change that people drop on the floor and then refuse to pick up. It's like tipping, only not as sanitary.
Western Europeans living in smaller, more distributed communities than Americans? I don't think so. Let's look at Germany as an example. Germany has a population of 82 million in an area of about 349,000 square kilometers, which, as the CIA factbook helpfully points out, is somewhat smaller than Montana. When you put 82 million people into an area this size it doesn't matter what kind of community they live in, smog is going to affect them. And as far as living in "smaller, more distributed communities" goes where is this in Western Europe? While countries in Western Europe such as Germany and the Netherlands don't have US style sprawl they make up for it in population density. The Europeans I've seen don't live in smaller, more distributed communities, they live in denser, more distributed communities.
I've got some bad news for you sunshine, Tony Blair, the British PM, is G.W's bitch. I don't know what Tony gets from sucking Bush's ass but it must be something good given the way he does it.
I don't know how many times I've heard people bring this up as a feature they wanted in their kitchen. However it has been brought up enough so that you can now purchase a fairly expensive dishwasher that has two separate wash compartments.