Hm. I tried pidgin, but I found it bloated in comparison to xchat. There may also be even leaner text-based clients, but I didn't try them, because xchat is just exactly right to my taste.
That was also my first reaction, but you know, there are quite a few interesting replies. I am positively surprised. Of course there are quite a bunch of science geeks in the slashdot crowd (I'm one myself), not all readers here are "IT monkeys". Those science geeks are not very vocal on the regular IT topics, but they may speak up when their particular area of expertise plays a role in the ongoing discussion. Such expert comments (if they are genuine) are always very interesting.
Could be that the submitter would have had more effective feedback on some other more specialized platforms (e.g. sci.math on usenet was suggested) but then I would not have been able enjoy this article.
With an e-paper monitor, you can work outdoors in bright sunlight. Enjoying a beautiful summer day and getting some computer-related work done are no longer incompatible. I bet that also in general e-paper is better for your eyes than CRT or LCD; the light intensity is always well balanced with the surroundings.
My employer provided me with a dual boot (XP/RedHatEL4) laptop, which I use with linux 99% of the time. After little more than a year of intense use the screen backlight broke, just the night before I'd fly to Europe for a week long meeting/workshop where I would need my laptop. At the airport I phoned our sysadmin and described the situation to him. While I traveled he talked with Dell. Three days later, at the starting day of the meeting, a local Dell representative technician came to visit me on site (in a small village near Berlin, Germany) and replaced the screen on the spot. He saw that I ran linux, and he found it cool. No insinuations whatsoever that linux would be the reason for the screen failure, nor that using linux would void the warranty.
I was quite impressed with this level of service (and so were my colleagues).
The energy spectrum of cosmic rays reaches energies much higher than we will ever achieve in man-made particle accelerators. High energy particle collisions happen all the time right above us in the atmosphere when those cosmic rays collide with air molecules.
So even if microscopic black holes can indeed be created with particle collisions in the lab, then this has happened already very many times in the Earth's atmosphere, and in five billion years Earth never got "eaten" by such a black hole. So either microscopic black holes cannot be created that way, or they can be created that way but they always evaporate.
(Why is the argument better this way: because everybody -- except maybe some philosophers -- can verify that Earth still exists, but only a few people can truly convince themselves that cosmic rays did not create black holes elsewhere in the Universe.)
OK, it summarizes the highlights of that 500+ comment discussion. I find that very useful. Now I do not have to wade through those 500+ blurbs in order to collect some of the most relevant remarks. For a top priority discussion I would want to do that sifting myself, but for something mildly interesting like this it's a very efficient way to get the gist of it.
Maybe developing anonymously shields you from attacks by patent lawyers, but you would have to give up on GPL (or any other license, I guess): if e.g. some company uses your software and violates the terms of the GPL (or other license), then you'd have to give up your anonymity in order to sue them. Well, before suing them you can send kind letters urging them to comply. You can even try to do that anonymously. But most companies do not want to do business with anonymous cowards, I think they want your real name. So an evil patent lawyer would just let some strawman violate the license on your software, then hit you as soon as you come out of cover.
Actually they are quite popular, I think; namely as the message editor in the "Pine" e-mail client. In my work (particle physics) lots of people use Pine (with the default editor). Though the students tend to deviate to the mozilla/firefox e-mail client. Even I use Pine with pico for casual e-mail; for every other text editing job I use vi, of course.
I work for AMANDA/IceCube. It's nice to see that our supercool experiment gets media attention, but there are a few statements in that article which need a comment or two. User davidoff404 already commented on the theoretical aspects of the article, so I will mostly limit myself to the experimental aspects.
"No more than a dozen high-energy neutrinos have been detected so far."
Actually, we see about 900 neutrino events per year. Their directions are homogeneously distributed over the sky and the energy spectrum is (still) compatible with the assumption that all these neutrinos were produced in interactions of high energy cosmic rays (protons, nuclei) with the Earth atmosphere (all around the globe). It might be that there are neutrinos among them from extraterrestrial sources, but individual events cannot be identified as such. We continue taking data until neutrino events from single extraterrestrial sources (or with higher energy than expected from atmospheric neutrinos) pile up enough such that they stick out over the atmospheric neutrino background.
Note: we do not detect those neutrinos directly; they interact with the ice, and may convert into a "muon" (which is like an electron, only about 200 times heavier, and it decays after a little while). That muon still carries most of the neutrino's energy with it, so it flies practically with the speed of light through the ice, sending out Cherenkov light (the electromagnetic equivalent of a sonic boom) along the way. The tracks can be kilometers long. We only see the part of the track in or near our detector, so we can only estimate a lower limit of the energy of an individual muon. When the neutrino does not convert into a muon, then the energy is dissipated in a relatively small volume; which makes it much harder to estimate the direction, but easier to estimate the energy.
(And of course those atmospheric neutrinos are not only background. We are happy to see them, as they prove that our detector is not blind. And we can use them to test the models of cosmic ray spectra and to study properties of neutrinos themselves.)
AMANDA, funded by the National Science Foundation, attempts to detect neutrinos raining down from above but also coming "up" through the Earth. Neutrinos are so weakly interacting that some can pass through the entire Earth unscathed. The total number of "down" and "up" neutrinos is uncertain; however, barring exotic effects, the relative detection rates are well known.
Actually, neutrinos are so weakly interacting that the vast majority of them just flies right through the Earth. It is really tiny fraction of them which happens to bump into an terrestrial atom. And an even tinier fraction which bumps into an ice molecule near our machine. So they come from all directions, up and down, the Earth is not shielding them. However, like everywhere on Earth there is a lot of cosmic rays thundering down on the atmosphere above the South Pole, and some of it results in high energy muons which make it all the way down to our detector. Their rate is about a million times higher than that of the muons originating from the neutrinos. Only when we see a muon track going upwards, or when it has an energy much higher than expected from the cosmic ray spectrum, then we call it a neutrino event.
When we start talking about really very high energy neutrinos (PeV and more) then the picture gets a little bit different: at those energies the probability that a neutrino interacts with atoms gets so high that the Earth is indeed opaque for neutrinos. If there are such high energy neutrinos flying through the universe, then we expect to see them from above and horizontally. This is already expected with standard model physics, without assumptions about microscopic black holes; so I am curious as to what Goldberg and Feng are after.
Maybe you already noticed, but here is a source.txt file in that directory which says that the collection was copied from http://kittens.sytes.org/. It also says that (parts of) it can be found all over the web, so maybe this is not the final answer.
Maybe this technology could be useful to make chips which can survive in radioactive environments like particle detectors in accelator laboratories or in satellites? (And if that is so then the military is probably also interested, to use them in battlefield drones.)
Preprint archives to the rescue: Problems with the Current Cosmological Paradigm, a talk recently given by Tom Shanks. Maybe a real cosmologist can tell us how much authority Tom Shanks has in the international community, and whether his view is taken seriously or that it is sceptically set aside as yet another attempt to kick the establishment.
But I don't remember why you can't just have a pile of neutrons...
Actually, you can and you hardly need to do anything for it. It happens all by itself. Let me refresh your memory:
The heaviest element known to science was recently discovered by investigators at a major U.S. research university. The element, tentatively named administratium, has no protons or electrons and thus has an atomic number of 0. However, it does have one neutron, 125 assistant neutrons, 75 vice neutrons and 111 assistant vice neutrons, which gives it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by a force that involves the continuous exchange of meson-like particles called morons.
Since it has no electrons, administratium is inert. However, it can be detected chemically as it impedes every reaction it comes in contact with. According to the discoverers, a minute amount of administratium causes one reaction to take over four days to complete when it would have normally occurred in less than a second.
Administratium has a normal half-life of approximately three years, at which time it does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which assistant neutrons, vice neutrons and assistant vice neutrons exchange places. Some studies have shown that the atomic mass actually increases after each reorganization.
Research at other laboratories indicates that administratium occurs naturally in the atmosphere. It tends to concentrate at certain points such as government agencies, large corporations, and universities. It can usually be found in the newest, best appointed, and best maintained buildings.
Scientists point out that administratium is known to be toxic at any level of concentration and can easily destroy any productive reaction where it is allowed to accumulate. Attempts are being made to determine how administratium can be controlled to prevent irreversible damage, but results to date are not promising.
(written by William DeBuvitz in April 1988, published in the January 1989 issue of The Physics Teacher; there is also a related publication by Ellin Beltz about Administrontium)
The original official reason to attack Saddam Hussein and his regime was that he might be hiding WMD and thus be a danger to his neighbours and to the rest of the world. Since his situation is rather desperate at the moment, you would expect that he would use them. I have not found any reports that he did so. I can think of three reasons for this:
He does not possess WMD.
This is, with all negative reports from the UN inspectors and the lack of convincing US/GB intelligence concerning 'his WMD', a good possibility.
He has WMD, but the devices to actually use them (bombs, missiles) have technical problems.
Less likely. If the missiles don't work, how difficult can it be for some well-motivated suicidal Republican Guards to deliver a few buckets of lethal material in South Iraq, spread it there and killing a lot of enemy soldiers?
He thinks that by using WMD he would politically condemn himself.
But that with this argument he would never use them which would make it pointless to have them at all.
Now from this simple naive considerations I would conclude that Hypothesis 1 is must most probable: it is unlikely that Saddam has any WMD.
Now I am absolutely no military expert and neither a politician (I am a scientist who thinks that scientific integrity is fundamentally incompatible with politics and diplomacy). I am very curious about other arguments about this issue.
No matter what the investigations show, there are no apparent credible crew survival options for the failure Columbia experienced. With the ISS out of reach in a far different orbit, there were no credible rescue options if even if wing damage had been apparent before reentry -- which it was not.
If, in the midst of its 16-day flight, wing damage had been found to be dire, the only potential -- but still unlikely -- option would have been the formulation over several days by Mission Control of a profile that could have, perhaps, reduced heating on the damaged wing at the expense of the other wing for an unguided reentry, with scant hope the vehicle would remain controllable to about 40,000 ft., allowing for crew bailout over an ocean.
So, let us suppose that the conclusion of the post-launch analysis of the damage done by the foam chunk was that it was in fact fatal, with absolute certainty; what would you do when you were in a commanding position in Houston?
Would you tell the crew: "Sorry, your spacecraft is broken, we do not see any possibility for repair so you will certainly die during reentry?" I think that would have been absolutely horrible for the astronauts.
I don't know, but "given" the fact that nothing can be done about it anymore in such a situation, I think it would be a realistic option (after consulting silently any other appropriate authorities) to keep them and everybody else ignorant of the imminent disaster and let them have a good flight, let them enjoy it and let them die (almost) happily.
The most serious objection I would see against the latter decision would be of religious nature: for many religions it is very important to prepare for death, say prayers and so on (sorry for my clumsy phrasing, I am not religious myself). In order to respect this, the crew should have gotten a warning somewhat longer before the expected catastrophe.
And..how about the poor soul that has to actually WORK at that station!
Well, it ain't that bad. I work for the Amanda/IceCube experiment. I did not yet go there myself, but a colleague just returned and she found it absolutely great there. For several reasons: the natural phenomena there are quite special, for instance the halo of the sun. Also the working atmosphere is very different from normal, the "level of enthusiasm" among the few hundred researchers (of several different sciences) there is much higher, either because of the oxygen levels (?) and/or because of the adventurous feeling as if you are on a different planet. It seems to be also refreshing to be so far away from (the rest of human) civilization for a while. The place is even addictive, she (my colleague) is still feeling very homesick to that place.
To be there as a winter-over (8 months, from Februari till November) is a different matter. Then there are much less people (between 50 and 70), typically the only activities are maintainance and routine data taking and you'd better not be somebody like me who gets depressed by longterm lack of sunlight. Still, winter-overs are volunteers and there are actually people taking this job for several years.
Next winter (that is, during the austral summer) I will also go there for a 5 week stay, I am really looking forward to it. It is actually one of the reasons why I joined this experiment...
Thanks, but that 'lead story' is very recent and was not there yet when I wrote my comment!
It is now clear to me now that this American hat and the polarization versus windows is only temporary; well, go ahead and have your party, this is apparently your way of celebrating 4th of July. I suppose that next week Tux will have a different outfit.
I maintain my point that you would only do MS a favour if you would always (not just in these days) stress linux as an 'alternative' to Windows, a safe haven for MS-haters. Because then it is not truly independent of Windows, just like without Tom Jerry wouldn't exist.
I see that the logo is a penguin with an Uncle Sam hat on its head and a sign on its belly which I would interpret as 'No Windows'.
I do not think of Linux as a typically or purely American phenomenon; it is cosmopolitic, not bound to a particular nation. Maybe the logo is temporary and mainly inspired by the 'Windependence Day' pun; or maybe the logo-choosers live and work in the US and wish to counter the assertion by some linux-haters that linux would be 'communistic' and 'un-American'? I would appreciate if somebody could provide with some info about the motivation of the 'American' part of the logo.
I do not really like the 'no Windows' suggestion, as it would suggest that Linux has only been created for Windows-haters. I like it that Linus Torvalds (when asked about his opinion about it in interviews) usually says that he does not care about Microsoft and their products. He just works on Linux, tries to make it an excellent piece of software, and MS may do what they like as long as they don't interfere with his project. MS is not relevant for somebody who is just happy with Linux, so there is no reason to honor MSWindows with a prominent (albeit negatively colored) place in a Linux news site logo.
You'll fail your networks class with math like that..
Fortunately I'm not a CS student, but a physicist!
You have missed some of the subtler points of the calculation. We are measuring the bandwidth of the wagon, not the transfer rate
Thanks! As an internet user (not a networking engineer) the most interesting quantity for me is the transfer rate rather than the bandwidth (in their proper definitions), I guess that is what made me (erroneously) equivalence these concepts. High transfer rate is the goal, high bandwidth is one of the requirements.
When you have a data connection between A and B and you want to know the speed in bytes per second, then you send a big amount of data and divide the data size by the time it takes to get from A to B.
The first part of the formula:
( WV / (TW * TL * TH ) ) * TC
calculates the data size. The time it takes from A to B is
DD / WS
where DD is the distance between A and B, not the length of the stationwagon!. Hence the correct formula for the station wagon band width is
BW = (( WV / (TW * TL * TH ) ) * TC * WS / DD)
and for the typical distance of the main story (and a Subaru is not amphibious, so let's take Wladiwostok & Lisbon instead of Alaska & Amsterdam for A & B) DD is 1684210 times longer than WL and the number for BW shrinks to 7.7 Gb/s which is still way higher than the number achieved with internet2 & SURFnet but not as impressive as Bonboard's 13 Petabyte/s.
Of course the distance between A and B plays a dirty role in these calculations. If you send your data optically to Alpha Centauri then it does not matter much if your emitter throws them with 1Gb/s into the ether or with 56kb/s, the transfer time is basically determined by the travel speed (speed o' lite), while for terrestrial internet only the number of intermediate switches is relevant (unless we start talking about very small amounts of data, less than a few kilobyte, say).
cover 1% of earth surface: why not sea surface?
on
Lunar Power
·
· Score: 1
Two thirds of the earth is covered by sea. We do not need all that space for ships and not all ocean is so ecologically important and vulnerable that it would be hurt by being covered with solar panels. Does anybody know if ever the feasability of floating solar panels has been investigated? Put a lot of them together in a network, enough distance from each other and connected by strong carbon fiber ropes, or with wave energy harvesting rods, as discussed in this/. story. Should be robust against large waves during storms. Put some loud high frequency whistles at the edges of the net to chase away whales (or some other similar protection trick). Transport of energy to land by cable on the bottom of the sea, just like phone & internet cables.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm afraid I was mixed up. X-chat is only an IRC client, not an IM client. Sorry.
Hm. I tried pidgin, but I found it bloated in comparison to xchat. There may also be even leaner text-based clients, but I didn't try them, because xchat is just exactly right to my taste.
That was also my first reaction, but you know, there are quite a few interesting replies. I am positively surprised. Of course there are quite a bunch of science geeks in the slashdot crowd (I'm one myself), not all readers here are "IT monkeys". Those science geeks are not very vocal on the regular IT topics, but they may speak up when their particular area of expertise plays a role in the ongoing discussion. Such expert comments (if they are genuine) are always very interesting.
Could be that the submitter would have had more effective feedback on some other more specialized platforms (e.g. sci.math on usenet was suggested) but then I would not have been able enjoy this article.
With an e-paper monitor, you can work outdoors in bright sunlight. Enjoying a beautiful summer day and getting some computer-related work done are no longer incompatible. I bet that also in general e-paper is better for your eyes than CRT or LCD; the light intensity is always well balanced with the surroundings.
My employer provided me with a dual boot (XP/RedHatEL4) laptop, which I use with linux 99% of the time. After little more than a year of intense use the screen backlight broke, just the night before I'd fly to Europe for a week long meeting/workshop where I would need my laptop. At the airport I phoned our sysadmin and described the situation to him. While I traveled he talked with Dell. Three days later, at the starting day of the meeting, a local Dell representative technician came to visit me on site (in a small village near Berlin, Germany) and replaced the screen on the spot. He saw that I ran linux, and he found it cool. No insinuations whatsoever that linux would be the reason for the screen failure, nor that using linux would void the warranty.
I was quite impressed with this level of service (and so were my colleagues).
I bet that "anonymous reader" is actually Clay Breshears himself.
Let me rephrase the observational argument.
The energy spectrum of cosmic rays reaches energies much higher than we will ever achieve in man-made particle accelerators. High energy particle collisions happen all the time right above us in the atmosphere when those cosmic rays collide with air molecules. So even if microscopic black holes can indeed be created with particle collisions in the lab, then this has happened already very many times in the Earth's atmosphere, and in five billion years Earth never got "eaten" by such a black hole. So either microscopic black holes cannot be created that way, or they can be created that way but they always evaporate.
(Why is the argument better this way: because everybody -- except maybe some philosophers -- can verify that Earth still exists, but only a few people can truly convince themselves that cosmic rays did not create black holes elsewhere in the Universe.)
OK, it summarizes the highlights of that 500+ comment discussion. I find that very useful. Now I do not have to wade through those 500+ blurbs in order to collect some of the most relevant remarks. For a top priority discussion I would want to do that sifting myself, but for something mildly interesting like this it's a very efficient way to get the gist of it.
Maybe developing anonymously shields you from attacks by patent lawyers, but you would have to give up on GPL (or any other license, I guess): if e.g. some company uses your software and violates the terms of the GPL (or other license), then you'd have to give up your anonymity in order to sue them. Well, before suing them you can send kind letters urging them to comply. You can even try to do that anonymously. But most companies do not want to do business with anonymous cowards, I think they want your real name. So an evil patent lawyer would just let some strawman violate the license on your software, then hit you as soon as you come out of cover.
Actually they are quite popular, I think; namely as the message editor in the "Pine" e-mail client. In my work (particle physics) lots of people use Pine (with the default editor). Though the students tend to deviate to the mozilla/firefox e-mail client. Even I use Pine with pico for casual e-mail; for every other text editing job I use vi, of course.
I work for AMANDA/IceCube. It's nice to see that our supercool experiment gets media attention, but there are a few statements in that article which need a comment or two. User davidoff404 already commented on the theoretical aspects of the article, so I will mostly limit myself to the experimental aspects.
Actually, we see about 900 neutrino events per year. Their directions are homogeneously distributed over the sky and the energy spectrum is (still) compatible with the assumption that all these neutrinos were produced in interactions of high energy cosmic rays (protons, nuclei) with the Earth atmosphere (all around the globe). It might be that there are neutrinos among them from extraterrestrial sources, but individual events cannot be identified as such. We continue taking data until neutrino events from single extraterrestrial sources (or with higher energy than expected from atmospheric neutrinos) pile up enough such that they stick out over the atmospheric neutrino background.
Note: we do not detect those neutrinos directly; they interact with the ice, and may convert into a "muon" (which is like an electron, only about 200 times heavier, and it decays after a little while). That muon still carries most of the neutrino's energy with it, so it flies practically with the speed of light through the ice, sending out Cherenkov light (the electromagnetic equivalent of a sonic boom) along the way. The tracks can be kilometers long. We only see the part of the track in or near our detector, so we can only estimate a lower limit of the energy of an individual muon. When the neutrino does not convert into a muon, then the energy is dissipated in a relatively small volume; which makes it much harder to estimate the direction, but easier to estimate the energy.
(And of course those atmospheric neutrinos are not only background. We are happy to see them, as they prove that our detector is not blind. And we can use them to test the models of cosmic ray spectra and to study properties of neutrinos themselves.)
Actually, neutrinos are so weakly interacting that the vast majority of them just flies right through the Earth. It is really tiny fraction of them which happens to bump into an terrestrial atom. And an even tinier fraction which bumps into an ice molecule near our machine. So they come from all directions, up and down, the Earth is not shielding them. However, like everywhere on Earth there is a lot of cosmic rays thundering down on the atmosphere above the South Pole, and some of it results in high energy muons which make it all the way down to our detector. Their rate is about a million times higher than that of the muons originating from the neutrinos. Only when we see a muon track going upwards, or when it has an energy much higher than expected from the cosmic ray spectrum, then we call it a neutrino event.
When we start talking about really very high energy neutrinos (PeV and more) then the picture gets a little bit different: at those energies the probability that a neutrino interacts with atoms gets so high that the Earth is indeed opaque for neutrinos. If there are such high energy neutrinos flying through the universe, then we expect to see them from above and horizontally. This is already expected with standard model physics, without assumptions about microscopic black holes; so I am curious as to what Goldberg and Feng are after.
Maybe this technology could be useful to make chips which can survive in radioactive environments like particle detectors in accelator laboratories or in satellites? (And if that is so then the military is probably also interested, to use them in battlefield drones.)
Preprint archives to the rescue: Problems with the Current Cosmological Paradigm, a talk recently given by Tom Shanks. Maybe a real cosmologist can tell us how much authority Tom Shanks has in the international community, and whether his view is taken seriously or that it is sceptically set aside as yet another attempt to kick the establishment.
Actually, you can and you hardly need to do anything for it. It happens all by itself. Let me refresh your memory:
(written by William DeBuvitz in April 1988, published in the January 1989 issue of The Physics Teacher; there is also a related publication by Ellin Beltz about Administrontium)
This is, with all negative reports from the UN inspectors and the lack of convincing US/GB intelligence concerning 'his WMD', a good possibility.
Less likely. If the missiles don't work, how difficult can it be for some well-motivated suicidal Republican Guards to deliver a few buckets of lethal material in South Iraq, spread it there and killing a lot of enemy soldiers?
But that with this argument he would never use them which would make it pointless to have them at all.
Now from this simple naive considerations I would conclude that Hypothesis 1 is must most probable: it is unlikely that Saddam has any WMD.
Now I am absolutely no military expert and neither a politician (I am a scientist who thinks that scientific integrity is fundamentally incompatible with politics and diplomacy). I am very curious about other arguments about this issue.
So, let us suppose that the conclusion of the post-launch analysis of the damage done by the foam chunk was that it was in fact fatal, with absolute certainty; what would you do when you were in a commanding position in Houston?
Would you tell the crew: "Sorry, your spacecraft is broken, we do not see any possibility for repair so you will certainly die during reentry?" I think that would have been absolutely horrible for the astronauts.
I don't know, but "given" the fact that nothing can be done about it anymore in such a situation, I think it would be a realistic option (after consulting silently any other appropriate authorities) to keep them and everybody else ignorant of the imminent disaster and let them have a good flight, let them enjoy it and let them die (almost) happily.
The most serious objection I would see against the latter decision would be of religious nature: for many religions it is very important to prepare for death, say prayers and so on (sorry for my clumsy phrasing, I am not religious myself). In order to respect this, the crew should have gotten a warning somewhat longer before the expected catastrophe.
Well, just a thought.
And..how about the poor soul that has to actually WORK at that station!
Well, it ain't that bad. I work for the Amanda/IceCube experiment. I did not yet go there myself, but a colleague just returned and she found it absolutely great there. For several reasons: the natural phenomena there are quite special, for instance the halo of the sun. Also the working atmosphere is very different from normal, the "level of enthusiasm" among the few hundred researchers (of several different sciences) there is much higher, either because of the oxygen levels (?) and/or because of the adventurous feeling as if you are on a different planet. It seems to be also refreshing to be so far away from (the rest of human) civilization for a while. The place is even addictive, she (my colleague) is still feeling very homesick to that place.
To be there as a winter-over (8 months, from Februari till November) is a different matter. Then there are much less people (between 50 and 70), typically the only activities are maintainance and routine data taking and you'd better not be somebody like me who gets depressed by longterm lack of sunlight. Still, winter-overs are volunteers and there are actually people taking this job for several years.
Next winter (that is, during the austral summer) I will also go there for a 5 week stay, I am really looking forward to it. It is actually one of the reasons why I joined this experiment...
It is now clear to me now that this American hat and the polarization versus windows is only temporary; well, go ahead and have your party, this is apparently your way of celebrating 4th of July. I suppose that next week Tux will have a different outfit.
I maintain my point that you would only do MS a favour if you would always (not just in these days) stress linux as an 'alternative' to Windows, a safe haven for MS-haters. Because then it is not truly independent of Windows, just like without Tom Jerry wouldn't exist.
I do not think of Linux as a typically or purely American phenomenon; it is cosmopolitic, not bound to a particular nation. Maybe the logo is temporary and mainly inspired by the 'Windependence Day' pun; or maybe the logo-choosers live and work in the US and wish to counter the assertion by some linux-haters that linux would be 'communistic' and 'un-American'? I would appreciate if somebody could provide with some info about the motivation of the 'American' part of the logo.
I do not really like the 'no Windows' suggestion, as it would suggest that Linux has only been created for Windows-haters. I like it that Linus Torvalds (when asked about his opinion about it in interviews) usually says that he does not care about Microsoft and their products. He just works on Linux, tries to make it an excellent piece of software, and MS may do what they like as long as they don't interfere with his project. MS is not relevant for somebody who is just happy with Linux, so there is no reason to honor MSWindows with a prominent (albeit negatively colored) place in a Linux news site logo.
Fortunately I'm not a CS student, but a physicist!
You have missed some of the subtler points of the calculation. We are measuring the bandwidth of the wagon, not the transfer rate
Thanks! As an internet user (not a networking engineer) the most interesting quantity for me is the transfer rate rather than the bandwidth (in their proper definitions), I guess that is what made me (erroneously) equivalence these concepts. High transfer rate is the goal, high bandwidth is one of the requirements.
The first part of the formula:
calculates the data size. The time it takes from A to B is where DD is the distance between A and B, not the length of the stationwagon!. Hence the correct formula for the station wagon band width is and for the typical distance of the main story (and a Subaru is not amphibious, so let's take Wladiwostok & Lisbon instead of Alaska & Amsterdam for A & B) DD is 1684210 times longer than WL and the number for BW shrinks to 7.7 Gb/s which is still way higher than the number achieved with internet2 & SURFnet but not as impressive as Bonboard's 13 Petabyte/s.Of course the distance between A and B plays a dirty role in these calculations. If you send your data optically to Alpha Centauri then it does not matter much if your emitter throws them with 1Gb/s into the ether or with 56kb/s, the transfer time is basically determined by the travel speed (speed o' lite), while for terrestrial internet only the number of intermediate switches is relevant (unless we start talking about very small amounts of data, less than a few kilobyte, say).
Sorry, I tried a song (at the mirror!) but the result comes nowhere near The Mighty Stephen Hawking.
Two thirds of the earth is covered by sea. We do not need all that space for ships and not all ocean is so ecologically important and vulnerable that it would be hurt by being covered with solar panels. Does anybody know if ever the feasability of floating solar panels has been investigated? Put a lot of them together in a network, enough distance from each other and connected by strong carbon fiber ropes, or with wave energy harvesting rods, as discussed in this /. story. Should be robust against large waves during storms. Put some loud high frequency whistles at the edges of the net to chase away whales (or some other similar protection trick). Transport of energy to land by cable on the bottom of the sea, just like phone & internet cables.
And I missed it... Thanks!