None of it, obviously, and such emotive appeals don't further your point, but thanks for the info. It still doesn't invalidate my point that 20 years is not particularly "old" for a telescope. Especially when it cost $US1.5billion. Hence all the servicing missions so far.
Is there any reason to believe JWST/NGST will cost significantly less than hubble? So lets estimate $US1-1.5billion all up. How much does a servicing mission cost to hubble (ignoring the fact that JWST will be at L2)? Something like a couple hundred million? I don't know the actual number, but that's what's in my head. (Do you know it? I'd like to know) The point: I'm *highly* skeptical of your "we just build a new one" claim. Prove it!
On the safety issue, I have no argument, because I completely agree with you there. A handful of astronauts died. Whilst tragic, so what? How many people die in cars or gun death in the US *every* day? Going to space is inherently dangerous! People die. It's sad, but it happens. Lots of astronauts have still volunteered to go anyway.
The cancelling of the original service mission was nothing other than political, as is this robotic service mission. Dumb and political, but O'keefe might get some mileage out of it, and by the time he pulls the plug entirely it'll be too late.
Incidentally, I don't buy into this public hysteria about "we have to save hubble" and all that crap. I'm just pissed COS got the arse, because I wanted to use it!
1) Age isn't necessarily a bad thing with a telescope. Lots of telescopes are a lot older than that - witness the Anglo-Australian Telescope, the UK Schmidt Telescope, and the recently burned-down Great Melbourne Telescope (aka MSSSO 50") which provided evidence that the universe is accelerating.
oh yeah, and hubble was launched on April 24, 1990 - you do the maths.
2) The replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope is optimised for the Infra-Red and can NOT operate in the blue/UV like hubble. Nor will it be launched until 2012, 4-5yrs *after* the prospective hubble death date.
JWST will also be at the L2 lagrange point, meaning that there is NO possibility of any servicing mission. here is info on the orbit.
3) There are NO better telescopes on the ground for imaging. Hubble has a *diffraction-limited* resolution of about 0.05" - 0.1" (0.05 - 0.1 arcsec). The BEST sites in the world (Mauna kea, cerro paranal) get seeing as good as 0.3-0.4" at the best of times, and that isn't too often.
No, adaptive optics do NOT help because they limit the field-of-view. Hubble has a diffraction limited FOV across the entire chip.
4) Hubble does not have to contend with atmospheric absorption, which makes observations in some bands (like the aforementioned UV) nigh on impossible.
This is simply not true. I have cut through a kensington cable lock in the past (the cable, not the lock). It's really quite easy. A pair of bolt-cutters about a foot long are all that's required. And it's really quite easy. No "lots of elbow grease" crap - they go *straight* through - one snip. Plus you can then slip the cutters into a coat pocket and mosey off with a shiny new laptop.
Don't trust the cable, let alone the lock. It is a visual deterrant only!
Because of the increase in complexity. NASA spends an enormous amount of it's time bending over backwards to make everything as completely "safe" as possible. Everything has to be hardened, triple-tested, redundant etc. Space systems cost a lot of money to develop and fully test. More things can go wrong and they're harder to fix when they do. The fewer systems you're trying to develop the better I would think.
Also, if you have one flexbile system you understand well, is this not better than two systems which are understood less well? I'm not sure, but I can certainly understand the NASA mentality, especially since everyone calls for blood when they have an accident.
NO! Read my other post and get your names correct before you start going on about "knowing nothing about astronomy".
The VLA is the Very Large Array, a RADIO telescope run by the american National Radio Astronomy Observatory (or NRAO). It is certainly NOT run by ESO, which is the European Southern Observatory, the organisation that runs the 4 8m Very Large Telescope (VLT) telescopes in chile.
There is no other complete solution to avoid atmospheric turbulence (i.e. seeing and scintillation) other than going to space. A *partial* solution is to use deformable mirrors in an adaptive optics to attempt to correct the problem.
Even with multiple-conjugate adaptive optics (which use multiple laser guide stars to improve performance), you will NOT get diffraction-limited images on an 8m telescope.
Crisper images taken from space will only be better if the diffraction limit of hte telescope is better than what can be obtained by a ground-based system using AO or MCAO. Although nobody has a working MCAO system yet.
sorry, sounds a bit much like a rant, but might add some helpful info into the discussion...
For god's sake, can we all please get our acronyms correct! This is important for astronomers, since we use a lot of them.
ESA = European Space Agency (space based missions, including a share of hubble) ESO = European Southern Observatory (i.e. Astronomers and telescopes) VLA = the Very Large Array, a ***RADIO*** telescope run by the NRAO (National Radio Astronomy Observatory). NRAO and VLA are run by americans. The VLA is in soccorro, new mexico. VLT = the Very Large Telescope. 4 8m ***OPTICAL*** telescopes in chile. Using NACO, which is an adaptive-optics systems, you can partially get around atmospheric problems and take high-resolution images.
well, partly, but also partly just because scientific/engineering calculations are inherently more efficient in fortran. It's what the language was designed for.
Another reason is that a lot of "old-timer" scientists use it (see above), so the tradition continues. One of the things that keeps it going is the "Numerical recipes in fortran" books, which have heaps of canned numerical algorithms. This books is now also available in C.
And finally, there's just a lot of scientific applications which are legcay code and which were designed to integrate with fortran. In the astronomy world, examples are figaro and iraf data reduction pacakages.
Use the tool that's best for the job, and in numerical/science applications, that tool is fortran. google provides me with this link.
200,000 airline passengers? Did you even read the article?
From the BBC article: "Some 13 million visitors from visa waiver countries visit the US each year, compared to some 19 million from non-visa waiver countries."
200,000 people, at ~400 people per 747 would make only 500 planes PER YEAR. WTF? That's 2 planes per day over the ENTIRE country?
Your argument is valid (and one with which I agree), but the numbers are way wrong! The problem is false positives, not false negatives, as you suggest. With the system mis-identifying large numbers of people as terrorists, people soon learn to mistrust it or ignore it. Bruce schnier has written about this extensively in the last couple of crypto-gram issues.
actually, yast has only just become open source in the last few weeks (/. story here) - you expect something as mature and rock-solid stable as debian to drop in a completely new installer (that does NOT support the 10+ architectures that debian supports) in the space of two weeks? You're kidding right?
The installer problem is well known. But really, writing a pretty GUI interface to work on the wide variety of architectures that debian supports is no mean feat.
Would be nice to have a fancy GUI x86 option though. Might kill a lot of the whining. The installer is only meant ot ever be used once! That's the whole point of apt! want the latest version? apt-get dist-upgrade. No buying the latest *insert your favourite distro here* CDs and completely re-installing...
well, usually they'll take a certain number of packages from the debian main, contrib, and non-free sections and roll them into a CD distro that is not something enormous (12CDs IIRC for the latest debian stable).
For example, knoppix is a single bootable CD with all the expected packages. They have a fancy default GUI interface (gnome or something like that), nice pretty installer (x86 support only though, not the zillion other archs that debian supports) and roll it all up into a single coherent, but smaller and more friendly, ball.
They try to provide most of the things that most people are likely to want. Knoppix (in our example) makes a nice try-before-you-buy or rescue-cd type thing. Good for newbies who want to fell the warm fuzzy debian way, but aren't quite ready for diving in yet.
So that's what debian-based means - parts of debian all rolled up into one.
What the FUCK? So it's ok to name anyone else "enemy combatants" as long as you don't do it to "american citizens"? Which is the implication I draw from the wording of your statement. Maybe not what you mean, but....
Perhaps a better phrasing might be "unlawful detention of _human beings_ without right to trial, counsel or EVEN BEING CHARGED, as well as routine fundamental human rights violations".
The US hasn't got a monopoly on fucked-up-ness, but semantics here are very important and these sorts of actions will certainly come back to bite...
I find this part amusing. "Real" coffee must be espresso. No exceptions. No dripping water through grounds, no freeze-dried instant gunk. Steam, forced through finely ground coffee under pressure (the size of the required grounds varies with temperature and humidity!).
I am currently trapped in coffee hell - finland. They are proud of the fact that they drink more coffee here per capita than anywhere else in the world - and it's all singularly crap! Not a real espresso machine in sight - complete filter madness. ugh!
BIOS bugs are quickly fixed? Well, by some companies perhaps, but it's clear you've never had a Dell machine and flashed the BIOS. There are so many bugs it's not funny. Part of the dell Inspiron BIOS forum's FAQ warns you about flashing some models BIOSes because the update is known to fry the mobo!! I don't know how much dell has spent on replacing motherboards, but it's a fair bit.
My own bios has a nasty video bug that only enable 1MB of the video memory. Not at all happy with that. Linux can hack around it, luckily (who knows what MS does). And the BIOS doesn't support video modes for my native 1400x1050 resolution screen, so things under linux are *very* annoying.
This is just one company mind, but I'm willing to bet there are other examples out there. Not even the kills-your-computer type bugs are always fixed (unless enough people complain). *sigh*
No. From it's website:
"AARNet Pty Ltd (APL) is the company that operates Australia's Research and Education Network (AREN). It is a not-for-profit company limited by shares. The shareholders are 37 Australian universities and the CSIRO."
AARNET provides all the internal infrastructure for the universities (and CSIRO). Well, not quite true. Each state has a regional network organisation (RNO) which runs the state network. These are connected through some dedicated fibres and private virtual circuits (PVCs) which go through Optus and/or telstra backbone links. They are also building Grangenet, the next generation national research network.
International (US) traffic mostly goes via the southern-cross cable network (SCCN), which is a big fat pipe that lands in seattle, jointly owned by optus and a bunch of other people.
Universities/CSIRO and other research orgnisations can be members of the RNOs if they qualify. AARNet used to be the main network supporting the whole country. Now it's research/university exclusive. And yes, prices are kinda high, but still waaaay lower than commercial prices.
Oh, and they have a pretty decent mirror for most useful things - mirror.aarnet.edu.au. Nice and fast:-)
It is very expensive, no matter what currency it's in. Standard cable/broadband connections cost somewhere between $40-80/month, with transfer caps of 500MB - a couple GB/month. Plus there's all the usual jockeying with numbers, rolling over bandwidth and the games you'd expect. But this is a satellite-based service, so you're paying for the infrastructure.
Looks like they're using ISDN for upstream and satellite for downstream - did I read this right?
It's a shame they can't leverage the bandwidth of AARNET, which has fibre running right down the newell highway (N-S in country NSW). This is academic stuff and I wouldn't expect that the economics would add up in country NSW for commerical ventures - just not enough people care about the internet there.
The "minor issues" point here is something I especially agree with - it's the law of diminishing returns. Does it matter that you squeeze that little bit of optimism out of packages? is it worth the extra effort? Reminds me of a knuth quote which is sort of appropriate: "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil."
Yep, I know exactly what you mean, but I would call this by a different name - abstraction! People are quite abstract in the way they think and the reason "slashdot mums" can use windows is because it's a good abstraction for the hardware. They don't care about kernel and stuff. They think about "sending an email" as a single, abstract object, not a system of protocols and programmes and layers etc etc. Windows-based systems, for all their clumsiness and inefficiency, are good at allowing users to do this sort of abstraction.
I can imagine a desktop system in a year or two where everything is at the level of allowing a mother to use it (probably not mine though. she has determinedly avoided all my (frustrated) bashing with a clue-stick:-), including setting up hardware bits etc.
Humans are amazing for their ability to think in abstract terms. It's really what makes us special....
It's a sensitive issue. I read this section to be an emphasis of the fact that pluto's status of a planet will not change as far as the IAU is concerned. Realistically, this is more for historical reasons than science ones.
Scientifically, it's pretty clear that pluto is just another kuiper-belt object. But to be fair, the existence of hte kuiper belt has only been know for 10-15years.
Yeah right. Observatory right in the middle of a pine forrest. Great news until it catches fire and burns down your telescope, like what happened at Mt Stromlo observatory in australia 18months ago. See here.
I just can't stand the SuSE mentality - it annoys the shit out of me, in the same way that windows and OSX annoy the shit out of me - it gets in my way and tries to hold my hand. Just leave me the hell alone! If I want to set up a bazillion bloody environment varibles etc, I'll fucking-well do it myself!
Global configurations should be minimalist. If you want a special protect-me-from-the-nasty-computer config, fine. But I don't, so piss off and leave me alone.
SuSE and Yast have done some great stuff in the way of installed, and opening up is a Good Thing(tm). But I'll never enjoy using suse unless they change their mentality...
That would be "IUPAC" I presume - the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry.
I think, as has been noted elsewhere, that hydrogen hydroxide is more correct, but it's really only semantic. And it's been a long time since my chem lectures. Chemistry's just applied physics anyway:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Which part of it did you build?
None of it, obviously, and such emotive appeals don't further your point, but thanks for the info. It still doesn't invalidate my point that 20 years is not particularly "old" for a telescope. Especially when it cost $US1.5billion. Hence all the servicing missions so far.
Is there any reason to believe JWST/NGST will cost significantly less than hubble? So lets estimate $US1-1.5billion all up. How much does a servicing mission cost to hubble (ignoring the fact that JWST will be at L2)? Something like a couple hundred million? I don't know the actual number, but that's what's in my head. (Do you know it? I'd like to know) The point: I'm *highly* skeptical of your "we just build a new one" claim. Prove it!
On the safety issue, I have no argument, because I completely agree with you there. A handful of astronauts died. Whilst tragic, so what? How many people die in cars or gun death in the US *every* day? Going to space is inherently dangerous! People die. It's sad, but it happens. Lots of astronauts have still volunteered to go anyway.
The cancelling of the original service mission was nothing other than political, as is this robotic service mission. Dumb and political, but O'keefe might get some mileage out of it, and by the time he pulls the plug entirely it'll be too late.
Incidentally, I don't buy into this public hysteria about "we have to save hubble" and all that crap. I'm just pissed COS got the arse, because I wanted to use it!
Ok, I'll bite, rather than mod you -1 troll.
1) Age isn't necessarily a bad thing with a telescope. Lots of telescopes are a lot older than that - witness the Anglo-Australian Telescope, the UK Schmidt Telescope, and the recently burned-down Great Melbourne Telescope (aka MSSSO 50") which provided evidence that the universe is accelerating.
oh yeah, and hubble was launched on April 24, 1990 - you do the maths.
2) The replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope is optimised for the Infra-Red and can NOT operate in the blue/UV like hubble. Nor will it be launched until 2012, 4-5yrs *after* the prospective hubble death date.
JWST will also be at the L2 lagrange point, meaning that there is NO possibility of any servicing mission. here is info on the orbit.
3) There are NO better telescopes on the ground for imaging. Hubble has a *diffraction-limited* resolution of about 0.05" - 0.1" (0.05 - 0.1 arcsec). The BEST sites in the world (Mauna kea, cerro paranal) get seeing as good as 0.3-0.4" at the best of times, and that isn't too often.
No, adaptive optics do NOT help because they limit the field-of-view. Hubble has a diffraction limited FOV across the entire chip.
4) Hubble does not have to contend with atmospheric absorption, which makes observations in some bands (like the aforementioned UV) nigh on impossible.
This is simply not true. I have cut through a kensington cable lock in the past (the cable, not the lock). It's really quite easy. A pair of bolt-cutters about a foot long are all that's required. And it's really quite easy. No "lots of elbow grease" crap - they go *straight* through - one snip. Plus you can then slip the cutters into a coat pocket and mosey off with a shiny new laptop.
Don't trust the cable, let alone the lock. It is a visual deterrant only!
Because of the increase in complexity. NASA spends an enormous amount of it's time bending over backwards to make everything as completely "safe" as possible. Everything has to be hardened, triple-tested, redundant etc. Space systems cost a lot of money to develop and fully test. More things can go wrong and they're harder to fix when they do. The fewer systems you're trying to develop the better I would think.
Also, if you have one flexbile system you understand well, is this not better than two systems which are understood less well? I'm not sure, but I can certainly understand the NASA mentality, especially since everyone calls for blood when they have an accident.
NO! Read my other post and get your names correct before you start going on about "knowing nothing about astronomy".
The VLA is the Very Large Array, a RADIO telescope run by the american National Radio Astronomy Observatory (or NRAO). It is certainly NOT run by ESO, which is the European Southern Observatory, the organisation that runs the 4 8m Very Large Telescope (VLT) telescopes in chile.
There is no other complete solution to avoid atmospheric turbulence (i.e. seeing and scintillation) other than going to space. A *partial* solution is to use deformable mirrors in an adaptive optics to attempt to correct the problem.
Even with multiple-conjugate adaptive optics (which use multiple laser guide stars to improve performance), you will NOT get diffraction-limited images on an 8m telescope.
Crisper images taken from space will only be better if the diffraction limit of hte telescope is better than what can be obtained by a ground-based system using AO or MCAO. Although nobody has a working MCAO system yet.
sorry, sounds a bit much like a rant, but might add some helpful info into the discussion...
For god's sake, can we all please get our acronyms correct! This is important for astronomers, since we use a lot of them.
ESA = European Space Agency (space based missions, including a share of hubble)
ESO = European Southern Observatory (i.e. Astronomers and telescopes)
VLA = the Very Large Array, a ***RADIO*** telescope run by the NRAO (National Radio Astronomy Observatory). NRAO and VLA are run by americans. The VLA is in soccorro, new mexico.
VLT = the Very Large Telescope. 4 8m ***OPTICAL*** telescopes in chile. Using NACO, which is an adaptive-optics systems, you can partially get around atmospheric problems and take high-resolution images.
well, partly, but also partly just because scientific/engineering calculations are inherently more efficient in fortran. It's what the language was designed for.
Another reason is that a lot of "old-timer" scientists use it (see above), so the tradition continues. One of the things that keeps it going is the "Numerical recipes in fortran" books, which have heaps of canned numerical algorithms. This books is now also available in C.
And finally, there's just a lot of scientific applications which are legcay code and which were designed to integrate with fortran. In the astronomy world, examples are figaro and iraf data reduction pacakages.
Use the tool that's best for the job, and in numerical/science applications, that tool is fortran. google provides me with this link.
200,000 airline passengers? Did you even read the article?
From the BBC article:
"Some 13 million visitors from visa waiver countries visit the US each year, compared to some 19 million from non-visa waiver countries."
200,000 people, at ~400 people per 747 would make only 500 planes PER YEAR. WTF? That's 2 planes per day over the ENTIRE country?
Your argument is valid (and one with which I agree), but the numbers are way wrong! The problem is false positives, not false negatives, as you suggest. With the system mis-identifying large numbers of people as terrorists, people soon learn to mistrust it or ignore it. Bruce schnier has written about this extensively in the last couple of crypto-gram issues.
you mean ftp-able iso's like these?
actually, yast has only just become open source in the last few weeks (/. story here) - you expect something as mature and rock-solid stable as debian to drop in a completely new installer (that does NOT support the 10+ architectures that debian supports) in the space of two weeks? You're kidding right?
The installer problem is well known. But really, writing a pretty GUI interface to work on the wide variety of architectures that debian supports is no mean feat.
Would be nice to have a fancy GUI x86 option though. Might kill a lot of the whining. The installer is only meant ot ever be used once! That's the whole point of apt! want the latest version? apt-get dist-upgrade. No buying the latest *insert your favourite distro here* CDs and completely re-installing...
well, usually they'll take a certain number of packages from the debian main, contrib, and non-free sections and roll them into a CD distro that is not something enormous (12CDs IIRC for the latest debian stable).
For example, knoppix is a single bootable CD with all the expected packages. They have a fancy default GUI interface (gnome or something like that), nice pretty installer (x86 support only though, not the zillion other archs that debian supports) and roll it all up into a single coherent, but smaller and more friendly, ball.
They try to provide most of the things that most people are likely to want. Knoppix (in our example) makes a nice try-before-you-buy or rescue-cd type thing. Good for newbies who want to fell the warm fuzzy debian way, but aren't quite ready for diving in yet.
So that's what debian-based means - parts of debian all rolled up into one.
What the FUCK? So it's ok to name anyone else "enemy combatants" as long as you don't do it to "american citizens"? Which is the implication I draw from the wording of your statement. Maybe not what you mean, but....
Perhaps a better phrasing might be "unlawful detention of _human beings_ without right to trial, counsel or EVEN BEING CHARGED, as well as routine fundamental human rights violations".
The US hasn't got a monopoly on fucked-up-ness, but semantics here are very important and these sorts of actions will certainly come back to bite...
$AUS0.02
I find this part amusing. "Real" coffee must be espresso. No exceptions. No dripping water through grounds, no freeze-dried instant gunk. Steam, forced through finely ground coffee under pressure (the size of the required grounds varies with temperature and humidity!).
I am currently trapped in coffee hell - finland. They are proud of the fact that they drink more coffee here per capita than anywhere else in the world - and it's all singularly crap! Not a real espresso machine in sight - complete filter madness. ugh!
Some good info here.
BIOS bugs are quickly fixed? Well, by some companies perhaps, but it's clear you've never had a Dell machine and flashed the BIOS. There are so many bugs it's not funny. Part of the dell Inspiron BIOS forum's FAQ warns you about flashing some models BIOSes because the update is known to fry the mobo!! I don't know how much dell has spent on replacing motherboards, but it's a fair bit.
My own bios has a nasty video bug that only enable 1MB of the video memory. Not at all happy with that. Linux can hack around it, luckily (who knows what MS does). And the BIOS doesn't support video modes for my native 1400x1050 resolution screen, so things under linux are *very* annoying.
This is just one company mind, but I'm willing to bet there are other examples out there. Not even the kills-your-computer type bugs are always fixed (unless enough people complain). *sigh*
No. From it's website: "AARNet Pty Ltd (APL) is the company that operates Australia's Research and Education Network (AREN). It is a not-for-profit company limited by shares. The shareholders are 37 Australian universities and the CSIRO."
:-)
AARNET provides all the internal infrastructure for the universities (and CSIRO). Well, not quite true. Each state has a regional network organisation (RNO) which runs the state network. These are connected through some dedicated fibres and private virtual circuits (PVCs) which go through Optus and/or telstra backbone links. They are also building Grangenet, the next generation national research network.
International (US) traffic mostly goes via the southern-cross cable network (SCCN), which is a big fat pipe that lands in seattle, jointly owned by optus and a bunch of other people.
Universities/CSIRO and other research orgnisations can be members of the RNOs if they qualify. AARNet used to be the main network supporting the whole country. Now it's research/university exclusive. And yes, prices are kinda high, but still waaaay lower than commercial prices.
Oh, and they have a pretty decent mirror for most useful things - mirror.aarnet.edu.au. Nice and fast
It is very expensive, no matter what currency it's in. Standard cable/broadband connections cost somewhere between $40-80/month, with transfer caps of 500MB - a couple GB/month. Plus there's all the usual jockeying with numbers, rolling over bandwidth and the games you'd expect. But this is a satellite-based service, so you're paying for the infrastructure.
Looks like they're using ISDN for upstream and satellite for downstream - did I read this right?
It's a shame they can't leverage the bandwidth of AARNET, which has fibre running right down the newell highway (N-S in country NSW). This is academic stuff and I wouldn't expect that the economics would add up in country NSW for commerical ventures - just not enough people care about the internet there.
The "minor issues" point here is something I especially agree with - it's the law of diminishing returns. Does it matter that you squeeze that little bit of optimism out of packages? is it worth the extra effort? Reminds me of a knuth quote which is sort of appropriate: "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil."
$AUS0.02
"all right, all right, I *AM* the messiah. Noooow *FUCK OFF*!"
"errrr...ahhh..how shall we....errr...fuck off, oh lord?"
hahaha!
Yep, I know exactly what you mean, but I would call this by a different name - abstraction! People are quite abstract in the way they think and the reason "slashdot mums" can use windows is because it's a good abstraction for the hardware. They don't care about kernel and stuff. They think about "sending an email" as a single, abstract object, not a system of protocols and programmes and layers etc etc. Windows-based systems, for all their clumsiness and inefficiency, are good at allowing users to do this sort of abstraction.
:-), including setting up hardware bits etc.
I can imagine a desktop system in a year or two where everything is at the level of allowing a mother to use it (probably not mine though. she has determinedly avoided all my (frustrated) bashing with a clue-stick
Humans are amazing for their ability to think in abstract terms. It's really what makes us special....
$AUS0.02
It's a sensitive issue. I read this section to be an emphasis of the fact that pluto's status of a planet will not change as far as the IAU is concerned. Realistically, this is more for historical reasons than science ones.
Scientifically, it's pretty clear that pluto is just another kuiper-belt object. But to be fair, the existence of hte kuiper belt has only been know for 10-15years.
Yeah right. Observatory right in the middle of a pine forrest. Great news until it catches fire and burns down your telescope, like what happened at Mt Stromlo observatory in australia 18months ago. See here.
This will NOT happen. The International Astronomical Union has Press Release in their FAQ section confirming pluto's status as a planet.
I just can't stand the SuSE mentality - it annoys the shit out of me, in the same way that windows and OSX annoy the shit out of me - it gets in my way and tries to hold my hand. Just leave me the hell alone! If I want to set up a bazillion bloody environment varibles etc, I'll fucking-well do it myself!
Global configurations should be minimalist. If you want a special protect-me-from-the-nasty-computer config, fine. But I don't, so piss off and leave me alone.
SuSE and Yast have done some great stuff in the way of installed, and opening up is a Good Thing(tm). But I'll never enjoy using suse unless they change their mentality...
AUS0.02c
hefty chunk of space to reinstall in case of OS failure? The compressed kernel is only ~30-40MB and apt-get does the rest!
ohhhh....must be that _other_ OS.
That would be "IUPAC" I presume - the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry.
:-)
I think, as has been noted elsewhere, that hydrogen hydroxide is more correct, but it's really only semantic. And it's been a long time since my chem lectures. Chemistry's just applied physics anyway