Henry Cavendish did an experiment to measure the gravitational constant G. He used a torsional pendulum with two small lead weights to measure the gravitational attraction of two large lead weights nearby. I did this experiment as an undergrad and got a pretty good value for G (big error bars though). It's amazing that back in the 1700s he could measure the gravitational force due to a lead ball.
I just did a google search on "Cavendish experiment" and found this. Evidently a geologist named John Michell deserves some credit too.
I understand that the surface of our planet is shielded from a lot of bad radiation by the magnetic field.
The atmosphere blocks most of the bad radiation. The magnetic field deflects energetic particles, which are mostly from the solar wind. Even if we didn't have a magnetic field, the atmosphere would block those too; only uncommonly energetic particles would make it to the ground.
A magnetic field is important over long timescales as it protects the atmosphere from the solar wind. Without it, the atmosphere would be slowly eroded away.
I doubt the yelling and screaming of the masses had anything near the influence of the dollars of the tech sector.
While I agree that having Intel on "our" side was the major reason the CBDTPA is going down, I think the yelling and screaming of the masses didn't go unnoticed:
"We haven't received one e-mail in support of the Hollings bill," said Judiciary Committee spokeswoman Mimi Devlin.
I've been reading some of the responses from the Congressmen posted here, and they all seem to read the same:
"blah blah blah, I will keep your views in mind, blah blah blah"
Which gives no indication that they actually even read the original letter sent by the constituent! It's nice to see Isakson's office returning a thoughtful response.
I signed up for a spamcop email account a couple of weeks ago. I had been using Yahoo! but the amount of spam I had been getting increased dramatically over the past few months and their interface makes it hard to report spam.
Spamcop is $30 a year, and I've been happy with it. Out of about 80 spams it let 3 or 4 slip into my inbox, and hasn't incorrectly detained any of them. The interface is pretty nice, but not perfectly smooth. I would recommend it to anyone who understands how email works.
Scientists actually finding that unlikely piece of Mars on Earth, in dirt.
I believe the meteorite you're talking about was found in Antarctica. I have a friend who was doing research there one season, and she said one of the things they would do when they were bored was look for meteorites. Pretty much anything that wasn't snow was a meteorite!
That alone made me scared of government contractors. But they can't all be incompetent slackers, can they?
Deep insight for the day: most people are lazy.
I used to work for a major defense contractor, and I saw lots of people wasting lots of time and lots of money (I was one of them...)
I talked to one of my co-workers about it, who was a colonel in the Air Force. He was one of the guys who used to award contracts to these companies. He told me that they were well aware that 80% of the work got done by 20% of the people, but they accepted it as a fact of life.
... they're not doing anything wrong, or bad, or illegal by trying to make money off code that was developed on their boxen, and on their time.
In many cases, those boxen and the labor by the researchers/students were paid for by federal grants. In other words, US citizens have already paid for the work. Why shouldn't we benefit from it instead of paying for it a second time to use under some restrictive license, if at all?
Last Christmas everyone and their mother got a DVD player. DVD already has serious market penetration, and it's set to last the next 10 years or so. People are not going to go out and buy new DVD players any time soon.
What if the price of a DVD/WM{a,v} player is $80? Would you buy a second one and put the old one in the bedroom?
The idea is that the solar tower takes advantage of the vertical temperature gradient in the atmosphere. The day-night change in temperature wouldn't help you out there.
The best places for this type of thing are tropical/subtropical deserts. Lots of sunshine, high temperatures, and dry weather.
Hmmm, if Saudi Arabia gets moving on these things, they'll have lots of electricity to sell once the oil runs out!
To avoid having everything thrown into/usr/local, I've been doing this (with emacs, for example):
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/emacs-21.1
make
make install
Uninstallation just involves removing the directory. This way I don't need to keep the source lying around and it's easy to change which version of the software I want to use. I usually do a
ln -s/usr/local/emacs-21.1/usr/local/emacs
so I don't need to update my PATH every time I compile a new version.
The only downsides are that/usr/local gets pretty cluttered and PATH sure gets long, but it's worth it to me.
But Debian is hell to install, I mean even FreeBSD is easier to install then Debian.
Yes, the install turned me off of debian the first time I tried it. Then I figured out the easy way: just install the base system and get it running, then use apt for everything else. It's quick, simple, and you don't end up with any software you don't need.
But this model doesn't put "the people" in control any more than a closed source model does!
Sure it does! If the "people" want a feature that isn't in the OSS, they can code it up themselves, or hire someone else to do it. Try that with closed source.
Cocoa is the "real deal" for OS X, and is based on C++.
Actually Cocoa is based on Objective C, which is an object oriented language based on C, but is significantly different than C++. There's also Objective C++, but I don't know anything about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Was it Einstein who said "all the experiments in the world can't prove me right, but just one can prove me wrong?"
Henry Cavendish did an experiment to measure the gravitational constant G. He used a torsional pendulum with two small lead weights to measure the gravitational attraction of two large lead weights nearby. I did this experiment as an undergrad and got a pretty good value for G (big error bars though). It's amazing that back in the 1700s he could measure the gravitational force due to a lead ball.
I just did a google search on "Cavendish experiment" and found this. Evidently a geologist named John Michell deserves some credit too.
For example, I do not imagine that Brittney Spears would ever argue against these sorts of laws. I doubt that she understands the implications
I dunno, Britney Spears seems pretty savvy on technical issues.
I understand that the surface of our planet is shielded from a lot of bad radiation by the magnetic field.
The atmosphere blocks most of the bad radiation. The magnetic field deflects energetic particles, which are mostly from the solar wind. Even if we didn't have a magnetic field, the atmosphere would block those too; only uncommonly energetic particles would make it to the ground.
A magnetic field is important over long timescales as it protects the atmosphere from the solar wind. Without it, the atmosphere would be slowly eroded away.
I doubt the yelling and screaming of the masses had anything near the influence of the dollars of the tech sector.
While I agree that having Intel on "our" side was the major reason the CBDTPA is going down, I think the yelling and screaming of the masses didn't go unnoticed:
"We haven't received one e-mail in support of the Hollings bill," said Judiciary Committee spokeswoman Mimi Devlin.
Keep up the yelling and screaming!
I've been reading some of the responses from the Congressmen posted here, and they all seem to read the same:
"blah blah blah, I will keep your views in mind, blah blah blah"
Which gives no indication that they actually even read the original letter sent by the constituent! It's nice to see Isakson's office returning a thoughtful response.
All proceeds will be used to lobby Congress to write more laws to protect you, the Consumer!
My two biggest offenders are NetFlix and 1-800-Flowers.
Interesting. I joined Netflix about two months ago and noticed a dramatic increase in spam since then. Are you sure about this?
I signed up for a spamcop email account a couple of weeks ago. I had been using Yahoo! but the amount of spam I had been getting increased dramatically over the past few months and their interface makes it hard to report spam.
Spamcop is $30 a year, and I've been happy with it. Out of about 80 spams it let 3 or 4 slip into my inbox, and hasn't incorrectly detained any of them. The interface is pretty nice, but not perfectly smooth. I would recommend it to anyone who understands how email works.
Could they stop MS shipping C# on the grounds that it is a java rip off?
I hope not. Linux is a UNIX rip off, isn't it?
I can't believe actually I'm defending the right of MS to "innovate".
We'll just send the BSA after this kid, and we can all rest easy, knowing the world is a better place.
Scientists actually finding that unlikely piece of Mars on Earth, in dirt.
I believe the meteorite you're talking about was found in Antarctica. I have a friend who was doing research there one season, and she said one of the things they would do when they were bored was look for meteorites. Pretty much anything that wasn't snow was a meteorite!
It's a pity they can't just clone the digital screens
Wouldn't that violate the DMCA?
That alone made me scared of government contractors. But they can't all be incompetent slackers, can they?
Deep insight for the day: most people are lazy.
I used to work for a major defense contractor, and I saw lots of people wasting lots of time and lots of money (I was one of them
I talked to one of my co-workers about it, who was a colonel in the Air Force. He was one of the guys who used to award contracts to these companies. He told me that they were well aware that 80% of the work got done by 20% of the people, but they accepted it as a fact of life.
... they're not doing anything wrong, or bad, or illegal by trying to make money off code that was developed on their boxen, and on their time.
In many cases, those boxen and the labor by the researchers/students were paid for by federal grants. In other words, US citizens have already paid for the work. Why shouldn't we benefit from it instead of paying for it a second time to use under some restrictive license, if at all?
Two words:
Steve Ballmer.
That's fine in the winter, but what happens in the summertime when you don't want warm air from the server room coming in?
Hell, I declare myself a candidate the job. Send me ten questions and I'll answer them. :)
My understanding is that the proposed committee has one chosen by MS, one by the government, and those two pick the third.
So what's the process to go from "self-declared" to serious contender for one of the slots?
Last Christmas everyone and their mother got a DVD player. DVD already has serious market penetration, and it's set to last the next 10 years or so. People are not going to go out and buy new DVD players any time soon.
What if the price of a DVD/WM{a,v} player is $80? Would you buy a second one and put the old one in the bedroom?
if (number_of_negatives > 1)
fprintf(stderr, "I don't think that less than 90%% of this sentence can't be parsed\n");
The idea is that the solar tower takes advantage of the vertical temperature gradient in the atmosphere. The day-night change in temperature wouldn't help you out there.
The best places for this type of thing are tropical/subtropical deserts. Lots of sunshine, high temperatures, and dry weather.
Hmmm, if Saudi Arabia gets moving on these things, they'll have lots of electricity to sell once the oil runs out!
make
make install
Uninstallation just involves removing the directory. This way I don't need to keep the source lying around and it's easy to change which version of the software I want to use. I usually do a
ln -s /usr/local/emacs-21.1 /usr/local/emacs
so I don't need to update my PATH every time I compile a new version.
The only downsides are that /usr/local gets pretty cluttered and PATH sure gets long, but it's worth it to me.
Yes, the install turned me off of debian the first time I tried it. Then I figured out the easy way: just install the base system and get it running, then use apt for everything else. It's quick, simple, and you don't end up with any software you don't need.
But this model doesn't put "the people" in control any more than a closed source model does!
Sure it does! If the "people" want a feature that isn't in the OSS, they can code it up themselves, or hire someone else to do it. Try that with closed source.
Actually Cocoa is based on Objective C, which is an object oriented language based on C, but is significantly different than C++. There's also Objective C++, but I don't know anything about it.