I ran up about $450 in international roaming charges in less than a week of traveling in 2004 - and I didn't use my phone much. $0.99 to $4.99 per minute on top of your actual call charges will do that to you. You could take ATT's cheapest, least-featured phone to Europe for a month, talk a lot, and come back to this or worse - without using any data at all.
Princeton? I'm sure you know (as do I - I grew up not far from there and a friend of the family worked at PPPL) that they already did quite a lot of experimentation with the Tokomak design, and held the world record for fusion back in the 90s. In fact, the Stellerator is sort of an optimized Tokomak; the overall shape of the plasma is still a torus (Mmmm, donuts!) but it's "twisted" so it's not the same cross-section in all spots.
I haven't read enough to really grasp why that's better, but 12MW is going to be a bit more powerful than the TFTR was.
Late one night while I was working on my dissertation on polarimetry of active galactic nuclei, I was surprised by Maria, the physics department's delicious young cleaning lady. Her janitorial uniform did little to conceal her large, perky breasts, which were spherical and of uniform density... I'm not sure this is a good idea...
35MW of capacity sitting about 20 miles from me as I type this.
Plus we have wind farms, beaches, girls in bikinis, volcanoes, a bunch of top astronomical observatories, and other things geeks like. And that's just on my island.
Maybe the Perl Whirl cruise should come here again.:)
...only a WinME cd with no Internet access... Well, the geek may suffer, but at least without Internet access, his copy of WinME won't get infected with everything out there and add to the suffering of others.
Back in the late '90s, I had a friend who worked for MERL. Can't even remember who it was, or how I knew him, now. Anyway, he was involved with the "Artificial Retina Skunkworks" there (Google Cache) and I had a Nec Versa 2000C running Linux (Red Had 6-ish).
I forget whether I offered to play with alpha-test hardware, or he offered to let me, but anyway I wound up with a little circuit board with an A.R. chip on it, a 9V battery connector wired in, and a DB-9 serial port. Cabled it to my laptop, used gphoto (0.3ish maybe) to grab images with it. It wasn't high-res, and it was monochromatic, but it was kinda neat.
If I recall, the technology was to be used in a camera for the GameBoy or something like that.:)
You can already get high-quality applications (Mac) to theme the iPhone and add your own ring tones (Win) for the phone. Ah yes, the different schools of thought.
The US lags because we set up our telcom infrastructure the first, and thus have the most primitive last-mile connections. Yes. All of which were supposed to have been replaced by fiber optics in roughly 1985-2000, by the telcos, in exchange for the government allowing them to continue their regional monopolies with reduced regulation, and so on, and so forth. Bleah.
If Mexico is NOT 3rd world, then what is your definition of such? That's an easy one, seriously.
The UN maintains a nice list of Least Developed Countries. (That term is, by the way, the politically correct equivalent of the politically incorrect "third world.")
I've only been to one of them, and it's one that is on its way toward getting off that list... and Mexico looks positively futuristic by comparison.
If your capital city has electricity that stays on for 24 hours straight at least once a week... you're probably not "third-world."
If you live 5 miles from Parliament and still have hot running water... you're probably not "third-world."
If most of the new vehicles on the road belong to anyone other than UN agencies and international aid agencies... you're probably not "third-world."
I've been waiting for this to be completed, since I sometimes work at the W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, and the GTC is based on (and only slightly larger than) Keck I and II.
Keck held the "world's largest" title (among optical scopes) for the last 15 years; it'll be interesting to see whether anything steals the crown from the GTC in the near future.
It just crops up at a different point in the process.
In the old days, you'd expose a bunch of film plates of a given chunk of sky, then have your assistant / grad student / whatever overlap them and look for anything that "appeared" or "moved" across the different frames.
5-10 years ago, you'd take digital images, then have your assistant / grad student / whatever "blink" back and forth between them, doing the same thing.
Nowadays, you take lots of digital images and feed them into a supercomputing cluster which analyzes them, then spits out a list of the things that "appear" or "move" that are most likely to be good targets for you... then you have your assistant / grad student / whatever take photometry, spectra, etc. to check on them.
The process gradually becomes more efficient, but the wetware's still in there - it's just being used in places where it matters most.
(I'm part of the wetware for one such project, in the / whatever category.)
Potentially federal issue? None of those items necessarily happen interstate. All of those items could happen intrastate. Could, yes. Around the time that identity thieves start checking to make sure they're only harvesting identities of people within their own states, and only selling them to other people within their own states, and so on.
Yeah, insurance fraud, identity theft and questionable online pharmacies aren't matters for federal law enforcement, because they don't cross state li... oh, wait.
Technically MS owns the patent to the jogging dial thingy on the iPod too, but since the terms of the deal... Really? Interesting. And of course the iPhone... has no jogging dial thingy. Not even a virtual on-screen one, as far as I could see in an hour of playing with one at a store. It's also not stuck in the "hierarchial interface" Creative sued Apple over.
I'm beginning to think that Apple's real design strength lies in its ability to note that someone else has come up with a good idea first (like Creative with the hierarchial model) and come up with a completely different idea that is at least as slick and pretty, and at least as good (though perhaps not actually better)... then persuade world+dog that anything someone else has a patent on is old and busted, while the new interface is the way to go.
Is "Cover Flow" - which Apple has been flogging everywhere from iTunes to Leopard's Finder to the iPhone - actually better than the hierarchial model? Hard to say. Is it far, far more slick and pretty? Hell, yeah. Same goes for the multi-touch interface. It may or may not actually be quantifiably better than whatever it replaced, but it's slick and pretty and will have everyone else chasing Apple's heels.
The BBC took a look at an iPhone and decided that the claims it was 5 years ahead of everything else weren't valid. Technologically, they said, it wasn't really ahead at all (mostly because of bog-slow EDGE). As far as the user experience, however, they said it had a good 10-year lead.
I've seen Zenith PC's before... back around 1990. They were distinctly not good. Haven't seen them since then, so I haven't had any reason to improve my opinion... and I don't think this will help either.
Regardless of how poor these watch lists may be implemented, some real terrorist threats will make their way on them. Fascinating bit of logic you've got, there. Let me generalize it a bit:
Any sufficiently long random string eventually includes the name of a terrorist.
If you give a bunch of monkeys typewriters, sooner or later they'll type "Osama bin Laden."
Now, maybe you can argue that the methodology being used to create and implement these lists is superior to that of giving typewriters to monkeys... or then again, maybe you can't.
Personally, I don't look forward to what I expect will be the eventual inevitable expansion of this program to include US citizens. I fly to about four continents a year, and go to US-friendly, popular-with-US-tourists places like Indonesia (CIA: the world's largest Muslim population) and Turkey (CIA: Muslim 99.8% (mostly Sunni)). Thus far I haven't developed much faith in DHS's ability to keep friends and foes straight.
Slashdot Mirror
I ran up about $450 in international roaming charges in less than a week of traveling in 2004 - and I didn't use my phone much. $0.99 to $4.99 per minute on top of your actual call charges will do that to you. You could take ATT's cheapest, least-featured phone to Europe for a month, talk a lot, and come back to this or worse - without using any data at all.
I, for one, welcome our new Vermicious Knid overlords.
Princeton? I'm sure you know (as do I - I grew up not far from there and a friend of the family worked at PPPL) that they already did quite a lot of experimentation with the Tokomak design, and held the world record for fusion back in the 90s. In fact, the Stellerator is sort of an optimized Tokomak; the overall shape of the plasma is still a torus (Mmmm, donuts!) but it's "twisted" so it's not the same cross-section in all spots.
I haven't read enough to really grasp why that's better, but 12MW is going to be a bit more powerful than the TFTR was.
Late one night while I was working on my dissertation on polarimetry of active galactic nuclei, I was surprised by Maria, the physics department's delicious young cleaning lady. Her janitorial uniform did little to conceal her large, perky breasts, which were spherical and of uniform density... I'm not sure this is a good idea...
35MW of capacity sitting about 20 miles from me as I type this.
:)
Plus we have wind farms, beaches, girls in bikinis, volcanoes, a bunch of top astronomical observatories, and other things geeks like. And that's just on my island.
Maybe the Perl Whirl cruise should come here again.
Indeed. The last five words were unnecessary to the truth of this title.
...only a WinME cd with no Internet access... Well, the geek may suffer, but at least without Internet access, his copy of WinME won't get infected with everything out there and add to the suffering of others.Back in the late '90s, I had a friend who worked for MERL. Can't even remember who it was, or how I knew him, now. Anyway, he was involved with the "Artificial Retina Skunkworks" there (Google Cache) and I had a Nec Versa 2000C running Linux (Red Had 6-ish).
:)
I forget whether I offered to play with alpha-test hardware, or he offered to let me, but anyway I wound up with a little circuit board with an A.R. chip on it, a 9V battery connector wired in, and a DB-9 serial port. Cabled it to my laptop, used gphoto (0.3ish maybe) to grab images with it. It wasn't high-res, and it was monochromatic, but it was kinda neat.
If I recall, the technology was to be used in a camera for the GameBoy or something like that.
Mac users want high-quality applications.
Windows users want ringtones.
It's all clear now.
I guess the A380s must be less delayed than I had thought. ;)
The UN maintains a nice list of Least Developed Countries. (That term is, by the way, the politically correct equivalent of the politically incorrect "third world.")
I've only been to one of them, and it's one that is on its way toward getting off that list... and Mexico looks positively futuristic by comparison.
If your capital city has electricity that stays on for 24 hours straight at least once a week... you're probably not "third-world."
If you live 5 miles from Parliament and still have hot running water... you're probably not "third-world."
If most of the new vehicles on the road belong to anyone other than UN agencies and international aid agencies... you're probably not "third-world."
Instead of an optical drive spindle.
And I'd like the cost/GB to be in the same ballpark as CD-R or DVD-R media.
Indeed. But since the mirrors aren't segmented a la Keck, it's kind of hard to decide whether it has 1 mirror or 7. :)
Bring on the (segmented) Thirty-Meter Telescope, I say.
I've been waiting for this to be completed, since I sometimes work at the W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, and the GTC is based on (and only slightly larger than) Keck I and II.
Keck held the "world's largest" title (among optical scopes) for the last 15 years; it'll be interesting to see whether anything steals the crown from the GTC in the near future.
It just crops up at a different point in the process.
In the old days, you'd expose a bunch of film plates of a given chunk of sky, then have your assistant / grad student / whatever overlap them and look for anything that "appeared" or "moved" across the different frames.
5-10 years ago, you'd take digital images, then have your assistant / grad student / whatever "blink" back and forth between them, doing the same thing.
Nowadays, you take lots of digital images and feed them into a supercomputing cluster which analyzes them, then spits out a list of the things that "appear" or "move" that are most likely to be good targets for you... then you have your assistant / grad student / whatever take photometry, spectra, etc. to check on them.
The process gradually becomes more efficient, but the wetware's still in there - it's just being used in places where it matters most.
(I'm part of the wetware for one such project, in the / whatever category.)
Pigs could, meanwhile, fly.
Yeah, insurance fraud, identity theft and questionable online pharmacies aren't matters for federal law enforcement, because they don't cross state li... oh, wait.
*plonk*
I'm beginning to think that Apple's real design strength lies in its ability to note that someone else has come up with a good idea first (like Creative with the hierarchial model) and come up with a completely different idea that is at least as slick and pretty, and at least as good (though perhaps not actually better)... then persuade world+dog that anything someone else has a patent on is old and busted, while the new interface is the way to go.
Is "Cover Flow" - which Apple has been flogging everywhere from iTunes to Leopard's Finder to the iPhone - actually better than the hierarchial model? Hard to say. Is it far, far more slick and pretty? Hell, yeah. Same goes for the multi-touch interface. It may or may not actually be quantifiably better than whatever it replaced, but it's slick and pretty and will have everyone else chasing Apple's heels.
The BBC took a look at an iPhone and decided that the claims it was 5 years ahead of everything else weren't valid. Technologically, they said, it wasn't really ahead at all (mostly because of bog-slow EDGE). As far as the user experience, however, they said it had a good 10-year lead.
I've seen Zenith PC's before... back around 1990. They were distinctly not good. Haven't seen them since then, so I haven't had any reason to improve my opinion... and I don't think this will help either.
You can use this to watch videos.
[subliminal: PORN!]
Millions and millions of different videos are available.
[subliminal: BOOBIES!]
Sooo... you're saying the 4-8 gigs of something in the iPhone isn't Random Access Memory? What is it?
Grad students at least have some eventual escape to work toward. I'm research support staff in a graduate school.
Yeah, I've been in a lot of labs with no atmosphere. ;)
Any sufficiently long random string eventually includes the name of a terrorist.
If you give a bunch of monkeys typewriters, sooner or later they'll type "Osama bin Laden."
Now, maybe you can argue that the methodology being used to create and implement these lists is superior to that of giving typewriters to monkeys... or then again, maybe you can't.
Personally, I don't look forward to what I expect will be the eventual inevitable expansion of this program to include US citizens. I fly to about four continents a year, and go to US-friendly, popular-with-US-tourists places like Indonesia (CIA: the world's largest Muslim population) and Turkey (CIA: Muslim 99.8% (mostly Sunni)). Thus far I haven't developed much faith in DHS's ability to keep friends and foes straight.