From what I've heard from David Tholen and others in the field, we have to wait until 2029 to see exactly what orbit Apophis winds up in after its pass.
However, we shouldn't wait that long to develop and test the technology necessary to alter its orbit. If we have a good orbit calculated by, say, 2030, and have the technology to alter it devloped and tested, 2036 becomes a non-event, and we can go back to worrying about the UNIX time overflow in 2038 instead.
Pan-STARRS most certainly is funded, is in active development, already has a single-telescope prototype up and running to some degree, and hopes to have its full system (4 telescopes, each with a 1.4 gigapixel camera) operational in the next few years. (The nastiest rock we're aware of so far will miss us in about 22 years.)
If there is a life on earth ending event occurring from some asteroid they COULD find, does it matter at all? There is nothing we can do about it anyway.
Actually, there is. Nature ran an article 2 years ago on a proposal for a "gravity tractor" by NASA astronauts Ed Lu and Stan Love. I've seen Ed's presentation on it, and he knows his stuff. (He's a farkin' astronaut, after all, and was an astrophysicist before that.)
So, to recap:
NASA has funded this stuff all along. The stuff Congress wants done probably will actually get done. And NASA's own people are already telling anyone who will listen what to do if we do find the big nasty rock.
Exactly why nobody at NASA can remember any of this when testifying before Congress... I have no idea.:)
Disclaimer: I work for the institute that's the lead organization on Pan-STARRS. Ed Lu used to work there too; I've met him; I may be biased.:) I also know and work with the (in)famous David Tholen, who found that 2029 rock, Apophis.
Oh, and if you'd like to check out a talk given by Ed, David, and Pan-STARRS's Rob Jedicke and Nick Kaiser, I'm sure my buddy over at AstroDay.net won't mind a few visitors... dunno if you'll all be listen to the audio podcast of the session at the same time, though!
Someone gave the example of standing outside in the country. (Presumably on a moonless night, maybe with clouds to block the stars?)
On a clear starry night, I've seen my shadow from starlight alone. So I've gotta ask, does this reflect so little light that you'd be unable to distinguish a shadow from the "illuminated" area around it?
Oh,/opt is where all the optical drive device files live, but only on Opteron-based systems, of course.:)
Actually, I'm trying to think where I first encountered/opt - it was either on a Sun or an SGI, around 1990-1996ish, I think. Anyway, it's basically for optional software packages - often third-party - that come with all their own libraries and baggage... like if you were installing the Netscape webserver or Adobe Photoshop 3 or something on an SGI box in the mid '90s, it might have gone into/opt. (Been a while, so I don't recall.:) Nuke something out of/opt and it should be gone pretty cleanly.
(Of course, modern package-management tools make this slightly unnecessary... but/opt bears a little bit of resemblance to OS X's/Applications in this regard - except that an application in/opt might also store its configuration, spools, and so on in its tree under/opt)
Actually, if something's your first offense, it's not uncommon for them to say "oh and by the way, if you complete the terms of your probation and so on and so forth, you can get this expunged in N years, where N is some prime number, like 5, 7, 13...
I wonder whether that means it will automatically be expunged after a certain amount of time, or not...
Actually yes it is. The moon is far closer to Mars then the earth is.
Either that's very subtle sarcasm you've got there... or you and others reading this aren't keeping track of 3 facts:
1. The moon is about 384,500 km from Earth. 2. Mars is about 55,000,000 km from Earth - at its closest. 3. Most importantly, the moon goes around the Earth all the time.
So... there are times where the moon is 384,500 km closer to Mars than the Earth is. And there are times where the moon is 384,500 km further than Mars is. And at best, that's six thousandths of the total straight-line distance to Mars.
q.v. http://www.astroday.net/AstroTalk35.html - the panel featured Dave Tholen (discoverer of Apophis, and colorful Usenet figure), Ed Lu (NASA Shuttle and ISS astronaut and co-inventor of the "gravity tractor" idea) and a couple guys from the Pan-STARRS asteroid-hunting project.
The rule-of-thumb I've seen is every time something changes hands, the price gets marked up.
For example, I took a pretty picture of something. Showed it to a friend who runs a little shop that sells a few photo prints. He said, "How much do you want for 25 of it?" I said, "What's your usual markup?" He said they doubled the wholesale price and added a buck. So I looked at their other prints, which were selling for about $10-11, figured out they were paying about $4.50-$5.00 each, and went off to find a place where I could get prints of my picture for less than half of that amount, since gosh, if they were going to make 100% profit, I wanted to make 100% profit too!
So my 25 prints wound up costing me $60 or so; my friend paid $120 or so, and at retail, they sold for a total of $250 or so. And everyone was happy, I guess.
ground based systems can't look at a single point in space for a long duration image set
Neither can Hubble. The Hubble Deep Field was pieced together from 10 nights of images. The newer Hubble Ultra Deep Field, from 11 nights.
Pretty much any half-decent-looking astronomical image you see is a combination of multiple exposures. I'm one of the operators of the 2.2-meter (that's slightly smaller than Hubble) telescope on Mauna Kea, and have been teaching myself the process of getting and combining images in different filters/wavelengths. For example, I made this shot of M76 from about a dozen exposures. (Using, incidentally, the same instrument that was used to discover the Kuiper Belt back in 1992.)
I would be curious to know whether some of the new Earth based observatories give Hubble a run for its money?
New? Keep in mind that the top Earth based observatory, Keck, is 10-15 years old too.;)
Oh, and with technology like adaptive optics, AO lasers and interferometry... yes, Keck (and others) can "give Hubble a run for its money" in some regards. Not across the board, though - no real UV capability, for example. Even up at Keck, there's still enough atmosphere over my head to ruin things.
People who can't stand MySpace's (or for that matter Orkut's) errors and general suck, and thus scout around to find the social-networking/media sharing site that sucks least, but leave a little something behind on MySpace as a "pointer" for their herd-behaving acquaintances. (I'm in this category)
From the description, Motorola Q already matches this iPhone thingy.
Well, it would... except that the iPhone is GSM and thus actually usable in most of the world, unlike the Q and any other CDMA phone. And the iPhone comes with, say, 60 times the storage of the Q. And better battery life. And a bigger, higher-resolution screen. And WiFi. And a higher-resolution camera...
I signed up for MySpace (yeah. I know.) from an email address with a plus in it.
Wanted to cancel, and the confirmation email never came.
Tried changing my email address (to something without a plus) and the confirmation email never came.
Wrote to privacy@myspace.com like MySpace says to in this situation... it's been 2-3 months and the account is still there.
For a couple of those months the account's name has been the uncensored version of "F*** MySpace" and its profile has been a description of how broken MySpace is in this regard. This hasn't gotten it canceled either.
Once I manage to move the account's few friends somewhere else, I think I'll have to update its publicly-visible goodness with some choice commentary on "Tom," Rupert Murdoch, barnyard animals, drugs, Al-Qaeda, minors, and whatever else, to see if that helps.
1. Many of the top 25 ship media containing both Windows versions (World of Warcraft, TurboTax, H&R Block Taxcut, Rosetta Stone Spanish)
2. Others are available in separate versions for both OSes (Microsoft Office 2003 for Windows/Office 2004 for Mac, QuickBooks, Quicken). What're you left with that's Windows-only?
3. Some Windows-only apps compete with things that come free on every Mac (Photoshop Elements, Premiere Elements)
4. Some Windows-only apps are largely unnecessary on a Mac (Norton Antivirus, Norton Internet Security Suite)
So out of the top 25, what apps are we left with that are Windows-only?
Microsoft Money, the Pets Expansion Pack for The Sims 2, Age of Empires: Collectors Edition, and Dragon Naturally Speaking.
Yep, the games and apps people use are definitely not available on any version of OS X.:)
Well, of course. Just to make sure nobody gave him anything on the plane that he could have combined with something else to make an explosive that he'd then use to blow up the patient. Entirely logical.
Kind of like going between flights in Japan. Off the plane, over to have your papers looked at and have everything put through the metal detector, then they'll actually let you into the airport proper.
Oh, and then there's the airports where you go through the metal detector before you even check in - Nairobi and Entebbe are good examples of this. Then, when you get to the gate, they do it again, just in case you bought all manner of dangerous things at duty-free. What fun.
Seen the whole machines-in-closets. A couple BBSes (QuartzBBS at Rutgers and later ISCABBS at UIowa) ran out of closets. I worked for a company whose mailserver was a 386 running BSD, in the coat closet.
Also worked with a company that was running Advanced PICK (bizarre) atop SCO OpenSewer (bizarre) on an old beige Dell PowerEdge... sitting on the counter next to the sink in the men's room, because they had nowhere else to put it.
Well, for me, anyway. I'd had accounts on just about everything since Friendster, but I really did a lot of consolidating onto just one site (and off Friendster, Orkut, Tribe, MySpace, LiveJournal, etc.) in the last year or so. It was just too much of a pain to log into a half-dozen different sites when I could just go to one that did a fairly good job as far as blogging, reviewing, photo sharing, music sharing, video sharing, link sharing, and a (so far) so-so job of calendaring. (And offered RSS so folks could keep up with me that way if they wanted.)
What the parent poster is forgetting here is the fact that TDS is on a network called, "Comedy Central." It in no way purports itself as a news station.
That's right... in the U.S. Outside the U.S., folks in some areas see The Daily Show on this other network, called "CNN International." Maybe you've heard of it?
(Yes, there is a little disclaimer message on black at the beginning of the show...)
Slashdot Mirror
From what I've heard from David Tholen and others in the field, we have to wait until 2029 to see exactly what orbit Apophis winds up in after its pass.
However, we shouldn't wait that long to develop and test the technology necessary to alter its orbit. If we have a good orbit calculated by, say, 2030, and have the technology to alter it devloped and tested, 2036 becomes a non-event, and we can go back to worrying about the UNIX time overflow in 2038 instead.
LINEAR
LONEOS
NEAT
Spacewatch
The next generation involves ones that will find more, find smaller (but still dangerous) ones, and find them faster. Like:
Pan-STARRS (prototype built)
LSST (proposed)
Pan-STARRS most certainly is funded, is in active development, already has a single-telescope prototype up and running to some degree, and hopes to have its full system (4 telescopes, each with a 1.4 gigapixel camera) operational in the next few years. (The nastiest rock we're aware of so far will miss us in about 22 years.)
Actually, there is. Nature ran an article 2 years ago on a proposal for a "gravity tractor" by NASA astronauts Ed Lu and Stan Love. I've seen Ed's presentation on it, and he knows his stuff. (He's a farkin' astronaut, after all, and was an astrophysicist before that.)
So, to recap:
NASA has funded this stuff all along. The stuff Congress wants done probably will actually get done. And NASA's own people are already telling anyone who will listen what to do if we do find the big nasty rock.
Exactly why nobody at NASA can remember any of this when testifying before Congress... I have no idea.
Disclaimer: I work for the institute that's the lead organization on Pan-STARRS. Ed Lu used to work there too; I've met him; I may be biased.
Oh, and if you'd like to check out a talk given by Ed, David, and Pan-STARRS's Rob Jedicke and Nick Kaiser, I'm sure my buddy over at AstroDay.net won't mind a few visitors... dunno if you'll all be listen to the audio podcast of the session at the same time, though!
Someone gave the example of standing outside in the country. (Presumably on a moonless night, maybe with clouds to block the stars?)
On a clear starry night, I've seen my shadow from starlight alone. So I've gotta ask, does this reflect so little light that you'd be unable to distinguish a shadow from the "illuminated" area around it?
Oh, /opt is where all the optical drive device files live, but only on Opteron-based systems, of course. :)
/opt - it was either on a Sun or an SGI, around 1990-1996ish, I think. Anyway, it's basically for optional software packages - often third-party - that come with all their own libraries and baggage... like if you were installing the Netscape webserver or Adobe Photoshop 3 or something on an SGI box in the mid '90s, it might have gone into /opt. (Been a while, so I don't recall. :) Nuke something out of /opt and it should be gone pretty cleanly.
/opt bears a little bit of resemblance to OS X's /Applications in this regard - except that an application in /opt might also store its configuration, spools, and so on in its tree under /opt)
Actually, I'm trying to think where I first encountered
(Of course, modern package-management tools make this slightly unnecessary... but
The FHS explanation of this seems pretty decent.
Actually, if something's your first offense, it's not uncommon for them to say "oh and by the way, if you complete the terms of your probation and so on and so forth, you can get this expunged in N years, where N is some prime number, like 5, 7, 13...
I wonder whether that means it will automatically be expunged after a certain amount of time, or not...
People go to conferences about, and take notes about... Go?
Wow.
Either that's very subtle sarcasm you've got there... or you and others reading this aren't keeping track of 3 facts:
1. The moon is about 384,500 km from Earth.
2. Mars is about 55,000,000 km from Earth - at its closest.
3. Most importantly, the moon goes around the Earth all the time.
So... there are times where the moon is 384,500 km closer to Mars than the Earth is.
And there are times where the moon is 384,500 km further than Mars is.
And at best, that's six thousandths of the total straight-line distance to Mars.
q.v. http://www.astroday.net/AstroTalk35.html - the panel featured Dave Tholen (discoverer of Apophis, and colorful Usenet figure), Ed Lu (NASA Shuttle and ISS astronaut and co-inventor of the "gravity tractor" idea) and a couple guys from the Pan-STARRS asteroid-hunting project.
The rule-of-thumb I've seen is every time something changes hands, the price gets marked up.
For example, I took a pretty picture of something. Showed it to a friend who runs a little shop that sells a few photo prints. He said, "How much do you want for 25 of it?" I said, "What's your usual markup?" He said they doubled the wholesale price and added a buck. So I looked at their other prints, which were selling for about $10-11, figured out they were paying about $4.50-$5.00 each, and went off to find a place where I could get prints of my picture for less than half of that amount, since gosh, if they were going to make 100% profit, I wanted to make 100% profit too!
So my 25 prints wound up costing me $60 or so; my friend paid $120 or so, and at retail, they sold for a total of $250 or so. And everyone was happy, I guess.
Seems like that's usually the way it works, after all.
ground based systems can't look at a single point in space for a long duration image set
Neither can Hubble. The Hubble Deep Field was pieced together from 10 nights of images. The newer Hubble Ultra Deep Field, from 11 nights.
Pretty much any half-decent-looking astronomical image you see is a combination of multiple exposures. I'm one of the operators of the 2.2-meter (that's slightly smaller than Hubble) telescope on Mauna Kea, and have been teaching myself the process of getting and combining images in different filters/wavelengths. For example, I made this shot of M76 from about a dozen exposures. (Using, incidentally, the same instrument that was used to discover the Kuiper Belt back in 1992.)
Just a data point.
I would be curious to know whether some of the new Earth based observatories give Hubble a run for its money?
New? Keep in mind that the top Earth based observatory, Keck, is 10-15 years old too. ;)
Oh, and with technology like adaptive optics, AO lasers and interferometry... yes, Keck (and others) can "give Hubble a run for its money" in some regards. Not across the board, though - no real UV capability, for example. Even up at Keck, there's still enough atmosphere over my head to ruin things.
*shakes fist and curses at atmosphere*
despite future spacecraft like JWST, none of the planned replacements will cover the UV range.
... and those are all future. JWST won't even launch until at least what, 2011? And it only does IR. TPF is even further away.
People who can't stand MySpace's (or for that matter Orkut's) errors and general suck, and thus scout around to find the social-networking/media sharing site that sucks least, but leave a little something behind on MySpace as a "pointer" for their herd-behaving acquaintances. (I'm in this category)
If the device is running an ARM processor, both Java and Flash are most likely supported (simply because the plugins are for x86 only).
Er... do you mean "are most likely NOT supported" there? 'Cos the sentence makes no sense this way...
And if you do mean that, I have two G4-based machines here that would like to disagree with you about Java and Flash support in Safari being x86-only.
customer service desks aren't overwhelmed with calls from idiots who broke their own phones by installing something.
:)
Of course not. Web discussion boards are, because mobile carrier customer service desks are beyond useless.
From the description, Motorola Q already matches this iPhone thingy.
Well, it would... except that the iPhone is GSM and thus actually usable in most of the world, unlike the Q and any other CDMA phone. And the iPhone comes with, say, 60 times the storage of the Q. And better battery life. And a bigger, higher-resolution screen. And WiFi. And a higher-resolution camera...
Strange match.
Yeah... Palm and RIM stocks were both down something in the 5-10% range. There's nothing like abrupt obsolescence.
I said the account's name - not the personalized URL. Someone else grabbed that URL.
The URL for the account in question is http://www.myspace.com/dantravels
I signed up for MySpace (yeah. I know.) from an email address with a plus in it.
Wanted to cancel, and the confirmation email never came.
Tried changing my email address (to something without a plus) and the confirmation email never came.
Wrote to privacy@myspace.com like MySpace says to in this situation... it's been 2-3 months and the account is still there.
For a couple of those months the account's name has been the uncensored version of "F*** MySpace" and its profile has been a description of how broken MySpace is in this regard. This hasn't gotten it canceled either.
Once I manage to move the account's few friends somewhere else, I think I'll have to update its publicly-visible goodness with some choice commentary on "Tom," Rupert Murdoch, barnyard animals, drugs, Al-Qaeda, minors, and whatever else, to see if that helps.
Um... right. Take a look at Amazon's best-selling software list sometime.
1. Many of the top 25 ship media containing both Windows versions (World of Warcraft, TurboTax, H&R Block Taxcut, Rosetta Stone Spanish)
2. Others are available in separate versions for both OSes (Microsoft Office 2003 for Windows/Office 2004 for Mac, QuickBooks, Quicken). What're you left with that's Windows-only?
3. Some Windows-only apps compete with things that come free on every Mac (Photoshop Elements, Premiere Elements)
4. Some Windows-only apps are largely unnecessary on a Mac (Norton Antivirus, Norton Internet Security Suite)
So out of the top 25, what apps are we left with that are Windows-only?
Microsoft Money, the Pets Expansion Pack for The Sims 2, Age of Empires: Collectors Edition, and Dragon Naturally Speaking.
Yep, the games and apps people use are definitely not available on any version of OS X.
Well, of course. Just to make sure nobody gave him anything on the plane that he could have combined with something else to make an explosive that he'd then use to blow up the patient. Entirely logical.
Kind of like going between flights in Japan. Off the plane, over to have your papers looked at and have everything put through the metal detector, then they'll actually let you into the airport proper.
Oh, and then there's the airports where you go through the metal detector before you even check in - Nairobi and Entebbe are good examples of this. Then, when you get to the gate, they do it again, just in case you bought all manner of dangerous things at duty-free. What fun.
Hmmmm.
Seen the whole machines-in-closets. A couple BBSes (QuartzBBS at Rutgers and later ISCABBS at UIowa) ran out of closets. I worked for a company whose mailserver was a 386 running BSD, in the coat closet.
Also worked with a company that was running Advanced PICK (bizarre) atop SCO OpenSewer (bizarre) on an old beige Dell PowerEdge... sitting on the counter next to the sink in the men's room, because they had nowhere else to put it.
Well, for me, anyway. I'd had accounts on just about everything since Friendster, but I really did a lot of consolidating onto just one site (and off Friendster, Orkut, Tribe, MySpace, LiveJournal, etc.) in the last year or so. It was just too much of a pain to log into a half-dozen different sites when I could just go to one that did a fairly good job as far as blogging, reviewing, photo sharing, music sharing, video sharing, link sharing, and a (so far) so-so job of calendaring. (And offered RSS so folks could keep up with me that way if they wanted.)
The link? It's up there.
That's right... in the U.S. Outside the U.S., folks in some areas see The Daily Show on this other network, called "CNN International." Maybe you've heard of it?
(Yes, there is a little disclaimer message on black at the beginning of the show...)