American deer are plentiful not only because their natural predators got beat back, but in large part because of conservation efforts by hunters all around the country that has preserved plenty of natural habitat for them to flourish in. This is the meaning of 'conservation' - we are not trying to turn the world into a petting zoo, we like to eat venison.
Or as someone high-up in a sustainability organization once said to me after a beer or two, "Sustainable development is about your grandkids being able to shoot Bambi, too."
It's pretty sad when the 35 authors can take paper space acknowledge the culturally significant role that the observatory site has for the indigenous Hawaiians, but can't specifically acknowledge the people who took the data.
Uh, they can, and they did, but you'd have to read the remainder of the paragraph to discover that - and for some reason, they don't refer to me by my Slashdot username.;) Occasionally I'll also proofread papers (I know more about English than astrophysics or cosmology) and get thanked for that, too.
The author list for peer-reviewed stuff is mostly full members of the collaboration - folks with Ph.D's, folks doing their Ph.D's on collaboration stuff, folks who wrote the custom data warehouse software, and of course Saul Perlmutter. (It never hurts to have someone with a Nobel in your author list, right?) I'm not a Ph.D, and probably never will be, although I'd like to finish my MSc someday. I am on the broader authors list for occasional "Astronomer's Telegram" announcements we send out after taking spectra of a newly discovered thing and figuring out what type of SN it is, how far pre- or post-maximum it is, and how far away it is.
The relation between light curve width and how bright SN are has been known since at least 1993 (Phillips, M., 1993, ApJ 413, L105). This was corrected for even in the original work that won the Nobel prize. So, the 'they aren't quite so standard candles' has been known for 20 years - what they are is 'standardizable' candles.
AC2:
I don't see the SuperNova Factory taking credit for discovering the relationship between light curve width and luminosity (the Phillips relation, which is indeed well-known, and made the discovery of Dark Energy with Type Ia supernovae possible).
Well... the Phillips Relationship is "well-known" in much the same way that these supernovae are "nearby" - to the people in that specific very narrow field of expertise. Yes, Wikipedia has an article on it, but I'd expect it to be unknown to the average adult walking down the street, the average amateur astronomer, the average Jeopardy contestant, the average undergraduate or first-year graduate astronomy student, or even the average science popularizer who isn't specifically dealing with supernovae. Just last month, I overheard one long-time amateur astronomer still telling tourists at the Mauna Kea Visitor Information Station that all SNe Ia are the same mass and brightness!
But anyway, as the 2nd AC said, the newer/more interesting bit is the relationship to progenitor mass, and the continued trend toward SNe Ia coming from diverse progenitors - i.e. the more we look, the more "exceptions to the rule" we find. We're already to the point where it looks like most SNe Ia aren't from single, Chandrasekhar-mass progenitors as was long thought to be the "norm," and the paper discusses some models for progenitors of varying masses that meet with varying degrees of success in attempting to match the observational results. I suspect the computational / theoretical / modeling folks will also have fun with it all.
for me a redshift of 3 or 4 is very much low redshift. Come to that, redshifts of 300 are low redshift.
Just as long as you don't claim things are "nearby." Even at the redshifts we deal with (0.03-0.08), you can't get a pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less.
I thought "Further research is needed" was code for "we have seventeen more papers in the works, all of which will cite this one and each of the others, thus inflating our g-index and h-index numbers."
I don't think it's going to make a difference. In fact, I'm not quite sure whether the dark energy research that got the Nobel was strictly limited to type Ia supernovae - it was before my time, and since they were using high-Z (very distant) supernovae, they might have wanted more massive type II ones, or something.
For about a decade, people have accepted that some SNe Ia are "over the limit" (under arrest!) and have developed "double-degenerate" models of colliding white dwarf stars. As sky surveys discover more and more, it's started to become apparent that there are also some "under the limit." This project has studied hundreds of supernovae over the last decade, and looked pretty closely at how they evolve over time. The reassuring part of the paper is that even though these supernovae are nowhere near all the same mass blowing up every time, they're still within a reasonably sensible range (0.9 to 1.4 solar masses) and that by watching what brightness they reach at their peaks, and how quickly they decline in brightness, and looking at their spectral curves (all of which are among the things that this particular collaboration looks at), astrophysicists can calculate their masses, and thus make any necessary adjustments to compensate for that. And by the standards of astrophysicists and cosmologists, the math required to "standardize" progenitors of different masses is probably considered "easy." Of course, these are the same people who think "nearby" means 0.4-1.0 billion light years away...
Disclaimer: I am not an astrophysicist of any kind. I got involved in astronomy a decade ago, and took a few classes 5 years ago, but my roles are overwhelmingly technical or operations, and when it comes to science, I am always the "village idiot" surrounded by PhD's. I'm not the guy who'll give a lecture about what the telescope's pointing at - I'm the guy who'll fix the telescope so it points at it in the first place. I'll take data - in this particular case, over a 10-year project, I'll probably rank #1 or #2 in terms of amount of time spent taking data - but I don't do the analysis or write the papers. My background was in things like systems administration, spamfighting, web development, etc., as one would expect of someone with my user number here.
There still seems to be plenty of data in science
on
'Data Science' Is Dead
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Our current-generation workhorse instruments here at the telescope spit out tens of gigabytes per night as it is. The new camera we've been commissioning produces something like two gigabytes per exposure. And oh, yes, that data has to be archived, reduced, analyzed, etc., using things like IRAF or IDL. (Not my job.)
This, or at least some of these... although I can think of some you've missed. (PlaysForSure? Windows phones that couldn't be upgraded to new OS versions?)
The whole anti-trust mess could have been, should have been, a moment for Microsoft to really change course and do things differently and better. Timing-wise, it happened around the same time Steve Jobs returned to Apple and started killing off beige rectangular computers, and around the time Linux was starting to hit its stride and be seen as a viable alternative to commercial UNIXes. But other than ditching DOS-based Windows with all its vulnerabilities for VMS-based Windows which has turned out to somehow have plenty of them as well, and some of the time managing to arrive at a version that works reasonably well (2000, XP, 7)... I just haven't seen it.
Sure, Microsoft made people hate them and their products back in the day, but for the last 15 years it's been much more a problem of just failing to give people reasons to like the company or its products enough to perceive them as sensible options to whatever else is out there.
Well, gosh... considering my laptop contains stuff from my.gov job, and my.ca job, and another job for which the foreign-CCTLD email has stopped working, that's three countries right there.
(But that said, I'm about to rearrange some stuff on the drive so that if any representative of one government asks to access the machine, I log into the account that contains their stuff, and don't in the process give them trivially easy access to any stuff, passwords, etc. related to the work I do for the others...)
Thank everyone against which pipeline? Keystone? Phase 1 has been operational since 2010 - and oh, look, it runs right through North Dakota. If I recall, phase 2 is built now too (somewhere else in the country) and phase 3 (part of Keystone XL) is under construction to connect those phases to the gulf coast. Oh, did you mean phase 4 of Keystone XL? That wouldn't even run through North Dakota... but if they build it, apparently that'd be another 2% of US daily oil consumption in pipelines.
I'd be very interested in knowing where this train came from and was going to, 'cos it sounds like it must not have been going where the perfectly good existing pipeline goes, or where any of the proposed bits would go.
Had to do this with MySpace once - their signup process accepted email address containing a + and their deletion process didn't.
After falsifying all the profile information and adjusting the age, my account left several publicly-visible comments about "Tom" and Rupert Murdoch...
While not professional drivers Walker and the driver were on a race team together and did plenty of circuit races. The guy driving has a GT3 so is more than familiar with the class of cars in question. Each had many more hours logged racing than any pilot would have flying before being able to get his flight license. It's easy to blame the driver, and it could rightly end up that way. However, the question of whether the car malfunctioned or should not be considered street legal should also be asked.
Among other questions. I have a friend/colleague at NASA JPL who has a Cayenne, takes it to Porsche Owners Club "track days" in the area, is actually a driving instructor for POC. He's had it almost a year, and so far the only troubles have been an engine fire on the track (some fluid overflow is positioned on top of the engine, whoops) and whatever has caused the car to currently be undergoing "open transmission surgery." I asked him about the crash, and he said he doesn't at all run in the same circles as Walker or Rodas, but that Rodas is enough of a professional that the idea of a car getting away from him is very surprising, and there will probably also have to be autopsies (gruesome, given the state of the bodies post-fire) to see whether someone had a medical emergency resulting in the loss of control.
So you've got a very highly tuned car, known for being a bit "finicky" and not immune to various parts failing, driven by a highly trained driver who's also not immune to various parts of him failing. I think I'll wait for the official report of the investigation.
Falkland Islands, or Islas Malvinas, as the Argentine people call them, are disputed territory. British forces usurped the islands from the Argentine authorities in the first half of the 19th century. OK, a stupid military government went to war to try to divert the attention of the Argentine citizens form the internal problems. And thanks to their military defeat democracy finally returned (18 months after the start of the war). But still, Argentina has the right to ask to have them back.
I dearly hope I'm not the only slashdotter who hangs around the UN, so that someone else can back me up on this.
Quite often, in the course of a meeting on something-or-other at the UN, subject-matter experts will be brought in for panel presentations.
Not terribly infrequently, one of the English-speaking experts, not knowing any better, will include a map of whatever (squid fisheries was the last one I personally recall) showing the Falkland Islands.
*ominous chord*
The delegate from Argentina will duck out of the room to call his capital.
The delegate from the UK will do likewise.
A short time later, the delegate from Argentina will ask for the floor, and read a statement to the effect that the Islas Malvinas rightfully belong to Argentina, and that the UK is bad and wrong and all that. The UK will then be asked if they wish to comment, and will read a statement to the effect that the Falklands have been under UK rule for some time, and that in keeping with its practice of divesting itself of various colonies and possessions around the world, and in keeping with the parts of the UN Charter about non-self-governing territories being helped toward independence, the UK would be delighted to be rid of them, squid and all - if the residents of the Falklands themselves were okay with it, and if the UK could be reasonably assured that granting the Falklands independence would not simply lead to Argentina immediately trying to take over them again.
And then, the delegates from the UK and Argentina will go back to being the best of friends, because they are after all diplomats and not the least bit personally interested in perpetuating this silly game.
If I'm parsing this all correctly, this is great news because it means I can port my graphical C++ (or whatever language, with hooks to C++) applications from Linux to Windows or OSX (or from Windows to Linux or OSX, or from OSX to Linux or Windows, whatever the case may be) without having to worry about UI widgetry.
Of course, unless my applications are already written in a language WxWidgets likes, and don't make any calls to other platform-dependent things (DirectX, I'm looking at you), this sounds like it makes my job a little easier, but not a whole lot. Admittedly, I haven't tried porting graphical apps across platforms before, so for all I know, getting the UI widgetry right could very well be 90% of the work.
I'm guessing I'm still going to need my platform-specific compilers/SDKs/IDEs on each platform for this all to feed into, as well. On the Mac side (the last place I built a graphical app, and that was several large cats ago) I'm a little unsure how using this with C++ or whatever is going to save me time over using Xcode with ObjC.
I welcome responses or thoughts on the pros and cons of all this, either from the WxWidgets folks themselves, or from other devs.
This may sound quaint, but back in the day, retailers and service providers knew their customers. In market segments where you can't just buy everything online, some still do. I'm on first-name basis with lots of people I buy things or services from in my small city. And honestly, I can get better service if they actually keep track of some info.
I have to get my car an annual safety check. If I forget, and the sticker is super out of date, I could get a ticket or something. Fortunately, I have a really great mechanic - so great that when I first started taking cars to him a decade or so ago, he was "just" a mechanic, and he now co-owns the service station. Great guy, seriously, and a good dad too; I run into him and his daughter sometimes around town. So I take the car to his station every year. Similarly, I have a dentist I go to. Years ago, we used to take turns driving each other's kids to school, so I've known his whole family for almost a decade now. Back then I didn't have dental insurance, but when I needed a dentist, he was the one I called, and when I got insurance, I stuck with him. He knows his stuff, and his support staff are all friendly too; his wife works the front office and his daughter that I used to drive to school does X-rays now. Of course, since I go there, my whole family goes there. So... real small-town Americana stuff, ya know?
Every time I see the dentist, we decide when my next appointment will be. Sometimes I have to change it due to work obligations. But about a week ahead of time, I get a postcard in the mail reminding me, and a couple days ahead of time, they give me a call to confirm. They're really good at this, and they apply it across their entire customer base, so they know ahead of time when somebody's cancelling/rescheduling an appointment and freeing up a slot that they can use for somebody who needs urgent work done.
On the other hand, the service station just puts a sticker on the inside of my windshield to remind me what month or mileage my next oil change should be at. They don't give me any kind of reminder about my safety check coming up for renewal - even though I consistently go to them, when I could go almost anywhere to get it done. On the rare occasions that my wife gets the car fueled (she isn't the do-it-herself kind), people at other stations will point out to her that it's coming up for renewal.
Scaling up a bit, you've probably heard the story about how Target knows us better than we know ourselves - guy notices that his regular ads from Target suddenly have a lot of baby-oriented things in them, wonders why, only later discovers that his daughter is preggers. Target knows what I buy and spits out coupons that are at least more relevant than Google ads. Safeway does likewise, and will even give me special offers above and beyond their "club card" prices on things they know I like (or think I might).
So if Apple collects that kind of data - customer records, usage records, behavioral stuff - for the purpose of providing better service to me, please forgive me if I don't immediately pick up a torch and a pitchfork and storm 1 Infinite Loop with the rest of the villagers.
Not to say that Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and the rest never do anything of the kind - right off the top of my head, "People you may know" features are actually fairly helpful - but the fact that Apple actually has a substantial "brick and mortar" retail presence that sells large amounts of physical, kickable things seems to help keep them from completely forgetting what "customer service" is about.
No, not off the OS, but the devices which run it are chewing up 80% of the global market. That's a big deal.
If that 80% of shipments correlated to more than 10% of profits, perhaps. And unless your name is Samsung, your share of those profits is right about 0%.
“I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.” - Steve Jobs
This isn't a surgical strike. This is an attack on Google's primary business model and revenue stream. Nobody makes much profit off Android - most players make no profit at all. Google's deep pockets are basically the only thing keeping Android a going concern. But this is, definitely, the "nuclear option," going after so much more than just Android.
During the shutdown, a hundred-some countries sent delegations to Kumamoto and Minamata, Japan, for the signing of the new global Minamata Convention on Mercury, in which everybody agrees to reduce or eliminate production and use of mercury since it's toxic. US delegates were sent, but on a day-by-day basis. The wording of the Convention had been agreed, but some accompanying resolutions were hashed out on October 7 and 8. The Convention opened for signature on October 10 - but the US delegates had been told on the morning of October 9 to change their tickets and fly home. Presumably the US will sign sometime soon - we already have the world's strictest regulations on mercury, and getting lots of other countries to play by our rules is probably a good thing - but it never looks good to pull your delegation back in mid-week - and probably spend more doing so.
I don't know what the current state of the art is, but once upon a time it was only possible to correct a for atmospheric variations over a very narrow field of view.
There are different goals at play. A lot of astronomical research - usually the kind of thing you'd be using adaptive optics for - can be done with a very narrow field of view - for example, studying specific distant galaxies, pulsars, quasars, transiting exoplanets, etc. Even the field of view required to image other planets in our own solar system is fairly small. So it's not at all uncommon to have instruments with fields of view less than one arcminute for observing single objects.
On the flip side, if you want to observe extended objects like nearby galaxies or nebulae, or do surveys looking for things like asteroids, trans-Neptunian objects or additional moons of the giant planets in our solar system, or do multi-object spectroscopy, a wide field of view can be very useful. So wide-field cameras and spectrographs, sometimes mounted at the prime focus, get used a lot for those purposes. Our current one at work has a field of view of about half a degree, and we're starting to commission one that'll do a degree and a half. The LSST will do, I think, 3 degrees.
The field of AO is still developing rapidly, with coronographs, multiconjugate AO, systems with multiple lasers to correct more of the field, and work on eliminating ground-layer distortion. And new instruments are being developed all the time to be deployed behind the latest AO systems.
Reflectivity is also going to be affected by what wavelength they're observing at. Typically, AO is used for near-IR observations. Although I forget the exact figures, I know Gemini North uses silver to coat its primary now because it only absorbs something like 1/4 as much NIR as aluminum did./Former aircraft spotter for the AO lasers at GN and Keck
Depends on how you define Unix. OSX/iOS are based on FreeBSD & NetBSD. If you're talking about official, formal Unix OS's, neither Linux, the *BSDs or OSX would count as none of them are entitled to use the Unix trademark; only Solaris, HP-UX and AIX are, that I can think of.
UNIX® is a registered trademark of The Open Group (ditto for Motif, and the X logo is also their trademark), who seem fairly certain that recent versions of Mac OS X are, in fact, certified as being UNIX, and entitled to use the trademark.
Jasper Maskelyne (of the stage-magician family) did something similar with searchlights and mirrors during WWII (North African campaign, if I recall) - sending flashes of light into the sky to disorient (or "disorientate" as the Brits would say) German pilots. So it was hardly a new idea, just a different light source that's worse for the eyes.
Slashdot Mirror
American deer are plentiful not only because their natural predators got beat back, but in large part because of conservation efforts by hunters all around the country that has preserved plenty of natural habitat for them to flourish in. This is the meaning of 'conservation' - we are not trying to turn the world into a petting zoo, we like to eat venison.
Or as someone high-up in a sustainability organization once said to me after a beer or two, "Sustainable development is about your grandkids being able to shoot Bambi, too."
It's pretty sad when the 35 authors can take paper space acknowledge the culturally significant role that the observatory site has for the indigenous Hawaiians, but can't specifically acknowledge the people who took the data.
Uh, they can, and they did, but you'd have to read the remainder of the paragraph to discover that - and for some reason, they don't refer to me by my Slashdot username. ;) Occasionally I'll also proofread papers (I know more about English than astrophysics or cosmology) and get thanked for that, too.
The author list for peer-reviewed stuff is mostly full members of the collaboration - folks with Ph.D's, folks doing their Ph.D's on collaboration stuff, folks who wrote the custom data warehouse software, and of course Saul Perlmutter. (It never hurts to have someone with a Nobel in your author list, right?) I'm not a Ph.D, and probably never will be, although I'd like to finish my MSc someday. I am on the broader authors list for occasional "Astronomer's Telegram" announcements we send out after taking spectra of a newly discovered thing and figuring out what type of SN it is, how far pre- or post-maximum it is, and how far away it is.
AC1:
The relation between light curve width and how bright SN are has been known since at least 1993 (Phillips, M., 1993, ApJ 413, L105). This was corrected for even in the original work that won the Nobel prize. So, the 'they aren't quite so standard candles' has been known for 20 years - what they are is 'standardizable' candles.
AC2:
I don't see the SuperNova Factory taking credit for discovering the relationship between light curve width and luminosity (the Phillips relation, which is indeed well-known, and made the discovery of Dark Energy with Type Ia supernovae possible).
Well... the Phillips Relationship is "well-known" in much the same way that these supernovae are "nearby" - to the people in that specific very narrow field of expertise. Yes, Wikipedia has an article on it, but I'd expect it to be unknown to the average adult walking down the street, the average amateur astronomer, the average Jeopardy contestant, the average undergraduate or first-year graduate astronomy student, or even the average science popularizer who isn't specifically dealing with supernovae. Just last month, I overheard one long-time amateur astronomer still telling tourists at the Mauna Kea Visitor Information Station that all SNe Ia are the same mass and brightness!
But anyway, as the 2nd AC said, the newer/more interesting bit is the relationship to progenitor mass, and the continued trend toward SNe Ia coming from diverse progenitors - i.e. the more we look, the more "exceptions to the rule" we find. We're already to the point where it looks like most SNe Ia aren't from single, Chandrasekhar-mass progenitors as was long thought to be the "norm," and the paper discusses some models for progenitors of varying masses that meet with varying degrees of success in attempting to match the observational results. I suspect the computational / theoretical / modeling folks will also have fun with it all.
for me a redshift of 3 or 4 is very much low redshift. Come to that, redshifts of 300 are low redshift.
Just as long as you don't claim things are "nearby." Even at the redshifts we deal with (0.03-0.08), you can't get a pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less.
I thought "Further research is needed" was code for "we have seventeen more papers in the works, all of which will cite this one and each of the others, thus inflating our g-index and h-index numbers."
I don't think it's going to make a difference. In fact, I'm not quite sure whether the dark energy research that got the Nobel was strictly limited to type Ia supernovae - it was before my time, and since they were using high-Z (very distant) supernovae, they might have wanted more massive type II ones, or something.
For about a decade, people have accepted that some SNe Ia are "over the limit" (under arrest!) and have developed "double-degenerate" models of colliding white dwarf stars. As sky surveys discover more and more, it's started to become apparent that there are also some "under the limit." This project has studied hundreds of supernovae over the last decade, and looked pretty closely at how they evolve over time. The reassuring part of the paper is that even though these supernovae are nowhere near all the same mass blowing up every time, they're still within a reasonably sensible range (0.9 to 1.4 solar masses) and that by watching what brightness they reach at their peaks, and how quickly they decline in brightness, and looking at their spectral curves (all of which are among the things that this particular collaboration looks at), astrophysicists can calculate their masses, and thus make any necessary adjustments to compensate for that. And by the standards of astrophysicists and cosmologists, the math required to "standardize" progenitors of different masses is probably considered "easy." Of course, these are the same people who think "nearby" means 0.4-1.0 billion light years away...
Disclaimer: I am not an astrophysicist of any kind. I got involved in astronomy a decade ago, and took a few classes 5 years ago, but my roles are overwhelmingly technical or operations, and when it comes to science, I am always the "village idiot" surrounded by PhD's. I'm not the guy who'll give a lecture about what the telescope's pointing at - I'm the guy who'll fix the telescope so it points at it in the first place. I'll take data - in this particular case, over a 10-year project, I'll probably rank #1 or #2 in terms of amount of time spent taking data - but I don't do the analysis or write the papers. My background was in things like systems administration, spamfighting, web development, etc., as one would expect of someone with my user number here.
Our current-generation workhorse instruments here at the telescope spit out tens of gigabytes per night as it is. The new camera we've been commissioning produces something like two gigabytes per exposure. And oh, yes, that data has to be archived, reduced, analyzed, etc., using things like IRAF or IDL. (Not my job.)
This, or at least some of these... although I can think of some you've missed. (PlaysForSure? Windows phones that couldn't be upgraded to new OS versions?)
The whole anti-trust mess could have been, should have been, a moment for Microsoft to really change course and do things differently and better. Timing-wise, it happened around the same time Steve Jobs returned to Apple and started killing off beige rectangular computers, and around the time Linux was starting to hit its stride and be seen as a viable alternative to commercial UNIXes. But other than ditching DOS-based Windows with all its vulnerabilities for VMS-based Windows which has turned out to somehow have plenty of them as well, and some of the time managing to arrive at a version that works reasonably well (2000, XP, 7)... I just haven't seen it.
Sure, Microsoft made people hate them and their products back in the day, but for the last 15 years it's been much more a problem of just failing to give people reasons to like the company or its products enough to perceive them as sensible options to whatever else is out there.
Well, gosh... considering my laptop contains stuff from my .gov job, and my .ca job, and another job for which the foreign-CCTLD email has stopped working, that's three countries right there.
(But that said, I'm about to rearrange some stuff on the drive so that if any representative of one government asks to access the machine, I log into the account that contains their stuff, and don't in the process give them trivially easy access to any stuff, passwords, etc. related to the work I do for the others...)
Miss enough payments, and all the circuitry inside your computer, your car, the home theater you got from Rent-A-Center, or whatever... *poof*
Of course, it'll put a lot of repo-men out of work...
Thank everyone against which pipeline? Keystone? Phase 1 has been operational since 2010 - and oh, look, it runs right through North Dakota. If I recall, phase 2 is built now too (somewhere else in the country) and phase 3 (part of Keystone XL) is under construction to connect those phases to the gulf coast. Oh, did you mean phase 4 of Keystone XL? That wouldn't even run through North Dakota... but if they build it, apparently that'd be another 2% of US daily oil consumption in pipelines.
I'd be very interested in knowing where this train came from and was going to, 'cos it sounds like it must not have been going where the perfectly good existing pipeline goes, or where any of the proposed bits would go.
Had to do this with MySpace once - their signup process accepted email address containing a + and their deletion process didn't.
After falsifying all the profile information and adjusting the age, my account left several publicly-visible comments about "Tom" and Rupert Murdoch...
*poof*
While not professional drivers Walker and the driver were on a race team together and did plenty of circuit races. The guy driving has a GT3 so is more than familiar with the class of cars in question. Each had many more hours logged racing than any pilot would have flying before being able to get his flight license. It's easy to blame the driver, and it could rightly end up that way. However, the question of whether the car malfunctioned or should not be considered street legal should also be asked.
Among other questions. I have a friend/colleague at NASA JPL who has a Cayenne, takes it to Porsche Owners Club "track days" in the area, is actually a driving instructor for POC. He's had it almost a year, and so far the only troubles have been an engine fire on the track (some fluid overflow is positioned on top of the engine, whoops) and whatever has caused the car to currently be undergoing "open transmission surgery." I asked him about the crash, and he said he doesn't at all run in the same circles as Walker or Rodas, but that Rodas is enough of a professional that the idea of a car getting away from him is very surprising, and there will probably also have to be autopsies (gruesome, given the state of the bodies post-fire) to see whether someone had a medical emergency resulting in the loss of control.
So you've got a very highly tuned car, known for being a bit "finicky" and not immune to various parts failing, driven by a highly trained driver who's also not immune to various parts of him failing. I think I'll wait for the official report of the investigation.
Limit on that road is 45, yes? Strange kind of racing that doesn't go over the speed limit. ;)
Falkland Islands, or Islas Malvinas, as the Argentine people call them, are disputed territory. British forces usurped the islands from the Argentine authorities in the first half of the 19th century. OK, a stupid military government went to war to try to divert the attention of the Argentine citizens form the internal problems. And thanks to their military defeat democracy finally returned (18 months after the start of the war). But still, Argentina has the right to ask to have them back.
I dearly hope I'm not the only slashdotter who hangs around the UN, so that someone else can back me up on this.
Quite often, in the course of a meeting on something-or-other at the UN, subject-matter experts will be brought in for panel presentations.
Not terribly infrequently, one of the English-speaking experts, not knowing any better, will include a map of whatever (squid fisheries was the last one I personally recall) showing the Falkland Islands.
*ominous chord*
The delegate from Argentina will duck out of the room to call his capital.
The delegate from the UK will do likewise.
A short time later, the delegate from Argentina will ask for the floor, and read a statement to the effect that the Islas Malvinas rightfully belong to Argentina, and that the UK is bad and wrong and all that. The UK will then be asked if they wish to comment, and will read a statement to the effect that the Falklands have been under UK rule for some time, and that in keeping with its practice of divesting itself of various colonies and possessions around the world, and in keeping with the parts of the UN Charter about non-self-governing territories being helped toward independence, the UK would be delighted to be rid of them, squid and all - if the residents of the Falklands themselves were okay with it, and if the UK could be reasonably assured that granting the Falklands independence would not simply lead to Argentina immediately trying to take over them again.
And then, the delegates from the UK and Argentina will go back to being the best of friends, because they are after all diplomats and not the least bit personally interested in perpetuating this silly game.
If I'm parsing this all correctly, this is great news because it means I can port my graphical C++ (or whatever language, with hooks to C++) applications from Linux to Windows or OSX (or from Windows to Linux or OSX, or from OSX to Linux or Windows, whatever the case may be) without having to worry about UI widgetry.
Of course, unless my applications are already written in a language WxWidgets likes, and don't make any calls to other platform-dependent things (DirectX, I'm looking at you), this sounds like it makes my job a little easier, but not a whole lot. Admittedly, I haven't tried porting graphical apps across platforms before, so for all I know, getting the UI widgetry right could very well be 90% of the work.
I'm guessing I'm still going to need my platform-specific compilers/SDKs/IDEs on each platform for this all to feed into, as well. On the Mac side (the last place I built a graphical app, and that was several large cats ago) I'm a little unsure how using this with C++ or whatever is going to save me time over using Xcode with ObjC.
I welcome responses or thoughts on the pros and cons of all this, either from the WxWidgets folks themselves, or from other devs.
This may sound quaint, but back in the day, retailers and service providers knew their customers. In market segments where you can't just buy everything online, some still do. I'm on first-name basis with lots of people I buy things or services from in my small city. And honestly, I can get better service if they actually keep track of some info.
I have to get my car an annual safety check. If I forget, and the sticker is super out of date, I could get a ticket or something. Fortunately, I have a really great mechanic - so great that when I first started taking cars to him a decade or so ago, he was "just" a mechanic, and he now co-owns the service station. Great guy, seriously, and a good dad too; I run into him and his daughter sometimes around town. So I take the car to his station every year. Similarly, I have a dentist I go to. Years ago, we used to take turns driving each other's kids to school, so I've known his whole family for almost a decade now. Back then I didn't have dental insurance, but when I needed a dentist, he was the one I called, and when I got insurance, I stuck with him. He knows his stuff, and his support staff are all friendly too; his wife works the front office and his daughter that I used to drive to school does X-rays now. Of course, since I go there, my whole family goes there. So... real small-town Americana stuff, ya know?
Every time I see the dentist, we decide when my next appointment will be. Sometimes I have to change it due to work obligations. But about a week ahead of time, I get a postcard in the mail reminding me, and a couple days ahead of time, they give me a call to confirm. They're really good at this, and they apply it across their entire customer base, so they know ahead of time when somebody's cancelling/rescheduling an appointment and freeing up a slot that they can use for somebody who needs urgent work done.
On the other hand, the service station just puts a sticker on the inside of my windshield to remind me what month or mileage my next oil change should be at. They don't give me any kind of reminder about my safety check coming up for renewal - even though I consistently go to them, when I could go almost anywhere to get it done. On the rare occasions that my wife gets the car fueled (she isn't the do-it-herself kind), people at other stations will point out to her that it's coming up for renewal.
Scaling up a bit, you've probably heard the story about how Target knows us better than we know ourselves - guy notices that his regular ads from Target suddenly have a lot of baby-oriented things in them, wonders why, only later discovers that his daughter is preggers. Target knows what I buy and spits out coupons that are at least more relevant than Google ads. Safeway does likewise, and will even give me special offers above and beyond their "club card" prices on things they know I like (or think I might).
So if Apple collects that kind of data - customer records, usage records, behavioral stuff - for the purpose of providing better service to me, please forgive me if I don't immediately pick up a torch and a pitchfork and storm 1 Infinite Loop with the rest of the villagers.
Not to say that Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and the rest never do anything of the kind - right off the top of my head, "People you may know" features are actually fairly helpful - but the fact that Apple actually has a substantial "brick and mortar" retail presence that sells large amounts of physical, kickable things seems to help keep them from completely forgetting what "customer service" is about.
Nobody makes much profit off Android
No, not off the OS, but the devices which run it are chewing up 80% of the global market. That's a big deal.
If that 80% of shipments correlated to more than 10% of profits, perhaps. And unless your name is Samsung, your share of those profits is right about 0%.
“I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.” - Steve Jobs
This isn't a surgical strike. This is an attack on Google's primary business model and revenue stream. Nobody makes much profit off Android - most players make no profit at all. Google's deep pockets are basically the only thing keeping Android a going concern. But this is, definitely, the "nuclear option," going after so much more than just Android.
During the shutdown, a hundred-some countries sent delegations to Kumamoto and Minamata, Japan, for the signing of the new global Minamata Convention on Mercury, in which everybody agrees to reduce or eliminate production and use of mercury since it's toxic. US delegates were sent, but on a day-by-day basis. The wording of the Convention had been agreed, but some accompanying resolutions were hashed out on October 7 and 8. The Convention opened for signature on October 10 - but the US delegates had been told on the morning of October 9 to change their tickets and fly home. Presumably the US will sign sometime soon - we already have the world's strictest regulations on mercury, and getting lots of other countries to play by our rules is probably a good thing - but it never looks good to pull your delegation back in mid-week - and probably spend more doing so.
Fiona Apple doesn't have that kind of money, does she?
I don't know what the current state of the art is, but once upon a time it was only possible to correct a for atmospheric variations over a very narrow field of view.
There are different goals at play. A lot of astronomical research - usually the kind of thing you'd be using adaptive optics for - can be done with a very narrow field of view - for example, studying specific distant galaxies, pulsars, quasars, transiting exoplanets, etc. Even the field of view required to image other planets in our own solar system is fairly small. So it's not at all uncommon to have instruments with fields of view less than one arcminute for observing single objects.
On the flip side, if you want to observe extended objects like nearby galaxies or nebulae, or do surveys looking for things like asteroids, trans-Neptunian objects or additional moons of the giant planets in our solar system, or do multi-object spectroscopy, a wide field of view can be very useful. So wide-field cameras and spectrographs, sometimes mounted at the prime focus, get used a lot for those purposes. Our current one at work has a field of view of about half a degree, and we're starting to commission one that'll do a degree and a half. The LSST will do, I think, 3 degrees.
The field of AO is still developing rapidly, with coronographs, multiconjugate AO, systems with multiple lasers to correct more of the field, and work on eliminating ground-layer distortion. And new instruments are being developed all the time to be deployed behind the latest AO systems.
Reflectivity is also going to be affected by what wavelength they're observing at. Typically, AO is used for near-IR observations. Although I forget the exact figures, I know Gemini North uses silver to coat its primary now because it only absorbs something like 1/4 as much NIR as aluminum did. /Former aircraft spotter for the AO lasers at GN and Keck
Depends on how you define Unix. OSX/iOS are based on FreeBSD & NetBSD. If you're talking about official, formal Unix OS's, neither Linux, the *BSDs or OSX would count as none of them are entitled to use the Unix trademark; only Solaris, HP-UX and AIX are, that I can think of.
UNIX® is a registered trademark of The Open Group (ditto for Motif, and the X logo is also their trademark), who seem fairly certain that recent versions of Mac OS X are, in fact, certified as being UNIX, and entitled to use the trademark.
Jasper Maskelyne (of the stage-magician family) did something similar with searchlights and mirrors during WWII (North African campaign, if I recall) - sending flashes of light into the sky to disorient (or "disorientate" as the Brits would say) German pilots. So it was hardly a new idea, just a different light source that's worse for the eyes.