I live in Ithaca, NY - not your big city, but home to Cornell: a single apartment (cramped bedroom, tiny kitchen, small living area) goes for at least $500 per month, and as much as $1400 if you want a luxury single. With roomies, you're looking at $3-400 per person per month... You're lucky to get good housing that cheap!
This whole news article reminds me of the Asimov story, "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline". (Astounding SF, March 1948, republished in The Early Asimov.)
Thiotimoline dissolves before you add the water - and the interval depends on the amount of uncertainty in the mind of the experimenter... This was published under Asimov's real name just before his (Biochem?) PhD thesis defense - its a delightful story, and its been used by authors like Silverberg as the basis for other time travel spoofs.
Check out Asimov's little story, "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline". (Astounding SF, March 1948, republished in The Early Asimov.)
Thiotimoline dissolves before you add the water to it... and this was published just before Asimov defended his PhD thesis...
"You've Got Mail" was a movie with blatant product placement - remember AOL and the Starbucks stores? So she used an Apple Powerbook (think different!), and he (the corporate type) used an IBM ThinkPad. Yes, both Apple and IBM paid good money for that. Truman Show, here we are already...
I hope to hell they rename it something else at launch: it sounds like a variant of Teflon, or maybe its the material from which they make Durex condoms....
You'd think marketroids who get paid to come up with names would do better than this!
So I received this virus at work, deleted some data files (no pr0n or mp3s at work, thank you), then sent it on to a bunch of friends - and Intel's server actually rejected it (503: "Potential Virus Detected")...
We need a preferences button which we can check off to say "We hereby grant/refuse permission to/. to reproduce our comments in any media or format without further ado: HTML, WML, Usenet, postscript, dead tree, M$Media, whatever.
Thank you Hemos for doing the right thing, but the vast majority of/. posters would have no problem with being quoted in a book and (oh horror!) not getting paid for it...
If you weren't serious, this would be a good troll...
The obvious problem with this scheme is that demand for some goods and services is much less elastic than for others: for example, your food costs about the same (within a factor of ten or so), whether you're Joe Shmoe or Bill G.
So the "Fair Tax" would take the same amount from the rich and the poor on these things, but it might be 20% of Joe's income and 0.000...01% of Bill's income. Isn't DoubleSpeak wonderful?
To paraphrase Alan Sokal, if you disagree that science makes real predictions about real things, I invite you to step out of my window on the 21st floor and argue epistemology with the Law of Gravity. You should read about the "Sokal affair" - you'd find it entertaining.
So "overpopulation" is a good thing and should be encouraged. The more people we have on the planet, the better.
Huh??? Maybe you would like to spend a couple of years living in a village in Bangladesh, or in a slum in Bombay? (I think not.) I guess I'm not used to seeing blatant trolls starting at +2...
Then, the choice of frequency for transmissions. Slap bang in the middle of a *critically* important astronomical region. I may be wrong, but I think it's a CO band.
As a radio astronomer, I have to comment: its the OH line. The VLA RFI plot page clearly shows Iridium: look under L band...
Well, I mean the RIAA's advocate, but same difference, eh?
Apparently, the stations don't pay the RIAA for normal broadcast, so they don't understand what's so special about Internet broadcast
This argument is rather contrived: what's different (at least from the RIAA's point of view) is that this broadcast stream leads to perfect copies. Yes, you could record tapes (even CDs) from radio broadcasts, but they'd be contaminated by radio propagation and other analog noise. Whereas with the net, you get bit-perfect copies, which are essentially trivial to capture and propagate...
Now if the radio stations promised to wireless broadcast the music across their studio, then re-digitize it and stream it on the net, I'm sure the RIAA would drop its suit at once... So the "we don't understand what the difference is" is clearly specious. Now should they bend over and let the RIAA screw them, or should they stand up for their freedom to broadcast using the best available technology? That's a different issue, and I'm happy that the NAB appear to be showing some spine, at least for now...
As an "Art House geek", as you put it (I enjoy old B/W movies, among other things), I have to second you: I utterly loathed this movie! Utter rip-off, and I can't see why *anyone* would like this movie that got its kick out of spilling game-console guts over the screen...
If this is real, its one of the most blatant examples of push polls I've seen: Microsoft would be proud! I mean, "Should US companies train US workers to perform jobs in some technical fields?" Well duh!
IEEE-USA just went waaaay down in my estimation. And I used to be an electrical engineer too...
I agree that "ethical" space exploration will require sterilized probes where there might be significant chances for indigenous life...
However, we have already been contaminated by, and have contaminated, most of our inner solar system - through metorites. Simulations show that good sized impacts or volcanic eruptions can fling some material into outer space, and then they cross from planet to planet in mere tens of thousands of years, not millions as previously thought. Turns out that there are dynamically stable / unstable regions which can collect and eject matter - the earth crossing asteroids (Apollos, Amors, Atens, Trojans? I forget which is which) produce signifant meteorites on earth, as do Mars and the moon.
So chances are, we've already "contaminated" other planets, even before our space probes tracked mud in all over the kitchen floor... Europa, because of its ice cover insulating a possible biosphere, is of course unique.
Since one of the instrument team leaders who works down the corridor has been tearing his hair out over this, I thought I'd put in a clarification:
One failure scenario involves the leg deployment: the recoil might trigger the landing sensors on the footpads, so a little flag is set saying "Ground detected". Now, much later, when the parachute is cut away, the computer checks that flag which has not been cleared due to a software error. And it says, "Oh, hey, I'm on the ground! Time to turn off the rockets." Projected impact speed on the ground is over 80 mph. SPLAT.
Another interesting scenario: there was talk of searching for the lander parachute using the Surveyor spacecraft, so NASA asked Lockheed Martin, "Where did you say the parachute would fall again?" Lockheed Martin redid the calculations and it came out that the parachute could very well be draped over the poor lander. Imagine the lander - "Help, help, I'm trapped in a parachute." Yes, these are the same guys who screwed up the units in the previous orbiter fiasco.
And there are many many many other failure scenarios, too depressing to enumerate further: in summary, too little money, too little testing, and not enough redundancy means that not only was this mission likely to fail, it is unlikely we'll even know why it failed. Faster, better, cheaper - bah!
As someone who just got a new Dell workstation(*) at the office with RH 6.0 on it, let me say that the preinstallation isn't great. Yes, its competent, but the partition sizes are all wrong (are they ever just right?), ethernet doesn't quite work right (hours with ifconfig) and its set to use NIS+, which won't play nice with the rest of our Solaris workshop.
So even if you get it preinstalled, odds are you'll want to redo it yourself. At least you'll know that it can be made to work, and there's only you to blame if it doesn't... and if you're running Linux, that's the way its meant to be, right?
So think of it as "tested to run Linux."
(*) Ah, a dual Pentium III 550 box, with a GB of RAM - those FFTs really fly now. Offtopic note: kernel 2.2.5-SMP15 doesn't do too well with the GB of RAM, and it seems to dribble the RAM away to rogue processes until it has a little over 170 MB left. Anyone interested in a remote diagnosis before I blow it away for a new kernel?
The problem was money: NASA couldn't afford the extra $5 million. Think about that - for less than the cost of a minute of SuperBowl advertising, we would have known exactly what went wrong - all we needed was an omnidirectional transmitter with its own power supply (and the weight penalty would have added the $5 mil). Oh well - maybe next time Congress will allow a few more dollars. Face it - this is rocket science, and it doesn't come cheap.
Well I'm seeing a lot of "what happens when they run out of data" posts deep down, so let me contribute my $0.02 worth of radio astronomy:
Much of the current data was picked up during the Arecibo upgrade, where the telescope was essentially out of commission and staring up at the sky.Since the earth rotates, the sky over the telescope changes, so just grabbing all the signal ("drift scans") still provided useful data.
Arecibo is huge - 305m in diameter, almost exactly a kilometer around (makes a good jogging track!): that's too large to steer. So it was designed as a spherical dish section, not parabolic like a sattelite dish: a parabola sees perfectly in one pointing direction, but a spherical dish can see fuzzily in any direction.
During the upgrade, the old line feed has been augmented by a Gregorian reflector, which allows perfect focus from a spherical dish. But the line feed still exists, as you can see from the pictures. So now, while the Gregorian takes astronomy data, the old line feed can continue looking off in some other (random) part of the sky, and take useful search data! And if the piggyback project is still running, the SETI people also get first dibs on all our data to search for their signals.
With additional tests for pulsations, one wonders how many of our pulsars the SETI people will rediscover. Useful check on their processing quality, I'm sure...
Arecibo's neat - consider visiting if you ever get a chance. Takes your breath away to realize the size of it all!
Check out this guy's job title, as listed in the article:
The availability of industry proven PKI source code will be a tremendous benefit to developers,'' said Mitchell Baker, Chief Lizard Wrangler at mozilla.org.
That just made my afternoon - can I get a job title like that too?
Oh, and this looks like all-round good news for mozilla, Open Source and widespread encryption, too - there, that should complete my buzzword quotient for this post:)
Even if they only release a bowl of petunias and a surprised-looking Sperm Whale, count me as being significantly impressed.
Now that would be something to talk about.
Especially if the sperm whale thought the convention floor looked big and round and decided to call it "ground", and wondered aloud if it was friendly...
Slashdot Mirror
Thiotimoline dissolves before you add the water - and the interval depends on the amount of uncertainty in the mind of the experimenter... This was published under Asimov's real name just before his (Biochem?) PhD thesis defense - its a delightful story, and its been used by authors like Silverberg as the basis for other time travel spoofs.
Reality is catching up with fiction, eh?
Thiotimoline dissolves before you add the water to it... and this was published just before Asimov defended his PhD thesis...
You'd think marketroids who get paid to come up with names would do better than this!
Hey, that's some proactive sysadmin there!
Thank you Hemos for doing the right thing, but the vast majority of /. posters would have no problem with being quoted in a book and (oh horror!) not getting paid for it...
The obvious problem with this scheme is that demand for some goods and services is much less elastic than for others: for example, your food costs about the same (within a factor of ten or so), whether you're Joe Shmoe or Bill G.
So the "Fair Tax" would take the same amount from the rich and the poor on these things, but it might be 20% of Joe's income and 0.000...01% of Bill's income. Isn't DoubleSpeak wonderful?
Or is this all a troll anyway?
You should read about the "Sokal affair" - you'd find it entertaining.
Huh??? Maybe you would like to spend a couple of years living in a village in Bangladesh, or in a slum in Bombay? (I think not.)
I guess I'm not used to seeing blatant trolls starting at +2...
Yeah, you can get that dehydrated, like in the famous Y2K survival kits... just add water and its ready in seconds!
As a radio astronomer, I have to comment: its the OH line. The VLA RFI plot page clearly shows Iridium: look under L band...
Apparently, the stations don't pay the RIAA for normal broadcast, so they don't understand what's so special about Internet broadcast
This argument is rather contrived: what's different (at least from the RIAA's point of view) is that this broadcast stream leads to perfect copies. Yes, you could record tapes (even CDs) from radio broadcasts, but they'd be contaminated by radio propagation and other analog noise. Whereas with the net, you get bit-perfect copies, which are essentially trivial to capture and propagate...
Now if the radio stations promised to wireless broadcast the music across their studio, then re-digitize it and stream it on the net, I'm sure the RIAA would drop its suit at once... So the "we don't understand what the difference is" is clearly specious. Now should they bend over and let the RIAA screw them, or should they stand up for their freedom to broadcast using the best available technology? That's a different issue, and I'm happy that the NAB appear to be showing some spine, at least for now...
IEEE-USA just went waaaay down in my estimation. And I used to be an electrical engineer too...
However, we have already been contaminated by, and have contaminated, most of our inner solar system - through metorites. Simulations show that good sized impacts or volcanic eruptions can fling some material into outer space, and then they cross from planet to planet in mere tens of thousands of years, not millions as previously thought. Turns out that there are dynamically stable / unstable regions which can collect and eject matter - the earth crossing asteroids (Apollos, Amors, Atens, Trojans? I forget which is which) produce signifant meteorites on earth, as do Mars and the moon.
So chances are, we've already "contaminated" other planets, even before our space probes tracked mud in all over the kitchen floor... Europa, because of its ice cover insulating a possible biosphere, is of course unique.
One failure scenario involves the leg deployment: the recoil might trigger the landing sensors on the footpads, so a little flag is set saying "Ground detected". Now, much later, when the parachute is cut away, the computer checks that flag which has not been cleared due to a software error. And it says, "Oh, hey, I'm on the ground! Time to turn off the rockets." Projected impact speed on the ground is over 80 mph. SPLAT.
Another interesting scenario: there was talk of searching for the lander parachute using the Surveyor spacecraft, so NASA asked Lockheed Martin, "Where did you say the parachute would fall again?" Lockheed Martin redid the calculations and it came out that the parachute could very well be draped over the poor lander. Imagine the lander - "Help, help, I'm trapped in a parachute." Yes, these are the same guys who screwed up the units in the previous orbiter fiasco.
And there are many many many other failure scenarios, too depressing to enumerate further: in summary, too little money, too little testing, and not enough redundancy means that not only was this mission likely to fail, it is unlikely we'll even know why it failed. Faster, better, cheaper - bah!
So even if you get it preinstalled, odds are you'll want to redo it yourself. At least you'll know that it can be made to work, and there's only you to blame if it doesn't... and if you're running Linux, that's the way its meant to be, right?
So think of it as "tested to run Linux."
(*) Ah, a dual Pentium III 550 box, with a GB of RAM - those FFTs really fly now.
Offtopic note: kernel 2.2.5-SMP15 doesn't do too well with the GB of RAM, and it seems to dribble the RAM away to rogue processes until it has a little over 170 MB left. Anyone interested in a remote diagnosis before I blow it away for a new kernel?
Face it - this is rocket science, and it doesn't come cheap.
Much of the current data was picked up during the Arecibo upgrade, where the telescope was essentially out of commission and staring up at the sky.Since the earth rotates, the sky over the telescope changes, so just grabbing all the signal ("drift scans") still provided useful data.
Arecibo is huge - 305m in diameter, almost exactly a kilometer around (makes a good jogging track!): that's too large to steer. So it was designed as a spherical dish section, not parabolic like a sattelite dish: a parabola sees perfectly in one pointing direction, but a spherical dish can see fuzzily in any direction.
During the upgrade, the old line feed has been augmented by a Gregorian reflector, which allows perfect focus from a spherical dish. But the line feed still exists, as you can see from the pictures. So now, while the Gregorian takes astronomy data, the old line feed can continue looking off in some other (random) part of the sky, and take useful search data! And if the piggyback project is still running, the SETI people also get first dibs on all our data to search for their signals.
With additional tests for pulsations, one wonders how many of our pulsars the SETI people will rediscover. Useful check on their processing quality, I'm sure...
Arecibo's neat - consider visiting if you ever get a chance. Takes your breath away to realize the size of it all!
Oops! I guess the "t" in the Mitchell threw me off there... Some day, I'll understand American naming conventions - but that's not anytime soon.
The availability of industry proven PKI source code will be a tremendous benefit to developers,'' said Mitchell Baker, Chief Lizard Wrangler at mozilla.org.
That just made my afternoon - can I get a job title like that too?
Oh, and this looks like all-round good news for mozilla, Open Source and widespread encryption, too - there, that should complete my buzzword quotient for this post :)