I read the articles linked to (and those linked to from the linked-to articles, ad. nauseum), but none (that I saw) said how these numbers are collected. Are there polls asking, "How many CDs have you illegally copied in the last year?"
I just upgraded to Opera 8.02 (usually use Firefox as my browser, but wanted to see what was new in Opera). Load/. to see the stories, and guess what was on top? w00t.
Making any changes is therefore a huge undertaking and the people who wrote it are far too busy maintaining the high journalistic standards slashdot is known for to do it....+5, nougat-filled sarcasm.
Who said typewriters wern't great in their day? I believe the point was you lose a lot of functionality using the same keysets in a computing environment....wwWHOOOOOOOSHhh...
Yeah, people never actually got any work done with typewriters. They were just playing around for about a hundred years until real keyboards came along.
Agreed that it's kind of silly. While reading the/. abstract, I said, "Hm... I wonder how long this computer (2GHz Centrino laptop) would take." It took 8.72 seconds to calculate Pi to a million decimal places, and display them (which always takes longer than anything else, it seems), using the Chudnovsky formula http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PiFormulas.html, in Mathematica 5.1.
I did not RTFA (I'm not new here), but might, since I want to know what slow-ass implementation this guy used to calculate that.
I love the fact that that particular thread was slashdotted, got back up, and, then... EDIT Oh my Godz!! The wiki has been slashdotted into digital dust!
My roommate in college did basically the same thing, only with a flight simulator. Takeoff was fun, then there were hours of boredom, then some landing. It was extremely realistic. I never understood what the fascination was.
However, flight sims (not necessarily the dogfighting ones, but the ones where you're a commercial pilot, etc.) are doing quite well. Go figure.
I read that preview, and it really does sound neat. However, there were a lot of "..and then suddenly, your village transformed into a city with roads and walls..." type phrases. This disturbs me a bit, as though the game were deciding "well, at this point I can't really make any changes, so things will transition to the 'next step'." That smacks of a lot of predestination, as these "expert systems" usually have. I'm not saying that I could figure out a better way, just that it would be nice if things were such that the transitions were more "real".
[...] in USA they have long, wide and straight roads[...]
In some places, yes. And many of our mountain pass roads are significantly better than in a lot of countries. But try driving in western Colorado with an automatic, or in any other region with significant hills and windy roads. Much better with manual transmission. It's too bad that most rental places don't even have stick-shifts to rent.
Of course I don't know your architecture, etc., but I very much recommend Mepis, especially as you've used Ubuntu and are probably somewhat used to the apt system of updates/upgrades.
Incidentally, my statement about finite-sized sources and "focusing" of radiations from it is correct... only not in this case (as far as I know). The beam formation from finite sources is due to monophase (or almost-monophase) emissions, and this sort of thing can't be expected from a black hole, even accounting for the finite speed of light. Mea culpa.
Two points to be made:
1) NASA can EXTREMELY accurately predict the motion of coasting space probes. One of my favorite diagrams is in Marion and Thornton's _Classical_Dynamics_ book (Chapter 8, pg. 316 in my 4th edition copy). The diagram shows an approximation of the International Sun-Earth Explorer 3's orbit, and eventual rendezvous with comet Giacobini-Zinner. There were (I'm copying from the text here) two close trips by Earth and five flybys of the moon (within 75 miles of the lunar surface once). The text states, "The entire path could be planned precisely because the force law [the inverse-square law for macroscale -- and, now, mesoscale -- gravitational force] is very well known." That satellite traveled for 3 years, and used almost no fuel because its orbit was so precisely calculated far in advance.
2) You're right -- every mass bends spacetime. Even energy (equivalent to mass via E=mc^2) bends spacetime. The coolest thing ever: GRAVITY ITSELF PRODUCES GRAVITY. My gen. relativity prof. did a riff on this in class for a couple days, and was able to show that at the level of a black hole, the "extra" gravity produced by the energy of a strong gravitational field basically leads to a runaway situation, and this is what happens at (or just "inside") an event horizon.
Much research has been done on this recently, and, if it weren't so late, I could give you the names of some of the experiments to measure this "self-gravity" effect. Erdos?
Although I don't necessarily think that your wording was very accurate, you've essentially hit one of the nails of strangeness in quantum mechanics quite squarely on the head.
One of the reasons that it took Bohr so long to come up with the (admittedly extremely simple) orbital model of the atom is that, hey, charges should radiate extremely fast at those accelerations (based on all sorts of measurements, most notably by Rutherford), and all matter should basically collapse very quickly. He eventually just sort of waved his hands and said that one of this postulates was that electrons simply can't radiate unless they're in transition from one "allowed" state to another, and then derived various neat consequences from that.
I could give various hand-wavy arguments based on such things as eigenstates and Wilson-Sommerfeld quantization rules (or, in more modern terms, show a bunch of stuff from quantum electrodynamics) but it's basically a lot of nomenclature and rules which have been shown to work exceedingly well and make awesome predictions... and not make a damned bit of sense from an intuitional standpoint. Seriously.
If you can dream up some way to connect the nonradiation of a point charge which is undergoing accelerations to everyday language which makes sense, I'm willing to bet you'd get a Nobel in record time.
(Incidentally, invoking smeared-out charge distributions only sweeps the problem under the rug, as it were.)
The problem with your reasoning is that high magnetic fields (and, yes, this is one reason that perfectly spherical -- without net angular momentum -- black holes are basically impossible) really screw up the 13.6eV ionization energy for atomic hydrogen. In fact, strong enough magnetic fields (and you easily get them near black holes) raise the ionization energy of atomic hydrogen well into the thermal x-ray range.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, a much better explanation than I've seen before. Thanks. ...but is that an African or European chicken?
I read the articles linked to (and those linked to from the linked-to articles, ad. nauseum), but none (that I saw) said how these numbers are collected. Are there polls asking, "How many CDs have you illegally copied in the last year?"
Requirements for Hello:
Microsoft® Windows® 98/Me/2000/XP
300MHz processor
64 MB of RAM
50 MB free disk space
Internet Explorer 5.0
You say Hello, I say Goodbye...
I just upgraded to Opera 8.02 (usually use Firefox as my browser, but wanted to see what was new in Opera). Load /. to see the stories, and guess what was on top? w00t.
Making any changes is therefore a huge undertaking and the people who wrote it are far too busy maintaining the high journalistic standards slashdot is known for to do it. ...+5, nougat-filled sarcasm.
Who said typewriters wern't great in their day? I believe the point was you lose a lot of functionality using the same keysets in a computing environment. ...wwWHOOOOOOOSHhh...
Yeah, people never actually got any work done with typewriters. They were just playing around for about a hundred years until real keyboards came along.
Emacs is gonna be a bitch with that thing.
Agreed that it's kind of silly. While reading the /. abstract, I said, "Hm... I wonder how long this computer (2GHz Centrino laptop) would take." It took 8.72 seconds to calculate Pi to a million decimal places, and display them (which always takes longer than anything else, it seems), using the Chudnovsky formula http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PiFormulas.html, in Mathematica 5.1.
I did not RTFA (I'm not new here), but might, since I want to know what slow-ass implementation this guy used to calculate that.
Oohhh... crap. I just fed a troll. Sorry, all.
I have one of these in my as right now...it's not that good.
I'm so scared to ask... Please tell me you either misspelled something or that's an acronym which is unfamiliar to me.
I love the fact that that particular thread was slashdotted, got back up, and, then... EDIT Oh my Godz!! The wiki has been slashdotted into digital dust!
You can always speed up the flying, so most of the "real" time is spent taking off, changing course, and landing.
You're right... but he wouldn't do that. Hours of... nothing (or so it looked to me). Then again, he was a Business major.
My roommate in college did basically the same thing, only with a flight simulator. Takeoff was fun, then there were hours of boredom, then some landing. It was extremely realistic. I never understood what the fascination was.
However, flight sims (not necessarily the dogfighting ones, but the ones where you're a commercial pilot, etc.) are doing quite well. Go figure.
I read that preview, and it really does sound neat. However, there were a lot of "..and then suddenly, your village transformed into a city with roads and walls..." type phrases. This disturbs me a bit, as though the game were deciding "well, at this point I can't really make any changes, so things will transition to the 'next step'." That smacks of a lot of predestination, as these "expert systems" usually have. I'm not saying that I could figure out a better way, just that it would be nice if things were such that the transitions were more "real".
Bad, BAD Zoot!
[...] in USA they have long, wide and straight roads[...]
In some places, yes. And many of our mountain pass roads are significantly better than in a lot of countries. But try driving in western Colorado with an automatic, or in any other region with significant hills and windy roads. Much better with manual transmission. It's too bad that most rental places don't even have stick-shifts to rent.
Of course I don't know your architecture, etc., but I very much recommend Mepis, especially as you've used Ubuntu and are probably somewhat used to the apt system of updates/upgrades.
No, no it's not. Whoops.
I think it's time for me to end this posting in a sudden and quite unsatisf --
....in Stephenson's Zodiac?
Incidentally, my statement about finite-sized sources and "focusing" of radiations from it is correct... only not in this case (as far as I know). The beam formation from finite sources is due to monophase (or almost-monophase) emissions, and this sort of thing can't be expected from a black hole, even accounting for the finite speed of light. Mea culpa.
Two points to be made:
1) NASA can EXTREMELY accurately predict the motion of coasting space probes. One of my favorite diagrams is in Marion and Thornton's _Classical_Dynamics_ book (Chapter 8, pg. 316 in my 4th edition copy). The diagram shows an approximation of the International Sun-Earth Explorer 3's orbit, and eventual rendezvous with comet Giacobini-Zinner. There were (I'm copying from the text here) two close trips by Earth and five flybys of the moon (within 75 miles of the lunar surface once). The text states, "The entire path could be planned precisely because the force law [the inverse-square law for macroscale -- and, now, mesoscale -- gravitational force] is very well known." That satellite traveled for 3 years, and used almost no fuel because its orbit was so precisely calculated far in advance.
2) You're right -- every mass bends spacetime. Even energy (equivalent to mass via E=mc^2) bends spacetime. The coolest thing ever: GRAVITY ITSELF PRODUCES GRAVITY. My gen. relativity prof. did a riff on this in class for a couple days, and was able to show that at the level of a black hole, the "extra" gravity produced by the energy of a strong gravitational field basically leads to a runaway situation, and this is what happens at (or just "inside") an event horizon.
Much research has been done on this recently, and, if it weren't so late, I could give you the names of some of the experiments to measure this "self-gravity" effect. Erdos?
Have you noticed the jets that black holes produce?How could they be that long and strait without breaking the maximum speedlimit?
Duuude. They're just going out to fight the Sharks and maybe dance a bit. They'll be back.
Although I don't necessarily think that your wording was very accurate, you've essentially hit one of the nails of strangeness in quantum mechanics quite squarely on the head.
One of the reasons that it took Bohr so long to come up with the (admittedly extremely simple) orbital model of the atom is that, hey, charges should radiate extremely fast at those accelerations (based on all sorts of measurements, most notably by Rutherford), and all matter should basically collapse very quickly. He eventually just sort of waved his hands and said that one of this postulates was that electrons simply can't radiate unless they're in transition from one "allowed" state to another, and then derived various neat consequences from that.
I could give various hand-wavy arguments based on such things as eigenstates and Wilson-Sommerfeld quantization rules (or, in more modern terms, show a bunch of stuff from quantum electrodynamics) but it's basically a lot of nomenclature and rules which have been shown to work exceedingly well and make awesome predictions... and not make a damned bit of sense from an intuitional standpoint. Seriously.
If you can dream up some way to connect the nonradiation of a point charge which is undergoing accelerations to everyday language which makes sense, I'm willing to bet you'd get a Nobel in record time.
(Incidentally, invoking smeared-out charge distributions only sweeps the problem under the rug, as it were.)
http://vega.bac.pku.edu.cn/~wuxb/nstar.html
The problem with your reasoning is that high magnetic fields (and, yes, this is one reason that perfectly spherical -- without net angular momentum -- black holes are basically impossible) really screw up the 13.6eV ionization energy for atomic hydrogen. In fact, strong enough magnetic fields (and you easily get them near black holes) raise the ionization energy of atomic hydrogen well into the thermal x-ray range.