While I don't agree that FIRST is "superior" (I think that there's room for all kinds of robots in the empire...), I am involved as a mentor with a team from Boulder, Colorado. We've been at our regional competition for two days now, and today is the comp's final day...with the top performers getting invited to the nationals in Atlanta in April.
FIRST really is remarkable. I've been amazed at the creativity these kids can harness, and at the solutions they've found to problems and the robots they've managed to build (in 6 weeks!). Talk about the Hacker ethos in action! And, walking around the pits for the last couple days, I've been really impressed with the overall vibe as well - nothing nasty, nothing destructive - just a bunch of kids (of all ages) having fun & helping each other out when necessary.
Now, if my team could just score a few more games today...:)
Please see the post below, in which the responder quite correctly points out the obvious conclusion to your observations: you are the one who lacks perceptive ability. Moreover, you didn't bother to read the article, which clearly states that "An original solution to this puzzle...was put forward BY FOUR theoretical physicists".
Shouldn't this read "Four scientists at Fermilab report..." rather than "Fermilab reports..."?
Fermilab is a big organization. Saying that "Ferilab reports" implies that the whole organization reports this, and I'm absolutely positive that there are many people within Fermilab who would dispute these results/conjectures/hypotheses.
Imagine someone reading something one of us says in a comment on/., and the NYT reporting that "Slashdot says that..."
Yahoo might have some remnant of niftyism about them for having survived this long, but let's face it. Their site(s)
a) suck b) look like shit c) use annoying navigation & layout d) are too Borg-like to attract people who were attracted by Flickr.
I just finshed uploading lots of pics to Flickr, and am now considering removing all of them and cancelling my PAID FOR membership, given this news of Yahoo's buyout.
I joined Flickr because they're NOT Yahoo/MSN/Google/etc. I love the community feel of Flickr, its layout, design, vibe...and I GUARANTEE that Yahoo won't leave it untouched. And even if it did leave the design the same, the changes to the TOS are bound to be evil by definition (as Flickr's were not).
i.e., you pay a buck extra a month and your ISP lets you keep your pages online when something like this happens? Maybe it would be good for once/year or something like that.
Strikes me as a good idea...but then, I've never been/.-ed.
> A strong military with a large officer core, with > training camps, procedures, and guidelines ready to > quickly train and equip a huge scale army in case of > invasion
Training new conscripts even to a "barely adequate" level would take at least six months, IMHO. Modern conflicts will generally be over within weeks, I think. (Iraq is an occupation, so is fundamentally different than the initial actual conflict involving large military forces in large-scale operations against enemy forces).
> Remember the probe that was lost because they forgot > to convert from metric to imperial? Thats several > million dollars down the drain. Did anyone get > fired?
You need to understand that it was NOT NASA WHO FU^&%ED UP. The mistake was made at Lockheed-Martin, not NASA. Lockheed was contracted to provide functioning, tested hardware and software to NASA, and it failed. You can bet that someone DID get fired.
That being said, I agree with the need to cut beaureaucractic waste and administrative overhead at NASA...but it won't happen. The best we can hope for, realistically, is for better leadership at the top. I say let's put an astronomer or an astronaut in charge.
And regarding your point about SpaceShip One: yes, it was an amazing feat. Yes, they did a great job, and will continue to do great things, as will many of the other private sector ventures. But let's remember that what they did was successfully place a person into a BALLISTIC path in space, for a couple minutes, WELL BELOW low earth orbit, FORTY+ YEARS AFTER it was done by governments. Personally, I'm saving my really enthusiastic clapping for when they put someone up there...and KEEP them up there.
> there's a lot of crap out there, but both BSG > and Firefly have been excellent
I was just going to start typing a long-winded post saying exactly the same thing. Both of these shows were/are very well written, wonderfully acted, and very enjoyable.
I was never a farscape fan (it seemed too...silly. Muppets don't belong in SF.), although I recognize that a lot of people enjoyed it. I am one of the few who actually think that Enterprise was not only not bad, but was the *best* series of the franchise, rather than the worst.
But as long as we periodically get intelligent SF for grownups (i.e., Firefly, BSG), I'll be happy. I just wish Firefly had been granted more than 13 episodes. So, to prevent the same thing happening for BSG, PLEASE, everyone - watch the new episodes this summer so they keep making more!
No apologies...I'm all for the "no stupid questions" maxim.
As for those being the only two possibilities: those are the two that leap to mind right off the bat, and I can't think of any reason why early galazies wouldn't have been emitting LOTS in the shorter wavelengths. In fact, I seem to recall that much of the recent literature suggests that early galaxies had a higher percentage of large, heavy, short-lived stars - which are very hot and emit largely in the UV. But then I've been doing other things lately, and I might not be current.
That's a good question, and worth a better answer than I have time do do here (mbrother?). The short answer is that they're so far away that we're actually seeing galaxies as they were very early in the universe. When we look at nearby galaxies, we only see galaxies as they exist after billions (current estimates are, if I'm up to date, that galaxy evolution has been going on for around 13Gy) of years of evolution. By looking FAR AWAY, we're also looking BACK IN TIME, and are thus able to see things we'd otherwise have no ability to observe.
A surprising amount can be gleaned from spectroscopic analysis of faint, red (& ancient) galaxies. What ionization levels are observable? Do we see lots of heavy elements, or none at all? Such observations can also be very powerful probes of the stuff IN BETWEEN here and there. If we can make certain assumptions about the original emissions, then by looking at the OBSERVED emissions, we can infer, to some degree, the conditions in the intervening space (and time) between emitter and collector. There is lots of good work being done in this area currently.
All galaxies (with the exception of the recently discovered and dubiously titled "dark matter galaxy" mentioned here a few days ago) emit light at a wide variety of wavelengths, from radio all the way to gamma rays. The wavelengths at which a star emits is related to its temperature (google "blackbody radiation" or "planck spectrum"); other astrophysical processes can produce or modify passing emissions as well (molecular & plasma clouds, various types of "dead" stars like neutron stars, white dwarfs, etc. can create emissions due to non-blackbody radiation - google "bremstrahllung", "cerenkov", "synchrotron", etc.).
The reason that these particular galaxies are only visible in the infrared is that a) intervening dust reddens emissions across intergalactic (and, for that matter, INTRAgalactic) distances, and b) they are so far away that as the universe has expanded, the light traveling from them has been redshifted - stretched along with the spacetime through which they have been traveling. Thus, what we see as infrared now was originally of much shorter wavelength when it was emitted.
> What happens if they want to charge $5 per episode?
Then people will use the DRM-busting tools that will necessarily emerge in response to whatever DRM schemes are used by the copyright holders.
The thing I love about the iTunes music store is that it's so cheap and so easy, people are actively buying music instead of downloading illegal copies. If a typical whole CD was $16 on iTMS, just like a physical CD is, they wouldn't be doing so well.......which suggests to me that the way for video media producers to make money is to release cheap, high-quality on-demand video without value-destroying DRM.
I think people would gladly pay on the order of $1 to have a good copy of a show they like. But if they come with DRM that limits where/how they can be played, or if the price tag is $5 or something, people will just go back to P2P networks.
> Great, another message from the pro copyright > infringment brigade.
Quite the contrary. I do not "pirate", and pay for things that have price tags. The only "free" mp3's in my collection are those which were offered as such by the artists. I use Netflix to preview DVD's, and if I like them, I buy them. Back when "Buffy" was on the air, I downloaded copies from usenet to watch, but ONLY if they hadn't been released for sale - when they were, I BOUGHT them. When BG is released for sale, I will buy the whole damn series, happily - as I did with Firefly.
Well, provided that you are correct, then I'm going to have to say that I don't give a rat's ass.
My recording/watching/sharing of media that has already been shown publicly is NOT the same thing as "dipping babies in vats of liquid mercury", as is abundantly clear. These shows are offered to anyone with the hardware to view them. If my recording of a television show is "fair use", then watching a downloaded copy and recording the original myself and then watching it are the same thing with the exception of who did the recording. And regardless of what the law specifically says, I say it's entirely fair and will act accordingly.
And before you go talking about avoiding commercials, let me ask you: if the downloaded copies of these retained the original commercials, would it matter to you (or the law)? No? Then it's a bogus issue.
I'm not going into a movie theatre and taping a movie, I'm watching shows recorded from what are essentially freely available transmissions. And copyright lawyers aside, I'll keep doing so, with a clean conscience.
Perhaps I'm confused, but it's my understanding that it's NOT specifically illegal to record, and trade, television shows, provided that no money changes hands. There is a difference between selling TV shows (which would clearly be illegal) and sharing recordings (which is akin to recording a show on your VCR and letting a friend borrow/copy the tape).
I managed to grab the whole series, through ep.13, from a torrent sharing site. Watched every single one of them on a single sunday several weeks back.
And people are telling you right: it IS a great series. Best thing to come along since Firefly, IMHO. Better in many respects, even, though it pains me to say it (being the Whedon fan that I am).
Actually, supernovae can have extreme effects on nearby (i.e., within 10^2-10^3 ly) stars, gas clouds, etc.
While most of the energy released isn't in the form of em radiation (it's largely in the form of accelerated neutrinos), there is enough to cause damage to systems in the 10's of light years away. Beyond that, the effects become more long-term, such as molecular cloud compression, possibly starburst regions, etc.
On the other hand, I seem to recall that the OP was NOT about a supernova, but rather a nova or cataclysmic variable system.
> The lead time for the design and construction of >a true replacement for the HST is likely to be >5 to 8 years.
No way in hell. Try 15 years, at best.
NGST (what JWST was called before the name change) began its concept development in 1995/1996, and isn't scheduled to launch until 2011 AT THE EARLIEST.
> While surfing I also found this: Tyvek which I'd > never heard about
You're dating yourself. You must never have used 5.25" (or 8") floppies, as most of the millions of sleeves they came in were made of tyvek, often marked with the name.
Slashdot Mirror
While I don't agree that FIRST is "superior" (I think that there's room for all kinds of robots in the empire...), I am involved as a mentor with a team from Boulder, Colorado. We've been at our regional competition for two days now, and today is the comp's final day...with the top performers getting invited to the nationals in Atlanta in April.
:)
FIRST really is remarkable. I've been amazed at the creativity these kids can harness, and at the solutions they've found to problems and the robots they've managed to build (in 6 weeks!). Talk about the Hacker ethos in action! And, walking around the pits for the last couple days, I've been really impressed with the overall vibe as well - nothing nasty, nothing destructive - just a bunch of kids (of all ages) having fun & helping each other out when necessary.
Now, if my team could just score a few more games today...
Please see the post below, in which the responder quite correctly points out the obvious conclusion to your observations: you are the one who lacks perceptive ability. Moreover, you didn't bother to read the article, which clearly states that "An original solution to this puzzle...was put forward BY FOUR theoretical physicists".
Shouldn't this read "Four scientists at Fermilab report..." rather than "Fermilab reports..."?
/., and the NYT reporting that "Slashdot says that..."
Fermilab is a big organization. Saying that "Ferilab reports" implies that the whole organization reports this, and I'm absolutely positive that there are many people within Fermilab who would dispute these results/conjectures/hypotheses.
Imagine someone reading something one of us says in a comment on
> Smack the tattlers and pop the champagne corks!
This is NOT GOOD NEWS.
Yahoo might have some remnant of niftyism about them for having survived this long, but let's face it. Their site(s)
a) suck
b) look like shit
c) use annoying navigation & layout
d) are too Borg-like to attract people who were attracted by Flickr.
I just finshed uploading lots of pics to Flickr, and am now considering removing all of them and cancelling my PAID FOR membership, given this news of Yahoo's buyout.
I joined Flickr because they're NOT Yahoo/MSN/Google/etc. I love the community feel of Flickr, its layout, design, vibe...and I GUARANTEE that Yahoo won't leave it untouched. And even if it did leave the design the same, the changes to the TOS are bound to be evil by definition (as Flickr's were not).
Edmund optical sells some good IR bandpass filters I've used in the past: here
Shouldn't ISP's offer /. insurance?
/.-ed.
i.e., you pay a buck extra a month and your ISP lets you keep your pages online when something like this happens? Maybe it would be good for once/year or something like that.
Strikes me as a good idea...but then, I've never been
> A strong military with a large officer core, with
> training camps, procedures, and guidelines ready to
> quickly train and equip a huge scale army in case of
> invasion
Training new conscripts even to a "barely adequate" level would take at least six months, IMHO. Modern conflicts will generally be over within weeks, I think. (Iraq is an occupation, so is fundamentally different than the initial actual conflict involving large military forces in large-scale operations against enemy forces).
> Remember the probe that was lost because they forgot
> to convert from metric to imperial? Thats several
> million dollars down the drain. Did anyone get
> fired?
You need to understand that it was NOT NASA WHO FU^&%ED UP. The mistake was made at Lockheed-Martin, not NASA. Lockheed was contracted to provide functioning, tested hardware and software to NASA, and it failed. You can bet that someone DID get fired.
That being said, I agree with the need to cut beaureaucractic waste and administrative overhead at NASA...but it won't happen. The best we can hope for, realistically, is for better leadership at the top. I say let's put an astronomer or an astronaut in charge.
And regarding your point about SpaceShip One: yes, it was an amazing feat. Yes, they did a great job, and will continue to do great things, as will many of the other private sector ventures. But let's remember that what they did was successfully place a person into a BALLISTIC path in space, for a couple minutes, WELL BELOW low earth orbit, FORTY+ YEARS AFTER it was done by governments. Personally, I'm saving my really enthusiastic clapping for when they put someone up there...and KEEP them up there.
> there's a lot of crap out there, but both BSG
> and Firefly have been excellent
I was just going to start typing a long-winded post saying exactly the same thing. Both of these shows were/are very well written, wonderfully acted, and very enjoyable.
I was never a farscape fan (it seemed too...silly. Muppets don't belong in SF.), although I recognize that a lot of people enjoyed it. I am one of the few who actually think that Enterprise was not only not bad, but was the *best* series of the franchise, rather than the worst.
But as long as we periodically get intelligent SF for grownups (i.e., Firefly, BSG), I'll be happy. I just wish Firefly had been granted more than 13 episodes. So, to prevent the same thing happening for BSG, PLEASE, everyone - watch the new episodes this summer so they keep making more!
This is the funniest use of an old, dead and tired webjoke I've seen in a long time. I think that I am going to print it and put it on my office door.
"...ALL the time..." Heh. Priceless.
> sorry for my brain-deadedness
No apologies...I'm all for the "no stupid questions" maxim.
As for those being the only two possibilities: those are the two that leap to mind right off the bat, and I can't think of any reason why early galazies wouldn't have been emitting LOTS in the shorter wavelengths. In fact, I seem to recall that much of the recent literature suggests that early galaxies had a higher percentage of large, heavy, short-lived stars - which are very hot and emit largely in the UV. But then I've been doing other things lately, and I might not be current.
> why do we care?
That's a good question, and worth a better answer than I have time do do here (mbrother?). The short answer is that they're so far away that we're actually seeing galaxies as they were very early in the universe. When we look at nearby galaxies, we only see galaxies as they exist after billions (current estimates are, if I'm up to date, that galaxy evolution has been going on for around 13Gy) of years of evolution. By looking FAR AWAY, we're also looking BACK IN TIME, and are thus able to see things we'd otherwise have no ability to observe.
A surprising amount can be gleaned from spectroscopic analysis of faint, red (& ancient) galaxies. What ionization levels are observable? Do we see lots of heavy elements, or none at all? Such observations can also be very powerful probes of the stuff IN BETWEEN here and there. If we can make certain assumptions about the original emissions, then by looking at the OBSERVED emissions, we can infer, to some degree, the conditions in the intervening space (and time) between emitter and collector. There is lots of good work being done in this area currently.
Hope that helps, let me know if I can clarify!
IAAA (I am an astronomer).
All galaxies (with the exception of the recently discovered and dubiously titled "dark matter galaxy" mentioned here a few days ago) emit light at a wide variety of wavelengths, from radio all the way to gamma rays. The wavelengths at which a star emits is related to its temperature (google "blackbody radiation" or "planck spectrum"); other astrophysical processes can produce or modify passing emissions as well (molecular & plasma clouds, various types of "dead" stars like neutron stars, white dwarfs, etc. can create emissions due to non-blackbody radiation - google "bremstrahllung", "cerenkov", "synchrotron", etc.).
The reason that these particular galaxies are only visible in the infrared is that a) intervening dust reddens emissions across intergalactic (and, for that matter, INTRAgalactic) distances, and b) they are so far away that as the universe has expanded, the light traveling from them has been redshifted - stretched along with the spacetime through which they have been traveling. Thus, what we see as infrared now was originally of much shorter wavelength when it was emitted.
Hope that's useful, let me know if I can clarify.
Infrared "energy" IS light.
Electromagnetic radiation takes many forms: radio, microwave, infrared, visual (what we see as "light"), UV, Xrays, gamma rays. They are all "light".
Sorry to be a pedant.
> What happens if they want to charge $5 per episode?
...which suggests to me that the way for video media producers to make money is to release cheap, high-quality on-demand video without value-destroying DRM.
Then people will use the DRM-busting tools that will necessarily emerge in response to whatever DRM schemes are used by the copyright holders.
The thing I love about the iTunes music store is that it's so cheap and so easy, people are actively buying music instead of downloading illegal copies. If a typical whole CD was $16 on iTMS, just like a physical CD is, they wouldn't be doing so well....
I think people would gladly pay on the order of $1 to have a good copy of a show they like. But if they come with DRM that limits where/how they can be played, or if the price tag is $5 or something, people will just go back to P2P networks.
> Great, another message from the pro copyright
> infringment brigade.
Quite the contrary. I do not "pirate", and pay for things that have price tags. The only "free" mp3's in my collection are those which were offered as such by the artists. I use Netflix to preview DVD's, and if I like them, I buy them. Back when "Buffy" was on the air, I downloaded copies from usenet to watch, but ONLY if they hadn't been released for sale - when they were, I BOUGHT them. When BG is released for sale, I will buy the whole damn series, happily - as I did with Firefly.
> And its the 1'st "legit" way to play MP3's
SO you're saying that NO OTHER players have paid the fee to Fraunhoffer? I don't buy it.
Well, provided that you are correct, then I'm going to have to say that I don't give a rat's ass.
My recording/watching/sharing of media that has already been shown publicly is NOT the same thing as "dipping babies in vats of liquid mercury", as is abundantly clear. These shows are offered to anyone with the hardware to view them. If my recording of a television show is "fair use", then watching a downloaded copy and recording the original myself and then watching it are the same thing with the exception of who did the recording. And regardless of what the law specifically says, I say it's entirely fair and will act accordingly.
And before you go talking about avoiding commercials, let me ask you: if the downloaded copies of these retained the original commercials, would it matter to you (or the law)? No? Then it's a bogus issue.
I'm not going into a movie theatre and taping a movie, I'm watching shows recorded from what are essentially freely available transmissions. And copyright lawyers aside, I'll keep doing so, with a clean conscience.
Perhaps I'm confused, but it's my understanding that it's NOT specifically illegal to record, and trade, television shows, provided that no money changes hands. There is a difference between selling TV shows (which would clearly be illegal) and sharing recordings (which is akin to recording a show on your VCR and letting a friend borrow/copy the tape).
I managed to grab the whole series, through ep.13, from a torrent sharing site. Watched every single one of them on a single sunday several weeks back.
And people are telling you right: it IS a great series. Best thing to come along since Firefly, IMHO. Better in many respects, even, though it pains me to say it (being the Whedon fan that I am).
Paragraphs, man, paragraphs! :)
Actually, supernovae can have extreme effects on nearby (i.e., within 10^2-10^3 ly) stars, gas clouds, etc.
While most of the energy released isn't in the form of em radiation (it's largely in the form of accelerated neutrinos), there is enough to cause damage to systems in the 10's of light years away. Beyond that, the effects become more long-term, such as molecular cloud compression, possibly starburst regions, etc.
On the other hand, I seem to recall that the OP was NOT about a supernova, but rather a nova or cataclysmic variable system.
> The lead time for the design and construction of
>a true replacement for the HST is likely to be
>5 to 8 years.
No way in hell. Try 15 years, at best.
NGST (what JWST was called before the name change) began its concept development in 1995/1996, and isn't scheduled to launch until 2011 AT THE EARLIEST.
Vulcans and Borg drones are so nineties.
What we really need are tall, sexy Cylons who look like, umm...Tricia Helfer.
Oh, wait...
> Look at this and tell me there's nothing
> homoerotic about it.
That's it, I'm going to have to find my friends new spacesuits for the burn this year...
> While surfing I also found this: Tyvek which I'd
> never heard about
You're dating yourself. You must never have used 5.25" (or 8") floppies, as most of the millions of sleeves they came in were made of tyvek, often marked with the name.
Ok, so maybe I'm dating MYSELF.