As it says on today's Astronomy Picture, we have observed a star whose orbit around the center of the galaxy reaches 17 light-hours from a large object, which is the black hole referred to. (That's about 3 times the radius of our solar system.) That does NOT mean that the black hole is that large, just that that's the closest we've seen anything come to it. The radius of the black hole itself is most certainly not near that size.
If the mass of the black hole is 2.6 x 10^6 times that of our sun, the radius would be closer to 150 million km. (That's a very crude pseudo-calculation, so don't quote me.)
it doesn't work very well with good heat conductors or materials with very high melting points, but the researchers envision a wide variety of manufacturing applications, and possibly some medical uses as well
Right. I know human tissue doesn't conduct heat well, but does anybody know its melting point?
When cellular (or other wireless techs) have enough bandwidth to supply a whole city with phone systems, will they continue to maintain lines to everybody's houses? Maybe fiber-optics are better for lines between telco stations, but why maintain the enormous phone grid when you can provide access to everybody with a few dozen transceivers? Mobility (convenience) + savings (lower maintenance costs)== profitability.
it will always be cheaper and more practical to, say, run a wire from your computer to your monitor than to have wireless hubs in each device.
Will computers still be so modular as they are today? I mean, the iMac has been around for a while and it's not modular. Even though I don't find them very aesthetically pleasing, I saw a single-unit computer the other day while I was looking for a new monitor, which I thought was really cool. It consists of a flat-screen monitor with the computer built into the back of it.
I think that computers will become less modular than they are now. (Probably not production computers like servers and whatnot, but I refer to user-end models.)
As for other computer-related things, like keyboards, I think wireless will also become more popular there. You said "it will always be cheaper and more practical" to run wires. Well, with wireless becoming easier and easier, "practicality" might be rated not on price of the unit in question, but on convenience. I, for one, prefer a wireless keyboard and mouse because I hate the wires limiting my mobility.
The other term you used is "cheaper." A device that uses wireless connections doesn't need a long cord. That's savings right there. And while wireless IS a touch more expensive to make right now, soon the price involved may be low enough that wireless is economically easier. Especially when you need multiple connections to a device. A TV (or other video device) needs several IN and OUT jacks to connect to all the things that people want them to connect to, like Antenna, VCR, DVD-player, etc. What if there was just one transceiver that could communicate both ways with all those devices? And your computer? And your WiFi remote? Forget directly programming your VCR or even your TiVo. You could just do it all through your computer.
You could run your whole house through your computer, without expensive interconnected wiring for everything. Have your computer turn on all your lights while you're on vacation. And if you get a new device, it'll already link with the rest of everything, so you don't have to run new wires even to a central hub.
I know, I know, it's what visionaries have been predicting all along, but now we can see a direct path from where we are now to where we could be. (Unlike with flying cars or ubiquitous conveyor belts.) I don't KNOW that this is the path that society will take, but I don't find it too far-fetched.
It'll be nice when there are no wires ANYWHERE. The way trends are going now, in a couple of dozen years all communication between people and devices will be wireless.
If you think about it, much of the last 2 decades' innovations and progress have had the effect (deliberate or not) of making life (at least for those who could afford it) more open and footloose. The company I work for used to have a Chicago address, just because nobody would believe that a large, international, reputable organization would be based in Salt Lake City. Nowadays nobody even thinks about that sort of thing. Even now, with telecommuting technologies, it's not necessary to have all your employees come to the office every day. Maybe in the future, the term "headquarters" will be obsolete, because organizations can be so distributed.
Okay, it's a little off-topic, but the article makes me think about the steps we're taking, technologically, and where they're leading.
holds more music because it supports WMA (though why someone would want to use WMA is beyond me)
I'm waiting for them to come out with one that supports.mid, so I can fit MILLIONS of hours on the drive. My dream is to listen to music constantly for the rest of my life without repeating a song once.
And those horrible video game music loops don't count.;)
Slight pause, then in a surprised tone: "You don't?"
Translation:
[press "no" button to get to next page on the script tree], then in a surprised tone: "You don't?"
They have the entire conversation scripted. Any objection they think you might have has been considered beforehand and planned for. The only way to REALLY screw them up is by getting out of their script tree.
Case in point:
My dad: Hello?
TM: Sir, my name is Foo, and I have a great prize for you today if you can answer one simple question.
Dad: Uh, okay.
TM: Who was the US president during the Civil War?
Dad: I think it was Truman.
TM: Well, this is a tough question, so I'll give you one more hint. It was either Ronald Reagan or Abraham Lincoln. (emphasis in original) Which do you think?
Dad: I still think it was Truman.
TM:... Uh,... sorry. [click]
I clicked on this thread, expecting to see discussion about this "burst of evolution" article, only to find just another creationist vs. evolutionist free-for-all. There's not even a link to the original article on New Scientist, just a link to a page that seems designed specifically to set off the ol' flame wars. Does the poster even care about the article he's posting, or just getting another flamefest started?
Have you tried Ms Outlook? It's got extensive rule-based sorting capability. It doesn't work for IMAP, and you mentioned IMAP leter in your message, but it's not clear that that's all you're dealing with.
Well, I think they aren't saying that this is the ONLY way rings form, just one way they could form. So the idea of Saturn having a moon break up isn't rejected.
Likely, it isn't because it was just philosophically the "right thing to do".
Why not? Can't there be true philanthropists anymore? Is altruism against human nature? Or are you arguing that anybody who actually has a million dollars to spare must be greedy?
They plan to have special encryption keys hidden in software and which are pressed onto CD-ROMs and which can not be read
with ordinary procedures. They claim that the location, length and number of embedded keys can vary making it more difficult to hack.
The data _must_ be accessible, in order for any normal CD-ROM to be able to read it, but you have to use, like you said, low-level access to the device. It's not impossible, but it's more difficult. First, there's the difficulty of determining where the software looks for the information. Presumably, it's reading the disk, and sorting out that one line that it's requesting the key from is difficult. I'm not saying it's impossible. But it would probably have to be done on a CD-by-CD basis. So likely, you'd have to either develop a very sophisticated program to determine, given a copy-protected CD with its program running, which data contains the key, or crack each CD one at a time.
It's not foolproof, but it at least is a new thing. When are producers of products going to learn that they CANNOT STOP people from ripping off their product until people have the MORALS not to do it? Face it, there's no unbreakable copy protection except for a populace who refuses to copy copyrighted works!
So the producers just have to keep coming up with new measures which will be either less or more effective than past ones, and hope that the crackers will be inconvenienced enough that they'll just wait for someone else to crack it and use the other person's crack. The more difficult the protection is to crack, the fewer people will be able to crack it, and (hopefully) the fewer people will be disposed to take the TIME to crack it.
Crackers will find a way for anything, if they feel like the rewards (free (as in beer) software, the pride of having cracked something, or whatever else motivates them) compensate for the trouble of finding a crack.
Person A professes to believe in something. Person B doesn't believe that Person A really believes it. Person A's belief is set aside and not considered "real."
Granted, many of the people who wrote "Jedi" probably don't really believe in jedism (?), but what about the few that probably do? Where does the state think it has the audacity to declare some peoples' beliefs justified and others invalid?
On the other hand, what about the groups that actually rely on census data to make their decisions? It is a problem if lots of people falsify data. I know that lots of people purposefully lie on exit polls as they leave the voting booths in November just to screw up the prediction system.
Australia's National Census. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.;)
The story of the Manhole Cover is true, but some of the numbers thrown around are not. I found the following at a site with lots of nuke information.
This article appears to be largely responsible for the presence of the "Sputnik manhole cover" legend on the Internet, where it has been often discussed. It does not identify the test, but from the information in the article it can be deduced that it had to be Pascal-B, which has since be confirmed to me by Dr. Brownlee
...
If the description of the plate is accurate - 4 feet wide, 4 inches thick and made of steel - then it would weigh about 900 kg (a lower weight is possible if the dimensions are inaccurate or if it was not of uniform thickness). A velocity of 6 times Earth's escape velocity (67 km/sec, since escape velocity is 11.2 km/sec) would give the plate a kinetic energy 60% larger than the total energy released by the explosion. This is clearly impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
Come on, editors. This is getting ridiculous.
If the mass of the black hole is 2.6 x 10^6 times that of our sun, the radius would be closer to 150 million km. (That's a very crude pseudo-calculation, so don't quote me.)
Geeks now have a vacuum cleaner web server!
First one to run apache/linux on it wins.
it doesn't work very well with good heat conductors or materials with very high melting points, but the researchers envision a wide variety of manufacturing applications, and possibly some medical uses as well
Right. I know human tissue doesn't conduct heat well, but does anybody know its melting point?
"It's about that whole religious fervor that grabs Mac users the way it doesn't with users of other platforms"
Pardon him. He hasn't visited Slashdot.
?!?!???!?!
They're actually $200 each.
Wireless tech isn't there yet, but it will be.
Will computers still be so modular as they are today? I mean, the iMac has been around for a while and it's not modular. Even though I don't find them very aesthetically pleasing, I saw a single-unit computer the other day while I was looking for a new monitor, which I thought was really cool. It consists of a flat-screen monitor with the computer built into the back of it.
I think that computers will become less modular than they are now. (Probably not production computers like servers and whatnot, but I refer to user-end models.)
As for other computer-related things, like keyboards, I think wireless will also become more popular there. You said "it will always be cheaper and more practical" to run wires. Well, with wireless becoming easier and easier, "practicality" might be rated not on price of the unit in question, but on convenience. I, for one, prefer a wireless keyboard and mouse because I hate the wires limiting my mobility.
The other term you used is "cheaper." A device that uses wireless connections doesn't need a long cord. That's savings right there. And while wireless IS a touch more expensive to make right now, soon the price involved may be low enough that wireless is economically easier. Especially when you need multiple connections to a device. A TV (or other video device) needs several IN and OUT jacks to connect to all the things that people want them to connect to, like Antenna, VCR, DVD-player, etc. What if there was just one transceiver that could communicate both ways with all those devices? And your computer? And your WiFi remote? Forget directly programming your VCR or even your TiVo. You could just do it all through your computer.
You could run your whole house through your computer, without expensive interconnected wiring for everything. Have your computer turn on all your lights while you're on vacation. And if you get a new device, it'll already link with the rest of everything, so you don't have to run new wires even to a central hub.
I know, I know, it's what visionaries have been predicting all along, but now we can see a direct path from where we are now to where we could be. (Unlike with flying cars or ubiquitous conveyor belts.) I don't KNOW that this is the path that society will take, but I don't find it too far-fetched.
If you think about it, much of the last 2 decades' innovations and progress have had the effect (deliberate or not) of making life (at least for those who could afford it) more open and footloose. The company I work for used to have a Chicago address, just because nobody would believe that a large, international, reputable organization would be based in Salt Lake City. Nowadays nobody even thinks about that sort of thing. Even now, with telecommuting technologies, it's not necessary to have all your employees come to the office every day. Maybe in the future, the term "headquarters" will be obsolete, because organizations can be so distributed.
Okay, it's a little off-topic, but the article makes me think about the steps we're taking, technologically, and where they're leading.
I'm waiting for them to come out with one that supports .mid, so I can fit MILLIONS of hours on the drive. My dream is to listen to music constantly for the rest of my life without repeating a song once.
And those horrible video game music loops don't count. ;)
Gosh, why is slashdot always so Eurocentric? Anybody mind converting those pounds into dollars?
Translation:
[press "no" button to get to next page on the script tree], then in a surprised tone: "You don't?"
They have the entire conversation scripted. Any objection they think you might have has been considered beforehand and planned for. The only way to REALLY screw them up is by getting out of their script tree.
Case in point:
My dad: Hello? ... Uh, ... sorry. [click]
TM: Sir, my name is Foo, and I have a great prize for you today if you can answer one simple question.
Dad: Uh, okay.
TM: Who was the US president during the Civil War?
Dad: I think it was Truman.
TM: Well, this is a tough question, so I'll give you one more hint. It was either Ronald Reagan or Abraham Lincoln. (emphasis in original) Which do you think?
Dad: I still think it was Truman.
TM:
Hey, what ever happened to Tiny Elvis? Does anybody know where I could find it? Might it even WORK in a Win32 environment?
Great! Maybe that'll help out all of us jobless geeks!!
I clicked on this thread, expecting to see discussion about this "burst of evolution" article, only to find just another creationist vs. evolutionist free-for-all. There's not even a link to the original article on New Scientist, just a link to a page that seems designed specifically to set off the ol' flame wars. Does the poster even care about the article he's posting, or just getting another flamefest started?
Have you tried Ms Outlook? It's got extensive rule-based sorting capability. It doesn't work for IMAP, and you mentioned IMAP leter in your message, but it's not clear that that's all you're dealing with.
Well, I think they aren't saying that this is the ONLY way rings form, just one way they could form. So the idea of Saturn having a moon break up isn't rejected.
Actually, I remember that episode because of the way she says "An the thing about gri' is, it's black."*
* ' = glottal stop
Yeah, I guess I could use a light snack.
Stand up.
It's a good thing my silverware isn't magnetic, or I'd wipe out all my food.
Why not? Can't there be true philanthropists anymore? Is altruism against human nature? Or are you arguing that anybody who actually has a million dollars to spare must be greedy?
From the post:
The data _must_ be accessible, in order for any normal CD-ROM to be able to read it, but you have to use, like you said, low-level access to the device. It's not impossible, but it's more difficult. First, there's the difficulty of determining where the software looks for the information. Presumably, it's reading the disk, and sorting out that one line that it's requesting the key from is difficult. I'm not saying it's impossible. But it would probably have to be done on a CD-by-CD basis. So likely, you'd have to either develop a very sophisticated program to determine, given a copy-protected CD with its program running, which data contains the key, or crack each CD one at a time.
It's not foolproof, but it at least is a new thing. When are producers of products going to learn that they CANNOT STOP people from ripping off their product until people have the MORALS not to do it? Face it, there's no unbreakable copy protection except for a populace who refuses to copy copyrighted works!
So the producers just have to keep coming up with new measures which will be either less or more effective than past ones, and hope that the crackers will be inconvenienced enough that they'll just wait for someone else to crack it and use the other person's crack. The more difficult the protection is to crack, the fewer people will be able to crack it, and (hopefully) the fewer people will be disposed to take the TIME to crack it.
Crackers will find a way for anything, if they feel like the rewards (free (as in beer) software, the pride of having cracked something, or whatever else motivates them) compensate for the trouble of finding a crack.
Granted, many of the people who wrote "Jedi" probably don't really believe in jedism (?), but what about the few that probably do? Where does the state think it has the audacity to declare some peoples' beliefs justified and others invalid?
On the other hand, what about the groups that actually rely on census data to make their decisions? It is a problem if lots of people falsify data. I know that lots of people purposefully lie on exit polls as they leave the voting booths in November just to screw up the prediction system.
Australia's National Census. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane. ;)