Wouldn't it favor people with high blood pressure? Seems like the songs that young, fit people like would drop to the bottom of the playlist, and the three geriatrics in the establishment would hear all their big-band faves bubbling to the top.
...and that's it. It doesn't represent artists, or art, or cultural diversity, or musical history. It's there to protect the interests of the recording industry. No insidious evil plot here—that's simply why it was created, and that's what it does.
The emergent behavior of a system, however, can be completely different from the stated purpose. How does a concept like "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need", for example, spawn realities like gulags and purges? The same way a concept like intellectual property spawns a group of uncreative lawyers protecting work that they neither create nor understand.
It wasn't that long ago when artists were simply paid by their patrons for works they'd commissioned, and didn't expect to get rich off royalties and licensing fees. It's a relatively new phenomenon, and in the face of technology, it may turn out to be quite short-lived. Just because we've lived with it all our lives doesn't mean it's right, or good, or sustainable.
Super-K is basically a huge underground cylindrical tank, about 40 meters wide and 40 meters deep, containing 50,000 tons of very nearly pure water. The sides, top, and bottom of the tank are covered with PMT's, the photomultiplier tubes which serve as detectors in the telescope. They are all pointed inward toward the mass of water, ready to detect the slightest Cherenkov light. (And slight it is—the Cherenkov light generated by the shockwave of a single muon is about as bright to the detector as a single candle seen from the Moon.)
Fortunately, each PMT is sensitive enough to detect a single photon of Cherenkov light. How does it do this? The same way you eat an elephant—one bite at a time. First, the photon hits a photo-cathode on the inner surface of the PMT's glass bulb, and the photo-cathode, in turn, releases an electron. The electron is attracted to a dynode, which carries a high-voltage positive charge, and accelerates toward it. When it hits, its great kinetic energy causes the dynode to emit several electrons, which are attracted to a second dynode with an even higher positive charge. The process repeats once for every dynode in the detector, until the final dynode is deluged with electrons, and sends a signal indicating that it has detected a photon. Neat, eh?
As you can imagine, PMT's are expensive ($3000 each, in this case), delicate, precision instruments, and you don't move them around like lightbulbs on a Christmas tree. Especially if you've recently gone from having 11,242 of them to having only 4,000 or so in one horrific oops.
...they're going to remove the imploded detectors, then take the 4000-odd surviving detectors and redistribute them, giving them a device of roughly half the resolution of the full SuperK. Is this what they intend to have working within a year?
I surely wish them good fortune getting it back online, and eventually restoring its full capacity.
Nothing ever collected in space has ever been practically useful. Dust, rocks, etc. were only used as research material, and then only back on earch. In effect, when it comes to space travel, we've always carried a sack lunch, and tend to pack out our trash.
In Earth's history, voyages of discovery have always taken enough supplies to get them to their destination, then they used indiginous resources to keep going. How far could Columbus (nasty Eurotrash that he was) have kept going if he'd had to get back before his food ran out?
Mining operations in space needn't be self-sufficient to represent a new era in space exploration; they need only become marginally profitable, and we'll be over the hump.
The new "New World" will begin to move past the exploration phase, and on to exploitation and settlement. Thank God we aren't carrying smallpox around anymore.
IBM Japan is paying over $166,000 a year for Asimo to be a receptionist? Looks like our futurist fantasies were half right — robots will do the menial jobs for us, but they'll charge through the nose for it. Maybe I can find a cheap one that'll fetch my slippers for only a couple grand a week.
The Internet is depending on unsecured servers for DNS? Now how am I going to sleep at night? Next you'll be telling me the earth isn't sitting snugly atop a giant turtle! Is nothing certain any more?
As someone else pointed out, this is a pretty touchy-feely press release, and it makes this Juggernaut of a satellite sound like one of Brautigan's "machines of loving grace." Everyone should be happy except for the "bad" algae, eh?
The hyperbole surrounding its data gathering rate (a dozen PC hard disks per day? Whoa! Any particular PC?) seems to lay groundwork for justifying not releasing received data until it has been 'reduced' to datasets fit for public consumption, and flawed or unexpected data has been filtered out. I'd assume pretty rapid turnaround of at least some of the data, though, if they're going to be predicting avalanches and mudslides worldwide.
Is my paranoia showing? Would you tell me if it were?
Anniversaries are great, but...
on
Intel 4004 Turns 30
·
· Score: 2, Offtopic
Every day is the 5nth anniversary of.055% of everything that ever happened, and as a rule we celebrate very little of it, or it would occupy all our time.
Do we really think the 4004 might be offended by the oversight, or that microprocessors in general aren't getting enough attention in the press? I think the computer industry as a whole could be modded down a point as it is.
Perhaps the reason Palm has lagged behind their competitors for a while is because they're directing their efforts toward The Next Big Thing — perhaps the BeOS will be running on our palmtops after all. It's a gorgeous, elegant, and terribly resource-efficient OS; given sufficient horsepower (from an ARM processor, for example), it might be quite impressive at 320x320 resolutions.
Anyone out there with behind-the-scenes knowledge willing to provide some insight?
Slashdot Mirror
_________________________
/y
General Protection Fault
_________________________
> Kill fault
With what -- your bare hands?
> Yes
Congratulations -- you have just made Windows a stable OS with your bare hands!
Unlikely, isn't it?
> Format c:
You are in a maze of unallocated sectors, all alike.
Looks like the story link is /.'ed. However, Digital Photography Review has this story with reams of specs and evaluation data. Read it whilst you can!
Wouldn't it favor people with high blood pressure? Seems like the songs that young, fit people like would drop to the bottom of the playlist, and the three geriatrics in the establishment would hear all their big-band faves bubbling to the top.
PhysicsWeb has this story providing additional detail about the accident, and their recovery plans.
...to C.M. Kornbluth's "Little Black Bag" all the time.
His basic premise was prophetic as well. Maybe I should go back and read him again.
...and that's it. It doesn't represent artists, or art, or cultural diversity, or musical history. It's there to protect the interests of the recording industry. No insidious evil plot here—that's simply why it was created, and that's what it does.
The emergent behavior of a system, however, can be completely different from the stated purpose. How does a concept like "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need", for example, spawn realities like gulags and purges? The same way a concept like intellectual property spawns a group of uncreative lawyers protecting work that they neither create nor understand.
It wasn't that long ago when artists were simply paid by their patrons for works they'd commissioned, and didn't expect to get rich off royalties and licensing fees. It's a relatively new phenomenon, and in the face of technology, it may turn out to be quite short-lived. Just because we've lived with it all our lives doesn't mean it's right, or good, or sustainable.
Super-K is basically a huge underground cylindrical tank, about 40 meters wide and 40 meters deep, containing 50,000 tons of very nearly pure water. The sides, top, and bottom of the tank are covered with PMT's, the photomultiplier tubes which serve as detectors in the telescope. They are all pointed inward toward the mass of water, ready to detect the slightest Cherenkov light. (And slight it is—the Cherenkov light generated by the shockwave of a single muon is about as bright to the detector as a single candle seen from the Moon.)
Fortunately, each PMT is sensitive enough to detect a single photon of Cherenkov light. How does it do this? The same way you eat an elephant—one bite at a time. First, the photon hits a photo-cathode on the inner surface of the PMT's glass bulb, and the photo-cathode, in turn, releases an electron. The electron is attracted to a dynode, which carries a high-voltage positive charge, and accelerates toward it. When it hits, its great kinetic energy causes the dynode to emit several electrons, which are attracted to a second dynode with an even higher positive charge. The process repeats once for every dynode in the detector, until the final dynode is deluged with electrons, and sends a signal indicating that it has detected a photon. Neat, eh?
As you can imagine, PMT's are expensive ($3000 each, in this case), delicate, precision instruments, and you don't move them around like lightbulbs on a Christmas tree. Especially if you've recently gone from having 11,242 of them to having only 4,000 or so in one horrific oops.
...they're going to remove the imploded detectors, then take the 4000-odd surviving detectors and redistribute them, giving them a device of roughly half the resolution of the full SuperK. Is this what they intend to have working within a year?
I surely wish them good fortune getting it back online, and eventually restoring its full capacity.
Nothing ever collected in space has ever been practically useful. Dust, rocks, etc. were only used as research material, and then only back on earch. In effect, when it comes to space travel, we've always carried a sack lunch, and tend to pack out our trash.
In Earth's history, voyages of discovery have always taken enough supplies to get them to their destination, then they used indiginous resources to keep going. How far could Columbus (nasty Eurotrash that he was) have kept going if he'd had to get back before his food ran out?
Mining operations in space needn't be self-sufficient to represent a new era in space exploration; they need only become marginally profitable, and we'll be over the hump. The new "New World" will begin to move past the exploration phase, and on to exploitation and settlement. Thank God we aren't carrying smallpox around anymore.
IBM Japan is paying over $166,000 a year for Asimo to be a receptionist? Looks like our futurist fantasies were half right — robots will do the menial jobs for us, but they'll charge through the nose for it. Maybe I can find a cheap one that'll fetch my slippers for only a couple grand a week.
The Internet is depending on unsecured servers for DNS? Now how am I going to sleep at night? Next you'll be telling me the earth isn't sitting snugly atop a giant turtle! Is nothing certain any more?
As someone else pointed out, this is a pretty touchy-feely press release, and it makes this Juggernaut of a satellite sound like one of Brautigan's "machines of loving grace." Everyone should be happy except for the "bad" algae, eh?
The hyperbole surrounding its data gathering rate (a dozen PC hard disks per day? Whoa! Any particular PC?) seems to lay groundwork for justifying not releasing received data until it has been 'reduced' to datasets fit for public consumption, and flawed or unexpected data has been filtered out. I'd assume pretty rapid turnaround of at least some of the data, though, if they're going to be predicting avalanches and mudslides worldwide.
Is my paranoia showing? Would you tell me if it were?
Every day is the 5nth anniversary of .055% of everything that ever happened, and as a rule we celebrate very little of it, or it would occupy all our time.
Do we really think the 4004 might be offended by the oversight, or that microprocessors in general aren't getting enough attention in the press? I think the computer industry as a whole could be modded down a point as it is.
I don't know how much their missions overlap, but does this put any more urgency on getting the Ice Cube neutrino scope up and running?
Whilst I'm here, I've been mulling over some possible reasons for the accident:
Perhaps the reason Palm has lagged behind their competitors for a while is because they're directing their efforts toward The Next Big Thing — perhaps the BeOS will be running on our palmtops after all. It's a gorgeous, elegant, and terribly resource-efficient OS; given sufficient horsepower (from an ARM processor, for example), it might be quite impressive at 320x320 resolutions.
Anyone out there with behind-the-scenes knowledge willing to provide some insight?