I understand that this security/usability patch will correct virtually all the problems with IE to which the BBS objects. Of course, it's a pretty complete patch...
Someone weird, apparently. The passage is an excerpt from the manifesto published widely in 1996 and written by Theodore J. Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber. I'm surprised to see it broadly quoted here, but not surprised that it's posted by A.C. I really don't like that guy.
Is this news for stupid OT whiners?
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Fanwing Planes?
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· Score: 2, Offtopic
Sorry, I just felt like being a stupid OT whiner today...
Are you suggesting that you aren't usually stupid, offtopic, or a whiner? Or that you aren't usually all three at once?
A quick scan of the page about you indicates that you've posted 18 times in the last year, and that most of your posts are along the lines of "This story SUCKS!" or "Yeah, me too!" Have you noticed that you've only garnered ONE positive mod point so far? That's a good sign that you aren't making good decisions about what, when and how to post.
You seem like a bright guy. Look back at the comments that you've enjoyed or learned from. What made them worthwhile to you? What made someone else mod them as Interesting, Insightful or Funny? Take some guidance from that when you post your own comments.
Even those of us who have maxed out our karma still post comments that get modded down (I expect this one will get an Offtopic or two), but if you aren't being modded up on the average, you have to wonder if your posts are adding to the discussion at all. Pour some of your intellect, experience, and wit into your comments, and we'll all be better off for it.
Nerine Shatner Memorial Fund
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Ask William Shatner
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· Score: 5, Interesting
After the tragic and untimely death of your wife Nerine, a recovering alcoholic, you took the courageous step of establishing a fund in her name to benefit Friendly House, an organization for recovering alcoholics. How is that work progressing, and has your involvement with this effort helped you work through this loss?
I know that this subject must be painful for you, but I'm sure there are many in the slashdot community who would benefit from your experience and insights here.
Re:Hope that was a STEEP curve...
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Helpful Handicap
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· Score: 1
First of all, who cares?
You do, Descartes, or you would not have replied.
Second, couldn't it just be "There are more things in heaven and earth...than are dremt of in your philosophy." instead? ellipsis!
Actually, that's "dreamt.";) Yes, an ellipsis would have been fine (I can't believe I'm involved in this discussion), but his version of the one-line quote had four inaccuracies, of which the omission of Horatio's name was only one. Proximo satis pro administratio, I suppose, but surely deserving of a goodhearted jab, considering that it sigged a joke about grading on the curve.
Now, a bit of on-topic humor...
The long-jumping champ from Algiers
Reduced his onlookers to tears
when in celebration
expressing elation
He bashed in his head with halteres.
There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy. -- Shakespeare's Hamlet
The actual line is, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Hamlet says it in Act I, Scene 5, IIRC.
...this is the yet another result of global warming.
People, we've already lost Venus to corporate carelessness and greed, and now Io is being turned into a wasteland! How many more Jovian moons must be covered in molten rock and sulfurous ash and before all the evil American companies wake up? The Face on Mars weeps for us all!!!
Please forgive my emotional tirade; I'm just upset because Stephen King died again.
__________
As a counterweight to the preceding foolishness, I'll add some meaningful data to the discussion by correcting the following line of the press release:
"The Surt eruption appears to cover an area of 1,900 square kilometers, which is larger than the city of Los Angeles and even larger than the entire city of London," Marchis said.
The city of Los Angeles covers 5,959 km^2, and London covers 4,147 km^2, so the eruption wasn't even half as large as either of them. Even Melbourne, at 2,027 km^2, would not have been completely covered by the lava flow, though I'm sure tourism would have been affected.
Re:Too bad it's unconstitutional -- and ill-advise
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HomeSec In the News
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· Score: 3, Insightful
How about a "loopback" line-item veto?
Scenario: The President vetoes a couple of items, and thus "'passes' a statute other than Congress intended," as you aptly pointed out. The line-item-vetoed bill automatically goes back to Congress just like a vetoed bill, with one possible action added: Congress can vote on the bill as vetoed. If passed, it immediately becomes law without a return trip to the White House.
IMHO, that would keep the President's legislative power in check, while giving him an official feedback channel in the process. The possibilities for additional checks and balances that this system would provide seem to be worth examining.
Don't tell me, this is an old idea, right? Okay, go ahead and tell me.
Re:Why the griping about stupid certificates?
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Redirecting NASA
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· Score: 2
No, I'm sorry, I don't equate moon rocks with Bryan Adams and Michael Bolton CDs that somehow become magical items of Immense Value and Rarity once they escape the earth's atmosphere.
You didn't mention the Michael Bolton CD's in your original post! I am in total agreement now, and retract my earlier reply with my deepest apologies. Since his tripe has infected over 50 million discs, destroying all affected media in this manner would be horribly inefficient.
Now, if they carried Bolton himself into orbit (in the cargo bay, of course), that would be an investment of taxpayers' money that all Slashdotters could get behind.
And as for the NASA employee's $900 wall hanging, my opinion is this: if it would be inappropriate to write that employee a $900 check, it would be just as inappropriate to spend public money on a $900 gift.
You're right that junk carried into space and back don't carry the cachet of stuff really FROM space, like the moonrock I mentioned. Sadly, though, our current space program doesn't include a lot of sample-return mass; most missions only bring in what they took out (the Bolton deployment mission would be a happy exception).
As for the rest of your tirade, I'm sorry, but I don't buy a bit of it. I visited the Smithsonian as a small child, and my only tactile memory of the event is that of touching a small rock that had once been on the Moon. That memory inspired me for years, and was one of the reasons I pursued a career in the hard sciences. How many others have been inspired by some piece of junk that a jaded Houston frame-shop worker wouldn't deign to touch, were she not being paid to do so?
So some secretary who's worked for twenty years at NASA gets a.01-ounce certificate that flew into orbit. So some Senator or Congressman who's supported our space program to the tune of a few billion in appropriations gets a $900 frame for a piece of space junk that will inspire some influential visitor to say, as you so aptly put it, "wow, it was in spaAAAce." So some astronaut who's devoted his career to the hope that someday he'd get picked for a mission, gets to take a few things he can share with his kids and grandkids. Why can't you just let it ride?
Do you really think that if Columbus hadn't brought anything back from the Americas, and there hadn't been any alien trinkets to pass around at the Court of King Ferdinand, that there'd have been as much interest to go back? And what if Spain had been a democracy? You can bet that Chris would have brought back a hold full of crap to pass around to anyone who could read, with certificates saying it was from the New WoOOOorld.
If RIAA attacks P2P networks with the stated intention of protecting their copyright, wouldn't systems for countering that specific threat be in violation of the DMCA?
It would seem defensible if it were framed as an effort to make P2P more robust in general, but to describe it as a hedge against actions of the copyright holders, IMHO, opens them up for some serious deep-pocket litigation.
Red light has the shortest wavelength possible, which is why it is used for mice. A small movement will then correspond to a large number of wavelengths, making tracking the mouse's position easier. If you switch to blue, the longest possible wavelength, your mouse will be essentially useless.
Uh, wrong. Red LED's emit at wavelengths of 640-700 nanometers, while blue LED's emit in the 430-475 nm range. Red LED's are used because they're cheap and plentiful, not because they have the shortest wavelength.
Besides, even a high-res, 1600DPI optical mouse only has to detect changes on the order of 625,000 nanometers, so any wavelength within the spectrum of commercially-available LED's will do, so long as the sensor will pick it up.
I suppose it's the height of hubris to second-guess the brains at IBM, but it seems to me that the benefits of such a system would be limited to a relatively few applications. Research firms and departments could supplement their processing power with grid computing, and brokerages could use it for getting better performance out of their already-parallelized market analysis tools. I'm sure there are some other applications as well. But as for the other 96% of the computing market, isn't it generally more cost-effective to add another CPU to the New York office than to set up a high-bandwidth, low-latency connection to the London computing center^H^Hre to use a CPU there?
The problem, it seems to me, is that CPU's are so darn cheap now. Barring SETI@Home and such, when was the last time that the processor in your desktop/notebook/PDA needed more power, and would have benefitted from a connection to additional computing, or even supercomputing, power elsewhere?
Let's take it to an extreme. Suppose you have access to two computers, both with equivalent Internet access:
A 1.3GHz machine with 128MB of RAM and a gigabit connection to your own private network of Cray 2K3's across town;
A 2.6GHz machine with 512MB of RAM and no outside resources.
Which is going to do the kind of work you do faster? Seems to me that it will always be cheaper and more effective to add processing power to the machine that you have, rather than add connections to machines that you don't.
Of course, this only applies to CPU power, not to information. If IBM applied these concepts to some sort of hyper-efficient all-inclusive datamining resource (think Snow Crash's Central Intelligence Corporation), I think they could make the Web as we know it look like a used comic-book stand. Just give me a Quad-Clawhammer PC with 4GB of RAM, a TB of RAID, and a VDSL connection to IBM Global DataMine, and I'll gladly take out a second mortgage.
For those who really don't remember (or who followed a different track to geekdom), executing that line on your TRS-80 Color Computer would make ROM cartridge programs run twice as fast, and bump up your BASIC program speed by about 50%. Of course, you'd better POKE 65496,0 when you're done, so your 'half-fast' cassette recorder would work again.
It wasn't all that noticeable with a single machine, but I once had a Beowulf cluster of these babies, and...
An article from last year with more info
on
Bacteria @ 41km
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· Score: 2
This article appeared on SpaceDaily over a year ago, and provides a bit more detail:
New Evidence Of Living Bacteria From Space Cardiff - July 29, 2001
Claims of evidence of living bacterial cells entering the Earth's upper atmosphere from space has come from a joint project involving Indian and UK scientists.
The first positive identification of extraterrestrial microbial life will be reported on Sunday, 29 July 2001 at the Astrobiology session of the 46th Annual SPIE meeting in San Diego, USA by Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe of Cardiff University. He will speak on behalf of an international team led by Professor Jayant Narlikar, Director of the Inter-Universities Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, India.
Samples of stratospheric air were collected on 21 January 2001 under the most stringent aseptic conditions by Indian scientists using the Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) cryogenic sampler payload flown on balloons from the Tata Institute Balloon Launching facility in Hyderabad. Part of the samples sent to Cardiff were analysed by a team at Cardiff University led by Professor David Lloyd and assisted by Melanie Harris.
Commenting on the results, Professor Wickramasinghe said: "There is now unambiguous evidence for the presence of clumps of living cells in air samples from as high as 41 kilometres, well above the local tropopause (16 km), above which no air from lower down would normally be transported."
The detection was made using a fluorescent cyanine dye which is only taken up by the membranes of living cells. The variation with height of the distribution of such cells indicates strongly that the clumps of bacterial cells are falling from space. The daily input of such biological material is provisionally estimated as about one third of a tonne over the entire planet.
This new evidence provides strong support for the Panspermia theory of Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe.
"We have argued for more than two decades that terrestrial life was brought down to Earth by comets and that cometary material containing microorganisms must still be reaching us in large quantities," said Professor Wickramasinghe.
-- 1 Corinthians 1:18-31 makes even more sense since Watson and Crick, doesn't it?
Or we could just change ourselves to match the climate. Has to be easier than developing terraforming technology capable of dealing with all the environments we may encounter...
Why would you assume this? AFAIK, the only seriously-proposed near-term genetic engineering techniques have been the equivalent of cutting and pasting, or commenting and uncommenting, lines of programming code. What you're describing would require the ability to design whole new capabilities (methane-breathing, for example) into the genome. Of course, that would require the redesign of the entire system, so even if we can eventually pull it off, you've simply created a new species loosely based on homo sapiens, and essentially left all those "new worlds" closed to the rest of us. What's the point?
Why would we take such a tack on other worlds when we don't even attempt it with mildly inhospitable Earth environments? Is your air conditioner or heater on right now? Is your tap water purified and chlorinated? It would be easier to simply adapt to your local climate and water supply than to develop refrigeration and water purification technologies, but the former limits you to living somewhat comfortably in one climate only, while the latter allows you to travel to any climate without harmful exposure to the elements.
You may be a bit more adventurous than I, but if spaceflight were cheap and fast, I'd have to be pretty convinced that Planet X3141 was the one before I'd submit my progeny to be genetically engineered for its environment. Call me a Luddite, I guess.
Think of the space elevator structure as a 100,000-km-long highway that will require ongoing maintenance and repair," says Smitherman.
How unrealistic can an analogy be? If a crack forms in some remote stretch of interstate, there's no danger of the rest of the interstate system suddenly ripping away and falling into space. Repairs would have to happen instantaneously without ever breaking an almost unimaginable ribbon tension. And this wouldn't be a very rare occurrence, either, as the ribbon would present a surface area of five to eleven million square meters on each side (5 to 11.5 cm wide, 10^8 meters long). And remember that it's on the equator, which every piece of orbiting debris crosses twice during each orbit.
And the only mentioned solution for lightning strikes (one of which could be fatal to the ribbon) seems almost totally unworkable, and doesn't take into account that a 100,000-kilometer-high conductive tower would generate its own lightning. Remember the ill-fated (but educational) Space Tether Experiment? And the tether was only a mile long. A space elevator's ribbon would intersect a huge chord of Earth's magnetic field, including both Van Allen Belts. Seems to me that, even if the ribbon didn't immediately blow like a giant flash-bulb filament, you still couldn't get within a hundred yards of the base due to the continuous electrical discharge.
Don't get me wrong--I've dreamed about space elevators since I was a kid reading about Clarke's hyperfilaments, but the more I think about it, the more unworkable it seems.
"Never before had so small and so harmless an object created such consternation."
They said that about George W's brain, too.
This post has been up for two days and it's now labeled (2, Insightful), thanks to three mod points: Troll, Insightful, Funny. I may see my post dropped to (-1, Offtopic), but I'm willing to spend some karma to say this:
Does anyone else think it ironic that this is a story about a Cold-War era scientific endeavor that was instantly politicized, and now 45 years later, the first posted comment is a political flame? Which was subsequently modded Insightful?
Get real, people. Use your moderation points to improve the dialogue, not to support a political agenda. Call it Funny if you must, but use your head when you mod. Please, for the good of Slashdot, let's try to elevate the discussion.
The single most amazing thing about the bible is that, despite the extrodinary stories written thousands of years ago, not a single one has been proven to be impossible.
Really? Wow, what a bummer. I thought all those things were miracles.
Seriously, are you implying that it's possible to:
make a living man out of clay?
flood the earth to a depth of over 29,000 feet?
turn a staff into a snake and back again?
stop the sun from moving in the sky?
raise a man from the dead after three days?
The significance of the Biblical story is not that it's never been proven impossible, but that it's never been proven incorrect. Archaeological discoveries have time after time reinforced the historical accuracy of both the old and new testaments. If all the miracles were mere inventions, why would the rest of this massive text have been kept so accurate? There's no reason at all, so I'm inclined to believe that the miracles occurred as well.
One that truly amazes me is the miracle at Bethsaida (Mark 8:22-26), where Jesus healed a blind man. Suddenly the man could see, but he perceived people to be like "trees, walking around." Jesus touched him again, and he could see clearly. Not until John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding is the concept mentioned in literature, that vision might require experience to be properly interpreted. A writer in the first century would have naturally assumed that someone whose eyes were healed would immediately see, regardless of how long they'd been blind. This story, however, presents a man who was healed twice, for reasons that would not become clear until the mid-twentieth century. Anyone reading this passage without an awareness of the neurological basis of sight would simply believe that, for some unknown reason, Jesus at first healed this man only halfway (something not done anywhere else in the Scriptures). Only a modern reader can see what the ancient writer could have only understood by inspiration: Two miracles had occurred, and the second was even more astonishing than the first.
Was it possible? Of course not. Did it happen? I am convinced that it did.
Now, as for the hailstones... in the book of Revelation, the original Greek indicates that they weighed one talent. According to a handy dictionary, "A talent of silver contained 3,000 shekels (Exodus 38:25,26) and was equal to 94 3/7 lbs. avoirdupois. The Greek talent, however, as in the LXX., was only 82 1/4 lbs. It was in
the form of a circular mass, as the Hebrew name kikkar denotes. A talent of gold was double the weight of a talent of silver. (2nd Samuel 12:30)"
So if you've been reading the apocalyptic Left Behind book series and you're afraid of being pelted with hundred-pound hailstones, relax. They may only be 82-pounders.
why on earth hasn't hollywood suggested, and gotten a.movie (.mov) or.film (.flm) suffix for all movie websites? I'm REALLY sick of seeing advertizements with urls attached like "reallylongmoviename_themovie.net" and such.
I'd rather see them not even use domain names at all, and instead follow Sony Pictures' example of placing all their movie sites under the studio's domain.
Instead, I'd like to see them add a domain ".dum" for all stupid websites.
Let me say, though, that I think your post was quite on-topic, insofar as the original post was of interest to/.'ers. (Personally, I think the most amazing thing about this story is that these links appear, so far, to be unslashdottable.) but does anyone know how "OT" came into use as shorthand for "off-topic?" What's the shorthand for "on-topic?"
Slashdot Mirror
"Mr. Bezos once logged onto Amazon.com (amazon.com) to show how it caters to his interests."
What a helpful link! I almost had a heart attack from laughing so hard. Anybody know the number to 911?
I understand that this security/usability patch will correct virtually all the problems with IE to which the BBS objects. Of course, it's a pretty complete patch...
I've still got 2.5 megabytes of download credit to use up on Rusty & Edie's, but for some reason the phone number doesn't work any more.
The name/address question was redundant, since they're now doing retina scans as folks enter the store. The bell actually indicates a database match.
Ding!
Who ARE you?
Someone weird, apparently. The passage is an excerpt from the manifesto published widely in 1996 and written by Theodore J. Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber. I'm surprised to see it broadly quoted here, but not surprised that it's posted by A.C. I really don't like that guy.
Sorry, I just felt like being a stupid OT whiner today...
Are you suggesting that you aren't usually stupid, offtopic, or a whiner? Or that you aren't usually all three at once?
A quick scan of the page about you indicates that you've posted 18 times in the last year, and that most of your posts are along the lines of "This story SUCKS!" or "Yeah, me too!" Have you noticed that you've only garnered ONE positive mod point so far? That's a good sign that you aren't making good decisions about what, when and how to post.
You seem like a bright guy. Look back at the comments that you've enjoyed or learned from. What made them worthwhile to you? What made someone else mod them as Interesting, Insightful or Funny? Take some guidance from that when you post your own comments. Even those of us who have maxed out our karma still post comments that get modded down (I expect this one will get an Offtopic or two), but if you aren't being modded up on the average, you have to wonder if your posts are adding to the discussion at all. Pour some of your intellect, experience, and wit into your comments, and we'll all be better off for it.
--
Why not read the FAQ?
After the tragic and untimely death of your wife Nerine, a recovering alcoholic, you took the courageous step of establishing a fund in her name to benefit Friendly House, an organization for recovering alcoholics. How is that work progressing, and has your involvement with this effort helped you work through this loss?
I know that this subject must be painful for you, but I'm sure there are many in the slashdot community who would benefit from your experience and insights here.
First of all, who cares?
;) Yes, an ellipsis would have been fine (I can't believe I'm involved in this discussion), but his version of the one-line quote had four inaccuracies, of which the omission of Horatio's name was only one. Proximo satis pro administratio, I suppose, but surely deserving of a goodhearted jab, considering that it sigged a joke about grading on the curve.
You do, Descartes, or you would not have replied.
Second, couldn't it just be "There are more things in heaven and earth...than are dremt of in your philosophy." instead? ellipsis!
Actually, that's "dreamt."
Now, a bit of on-topic humor...
The long-jumping champ from Algiers
Reduced his onlookers to tears
when in celebration
expressing elation
He bashed in his head with halteres.
There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy. -- Shakespeare's Hamlet
The actual line is, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Hamlet says it in Act I, Scene 5, IIRC.
...this is the yet another result of global warming.
People, we've already lost Venus to corporate carelessness and greed, and now Io is being turned into a wasteland! How many more Jovian moons must be covered in molten rock and sulfurous ash and before all the evil American companies wake up? The Face on Mars weeps for us all!!!
Please forgive my emotional tirade; I'm just upset because Stephen King died again.
__________
As a counterweight to the preceding foolishness, I'll add some meaningful data to the discussion by correcting the following line of the press release:
"The Surt eruption appears to cover an area of 1,900 square kilometers, which is larger than the city of Los Angeles and even larger than the entire city of London," Marchis said.
The city of Los Angeles covers 5,959 km^2, and London covers 4,147 km^2, so the eruption wasn't even half as large as either of them. Even Melbourne, at 2,027 km^2, would not have been completely covered by the lava flow, though I'm sure tourism would have been affected.
How about a "loopback" line-item veto?
Scenario: The President vetoes a couple of items, and thus "'passes' a statute other than Congress intended," as you aptly pointed out. The line-item-vetoed bill automatically goes back to Congress just like a vetoed bill, with one possible action added: Congress can vote on the bill as vetoed. If passed, it immediately becomes law without a return trip to the White House.
IMHO, that would keep the President's legislative power in check, while giving him an official feedback channel in the process. The possibilities for additional checks and balances that this system would provide seem to be worth examining.
Don't tell me, this is an old idea, right? Okay, go ahead and tell me.
No, I'm sorry, I don't equate moon rocks with Bryan Adams and Michael Bolton CDs that somehow become magical items of Immense Value and Rarity once they escape the earth's atmosphere.
You didn't mention the Michael Bolton CD's in your original post! I am in total agreement now, and retract my earlier reply with my deepest apologies. Since his tripe has infected over 50 million discs, destroying all affected media in this manner would be horribly inefficient.
Now, if they carried Bolton himself into orbit (in the cargo bay, of course), that would be an investment of taxpayers' money that all Slashdotters could get behind.
And as for the NASA employee's $900 wall hanging, my opinion is this: if it would be inappropriate to write that employee a $900 check, it would be just as inappropriate to spend public money on a $900 gift.
You're right that junk carried into space and back don't carry the cachet of stuff really FROM space, like the moonrock I mentioned. Sadly, though, our current space program doesn't include a lot of sample-return mass; most missions only bring in what they took out (the Bolton deployment mission would be a happy exception).
Plans have been scraped?? Ow! That must hurt!
That would make it a planed release, wouldn't it?
Actually it makes sense. Remember Gattaca? They were probably just scraping off the Windows DNA to hide its defective genetic code.
they probably should give me a medal for being an astronaught by proxy.
.01-ounce certificate that flew into orbit. So some Senator or Congressman who's supported our space program to the tune of a few billion in appropriations gets a $900 frame for a piece of space junk that will inspire some influential visitor to say, as you so aptly put it, "wow, it was in spaAAAce." So some astronaut who's devoted his career to the hope that someday he'd get picked for a mission, gets to take a few things he can share with his kids and grandkids. Why can't you just let it ride?
After seeing your portrait of Richard Stallman, I'd agree that you qualify as having been to spaAAAace.
As for the rest of your tirade, I'm sorry, but I don't buy a bit of it. I visited the Smithsonian as a small child, and my only tactile memory of the event is that of touching a small rock that had once been on the Moon. That memory inspired me for years, and was one of the reasons I pursued a career in the hard sciences. How many others have been inspired by some piece of junk that a jaded Houston frame-shop worker wouldn't deign to touch, were she not being paid to do so?
So some secretary who's worked for twenty years at NASA gets a
Do you really think that if Columbus hadn't brought anything back from the Americas, and there hadn't been any alien trinkets to pass around at the Court of King Ferdinand, that there'd have been as much interest to go back? And what if Spain had been a democracy? You can bet that Chris would have brought back a hold full of crap to pass around to anyone who could read, with certificates saying it was from the New WoOOOorld.
If RIAA attacks P2P networks with the stated intention of protecting their copyright, wouldn't systems for countering that specific threat be in violation of the DMCA?
It would seem defensible if it were framed as an effort to make P2P more robust in general, but to describe it as a hedge against actions of the copyright holders, IMHO, opens them up for some serious deep-pocket litigation.
Red light has the shortest wavelength possible, which is why it is used for mice. A small movement will then correspond to a large number of wavelengths, making tracking the mouse's position easier. If you switch to blue, the longest possible wavelength, your mouse will be essentially useless.
Uh, wrong. Red LED's emit at wavelengths of 640-700 nanometers, while blue LED's emit in the 430-475 nm range. Red LED's are used because they're cheap and plentiful, not because they have the shortest wavelength.
Besides, even a high-res, 1600DPI optical mouse only has to detect changes on the order of 625,000 nanometers, so any wavelength within the spectrum of commercially-available LED's will do, so long as the sensor will pick it up.
The problem, it seems to me, is that CPU's are so darn cheap now. Barring SETI@Home and such, when was the last time that the processor in your desktop/notebook/PDA needed more power, and would have benefitted from a connection to additional computing, or even supercomputing, power elsewhere?
Let's take it to an extreme. Suppose you have access to two computers, both with equivalent Internet access:
- A 1.3GHz machine with 128MB of RAM and a gigabit connection to your own private network of Cray 2K3's across town;
- A 2.6GHz machine with 512MB of RAM and no outside resources.
Which is going to do the kind of work you do faster? Seems to me that it will always be cheaper and more effective to add processing power to the machine that you have, rather than add connections to machines that you don't.Of course, this only applies to CPU power, not to information. If IBM applied these concepts to some sort of hyper-efficient all-inclusive datamining resource (think Snow Crash's Central Intelligence Corporation), I think they could make the Web as we know it look like a used comic-book stand. Just give me a Quad-Clawhammer PC with 4GB of RAM, a TB of RAID, and a VDSL connection to IBM Global DataMine, and I'll gladly take out a second mortgage.
"[long list of world's evils, tragedies, scandals & crises], and you people have the gall to be discussing [tech-related news item]????"
You forgot to mention that Steven King died again today.
--
"They've got a cave troll!" -- Boromir
For those who really don't remember (or who followed a different track to geekdom), executing that line on your TRS-80 Color Computer would make ROM cartridge programs run twice as fast, and bump up your BASIC program speed by about 50%. Of course, you'd better POKE 65496,0 when you're done, so your 'half-fast' cassette recorder would work again.
It wasn't all that noticeable with a single machine, but I once had a Beowulf cluster of these babies, and...
This article appeared on SpaceDaily over a year ago, and provides a bit more detail:
New Evidence Of Living Bacteria From Space
Cardiff - July 29, 2001
Claims of evidence of living bacterial cells entering the Earth's upper atmosphere from space has come from a joint project involving Indian and UK scientists.
The first positive identification of extraterrestrial microbial life will be reported on Sunday, 29 July 2001 at the Astrobiology session of the 46th Annual SPIE meeting in San Diego, USA by Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe of Cardiff University. He will speak on behalf of an international team led by Professor Jayant Narlikar, Director of the Inter-Universities Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, India.
Samples of stratospheric air were collected on 21 January 2001 under the most stringent aseptic conditions by Indian scientists using the Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) cryogenic sampler payload flown on balloons from the Tata Institute Balloon Launching facility in Hyderabad. Part of the samples sent to Cardiff were analysed by a team at Cardiff University led by Professor David Lloyd and assisted by Melanie Harris.
Commenting on the results, Professor Wickramasinghe said: "There is now unambiguous evidence for the presence of clumps of living cells in air samples from as high as 41 kilometres, well above the local tropopause (16 km), above which no air from lower down would normally be transported."
The detection was made using a fluorescent cyanine dye which is only taken up by the membranes of living cells. The variation with height of the distribution of such cells indicates strongly that the clumps of bacterial cells are falling from space. The daily input of such biological material is provisionally estimated as about one third of a tonne over the entire planet.
This new evidence provides strong support for the Panspermia theory of Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe.
"We have argued for more than two decades that terrestrial life was brought down to Earth by comets and that cometary material containing microorganisms must still be reaching us in large quantities," said Professor Wickramasinghe.
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1 Corinthians 1:18-31 makes even more sense since Watson and Crick, doesn't it?
Or we could just change ourselves to match the climate. Has to be easier than developing terraforming technology capable of dealing with all the environments we may encounter...
Why would you assume this? AFAIK, the only seriously-proposed near-term genetic engineering techniques have been the equivalent of cutting and pasting, or commenting and uncommenting, lines of programming code. What you're describing would require the ability to design whole new capabilities (methane-breathing, for example) into the genome. Of course, that would require the redesign of the entire system, so even if we can eventually pull it off, you've simply created a new species loosely based on homo sapiens, and essentially left all those "new worlds" closed to the rest of us. What's the point?
Why would we take such a tack on other worlds when we don't even attempt it with mildly inhospitable Earth environments? Is your air conditioner or heater on right now? Is your tap water purified and chlorinated? It would be easier to simply adapt to your local climate and water supply than to develop refrigeration and water purification technologies, but the former limits you to living somewhat comfortably in one climate only, while the latter allows you to travel to any climate without harmful exposure to the elements.
You may be a bit more adventurous than I, but if spaceflight were cheap and fast, I'd have to be pretty convinced that Planet X3141 was the one before I'd submit my progeny to be genetically engineered for its environment. Call me a Luddite, I guess.
Think of the space elevator structure as a 100,000-km-long highway that will require ongoing maintenance and repair," says Smitherman.
How unrealistic can an analogy be? If a crack forms in some remote stretch of interstate, there's no danger of the rest of the interstate system suddenly ripping away and falling into space. Repairs would have to happen instantaneously without ever breaking an almost unimaginable ribbon tension. And this wouldn't be a very rare occurrence, either, as the ribbon would present a surface area of five to eleven million square meters on each side (5 to 11.5 cm wide, 10^8 meters long). And remember that it's on the equator, which every piece of orbiting debris crosses twice during each orbit.
And the only mentioned solution for lightning strikes (one of which could be fatal to the ribbon) seems almost totally unworkable, and doesn't take into account that a 100,000-kilometer-high conductive tower would generate its own lightning. Remember the ill-fated (but educational) Space Tether Experiment? And the tether was only a mile long. A space elevator's ribbon would intersect a huge chord of Earth's magnetic field, including both Van Allen Belts. Seems to me that, even if the ribbon didn't immediately blow like a giant flash-bulb filament, you still couldn't get within a hundred yards of the base due to the continuous electrical discharge.
Don't get me wrong--I've dreamed about space elevators since I was a kid reading about Clarke's hyperfilaments, but the more I think about it, the more unworkable it seems.
"Never before had so small and so harmless an object created such consternation."
They said that about George W's brain, too.
This post has been up for two days and it's now labeled (2, Insightful), thanks to three mod points: Troll, Insightful, Funny. I may see my post dropped to (-1, Offtopic), but I'm willing to spend some karma to say this:
Does anyone else think it ironic that this is a story about a Cold-War era scientific endeavor that was instantly politicized, and now 45 years later, the first posted comment is a political flame? Which was subsequently modded Insightful?
Get real, people. Use your moderation points to improve the dialogue, not to support a political agenda. Call it Funny if you must, but use your head when you mod. Please, for the good of Slashdot, let's try to elevate the discussion.
Focus, Trinity.
Really? Wow, what a bummer. I thought all those things were miracles.
Seriously, are you implying that it's possible to:
- make a living man out of clay?
- flood the earth to a depth of over 29,000 feet?
- turn a staff into a snake and back again?
- stop the sun from moving in the sky?
- raise a man from the dead after three days?
The significance of the Biblical story is not that it's never been proven impossible, but that it's never been proven incorrect. Archaeological discoveries have time after time reinforced the historical accuracy of both the old and new testaments. If all the miracles were mere inventions, why would the rest of this massive text have been kept so accurate? There's no reason at all, so I'm inclined to believe that the miracles occurred as well.One that truly amazes me is the miracle at Bethsaida (Mark 8:22-26), where Jesus healed a blind man. Suddenly the man could see, but he perceived people to be like "trees, walking around." Jesus touched him again, and he could see clearly. Not until John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding is the concept mentioned in literature, that vision might require experience to be properly interpreted. A writer in the first century would have naturally assumed that someone whose eyes were healed would immediately see, regardless of how long they'd been blind. This story, however, presents a man who was healed twice, for reasons that would not become clear until the mid-twentieth century. Anyone reading this passage without an awareness of the neurological basis of sight would simply believe that, for some unknown reason, Jesus at first healed this man only halfway (something not done anywhere else in the Scriptures). Only a modern reader can see what the ancient writer could have only understood by inspiration: Two miracles had occurred, and the second was even more astonishing than the first.
Was it possible? Of course not. Did it happen? I am convinced that it did.
Now, as for the hailstones... in the book of Revelation, the original Greek indicates that they weighed one talent. According to a handy dictionary, "A talent of silver contained 3,000 shekels (Exodus 38:25,26) and was equal to 94 3/7 lbs. avoirdupois. The Greek talent, however, as in the LXX., was only 82 1/4 lbs. It was in the form of a circular mass, as the Hebrew name kikkar denotes. A talent of gold was double the weight of a talent of silver. (2nd Samuel 12:30)"
So if you've been reading the apocalyptic Left Behind book series and you're afraid of being pelted with hundred-pound hailstones, relax. They may only be 82-pounders.
why on earth hasn't hollywood suggested, and gotten a .movie (.mov) or .film (.flm) suffix for all movie websites? I'm REALLY sick of seeing advertizements with urls attached like "reallylongmoviename_themovie.net" and such.
/.'ers. (Personally, I think the most amazing thing about this story is that these links appear, so far, to be unslashdottable.) but does anyone know how "OT" came into use as shorthand for "off-topic?" What's the shorthand for "on-topic?"
I'd rather see them not even use domain names at all, and instead follow Sony Pictures' example of placing all their movie sites under the studio's domain.
Instead, I'd like to see them add a domain ".dum" for all stupid websites.
Let me say, though, that I think your post was quite on-topic, insofar as the original post was of interest to