I agree when I'm somewhere and see something that I want a photo of I'll want a good quality photo. When phones can take 10M-12M pixel images with, say, a zoom equivalent to a 35mm camera's 20mm-200mm, then we'll have something. Make that a macro lense as well, will ya. (Oh yeah... it's also gotta be light enough and small enough to fit in my pocket when I'm out on my bike or out on a run.)
OK, I know you're asking for the moon on a stick here to make a point:) But...
Do you really want 10-12 Mpix on a phone-sized sensor? At that pixel density the signal/noise is lousy, and the noise reduction will destroy the detail anyway (assuming the lens is good enough for there to be any point in all of those pixels in the first place). A phone-sized sensor would give better pictures with fewer pixels plus a better lens and jpeg engine, but that isn't as easy to turn into a marketing soundbite.
You are right: in particular, electron + positron normally annihilate to produce 2 511 keV gammas, which is a very distinctive signature indeed. So if this was a large M/AM event not only would NASA know what it was, but they'd be able to use the red shift to locate it somewhat better than "outside our galaxy but within the visible universe".
The absence of this signature generally (except near highly energetic phenomena which are themselves capable of producing antimatter) is a major reason we believe that the universe is composed entirely of matter, as opposed to having matter-dominated and antimatter-dominated regions, e.g. AM galaxies would be identifiable from the gammas produced when their interstellar (anti)gas met the intergalactic medium.
Okay I'm not an engineer or a physicist, so I was a bit fuzzy on this whole area here. I was working it from 1m per second acceleration every single meter traversed (based on distance not time elapsed), bringing you to 11,000m/s when you pop out the top; am I completely off base in that? Assuming I am, how much taller would the tower need to be built to get escape velocity,
1 m/s^2 acceleration means that for every second which passes you gain 1m/s in velocity (not 1m/s for every meter travelled). Thus to get to escape velocity at 1 m/s acceleration you must accelerate for about 11,000 seconds (3 hours). There's a little formula based on Newton's laws we can now use:
With initial velocity = 0, then the height of the tower to reach escape velocity at 1m/s^2 acceleration = 0.5*1*11,000*11,000 = 60,500 km. This is about 1.7* the radius of a geostationary orbit.
or would adding chemical propellants once it is clear of the tower have much effect? Certainly much, much less propellant would be required in the latter case than is currently needed, I think.
Your velocity when you exit the 11km tower is small compared with escape velocity, about 150 m/s for 1m/s^2 acceleration. This will increase as the square root of the acceleration, so for any acceleration that a human can survive you will still exit at a few percent of escape velocity. Better than nothing, but a lot of work still to do.
Of course, if you start from higher, the escape velocity will itself be lower: the gravitational potential energy of an object is proportional to 1/distance from the centre of the Earth (gravitational force is 1/distance^2). However, since the radius of the Earth is 6378km, the extra 11km of the tower doesn't help much - a fraction of a percent.
So you've saved the fuel needed for the first few % of the acceleration (which are the most expensive %), and you have less air resistance to overcome, but while I've not done the sums here I would guess that the net payoff isn't the revolution you are looking for.
and, above all, i want to be able to maintain sessions on a lot of sites. increasintly, if you don't have cookies, holding a session is impossible (unique id's on the getline are going the way of the dodo) and, increasingly, sites want you to maintain sessions to do anything useful.
Only reason I allow them. But for this there is no need for the cookie to persist after the session, and hence my browsers are set to delete all cookies when I close the program.
Cookies which don't serve such purposes (e.g. most 3rd party cookies, anything at all from certain domains) are blocked anyway.
Sounds like the e680 (Linux, touchscreen, no numeric keypad, just onscreen version where needed). It's silver on the front, black on the back. Think that one's a TFT rather than an OLED though.
Can find specs on www.gsmarena.com, or a user review in www.howardforums.com (see motorola section - use search if no recent posts on that thread). Though I think gsmarena have the length wrong (their claimed 124mm would make it longer than the SE 910, but the review above has photos of the two together, and it is clearly shorter).
There is also a "big brother" coming out - a780, with flip cover (and keys and speaker on the outside of the flip, for those who want to pretend it's a normal candybar phone).
If price is right these look interesting devices. I worry about the robustness of an exposed touchscreen though (I treat my Palm much more carefully than my phone!)
Not finding the Higgs at LHC energies would arguably be more interesting than finding it:-)
But whatever the case, the LHC will allow us to study some aspect of the electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism (normally ascribed to the Higgs). If there is a Higgs boson, then either it
must be lighter than about 800 GeV (well within the range the LHC is designed to study) or else there must be other new physics at around this energy. Otherwise, calculations for e.g. the scattering of W and Z bosons become nonsensical at around this energy - so by studying such processes we learn something about the mechanism, whatever it turns out to be.
Supersymmetry is trickier. I'm sure that if you just want SUSY as part of your pet theory of quantum gravity it doesn't need to be accessible at the LHC. However, if there is a fundamental Higgs boson, the easiest way of stabilising its mass (i.e. keeping it on the scale above, rather than at the much higher scale grand unification or gravity) is if supersymmetric particles exist at a similar mass scale (they take the opposite signs to normal particles in the radiative corrections, so cancel out the effects which would naturally make the Higgs extremely heavy).
So if there is no fundamental Higgs, there is no particular reason why supersymmetry has to exist in the LHC energy range either (though, as said above, there must be something doing the Higg's job, and that does have to show at least part of its face). But if there is a Higgs, then there is good reason to think that we might get SUSY as well.
I'd vote for "better beer" (though there is the bottled Czech stuff:-).
Actually you used to be able to get beer at breakfast (or any other time), which could be handy if you were doing night shifts at one of the experiments. One way in which things have gone backwards (though still way better than SLAC in that respect!).
Re:Email postage will get abused by spammers
on
Gates on Spam
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· Score: 1
The point about spam originating from trojaned Windows boxes is probably why Gates isn't proposing payment directly in cash.
Imagine: I receive a huge bill because my system is compromised due to a weakness in Windows (note: ficticious example!). I'd be tempted to sue M$, and I'm not even American:-)
Now maybe the "we accept no responsibility for anything" clause in the user agreement would stand up in court, and maybe it wouldn't. But now imagine that the hole was known to M$, but they were relying on obscurity to keep it "safe" (sic). Little guy against big bad monopolist who was selling faulty software, knew it was faulty, but didn't even warn me? Who do you reckon the jury would side with? And either way, how much would the publicity cost?
So no, I can't imagine any OS vendor (esp. M$) really wanting sending email to cost real money.
The impression I got from the cinematic release was that Denethor was mad because he had lost Boromir, his heir, and no longer cared what happened.
Of course I hope the extended DVD will show the rest of that story, but it seemed to me that as it stood his behaviour should be explicable to someone who hadn't read the book, even if that person would only get half of the reason.
That is also how it will work at the LHC - write it out and analyse it later. But unlike Seti@home there isn't a single analysis which will be run on this stuff. Everybody has their own projects which they will be running on their own (subsets) of the data. With PetaBytes/annum of data (even after all of the real-time filtering and compression) this is a pretty big task.
The full rate (real time, unfiltered, non zero-suppressed) for one of these detectors is *much* higher (40 million collisions/second * 10**7 channels of readout electronics). That's the real-time problem, and that is nothing to do with the Grid.
Actually some manufacturers (Motorola, Ericsson) are making their high-end GSM phone tri-band (900/1800/1900), so there is no technical reason why these cannot appear in the States at the same time as in Europe/rest-of-world. I guess the Motos probably do (if not earlier), while the Erics seem to take a little longer to get to the States (how much is manufacturer and how much is networks though?).
Nokia, however, seem to regard this as not worth the effort (they explicitly said last year that tri-band was not a priority for them). Odd, since it would mean you could get your new handsets into all GSM markets at once, and must save development costs over making 2 versions. OTOH, Nokia seem to have been rather complacent recently, and for me at least the new phones don't change that (I suspect the phone which started this thread will be very much a niche product, though they may prove me wrong).
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I agree when I'm somewhere and see something that I want a photo of I'll want a good quality photo. When phones can take 10M-12M pixel images with, say, a zoom equivalent to a 35mm camera's 20mm-200mm, then we'll have something. Make that a macro lense as well, will ya. (Oh yeah... it's also gotta be light enough and small enough to fit in my pocket when I'm out on my bike or out on a run.)
OK, I know you're asking for the moon on a stick here to make a point :) But...
Do you really want 10-12 Mpix on a phone-sized sensor? At that pixel density the signal/noise is lousy, and the noise reduction will destroy the detail anyway (assuming the lens is good enough for there to be any point in all of those pixels in the first place). A phone-sized sensor would give better pictures with fewer pixels plus a better lens and jpeg engine, but that isn't as easy to turn into a marketing soundbite.
The absence of this signature generally (except near highly energetic phenomena which are themselves capable of producing antimatter) is a major reason we believe that the universe is composed entirely of matter, as opposed to having matter-dominated and antimatter-dominated regions, e.g. AM galaxies would be identifiable from the gammas produced when their interstellar (anti)gas met the intergalactic medium.
1 m/s^2 acceleration means that for every second which passes you gain 1m/s in velocity (not 1m/s for every meter travelled). Thus to get to escape velocity at 1 m/s acceleration you must accelerate for about 11,000 seconds (3 hours). There's a little formula based on Newton's laws we can now use:
distance travelled = initial velocity*time + 0.5*acceleration*time^2
With initial velocity = 0, then the height of the tower to reach escape velocity at 1m/s^2 acceleration = 0.5*1*11,000*11,000 = 60,500 km. This is about 1.7* the radius of a geostationary orbit.
or would adding chemical propellants once it is clear of the tower have much effect? Certainly much, much less propellant would be required in the latter case than is currently needed, I think.
Your velocity when you exit the 11km tower is small compared with escape velocity, about 150 m/s for 1m/s^2 acceleration. This will increase as the square root of the acceleration, so for any acceleration that a human can survive you will still exit at a few percent of escape velocity. Better than nothing, but a lot of work still to do.
Of course, if you start from higher, the escape velocity will itself be lower: the gravitational potential energy of an object is proportional to 1/distance from the centre of the Earth (gravitational force is 1/distance^2). However, since the radius of the Earth is 6378km, the extra 11km of the tower doesn't help much - a fraction of a percent.
So you've saved the fuel needed for the first few % of the acceleration (which are the most expensive %), and you have less air resistance to overcome, but while I've not done the sums here I would guess that the net payoff isn't the revolution you are looking for.
and, above all, i want to be able to maintain sessions on a lot of sites. increasintly, if you don't have cookies, holding a session is impossible (unique id's on the getline are going the way of the dodo) and, increasingly, sites want you to maintain sessions to do anything useful.
Only reason I allow them. But for this there is no need for the cookie to persist after the session, and hence my browsers are set to delete all cookies when I close the program.
Cookies which don't serve such purposes (e.g. most 3rd party cookies, anything at all from certain domains) are blocked anyway.
Can find specs on www.gsmarena.com, or a user review in www.howardforums.com (see motorola section - use search if no recent posts on that thread). Though I think gsmarena have the length wrong (their claimed 124mm would make it longer than the SE 910, but the review above has photos of the two together, and it is clearly shorter).
There is also a "big brother" coming out - a780, with flip cover (and keys and speaker on the outside of the flip, for those who want to pretend it's a normal candybar phone).
If price is right these look interesting devices. I worry about the robustness of an exposed touchscreen though (I treat my Palm much more carefully than my phone!)
But whatever the case, the LHC will allow us to study some aspect of the electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism (normally ascribed to the Higgs). If there is a Higgs boson, then either it must be lighter than about 800 GeV (well within the range the LHC is designed to study) or else there must be other new physics at around this energy. Otherwise, calculations for e.g. the scattering of W and Z bosons become nonsensical at around this energy - so by studying such processes we learn something about the mechanism, whatever it turns out to be.
Supersymmetry is trickier. I'm sure that if you just want SUSY as part of your pet theory of quantum gravity it doesn't need to be accessible at the LHC. However, if there is a fundamental Higgs boson, the easiest way of stabilising its mass (i.e. keeping it on the scale above, rather than at the much higher scale grand unification or gravity) is if supersymmetric particles exist at a similar mass scale (they take the opposite signs to normal particles in the radiative corrections, so cancel out the effects which would naturally make the Higgs extremely heavy).
So if there is no fundamental Higgs, there is no particular reason why supersymmetry has to exist in the LHC energy range either (though, as said above, there must be something doing the Higg's job, and that does have to show at least part of its face). But if there is a Higgs, then there is good reason to think that we might get SUSY as well.
I'd vote for "better beer" (though there is the bottled Czech stuff :-).
Actually you used to be able to get beer at breakfast (or any other time), which could be handy if you were doing night shifts at one of the experiments. One way in which things have gone backwards (though still way better than SLAC in that respect!).
The point about spam originating from trojaned Windows boxes is probably why Gates isn't proposing payment directly in cash.
:-)
Imagine: I receive a huge bill because my system is compromised due to a weakness in Windows (note: ficticious example!). I'd be tempted to sue M$, and I'm not even American
Now maybe the "we accept no responsibility for anything" clause in the user agreement would stand up in court, and maybe it wouldn't. But now imagine that the hole was known to M$, but they were relying on obscurity to keep it "safe" (sic). Little guy against big bad monopolist who was selling faulty software, knew it was faulty, but didn't even warn me? Who do you reckon the jury would side with? And either way, how much would the publicity cost?
So no, I can't imagine any OS vendor (esp. M$) really wanting sending email to cost real money.
The impression I got from the cinematic release was that Denethor was mad because he had lost Boromir, his heir, and no longer cared what happened. Of course I hope the extended DVD will show the rest of that story, but it seemed to me that as it stood his behaviour should be explicable to someone who hadn't read the book, even if that person would only get half of the reason.
That is also how it will work at the LHC - write it out and analyse it later. But unlike Seti@home there isn't a single analysis which will be run on this stuff. Everybody has their own projects which they will be running on their own (subsets) of the data. With PetaBytes/annum of data (even after all of the real-time filtering and compression) this is a pretty big task.
The full rate (real time, unfiltered, non zero-suppressed) for one of these detectors is *much* higher (40 million collisions/second * 10**7 channels of readout electronics). That's the real-time problem, and that is nothing to do with the Grid.
Actually some manufacturers (Motorola, Ericsson) are making their high-end GSM phone tri-band (900/1800/1900), so there is no technical reason why these cannot appear in the States at the same time as in Europe/rest-of-world. I guess the Motos probably do (if not earlier), while the Erics seem to take a little longer to get to the States (how much is manufacturer and how much is networks though?).
Nokia, however, seem to regard this as not worth the effort (they explicitly said last year that tri-band was not a priority for them). Odd, since it would mean you could get your new handsets into all GSM markets at once, and must save development costs over making 2 versions. OTOH, Nokia seem to have been rather complacent recently, and for me at least the new phones don't change that (I suspect the phone which started this thread will be very much a niche product, though they may prove me wrong).