While our radio radiation will probably become harder to distinguish (this was originally supposed to happen because of cable), we still have oxygen in our atmosphere. Oxygen is too reactive to stick around without being replenished, so it's a pretty good indicator of life. Life isn't necessarily intelligent, but I think that anyone taking a spectrum of Earth would be interested enough to further investigate (like integrating a long time with a big radio telescope, and sending a probe).
True, being radio quiet makes us a much smaller needle in a bigger haystack, but we are starting
(or starting to think about, anyway) our own surveys for oxygen in extrasolar planetary atmospheres, for the same reason.
isn't the name of our star "Sol", hence the Solar system? I was a little surprised to see it labeled "Sun" in the viewer.
I am an astronomer, but this doesn't come up much, so don't assume that I know the official designation. I do know that in practice among English speaking astronomers either "the Sun" or "Sol" is acceptable, with "the Sun" being more common. For the Moon "Luna" is even rarer, but probably still what we're supposed to say. Typically we use "the" and capitalization to avoid confusion.
The point is that the value of the data consists not of the information itself, but of the availability through a service like freedb/cddb. Thus Gracenote did hijack the data. Not the contents, but the value. The value is the time of the thousands of people who typed in the information.
Exactly. Remember that cddb came out before mp3s became popular, so nearly all cddb users already possessed the info, but didn't have it with them at the moment (were at work, but the liner notes were at home, or they just weren't able to rip their eyes away from the monitor).
I've also seen some cddb entries with extended info that isn't in the CD liner notes, added by dedicated fans. For example, 8309a809 has a note about how Sire mixed up the masters of Speaking in Tongues, so there are 2 versions, one a few minutes longer. I don't have the liner notes here to check, but I doubt they include that tidbit.
You're right about people. When they refuse to learn how to use technology, but instead wait for it to adapt to them, they miss out on a lot. It's like this: Horse salesperson: "You can buy this horse and go whereever you want. All you have to do is get on and take a few lessons". Customer: "Get on that? Lessons? No, I'm staying right here on the ground."
Eventually the salesperson replaces the horses with elephants, which can use their trunk to carry things to the customer, while the customer just stands there. More powerful, but slower and more expensive.
Down to brass tacks, someone who refuses to learn how to program, or regular expressions, is never going to be able to safely use a spam filter. Oh, they can use someone else's default settings,
but will never be able to find their own balance between too much crap and having legit email go missing. And their VCR will eternally flash 12:00;-)
I have a non-networked home use for X not being directly tied to the hardware: I run two X servers on my Celeron with a Voodoo 3 card. That way I can leave my work as it is without logging out when I leave the room, and my wife can come in, ctrl-alt-F7 to the other X screen, and do her stuff.
Maybe there's another way to accomplish that (window manager checkpointing everything it's managing?) but I'd like to hear it. (In any OS. I'm not thinking of switching from Linux, but it's been ages since I seriously used anything else, and I'm curious if they can do it.)
Personally, when I'm^H^H^H someone I know is told to RTFM, I assume they meant the Fine manual, and as long as the advice is accurate, I accept it as useful. Not because I haven't already tried reading the manual, but because it lets me know that it is in the manual. Most people, however, are mortally offended by RTFM, if they even know what it means, which seems to encourage flame happy guru wannabes to scream it without even bothering to read the whole question.
Suggestions:
1. Say "It's in the manual." Relatively inoffensive, and universally (with Babelfish) understandable. Make an editor macro if it's too much typing. 2. The questioner probably tried looking, but searched the wrong section/document, or used the wrong term. Advice on what to look for, or best way to do it general, is useful. 3. Read the whole question and make sure it's in the manual before you shoot your mouth off. (Obvious)
The only way pi could be different was if space itself was not "flat" but curved.
Even then pi would still be 3.14159... It can be defined outside of geometry with e^(i pi) = -1. You're right that the circumference of a circle would not be 2 pi r in a curved space, but that doesn't mean it would be 2 P r, where P is some other constant. It would be 2 pi f(r), where f(r) is r for flat space, > r for negatively curved spaces (saddles), and < r for positively curved spaces (i.e. spheroids. Try comparing the (Ant)Arctic Circle to the Equator.). I like to think of curvature as a sort of second derivative of distance, so it shows up in the r part, not the pi part.
But I haven't proved the above. I'd be interested in examples of geometries where C = 2 P r, and A = P r^2, etc., where P is a constant not equal to 3.14159...
Its info page on my GNU/Linux box says assert is a GNU extension. I suppose I could still keep a debugging copy with asserts, and then sed them all out for a shipping copy, or better make configure do it if necessary, but that's work.
This is just gravity, but I can see how it confuses
people, and it's unfortunate that Scientific American doesn't seem to mind. To explain what gravitomagnetism means, let's first explain electromagnetism. Before Maxwell, people knew that
there was an electric force between charges, as in batteries and static electricity, and a magnetic force between currents, which are moving charges. Maxwell unified the electric and magnetic forces (which probably didn't come as a big surprise) and showed that light is a electromagnetic wave (which isn't so obvious).
Gravitomagnetism is just an analogy to electromagnetism since it is the gravitational effect from the motion of masses, as opposed to the gravitostatic force from still masses, which is what we're used to. You've probably heard of gravitational waves, which would have been a much less dramatic term than gravitomagnetism.
To confuse things more, in this case the masses are being moved by electromagnetic waves, so it looks like electromagnetic waves are being coupled to gravitomagnetic waves. This is what is being proposed, but it isn't really a Grand Unification Theory. If you move the masses some other way you can still get gravitomagnetism without electromagnetism.
Good idea, but at first you would have to prevent cyc from developing a heuristic like "while(politician->mouth.open) turn(redlight, on);"
Probably the best way to do that would be to give it an assertion before the debate: "Yes, in theory,
politicians can tell the truth. Sorry, I can't give any examples."
Creating a gravity field is relatively;-) easy, and we've known how since E = mc^2. Energy creates a gravitational field just like mass, so to
give a spacecraft its own "artificial" gravity, we can put either a lot of mass or energy in its floor. Of course getting that much mass into space
is impractical, and not worth the effort. Energy is easier to move, but the effective mass is only E/c^2, and c is pretty large, so you would need a LOT of energy. I think your money would be better spent on velcro.
As a tie-in to superconductivity, a superconductor would be one way to store the energy, but I think current ones are limited in how much they can hold.
I seriously hope they aren't going to allow George W. Bush to input any intelligence into this thing.
Seriously, the article says that cyc already knows enough to check its inputs by crossreferencing and using its vaulted common sense. So it should be Bushproof. Pretty cool, eh?
> But the thing that bugs me most is disk space. Typical inboxes are
> made of 5% to 10% of Text including Headers and HTML. The rest are
> BASE64- (or UU-) encoded pictures, word documents, zip archives and so
> on. The problem here is the encoding which wastes considerable amounts
> of space (at least one third).
It's theoretically possible, if you wrote your own Evolution storage plugin, to change the Content-Transfer-Encoding header value of binary attachments to "binary" (and text attachments to "8bit") before writing the message out to disk (or wherever) thus magically making it so that you no longer save the encoded text of the attachments but rather in-line binary data content. (Yes, it's as easy as setting an enum value in the CamelMimePart structure).
However, you have to be aware of the consequences of this. Most importantly, you will not be able to validate any of your PGP/MIME or S/MIME signed messages as according to the RFCs for these types, the signed MIME parts MUST be treated as opaque (meaning that you may not modify them in any way).
It could still be made useful by adding a "Good signature received from bla bla..." blurb, modifying the message as you said above, then signing the modified message with the user's own key. That way the user would have a trustable receipt that the message was originally signed by the original sender. The only loss would be not being able to pass the message along to someone else with a verifiable sig from the orig sender.
The Mythical Man-Month by Fred somebody-or-other explained years ago how the effectiveness of a team goes up (or perhaps even down) much less than linearly as new members are added.
Supersonic shmupersonic. Doesn't anyone else
recgonize the prescience of that Star Trek episode
where Picard declared some region of space a Warp 4 or less zone, for environmental reasons? It almost
makes up for the Fermat's Last Theorem booboo.;)
I don't think the problem is with anonymous posters, it's with interested parties claiming to be other people. This is a good reason to GPG sign
everything. Seriously, what good is a discussion
if it's polluted by lies under false pretenses?
But the frequency (f = sqrt(g/l)) isn't the same as the speed (v = lf = sqrt(lg)), so the speed does go
up with length (l). I only checked this with dimensional analysis, so I am probably missing a pi/2, but it doesn't matter.
Also Spidey can and does usually start each swing with an initial velocity, and doesn't always stick
to small angles.
You should save entropy by using gunzip, or bunzip2
if you prefer. The output of a good compressor is random (anything nonrandom is a pattern, all patterns should be compressed...), so feeding random bits to a good uncompressor should give you lots and lots of interesting stuff.
A Bachelor of Science degree doesn't imply that the associated field of study is a science.
It does imply exactly that to 99% of people, with good reason.
One can get a bachelor of science in things like performing arts,
Art!
religion,
That'd be putting the B.S. in B.Sc!
I'm all for science (or any) journalists taking science courses, but there's a thing called a minor for that "bit of extra coursework". Part of your employment problem might be the pretentiousnous of your degree.
Slashdot Mirror
True, being radio quiet makes us a much smaller needle in a bigger haystack, but we are starting (or starting to think about, anyway) our own surveys for oxygen in extrasolar planetary atmospheres, for the same reason.
I am an astronomer, but this doesn't come up much, so don't assume that I know the official designation. I do know that in practice among English speaking astronomers either "the Sun" or "Sol" is acceptable, with "the Sun" being more common. For the Moon "Luna" is even rarer, but probably still what we're supposed to say. Typically we use "the" and capitalization to avoid confusion.
Exactly. Remember that cddb came out before mp3s became popular, so nearly all cddb users already possessed the info, but didn't have it with them at the moment (were at work, but the liner notes were at home, or they just weren't able to rip their eyes away from the monitor).
I've also seen some cddb entries with extended info that isn't in the CD liner notes, added by dedicated fans. For example, 8309a809 has a note about how Sire mixed up the masters of Speaking in Tongues, so there are 2 versions, one a few minutes longer. I don't have the liner notes here to check, but I doubt they include that tidbit.
1. If they were willing to accept "MYOB", they'd also let you leave the field blank.
2. If someone answered MYOB to income, they'd just assume it was more than $100 000 or whatever the trigger level is for massive junk mailing.
Horse salesperson: "You can buy this horse and go whereever you want. All you have to do is get on and take a few lessons".
Customer: "Get on that? Lessons? No, I'm staying right here on the ground."
Eventually the salesperson replaces the horses with elephants, which can use their trunk to carry things to the customer, while the customer just stands there. More powerful, but slower and more expensive.
Down to brass tacks, someone who refuses to learn how to program, or regular expressions, is never going to be able to safely use a spam filter. Oh, they can use someone else's default settings, but will never be able to find their own balance between too much crap and having legit email go missing. And their VCR will eternally flash 12:00 ;-)
Maybe there's another way to accomplish that (window manager checkpointing everything it's managing?) but I'd like to hear it. (In any OS. I'm not thinking of switching from Linux, but it's been ages since I seriously used anything else, and I'm curious if they can do it.)
Suggestions: 1. Say "It's in the manual." Relatively inoffensive, and universally (with Babelfish) understandable. Make an editor macro if it's too much typing.
2. The questioner probably tried looking, but searched the wrong section/document, or used the wrong term. Advice on what to look for, or best way to do it general, is useful.
3. Read the whole question and make sure it's in the manual before you shoot your mouth off. (Obvious)
Even then pi would still be 3.14159... It can be defined outside of geometry with e^(i pi) = -1. You're right that the circumference of a circle would not be 2 pi r in a curved space, but that doesn't mean it would be 2 P r, where P is some other constant. It would be 2 pi f(r), where f(r) is r for flat space, > r for negatively curved spaces (saddles), and < r for positively curved spaces (i.e. spheroids. Try comparing the (Ant)Arctic Circle to the Equator.). I like to think of curvature as a sort of second derivative of distance, so it shows up in the r part, not the pi part.
But I haven't proved the above. I'd be interested in examples of geometries where C = 2 P r, and A = P r^2, etc., where P is a constant not equal to 3.14159...
Hey moderator, did you actually look at the image of the Sun being discussed?
Subject says it all...
Its info page on my GNU/Linux box says assert is a GNU extension. I suppose I could still keep a debugging copy with asserts, and then sed them all out for a shipping copy, or better make configure do it if necessary, but that's work.
Gravitomagnetism is just an analogy to electromagnetism since it is the gravitational effect from the motion of masses, as opposed to the gravitostatic force from still masses, which is what we're used to. You've probably heard of gravitational waves, which would have been a much less dramatic term than gravitomagnetism.
To confuse things more, in this case the masses are being moved by electromagnetic waves, so it looks like electromagnetic waves are being coupled to gravitomagnetic waves. This is what is being proposed, but it isn't really a Grand Unification Theory. If you move the masses some other way you can still get gravitomagnetism without electromagnetism.
Probably the best way to do that would be to give it an assertion before the debate: "Yes, in theory, politicians can tell the truth. Sorry, I can't give any examples."
As a tie-in to superconductivity, a superconductor would be one way to store the energy, but I think current ones are limited in how much they can hold.
Seriously, the article says that cyc already knows enough to check its inputs by crossreferencing and using its vaulted common sense. So it should be Bushproof. Pretty cool, eh?
We used to run a 100mhz sparc with 64mb that did 750k dynamically generated hits per day.
205 mHz is possible (1 cycle roughly every 5 seconds), but how do you get 64 millibytes? Case matters in metric!
> made of 5% to 10% of Text including Headers and HTML. The rest are
> BASE64- (or UU-) encoded pictures, word documents, zip archives and so
> on. The problem here is the encoding which wastes considerable amounts
> of space (at least one third).
It's theoretically possible, if you wrote your own Evolution storage plugin, to change the Content-Transfer-Encoding header value of binary attachments to "binary" (and text attachments to "8bit") before writing the message out to disk (or wherever) thus magically making it so that you no longer save the encoded text of the attachments but rather in-line binary data content. (Yes, it's as easy as setting an enum value in the CamelMimePart structure).
However, you have to be aware of the consequences of this. Most importantly, you will not be able to validate any of your PGP/MIME or S/MIME signed messages as according to the RFCs for these types, the signed MIME parts MUST be treated as opaque (meaning that you may not modify them in any way).
It could still be made useful by adding a "Good signature received from bla bla..." blurb, modifying the message as you said above, then signing the modified message with the user's own key. That way the user would have a trustable receipt that the message was originally signed by the original sender. The only loss would be not being able to pass the message along to someone else with a verifiable sig from the orig sender.
The Mythical Man-Month by Fred somebody-or-other explained years ago how the effectiveness of a team goes up (or perhaps even down) much less than linearly as new members are added.
Supersonic shmupersonic. Doesn't anyone else recgonize the prescience of that Star Trek episode where Picard declared some region of space a Warp 4 or less zone, for environmental reasons? It almost makes up for the Fermat's Last Theorem booboo. ;)
I don't think the problem is with anonymous posters, it's with interested parties claiming to be other people. This is a good reason to GPG sign everything. Seriously, what good is a discussion if it's polluted by lies under false pretenses?
Also Spidey can and does usually start each swing with an initial velocity, and doesn't always stick to small angles.
You should save entropy by using gunzip, or bunzip2 if you prefer. The output of a good compressor is random (anything nonrandom is a pattern, all patterns should be compressed...), so feeding random bits to a good uncompressor should give you lots and lots of interesting stuff.
He's a typical nerd.
It does imply exactly that to 99% of people, with good reason.
One can get a bachelor of science in things like performing arts,
Art!
religion,
That'd be putting the B.S. in B.Sc!
I'm all for science (or any) journalists taking science courses, but there's a thing called a minor for that "bit of extra coursework". Part of your employment problem might be the pretentiousnous of your degree.
Why does your university (you didn't say which one...) consider TV to be a science?