The best place to start is by connecting with other people who share the same passions as you.
I've similarly been fascinated by astronomy since I was a young child. A few years ago I rekindled my interest by buying a telescope and joining a club in Pittsburgh. I learned more from a few casual conversations with members than I had in months and months of reading and practicing on my own.
Now I practice astrophotography and engage in lots of educational and community outreach events, and I owe just about everything to the club I joined.
Best of luck, and clear skies!
That's certainly an option that will be looked at if they can't revive the probe in time, but it might be tricky. That would just about double the expected mission lifetime. It's tough to say that the mission-critical hardware (batteries, most importantly) will still be serviceable in 18 months. The rapid day/night cycles of earth orbit put a lot of strain on electrical systems from constantly switching power supplies.
The location/position of the probe has been known almost from the beginning. It was never that they couldn't find it, the problem was that the booster pack that was supposed to send the probe on to Mars never fired and the probe wasn't responding to the Russian's radio commands. What has changed in the last day is that receivers here on Earth are finally picking up radio signals from the probe itself, indicating that it is still alive and at least theoretically operational. Telemetry hasn't yet been received, but now there is a possibility we can communicate with it and try to diagnose the failures it suffered.
As for if it can be recovered, I've not heard a definitive answer on this. One source will say the window has already closed, another says it's open until sometime in December. The window can probably be extended if they have enough fuel to try some exotic gravity assist with the Earth or Moon, but if it hasn't already passed it will soon.
I've been slowly switching over everyone I can. If someone asks me to fix their virus-and-spyware laden XP machine, I tell them I'm only going to do it if they'll switch to a safer web browser and learn how to run Ad-Aware. At first they're kind of reluctant, but after two or three times of me having to fix their computer (at my leisure) they're usually pretty open to new ideas.
So that book on why Firefox is better than IE sounds terrific, but at 152 pages isn't exactly what I'd call light reading. Does anyone know of any shorter dead-tree books or pamphlets that condense everything down into some nice sound-byte type facts?
From TFA:
"The NFL, meanwhile, is concerned that a user could send a copy of a game to someone in another time zone, where the game is blacked out."
Cry me a freaking river. I'm a huge NFL fan, but as I'm just out of school, I don't have the money to afford to buy tickets for the games. Yet, if the stadium isn't sold out, the home-team TV markets are forbidden from showing the game because if people really wanted to see it, they'd pony up and buy up all the available tickets. Thats the contractual agreement the NFL made with CBS and Fox. So what happens if other people don't want to buy tickets? I'm unable to watch my team play.
The networks are broadcasting it elsewhere, just not in my area. So if the NFL has a problem with me doing what it takes to LEGALLY acquire game footage, they can go screw themselves. Last I heard, having someone give me a tape of anything broadcast on network television, so long as its not sold for profit, is entirely legal.
This is me, playing My Heart Bleeds For You on the worlds smallest violin. It looks amazingly similar to my middle finger.
A few months back we had President Bush get everyone all worked up and excited about his grand "vision" for our return to space. There was all kinds of good press coverage and publicity on the matter. NASA was told to develop a replacement for the Shuttle, expand exploration of the Moon for our eventual manned missions and all that jazz. IIRC, his approval rating even bounced up a few percent afterwards, reflecting the public's wishes for a strong space program.
Now reality sets in. All the talk and good publicity is over. The media has moved on to newer "news" like Jenna Bush sticking her tongue out at reporters and the latest Hollywood romances that has the people back to their glazed over state. Congress gets the job of deciding how to make up for the hundreds of billions we've spent on Iraq and anti-terror efforts and doesn't really have many options for cutting the budget at this point. So NASA gets hung out to dry once more, and Bush suffers little (if any) bad press. After all, he didn't cut the budget!
God...I hate politicians so much. And not just one party either. They'll all say anything to get re-elected.
C'mon now, we all know that just by looking for the evil bit at the start of OP packets we can filter them out. In fact, I'm pretty sure there were SEVERAL stories about this just about a year ago...
bnlrules sez:
"For quick reference they can't be beat!"
I think you've hit the nail on the head. If I have a hard copy of the LotR trilogy and an electronic copy, I'll get exactly the same story, same information. Heck, probably even the same font.
Aside from the information, their uses can be vastly divergent. Lets say that I'm writing a college term paper on the LotR. With the electronic copy, I can search through it with a few key strokes and be 100% accurate. Doing the same thing with a hard copy would require days/weeks of annotating with pen/paper as you read it. And having done such a thing, its much less enjoyable to read when you have to stop every few minutes to make notes rather than just let the story flow.
I don't think ebooks are failures, they just have different strengths compared to dead tree copies.
I am not a physicist, but from my basic physics and chemistry classes in high school and college, I seem to remember that compressing any matter increases its temperature. Wouldn't the gravitational compression of trillions of tons of gas and dust cause a temperature of billions of degrees? It seems unlikely that a Bose-Einstein condensate would form in such an environment. Can someone more informed that I provide an explanation?
If they invalidate the GPL in this manner and get away with it, won't they just have the effect of providing legel precedent for throwing out ALL software licenses and EULAs? Surely this move has got to be one of the STRANGEST moves yet by SCO.
Assuming that their actions of late (starting with the IBM lawsuit) have been directed under the advice of their team of lawyers, who the heck gave the approval for this? Even IF they somehow invalidate the GPL, are their lawyers so short-sighted that they can't see this coming back to haunt not just SCO, but the entire commercial software industry?
Why is it that more and more companies believe that turning a profit and being honest are mutually exclusive? Is there some secret, black ritual to remove ethics from the thought process during MBA classes?
My company has been utterly inundated with spam for the past two days. Somehow, a spammer thinks we're running an open relay because we have our spam filter set up to just kill all junk email sent to our system rather than bouncing a failed message.
Looking through some of the emails, they're coming though mostly two or three servers with Taiwanese domain names. They use a rotating IP address that cycles to a new one every ten or twenty messages, so we ended up blacklisting the entire domain.
Spam is entirely out of control, its almost to the point where we almost have to hand deliver email anymore so that people know its not junk!
I replied to a similar question below, but I don't want to ignore you either.
We're in the international relocation business, and its BIG. Each of our Ops people maintains daily contact with over a hundred people (and usually closer to 200) in the process of moving overseas. Imagine coordinating moving companies on both sides of the pond, customs agents, airlines, insurange agents...I'm sure you get the idea.
We actually have a special arrangement with our ISP because of our volume. They do site inspections every once in a while to make sure that we're not a spamhaus, but because of the volume of mail we send out, it keeps tripping their filters.
We're not spammers, I assure you. We're in the international relocation business. I didn't even know this industry existed until a few years back, but its pretty big. On averge, our Ops people maintain contacts with approximately 100-250 individuals who are moving at any given time. That means each person tends to be coordinating the actions of literally thousands of people on a daily basis. So yeah, 14,000 sounds like a spamhaus, but I swear we're not.
I've been dealing with literally thousands of emails coming into my office just today! The sales people are having a running contest to see who gets the most infected emails every hour. So far the winners are usually at ~150/hour.
Normally we don't block emails with specific attachments at our post office because it takes too long to scan them. Our company of 100 people averages 14,000 legit email per day in and out, but with this outbreak as bad as it is (and not peaked yet!) the blocking is being instated tonight.
While musing with a programmer here who just moved her daughter into college, we brought up an interesting thought: Hundreds of thousands of college kids are moving back into dorms with huge fat pipes and Outlook style email clients on computers that haven't been patched since April or May. Yikes!
>>That means that all of those CPU hours came in a row (at idle priority even).
I'm just a lowly database programmer, so I have no clue about high end programs like this. Is it a common practice for time intensive processes to not have any sort of save file?
Ok, its one thing to have a EULA that tries to prevent piracy and the like. To be quite honest, I have no problems with MS or any other company using a EULA to try and enforce that.
But why would a EULA make a user agree to not use a particular product as a webserver or fileserver?? Before I turned to Linux, I had an old computer running Windows 98 acting as a fileserver. If I wanted to do that with XP Pro I'd be in violation of the EULA?
Technicaly, that means that anyone who enables file and printer sharing is violating the EULA! If MS is so against it, why do they build it into their products?!
This is a reaction to all the new bits that have been added to the IPv6 protocol today. It would just take far too long for each on their own to implement these changes. Thank goodness I read it here first on Slashdot and am way ahead of the game!
Every time a criminal investigation takes place, innocent people are likely to be included in police files. Why? Because it is an investigation. How can authorities determine innocence or guilt without gathering information?
Take the case of Laci Peterson (sp?) for example. She was the lady in California who dissappeared when she was 8 months pregnant. The police have been looking for her since November or December I think. They've interviewed dozens, if not hundreds of people and probably conducted at least that many background checks on people too. Do they believe that every single person they interviewed was responsible for her dissappearance? Not likely, but how else will they be sure their information is correct unless they look everywhere?
Can Echelon be used on more people more easily? Probably. Is there a potential for abuse? Of course. Is the principle of what it can do new to the world? No, it is just more electronic now than its manpower intensive perdecessors.
While its still a fair target to use for Big Brother type arguments, hopefully this event will score a few points for proponents of 21st century electronic surveilance.
This guy is a fair and legitimate target for electronic surveilance. He's a know leader of a network of individuals who are dedicated to causing harm to untold millions of people whose biggest crime is living in a country whose ideals he disagrees with. If Echelon is used fairly and honestly in these types of situations, then I will not complain one bit about the extraordinary secrecy of its network.
I totally agree. I work for a company of roughly the same size. We're pushing a big new intiative to reach $100 million in revenue by 2005. The best part is that it is privately owned, no stocks anywhere.
Its far from being glamorous, but I get paid a competitive amount and have mostly very reasonable managers. The company has a sound business model that has developed because we don't have shareholders that only care about a rapidly increasing stock price. The President of the company has to make sure that there is real and honest business going on because if he doesn't, he doesn't get paid either.
For New York to just now beginning to have to switch over to dialing 1 plus the area code first says that the phone company or companies have done a good job of managing a hugely concentrated population exploding with new phone lines.
I live in rural western Pennsylvania and we switched to 10 digit dialing about two years ago. For those of you who aren't familial with this part of the country, we have a population of roughly one million people in the area codes where this is enforced. New York has more than ten times our population and they managed to last two more years? Further proof that the local Telcos are incompetant.
Apparently, whoever wrote that never met any of the jocks at my high school!;-)
Back on-topic, it does open up a whole lot of new possibilities as far as evolution goes. The evolutionary tree that is so commonly displayed in high school (and some higher-level) biology books might need some major rethinking.
Slashdot Mirror
The best place to start is by connecting with other people who share the same passions as you. I've similarly been fascinated by astronomy since I was a young child. A few years ago I rekindled my interest by buying a telescope and joining a club in Pittsburgh. I learned more from a few casual conversations with members than I had in months and months of reading and practicing on my own. Now I practice astrophotography and engage in lots of educational and community outreach events, and I owe just about everything to the club I joined. Best of luck, and clear skies!
That's certainly an option that will be looked at if they can't revive the probe in time, but it might be tricky. That would just about double the expected mission lifetime. It's tough to say that the mission-critical hardware (batteries, most importantly) will still be serviceable in 18 months. The rapid day/night cycles of earth orbit put a lot of strain on electrical systems from constantly switching power supplies.
The location/position of the probe has been known almost from the beginning. It was never that they couldn't find it, the problem was that the booster pack that was supposed to send the probe on to Mars never fired and the probe wasn't responding to the Russian's radio commands. What has changed in the last day is that receivers here on Earth are finally picking up radio signals from the probe itself, indicating that it is still alive and at least theoretically operational. Telemetry hasn't yet been received, but now there is a possibility we can communicate with it and try to diagnose the failures it suffered. As for if it can be recovered, I've not heard a definitive answer on this. One source will say the window has already closed, another says it's open until sometime in December. The window can probably be extended if they have enough fuel to try some exotic gravity assist with the Earth or Moon, but if it hasn't already passed it will soon.
So that book on why Firefox is better than IE sounds terrific, but at 152 pages isn't exactly what I'd call light reading. Does anyone know of any shorter dead-tree books or pamphlets that condense everything down into some nice sound-byte type facts?
-Shadow
Cry me a freaking river. I'm a huge NFL fan, but as I'm just out of school, I don't have the money to afford to buy tickets for the games. Yet, if the stadium isn't sold out, the home-team TV markets are forbidden from showing the game because if people really wanted to see it, they'd pony up and buy up all the available tickets. Thats the contractual agreement the NFL made with CBS and Fox. So what happens if other people don't want to buy tickets? I'm unable to watch my team play.
The networks are broadcasting it elsewhere, just not in my area. So if the NFL has a problem with me doing what it takes to LEGALLY acquire game footage, they can go screw themselves. Last I heard, having someone give me a tape of anything broadcast on network television, so long as its not sold for profit, is entirely legal.
This is me, playing My Heart Bleeds For You on the worlds smallest violin. It looks amazingly similar to my middle finger.
-Shadow
Now reality sets in. All the talk and good publicity is over. The media has moved on to newer "news" like Jenna Bush sticking her tongue out at reporters and the latest Hollywood romances that has the people back to their glazed over state. Congress gets the job of deciding how to make up for the hundreds of billions we've spent on Iraq and anti-terror efforts and doesn't really have many options for cutting the budget at this point. So NASA gets hung out to dry once more, and Bush suffers little (if any) bad press. After all, he didn't cut the budget!
God...I hate politicians so much. And not just one party either. They'll all say anything to get re-elected.
-Shadow
-Shadow
"For quick reference they can't be beat!"
I think you've hit the nail on the head. If I have a hard copy of the LotR trilogy and an electronic copy, I'll get exactly the same story, same information. Heck, probably even the same font.
Aside from the information, their uses can be vastly divergent. Lets say that I'm writing a college term paper on the LotR. With the electronic copy, I can search through it with a few key strokes and be 100% accurate. Doing the same thing with a hard copy would require days/weeks of annotating with pen/paper as you read it. And having done such a thing, its much less enjoyable to read when you have to stop every few minutes to make notes rather than just let the story flow.
I don't think ebooks are failures, they just have different strengths compared to dead tree copies.
Shadow
-Shadow
Assuming that their actions of late (starting with the IBM lawsuit) have been directed under the advice of their team of lawyers, who the heck gave the approval for this? Even IF they somehow invalidate the GPL, are their lawyers so short-sighted that they can't see this coming back to haunt not just SCO, but the entire commercial software industry?
-Shadow
-Shadow
Looking through some of the emails, they're coming though mostly two or three servers with Taiwanese domain names. They use a rotating IP address that cycles to a new one every ten or twenty messages, so we ended up blacklisting the entire domain.
Spam is entirely out of control, its almost to the point where we almost have to hand deliver email anymore so that people know its not junk!
-Shadow
We're in the international relocation business, and its BIG. Each of our Ops people maintains daily contact with over a hundred people (and usually closer to 200) in the process of moving overseas. Imagine coordinating moving companies on both sides of the pond, customs agents, airlines, insurange agents...I'm sure you get the idea.
We actually have a special arrangement with our ISP because of our volume. They do site inspections every once in a while to make sure that we're not a spamhaus, but because of the volume of mail we send out, it keeps tripping their filters.
-Shadow
-Shadow
Normally we don't block emails with specific attachments at our post office because it takes too long to scan them. Our company of 100 people averages 14,000 legit email per day in and out, but with this outbreak as bad as it is (and not peaked yet!) the blocking is being instated tonight.
While musing with a programmer here who just moved her daughter into college, we brought up an interesting thought: Hundreds of thousands of college kids are moving back into dorms with huge fat pipes and Outlook style email clients on computers that haven't been patched since April or May. Yikes!
-Shadow
I'm just a lowly database programmer, so I have no clue about high end programs like this. Is it a common practice for time intensive processes to not have any sort of save file?
Shadow
-Shadow
But why would a EULA make a user agree to not use a particular product as a webserver or fileserver?? Before I turned to Linux, I had an old computer running Windows 98 acting as a fileserver. If I wanted to do that with XP Pro I'd be in violation of the EULA?
Technicaly, that means that anyone who enables file and printer sharing is violating the EULA! If MS is so against it, why do they build it into their products?!
-Shadow
-Shadow
Take the case of Laci Peterson (sp?) for example. She was the lady in California who dissappeared when she was 8 months pregnant. The police have been looking for her since November or December I think. They've interviewed dozens, if not hundreds of people and probably conducted at least that many background checks on people too. Do they believe that every single person they interviewed was responsible for her dissappearance? Not likely, but how else will they be sure their information is correct unless they look everywhere?
Can Echelon be used on more people more easily? Probably. Is there a potential for abuse? Of course. Is the principle of what it can do new to the world? No, it is just more electronic now than its manpower intensive perdecessors.
-Shadow
This guy is a fair and legitimate target for electronic surveilance. He's a know leader of a network of individuals who are dedicated to causing harm to untold millions of people whose biggest crime is living in a country whose ideals he disagrees with. If Echelon is used fairly and honestly in these types of situations, then I will not complain one bit about the extraordinary secrecy of its network.
-Shadow
Its far from being glamorous, but I get paid a competitive amount and have mostly very reasonable managers. The company has a sound business model that has developed because we don't have shareholders that only care about a rapidly increasing stock price. The President of the company has to make sure that there is real and honest business going on because if he doesn't, he doesn't get paid either.
-Shadow
I live in rural western Pennsylvania and we switched to 10 digit dialing about two years ago. For those of you who aren't familial with this part of the country, we have a population of roughly one million people in the area codes where this is enforced. New York has more than ten times our population and they managed to last two more years? Further proof that the local Telcos are incompetant.
-Shadow
Back on-topic, it does open up a whole lot of new possibilities as far as evolution goes. The evolutionary tree that is so commonly displayed in high school (and some higher-level) biology books might need some major rethinking.
-Shadow