Yea, but this is a retarded argument since letting hams on the net doesn't kick everyone else off, whereas letting others into hams' airspace effectively kicks the hams off...
The statement that either company might be able to buy SCO with a months revenue is dubious, but in any case, Microsoft would actually be in a better position to buy them than IBM. I say this because I just went and compared the financial reports of the two companies (1, 2). Notice that while IBM has more assets than Microsoft (96B vs. 79B), Microsoft has an astounding 50 Billion dollars in cash reserves. Seeing as this is a full order of magnitude larger than IBM's 5B in cash I think Microsoft would be in a better position to make a surprise hostile takeover bid on SCO.
I've just installed firefox today and am giving it a try (I too am a former(?) Opera user). However, I've installed the mouse gestures extension and am unable to configure it (the options box is greyed out). Did you run into this? How did you get around it?
Without configuration you have to use the LMB for gestures, which sucks ass...
Um, how is what you posted any different from the quote you took from the summary? where does it say that any legal decisions, jackbooted thugs, DoS attacks, or the first amendment were involved?
The summary says that a prof complained and threatened to sue, and that the site's owner (a reasonable assumption, as nothing to the contrary is mentioned) took it down. You say NO! the site owner caved to a potential suit. Where exactly is the difference!?
jeeze i'm getting tired of trolls that can gramatically outwid the mods into thinking they're intelligent...
* Easy professor removal. I believe professors should have the right to make their reviews be private. A professor will have the ability to hide all reviews from public view. Reviews posted will be emailed to that professor, but not shared with the rest of the world. The number of reviews and possibility other information will remain on the site.
I FULLY agree with all of the proposed changes except for this one. Enabling this totally ruins the purpose of your site, as good professors will leave review on, but those professors who consistently get bad reviews will just take them off the site. I think that allowing a professor to make all reviews private is a horrible idea - though it will help protect you from lawsuits...
The reason it can't be inspected using hubble is that hubble's optics are designed for imaging objects at near-infinite distances and are unable to produce clear pictures unless you are at least a certain distance away. I'm unsure of the exact numbers, but I do know that this distance is WAY to far away to be practical.
I just shudder to to think that this will train people, to the point where eventually most tech support calls will sound like this. Do the people who came up with this actually think they'll be making things easier on themselves?
For other tech support stories and recordings like the mouse one, see http://www.techcomedy.com/new_stories.php. Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with the website, I just remembered reading some funny things there that popped into mind when I read this story.
Actually, I don't really blame him as even the article fails to make it really clear that there's a difference. Furthermore, the article doesn't even mention how they will accomplish this partial gravity! I assume that they will be using a rotating cylinder of some sort where the cetripetal acceleration simulates gravity, as this is the most commonly proposed mechanism for simulating gravity. Does anyone know of any other way to simulate gravity in space?
I don't know about mice, I'd like to see us construct a partial-gravity space station for humans. Then we can have astronauts in space for an almost unlimited amount of time as they won't need to worry about muscle atrophy and loss of bone mass. The key to make such a project economically viable though, is to make it part of a planned future mars mission. At some point in the future, a set of engines, supply pods, instruments, and a lander could be hooked up to the space station along its rotational axis and the whole thing can then be launched as a mission to mars. Astronauts go there, land, tool around mars for a bit, and then go back to the space station and return it to earth. A simple retrofit of the station and it is ready to be used again on another mission. Whether you want to go to mars again, or on an orbital mission to venus, or even just a quick jaunt to the moon, such a gravity platform could be designed to be a modular living quarters on any space mission.
Wow, I've actually never heard of these before but they seem really cool. A few things I'm wondering though: Are there any other vendors out there? How do these things attach to your screen? Finally, how does the image quality fare when using one of these?
The person who wrote the worm is not very good anyways... only 25% of infected machines will perform the DoS attack (see the virus information page for McAfee and Symantec).
I don't know that this is a mistake. Another purpose of the virus is to open backdoors on a system so that it can be used as a relay by spammers. Given this, they probably don't really care about SCO.
I realize this is a joke, but to stem the flood of responses by people who didn't RTFA, here's the scoop:
You take a plane, fill it with seed "bomblets" and disperse them over a minefield. The bomblets embed in the soil and the plants grow. Within a few months you have a field of plants, a few of which are a different colour. The ones that have changed colour are close to mines. This makes finding the mines easier, and it also makes it possible to find a safe route through the field by only looking at the colour of the plants.
Everybody here seems to be missing the biggest advantage that these have for military uses - realtime display of deployments! Imagine a company lieutenant pulling one of these out of his pack and looking at it. It syncs via wifi to the HQ and he instantly can see where the nearest frienldly armoured unit is, the current target of his backup artillery, and where other units are and whether they are in a position to support him. If every unit carries a GPS unit that automagically radios their position back to HQ, then it would not be infeasible to preoduce data like this on the map.
Obviously, with such a system reliability is going to be the biggest issue. The biggest advantage of these screens then is that they keep there last image even if power is lost. Thus, if there are any problems with the wifi link or power supply, they're still useful as a basic map. The biggest issue then is reduced to durability (i.e. dirt, water, shocks). While admittedly a big issue, the technology has serious potential now.
Hello from Canada, where we do indeed use the AC in our cars in the summer when it's routinely >25 celcius for months on end. And guess what, plenty of people even have AC in their homes in Ontario-Quebec (admittedly there are fewer home AC units in the other provinces).
Oh, and what about when to say: 'Good morning/day/afternoon/night' is there a standard time interval for this?
Um, It's quite simple. Using local times - Good morning: dawn, or just predawn until noon Good day: when it's daylight Good afternoon: noon 'til dusk Good night: dusk 'til early the next morning
Admittedly, there is some overlap between G'afternoon and G'night, and the distinction between g'nite and g'morning generally just depends on the circumstances (i.e. did you just wake up or are you going to bed?).
However, since we're not using Good morning/day/afternoon/night to measure parts for spacecraft (or anything else) I'm willing to live with these ambiguities.
OT: Um, there's no such thing as Burma anymore - it's called Myanmar (and has been called that since 1989). Actually, now that I do some googling it appears that you yanks refuse to officially recognize the name change and still call it Burma. I guess you can blame your ignorance on your government this time.
Um, doesn't lower pressure depress the freezing + boiling points? Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I would be interested in seeing your equations.
Ok, why the hell is this? I can understand how it might take a while to dispose of chemical ordinance but why is it so difficult to dispose of what they've found? Just clear everyone away and blow it up!
No actually, this does have something to do with Bose-Einstein Condensation. Now, IANATheoretical Physicist, but as I understand it, at the quantum level these results may be a manifestation of b-e condenstation in the solid phase (to date, b-e condensation has only been observed in the liquid and gas phases). Now, the original poster was a little bit out to lunch with respect to his description of what a b-e condensate is, do I still highly reccomend reading the wikipedia article. There's still a lot of work to be done before we really figure out exactly what's going on in this experiment, but it looks to have some pretty cool implications at the moment.
IIRC, it's not that they take more energy to make than they produce, it's that the production process creates/uses all sorts of nasty chemicals which have a detrimental effect on the environment. Thus, while the post-production energy created by solar cells may be clean, the net environmental impact is actually pretty bad (depending on how you weight the various components - it's kind of difficult to convert between units of toxic chemicals and energy).
Um, actually no it doesn't. The credit card industry spends billions of dollars every year on fraudulent charges. The costs are just passed off to the consumer in terms of interest rates. I'll let someone else google the statistics for some karma-whoring.
The article mentions that the astronauts are burning oxygen producing candles to make up some of the deficit of lost air. Oxygen-producing candles seems kind of oxymoronic to me, does anyone have any info or insight into how they work or what they are made of?
Slashdot Mirror
Yea, but this is a retarded argument since letting hams on the net doesn't kick everyone else off, whereas letting others into hams' airspace effectively kicks the hams off...
The statement that either company might be able to buy SCO with a months revenue is dubious, but in any case, Microsoft would actually be in a better position to buy them than IBM. I say this because I just went and compared the financial reports of the two companies (1, 2). Notice that while IBM has more assets than Microsoft (96B vs. 79B), Microsoft has an astounding 50 Billion dollars in cash reserves. Seeing as this is a full order of magnitude larger than IBM's 5B in cash I think Microsoft would be in a better position to make a surprise hostile takeover bid on SCO.
I've just installed firefox today and am giving it a try (I too am a former(?) Opera user). However, I've installed the mouse gestures extension and am unable to configure it (the options box is greyed out). Did you run into this? How did you get around it?
Without configuration you have to use the LMB for gestures, which sucks ass...
Um, how is what you posted any different from the quote you took from the summary? where does it say that any legal decisions, jackbooted thugs, DoS attacks, or the first amendment were involved?
The summary says that a prof complained and threatened to sue, and that the site's owner (a reasonable assumption, as nothing to the contrary is mentioned) took it down. You say NO! the site owner caved to a potential suit. Where exactly is the difference!?
jeeze i'm getting tired of trolls that can gramatically outwid the mods into thinking they're intelligent...
* Easy professor removal. I believe professors should have the right to make their reviews be private. A professor will have the ability to hide all reviews from public view. Reviews posted will be emailed to that professor, but not shared with the rest of the world. The number of reviews and possibility other information will remain on the site.
I FULLY agree with all of the proposed changes except for this one. Enabling this totally ruins the purpose of your site, as good professors will leave review on, but those professors who consistently get bad reviews will just take them off the site. I think that allowing a professor to make all reviews private is a horrible idea - though it will help protect you from lawsuits...
The reason it can't be inspected using hubble is that hubble's optics are designed for imaging objects at near-infinite distances and are unable to produce clear pictures unless you are at least a certain distance away. I'm unsure of the exact numbers, but I do know that this distance is WAY to far away to be practical.
I just shudder to to think that this will train people, to the point where eventually most tech support calls will sound like this. Do the people who came up with this actually think they'll be making things easier on themselves?
For other tech support stories and recordings like the mouse one, see http://www.techcomedy.com/new_stories.php. Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with the website, I just remembered reading some funny things there that popped into mind when I read this story.
Actually, I don't really blame him as even the article fails to make it really clear that there's a difference. Furthermore, the article doesn't even mention how they will accomplish this partial gravity! I assume that they will be using a rotating cylinder of some sort where the cetripetal acceleration simulates gravity, as this is the most commonly proposed mechanism for simulating gravity. Does anyone know of any other way to simulate gravity in space?
I don't know about mice, I'd like to see us construct a partial-gravity space station for humans. Then we can have astronauts in space for an almost unlimited amount of time as they won't need to worry about muscle atrophy and loss of bone mass. The key to make such a project economically viable though, is to make it part of a planned future mars mission. At some point in the future, a set of engines, supply pods, instruments, and a lander could be hooked up to the space station along its rotational axis and the whole thing can then be launched as a mission to mars. Astronauts go there, land, tool around mars for a bit, and then go back to the space station and return it to earth. A simple retrofit of the station and it is ready to be used again on another mission. Whether you want to go to mars again, or on an orbital mission to venus, or even just a quick jaunt to the moon, such a gravity platform could be designed to be a modular living quarters on any space mission.
ANyways, its just an idea.
a few weeks ago, I was sitting on the computer (what else)
I dunno, I usually sit on a chair or something, they're usually much more comfortable than a computer. You should try it sometime...
Wow, I've actually never heard of these before but they seem really cool. A few things I'm wondering though: Are there any other vendors out there? How do these things attach to your screen? Finally, how does the image quality fare when using one of these?
Thanks.
The person who wrote the worm is not very good anyways... only 25% of infected machines will perform the DoS attack (see the virus information page for McAfee and Symantec).
I don't know that this is a mistake. Another purpose of the virus is to open backdoors on a system so that it can be used as a relay by spammers. Given this, they probably don't really care about SCO.
I realize this is a joke, but to stem the flood of responses by people who didn't RTFA, here's the scoop:
You take a plane, fill it with seed "bomblets" and disperse them over a minefield. The bomblets embed in the soil and the plants grow. Within a few months you have a field of plants, a few of which are a different colour. The ones that have changed colour are close to mines. This makes finding the mines easier, and it also makes it possible to find a safe route through the field by only looking at the colour of the plants.
Everybody here seems to be missing the biggest advantage that these have for military uses - realtime display of deployments! Imagine a company lieutenant pulling one of these out of his pack and looking at it. It syncs via wifi to the HQ and he instantly can see where the nearest frienldly armoured unit is, the current target of his backup artillery, and where other units are and whether they are in a position to support him. If every unit carries a GPS unit that automagically radios their position back to HQ, then it would not be infeasible to preoduce data like this on the map.
Obviously, with such a system reliability is going to be the biggest issue. The biggest advantage of these screens then is that they keep there last image even if power is lost. Thus, if there are any problems with the wifi link or power supply, they're still useful as a basic map. The biggest issue then is reduced to durability (i.e. dirt, water, shocks). While admittedly a big issue, the technology has serious potential now.
Hello from Canada, where we do indeed use the AC in our cars in the summer when it's routinely >25 celcius for months on end. And guess what, plenty of people even have AC in their homes in Ontario-Quebec (admittedly there are fewer home AC units in the other provinces).
Heh, alright. You called me fair and square, and what's more, politely. You just gained a fan.
Oh, and what about when to say: 'Good morning/day/afternoon/night' is there a standard time interval for this?
Um, It's quite simple. Using local times -
Good morning: dawn, or just predawn until noon
Good day: when it's daylight
Good afternoon: noon 'til dusk
Good night: dusk 'til early the next morning
Admittedly, there is some overlap between G'afternoon and G'night, and the distinction between g'nite and g'morning generally just depends on the circumstances (i.e. did you just wake up or are you going to bed?).
However, since we're not using Good morning/day/afternoon/night to measure parts for spacecraft (or anything else) I'm willing to live with these ambiguities.
OT: Um, there's no such thing as Burma anymore - it's called Myanmar (and has been called that since 1989). Actually, now that I do some googling it appears that you yanks refuse to officially recognize the name change and still call it Burma. I guess you can blame your ignorance on your government this time.
Um, doesn't lower pressure depress the freezing + boiling points? Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I would be interested in seeing your equations.
Yea, who could possibly expect that server to work under this load...
:-)
Mirror anyone?
Ok, why the hell is this? I can understand how it might take a while to dispose of chemical ordinance but why is it so difficult to dispose of what they've found? Just clear everyone away and blow it up!
No actually, this does have something to do with Bose-Einstein Condensation. Now, IANATheoretical Physicist, but as I understand it, at the quantum level these results may be a manifestation of b-e condenstation in the solid phase (to date, b-e condensation has only been observed in the liquid and gas phases). Now, the original poster was a little bit out to lunch with respect to his description of what a b-e condensate is, do I still highly reccomend reading the wikipedia article. There's still a lot of work to be done before we really figure out exactly what's going on in this experiment, but it looks to have some pretty cool implications at the moment.
IIRC, it's not that they take more energy to make than they produce, it's that the production process creates/uses all sorts of nasty chemicals which have a detrimental effect on the environment. Thus, while the post-production energy created by solar cells may be clean, the net environmental impact is actually pretty bad (depending on how you weight the various components - it's kind of difficult to convert between units of toxic chemicals and energy).
Um, actually no it doesn't. The credit card industry spends billions of dollars every year on fraudulent charges. The costs are just passed off to the consumer in terms of interest rates. I'll let someone else google the statistics for some karma-whoring.
Uh Cypress Hill?
How about the Stones, the Grateful Dead, Hendrix, or even the Beatles?! Weed's been selling music for decades man...
The article mentions that the astronauts are burning oxygen producing candles to make up some of the deficit of lost air. Oxygen-producing candles seems kind of oxymoronic to me, does anyone have any info or insight into how they work or what they are made of?