Now all we need is for HD manufacturers to stop defining "Gigabyte" as "1 billion bytes", so my 160 GB drive is actually 160 GB (171 billion bytes), and not 149 GB (160 billion bytes).
Or alternatively we need RAM manufacturers to stop defining 'gigabyte' as '1,073,741,824 bytes'. If they must insist on using a power of 1,024, then they can pick a different word for it, that doesn't conflict with the usage of the 'giga' prefix to mean 'x10^9' in every other field in the world. May I suggest 'gibibyte'?
This series of craters really looks strange. What's the probability of this?
A lot of asteroids are fairly loosely built, more like heaps of rubble than large boulders. So: let such an asteroid have a close encounter with a planet on its travels, let us say Jupiter. Let it pass close to the planet, and be torn apart by tidal forces, and then escape on the other side. It's now a strung-out row of smaller bodies - remember Shoemaker-Levy 9? Then passing through the main asteroid belt, let it collide with a more solid asteroid. Result: a chain of impact craters.
You see similar things on larger bodies - there are impact chains on the Moon, for instance - but these are attributed to debris ejected from a larger impact falling back to the surface further along from the impact site. On an asteroid I doubt gravity would pull anything back, so we'd need a third party to have arranged for a series of impacts instead.
Personally I'm a socialist and support our high taxes in Sweden, but I make sure to never miss out an opportunity to withhold as much taxes I can get away with.. Has more to do with personal greed than with any political ideology.:)
And here we have the triumph of the capitalists in microcosm. If even those who call themselves Socialists will lie and cheat to avoid contributing to the common good, what hope then for Socialism?
Regarding the definition of 'overseas' for import purposes, by the way: the EU is a single market. Tax is not payable on anything you buy from another EU state, provided it is for your own use rather than for commercial resale. For some reason the British customs think there is still something called a 'personal allowance' which limits how much you can import, but this is not in fact the case; good luck convincing the bloke in Dover that your Transit van full of fags from Calais is entirely for your own use, though.
Well, while we're on the subject, I once met a girl hitch-hiking across country. Came from Miami apparently. Something didn't seem quite right about her, but when I asked about it I couldn't hear the answer because of all the coloured girls going doo, doo doo, doo doo, doo doo doo doo...
No matter how clever your software or your adaptive optics, you can't beat the diffraction limit. To get substantially higher resolutions, they have to launch bigger telescopes, which would require bigger rockets, which would be really obvious - or they have to fly spysats in formation and do interferometry, which would be difficult to do in the first place, orbits being what they are, and impossible to hide even if you could.
The British government were way ahead of the game on this one. To avoid just this kind of analysis, they established an entire department dedicated to the development of unusual gaits.
geostationary satellites simply don't have the resolution to provide useful detail
Who puts a spysat in geostationary orbit? It's way too high, you'd need a telescope that dwarfs Hubble to get a decent view. You put spysats in the lowest orbit you can get away with, and you make sure that you have enough of them that any target of interest will be covered frequently enough for your purposes.
Old. There are proper Malkavians in it. They're fun to play, and the Malkavian-specific dialogue is terrific, but I preferred playing Tremere; they're just so much more stylish, and don't go about the place in a cowgirl outfit.
And obviously everyone who ever played the game at some point created a Brujah called Cassidy. It's compulsory.
That puts this particle at about a third of the speed of light.
No it doesn't, I forgot I'd taken the reciprocal. It puts it at about three times the speed of light. I'd guess the other poster is right, then, and that time dilation prolongs its lifetime.
TFA states that the Omega-sub-b travels 1 mm in a trillionth of a second. This seems a little high to me, given that c is about 3*10^8 m/s = 3^10^11 mm/s.
Following up the second part of your post: It's 3.3x10^-12 seconds per millimetre. That puts this particle at about a third of the speed of light.
TFA notes that 13 out of 20 predicted baryons have been observed, leaving 7 still to be discovered. Surely these will be just as noteworthy as this discovery. Is the LHC the only accelerator capable of creating and observing these remaining baryons?
Who knows? Perhaps that's why they're yet to be discovered: that we haven't reached the right energies. Well, the LHC will reach far higher energies than anything else on earth. Every time there's been a substantial step up in collision energies, all manner of new particles fall out. That alone makes the LHC favourite to dominate the field for the foreseeable future. That's before you consider the fact that a project of this scale, with absolutely enormous long-term funding, attracts everyone. The best particle physicists in the world are going to be attracted to working on the LHC, or on analysis of the data it produces.
There'll still be discoveries made elsewhere, but for the headline stuff, watch CERN.
Through the Looking Glass is even worse. A Ph.D. isn't enough to understand some of the text in that one: you need to be an anthropomorphic egg to have that level of command of the language. There's glory for you!
There are missile defences around Canada? I thought there were only radars in Canada, to provide a warning of an attack early enough that missiles could be launched in time to prevent warheads reaching the USA. As long as America's protected all right, the rest of us can burn.
Unless Canada wants to charge a million bucks a ship
Charter rates for the largest freight ships can be $40,000 - $70,000 per day. If taking the Northwest Passage can save such a ship 25 days at sea, then even at the lowest daily rates that's saved them a million already. Factor in fuel costs and Canada's apparently exorbitant fee could start looking reasonable.
" The UK police's Serious Fraud Office" as opposed to the Humourous Fraud Office, which goes around nightclubs catching and prosecuting bad comedians.
The Humourous Fraud Office are mostly known as the people you call if you buy a pet which, when you get it home not half an hour later, turns out not to have been just resting at all, but in fact to be stone dead and nailed to the perch.
I loved SimEarth. I always used to do horribly abusive things in it, though. Life quality for my sentients was rarely better than Hellish. I remember once I'd boiled off the oceans, but somehow preserved life and ended up with a jungle world looking something like a 19th-century dream of Venus. The avian race that prevailed there ended up hitting the Exodus while there were still a few information-age cities in the world. So the fast-spreading info-age cities replaced the nanotech cities the moment they left, then transitioned straight back up to nanotech, then took off in their turn... an endless stream of sentients getting the hell out of my monstrous hellhole of a planet.
I liked creating the hidden robot species, too. There wasn't much could survive in competition with them. I did manage it once: with dinosaurs. Dinosaurs versus robots: someone should make that movie.
the fact that GNU tools are an essential part of linux, BSD, OS-X.
I thought BSD generally used their own Unix tools? GNU's not Unix, after all. And I'm sure you must have seen more than one licence flamewar in your time here over whether the BSD or GPL licence better preserves freedom.
The thing is, despite the simulations, a lot of the observed exoplanets have highly eccentric orbits.
It occurs to me that we might just have been lucky in that a monster planet formed in a circular orbit. Any mass in the Solar System going onto a highly eccentric orbit would then have ended up inside Jupiter.
You mean accidentally reaching a circular orbit again after the orbit had already become elliptical? I think that'd be extremely unlikely. When various objects act on one another (as they invariably do), they're most likely to become more elliptical, not less.
Try modelling tidal effects in your simulation. These tend to drive orbits towards the circular over time.
Slashdot Mirror
Or alternatively we need RAM manufacturers to stop defining 'gigabyte' as '1,073,741,824 bytes'. If they must insist on using a power of 1,024, then they can pick a different word for it, that doesn't conflict with the usage of the 'giga' prefix to mean 'x10^9' in every other field in the world. May I suggest 'gibibyte'?
This must be the Verizon music store.
A lot of asteroids are fairly loosely built, more like heaps of rubble than large boulders. So: let such an asteroid have a close encounter with a planet on its travels, let us say Jupiter. Let it pass close to the planet, and be torn apart by tidal forces, and then escape on the other side. It's now a strung-out row of smaller bodies - remember Shoemaker-Levy 9? Then passing through the main asteroid belt, let it collide with a more solid asteroid. Result: a chain of impact craters.
You see similar things on larger bodies - there are impact chains on the Moon, for instance - but these are attributed to debris ejected from a larger impact falling back to the surface further along from the impact site. On an asteroid I doubt gravity would pull anything back, so we'd need a third party to have arranged for a series of impacts instead.
And here we have the triumph of the capitalists in microcosm. If even those who call themselves Socialists will lie and cheat to avoid contributing to the common good, what hope then for Socialism?
Regarding the definition of 'overseas' for import purposes, by the way: the EU is a single market. Tax is not payable on anything you buy from another EU state, provided it is for your own use rather than for commercial resale. For some reason the British customs think there is still something called a 'personal allowance' which limits how much you can import, but this is not in fact the case; good luck convincing the bloke in Dover that your Transit van full of fags from Calais is entirely for your own use, though.
Assuming that your cryptosystem has been broken, how do you even authenticate to the satellite that you are who you say you are?
Well, while we're on the subject, I once met a girl hitch-hiking across country. Came from Miami apparently. Something didn't seem quite right about her, but when I asked about it I couldn't hear the answer because of all the coloured girls going doo, doo doo, doo doo, doo doo doo doo...
No matter how clever your software or your adaptive optics, you can't beat the diffraction limit. To get substantially higher resolutions, they have to launch bigger telescopes, which would require bigger rockets, which would be really obvious - or they have to fly spysats in formation and do interferometry, which would be difficult to do in the first place, orbits being what they are, and impossible to hide even if you could.
That's terrorist talk. The correct way to say it is 'Our Predator drone blew up a terrorist cell and 25 collaborators'.
The British government were way ahead of the game on this one. To avoid just this kind of analysis, they established an entire department dedicated to the development of unusual gaits.
Who puts a spysat in geostationary orbit? It's way too high, you'd need a telescope that dwarfs Hubble to get a decent view. You put spysats in the lowest orbit you can get away with, and you make sure that you have enough of them that any target of interest will be covered frequently enough for your purposes.
Old. There are proper Malkavians in it. They're fun to play, and the Malkavian-specific dialogue is terrific, but I preferred playing Tremere; they're just so much more stylish, and don't go about the place in a cowgirl outfit.
And obviously everyone who ever played the game at some point created a Brujah called Cassidy. It's compulsory.
Way out in the water. See it swimming?
No it doesn't, I forgot I'd taken the reciprocal. It puts it at about three times the speed of light. I'd guess the other poster is right, then, and that time dilation prolongs its lifetime.
Following up the second part of your post: It's 3.3x10^-12 seconds per millimetre. That puts this particle at about a third of the speed of light.
Who knows? Perhaps that's why they're yet to be discovered: that we haven't reached the right energies. Well, the LHC will reach far higher energies than anything else on earth. Every time there's been a substantial step up in collision energies, all manner of new particles fall out. That alone makes the LHC favourite to dominate the field for the foreseeable future. That's before you consider the fact that a project of this scale, with absolutely enormous long-term funding, attracts everyone. The best particle physicists in the world are going to be attracted to working on the LHC, or on analysis of the data it produces.
There'll still be discoveries made elsewhere, but for the headline stuff, watch CERN.
Through the Looking Glass is even worse. A Ph.D. isn't enough to understand some of the text in that one: you need to be an anthropomorphic egg to have that level of command of the language. There's glory for you!
There are missile defences around Canada? I thought there were only radars in Canada, to provide a warning of an attack early enough that missiles could be launched in time to prevent warheads reaching the USA. As long as America's protected all right, the rest of us can burn.
Charter rates for the largest freight ships can be $40,000 - $70,000 per day. If taking the Northwest Passage can save such a ship 25 days at sea, then even at the lowest daily rates that's saved them a million already. Factor in fuel costs and Canada's apparently exorbitant fee could start looking reasonable.
The Humourous Fraud Office are mostly known as the people you call if you buy a pet which, when you get it home not half an hour later, turns out not to have been just resting at all, but in fact to be stone dead and nailed to the perch.
And this is why Windows is fine for nerds and hobbyists, but not ready for the mainstream desktop.
I liked creating the hidden robot species, too. There wasn't much could survive in competition with them. I did manage it once: with dinosaurs. Dinosaurs versus robots: someone should make that movie.
I thought BSD generally used their own Unix tools? GNU's not Unix, after all. And I'm sure you must have seen more than one licence flamewar in your time here over whether the BSD or GPL licence better preserves freedom.
It occurs to me that we might just have been lucky in that a monster planet formed in a circular orbit. Any mass in the Solar System going onto a highly eccentric orbit would then have ended up inside Jupiter.
Try modelling tidal effects in your simulation. These tend to drive orbits towards the circular over time.
If I remember correctly, in the Independent it's actually called 'Mea culpa'.