Interestingly, if you search for the Lebesgue Integral in answers.com, you get an article from Wikipedia.
Now, the question is whether this is good for Wikipedia (more people see its contents) or bad (fewer people even know that they could/should improve Wikipedia)?
I still don't understand - did Huygens actually land on Titan, not crash into it? How and why?
As far as I understand, you'd need a lot of fuel (more than on the Mars rover - Huydens was not surrounded with a bouncy ball, and Titan is bigger than Mars, I think) and a ton of luck for a soft touchdown, and nobody even knew if the probe would land in a sea. Then, it seems that the probe did not do much sitting on the surface. Why not just go down the atmosphere transmitting data, then crash and be done with it? That would be cheaper, or we could replace the weight with something more useful than fuel.
Then, if we did count on it landing safely, why not put all the stuff they had on Beagle on it? It could have a drill, a microscope, etc.
Yes, of course, you can not gurantee anything by writing to anyone in the government. Your only hope is that the congressman will suddenly notice that he has to sign an awful lot of stock letters #24 rather than #1 or #3. And that's a pretty strong reason to write him - unless you can imagine doing anything else that actually has a tiny chance of changing the guy's position without spending a ton of money.
Well, of course it is a pragmatic decision on the part of MS, designed to increase their profits. However, it is also one that happens to benefit us all. That's the point of capitalism - selfish decisions on the part of businesses should improve the life of society. It's good when this system works.
I always wondered what those OEM versions are... In particular, is it a CD or some strange partition on the hard drive? Can you reinstall one after installing a new hard drive? Changing the partition table?
The question should not be whether computers can calcualte flawlessly - that's obviously wrong. The question is whether the probability of all the different configurations of computers consistently giving the same wrong answer to a problem is greater than the probability of all the human mathematicians agreeing on the same wrong answer. To me, it seems obvious that the computers are better off...
Hmm... The website has some 76 episodes of Futurama. The two released DVDs have about 30. Do the rest even exist in some real sense? Is there any place to buy those?
No, a rescue mission is already on thier way. They are going to fish out the cablewrecked packets from a helicopter as the packets reach the surface, and manually deliver them to the site of their destination.
Re:Communications potential of space probes?
on
Goodbye, Galileo
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· Score: 1
As far as I understand, the main antenna of the probe simply jammed when opening. So, NASA had to use some secondary antenna that was never designed for communication with Earth. Hence 120 bits/second.
Although this probably would've annoyed Kazaa, it would also greatly annoy anyone searching Kazaa on Google. I think Google doesn't do this because it doesn't want to annoy its customers. There might well be more people searching for Kazaa than there are people on Slashdot...
There are two strage things happening in the universe on the large scale. The first one is the "dark matter". Basically, if we apply Newton's equations for gravity to various galaxies, we find out that they are spinning too fast. If the force holding them together is what we think it is, most of the stars in a galaxy should have been slingshoted away and left the galaxy. So there must be something making the attraction stronger than we think.
The second strangeness - the "dark energy" - concerns the expansion of the universe. Different pieces of matter in the universe attract to each other by gravity. This slows down the expansion of the universe. As far as we know, gravity is the only thing that can affect the universe on a large scale. So, the expansion of the universe should be slowing down. However, as WMAP showed, the rate of expansion of the universe is actually speeding up. So, there must be something that makes the universe speed up faster than we think.
In both cases, there are two possibilities. The first one is that the anomality is equally distributed through space. This would mean that our equations are a little bit off. For instance, we can account for the "dark energy" by adding an extra term to Einstein's equation for the expansion of the universe. If we change Newton's equation to make gravity stronger over large distances, we can eliminate dark matter.
Yet, there is a possibility that there can be more of the "strangeness" in one point in the universe than in another. For example, one galaxy may be held together tighter than another one of the same size. That would mean that there is another strange beast in the universe apart from the types of matter and energy we know. A whole new branch of physics will be needed to deal with the beast and ask questions like "Why is there more dark matter here than there is there?" and "Does dark matter interact with ordinary matter in any other way than gravity?". Dark matter will compress things on a smaller scale; dark energy will expand things on a larger scale. Obviosly, the statement that "Universe is 75% (or whatever) dark matter" will only be meaningful in this case. As far as I know, we need more precise observations to choose between the two possibilities.
I hope that someone who actually is a physicist, is not asleep, or can reach the "Reply" button will explain all the points I'm wrong on...
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine: a Mac with a case made entirely of Apple fans, all in an Apple t-shirt and beaming smiles.
MPAA only asked them to rename "My Music". Microsoft then realized it would have to rename the rest for publicity's sake...
Just below the Slashdot article, there was an ad with this link: Interoperability Month. It seems that this is a new stage of Get the Facts...
Interestingly, the picture of the ad itself had no mention of Misrosoft.
Interestingly, if you search for the Lebesgue Integral in answers.com, you get an article from Wikipedia.
Now, the question is whether this is good for Wikipedia (more people see its contents) or bad (fewer people even know that they could/should improve Wikipedia)?
If I were them, I'd call it 'omnivore'.
I still don't understand - did Huygens actually land on Titan, not crash into it? How and why?
As far as I understand, you'd need a lot of fuel (more than on the Mars rover - Huydens was not surrounded with a bouncy ball, and Titan is bigger than Mars, I think) and a ton of luck for a soft touchdown, and nobody even knew if the probe would land in a sea. Then, it seems that the probe did not do much sitting on the surface. Why not just go down the atmosphere transmitting data, then crash and be done with it? That would be cheaper, or we could replace the weight with something more useful than fuel.
Then, if we did count on it landing safely, why not put all the stuff they had on Beagle on it? It could have a drill, a microscope, etc.
For Windows, use BootVis. Comes very handy to figure out what driver is pausing the boot process for 5 minutes...
For bonus points, explain why Microsoft pulled it from its website.
Yes, of course, you can not gurantee anything by writing to anyone in the government. Your only hope is that the congressman will suddenly notice that he has to sign an awful lot of stock letters #24 rather than #1 or #3. And that's a pretty strong reason to write him - unless you can imagine doing anything else that actually has a tiny chance of changing the guy's position without spending a ton of money.
And why, oh why, does Windows (+IE+Word+.dlls for everything) boot up so much faster than Linux+KDE?
How does she sleep?
Where does she keep her food? (90 days of food in this tiny canoe?)
What if there is a storm? (Good weather guaranteed? A ship following her just in case?)
Overture takes payment from sites that want their rating increased, correct?
I'll stick with Google, if only to make a point about a business practice...
Well, of course it is a pragmatic decision on the part of MS, designed to increase their profits. However, it is also one that happens to benefit us all. That's the point of capitalism - selfish decisions on the part of businesses should improve the life of society. It's good when this system works.
I always wondered what those OEM versions are... In particular, is it a CD or some strange partition on the hard drive? Can you reinstall one after installing a new hard drive? Changing the partition table?
.. download the patches form Windows Catalogue? Or do even they not work? What about service packs?
If you were right, the Wayback machine would be controlling the internet. Meanwhile, it seems that few (out-of-slashdot) people even know it exists.
The question should not be whether computers can calcualte flawlessly - that's obviously wrong. The question is whether the probability of all the different configurations of computers consistently giving the same wrong answer to a problem is greater than the probability of all the human mathematicians agreeing on the same wrong answer. To me, it seems obvious that the computers are better off...
Hmm... The website has some 76 episodes of Futurama. The two released DVDs have about 30. Do the rest even exist in some real sense? Is there any place to buy those?
There's an interesting discussion of this and some facts at kuro5hin.
http://www.sco.com/scosource/
No, a rescue mission is already on thier way. They are going to fish out the cablewrecked packets from a helicopter as the packets reach the surface, and manually deliver them to the site of their destination.
I just searched for "Kazza Lite" on Google, and no results were censored! Does anyone know what has changed?
As far as I understand, the main antenna of the probe simply jammed when opening. So, NASA had to use some secondary antenna that was never designed for communication with Earth. Hence 120 bits/second.
Although this probably would've annoyed Kazaa, it would also greatly annoy anyone searching Kazaa on Google. I think Google doesn't do this because it doesn't want to annoy its customers. There might well be more people searching for Kazaa than there are people on Slashdot...
..IANAP (i'm not a physicist), though.
There are two strage things happening in the universe on the large scale. The first one is the "dark matter". Basically, if we apply Newton's equations for gravity to various galaxies, we find out that they are spinning too fast. If the force holding them together is what we think it is, most of the stars in a galaxy should have been slingshoted away and left the galaxy. So there must be something making the attraction stronger than we think.
The second strangeness - the "dark energy" - concerns the expansion of the universe. Different pieces of matter in the universe attract to each other by gravity. This slows down the expansion of the universe. As far as we know, gravity is the only thing that can affect the universe on a large scale. So, the expansion of the universe should be slowing down. However, as WMAP showed, the rate of expansion of the universe is actually speeding up. So, there must be something that makes the universe speed up faster than we think.
In both cases, there are two possibilities. The first one is that the anomality is equally distributed through space. This would mean that our equations are a little bit off. For instance, we can account for the "dark energy" by adding an extra term to Einstein's equation for the expansion of the universe. If we change Newton's equation to make gravity stronger over large distances, we can eliminate dark matter.
Yet, there is a possibility that there can be more of the "strangeness" in one point in the universe than in another. For example, one galaxy may be held together tighter than another one of the same size. That would mean that there is another strange beast in the universe apart from the types of matter and energy we know. A whole new branch of physics will be needed to deal with the beast and ask questions like "Why is there more dark matter here than there is there?" and "Does dark matter interact with ordinary matter in any other way than gravity?". Dark matter will compress things on a smaller scale; dark energy will expand things on a larger scale. Obviosly, the statement that "Universe is 75% (or whatever) dark matter" will only be meaningful in this case. As far as I know, we need more precise observations to choose between the two possibilities.
I hope that someone who actually is a physicist, is not asleep, or can reach the "Reply" button will explain all the points I'm wrong on...
Hah, if it's less than a googol it's not a number!
Oh, the temptation to write "google" instead...