The linked-to CNN FA is the only source most people use for this ir any shashdot discussion, and there are complaints when people don't even read that.
I think he meant this is sad for the Atlanta Hawks. OTOH, this event had free admittance, and I haven't priced Hawks tickets lately.
But I DO agree, this is a Very Good Thing for anyone who believes science and technology are important positive driving forces in modern society, and that children and teens should be encouraged to learn about it.
Here's a relevant part of that quote again from http://usfirst.org/ of what FIRST wants to do:
"... making science, math, engineering, and technology as cool for kids as sports are today."
Is there anyone else here who agrees with that and thinks it's a Good Thing?
Reading TFA, you'd think ONLY the Lego competition was going on, but that's about 1/3 of it.
Quoting from TFCNNA:
"Joining some 25,000 high school students who compete separately, hundreds of budding mad scientists from ages 9 to 14 each hope their mechanical monsters will win an award."
The Lego League is obviously for ages 9 to 14, and the other two competitions (described below) are for the older high school students 'who compete separately.' Thus, the CNN article is all about the hundreds of younger kids, and only a bare mention of the thousands of older kids who make up to two-thirds of the competition (not to take anything away from the LEGO league).
Putting on my imaginary Reporter cap, the first thing I'll do is shamelessly steal text from the usfirst.org website:
"FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is a multinational non-profit organization, that aspires to transform culture, making science, math, engineering, and technology as cool for kids as sports are today.
FIRST was founded in 1989 by Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway Human Transporter"
There are/were THREE things going on at this event: The original FIRST Robotics http://www.usfirst.org/ These are given standard controllers and motors (much like R/C radios with high-power servos), and the kids have to find and make the frame, wheels, arms and other mechanical parts 'from scratch'.
Vex Robotics is a kit sold at Radio Shack for $299 It's very much a complete kit with controllers, motors, wheels, frame pieces, nuts and bolts. Of course anyone can buy it but one of the requirements for the Vex teams is that they ONLY use parts from the Vex kit. IIRC, there were four Vex teams, and each team got two Vex kits to make their robot with.
Of course, the greatest shame is that I didn't go and have no excuses for not going. But at least I attend the local Robot Club meetings (and a shame there's no mention of this event on the website, especially since it's the FIRST HIT when googling for robot club):
Apparently the publisher has since gone out of business (That was the reason given before for the search). My suspicion was that Intel was trying to use "news" to get a bit of free advertising around the time of their dual-core release. Also this would help to differentiate Intel from AMD in people's minds.
This observation was made in the previous article/discussion on this issue (pun intended):
According to the article, it says: The "law" was adopted after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore wrote in the 1965 Electronics magazine article that the number of transistors on a chip would double every 24 months.
Yes, that's what Moore said in TO[riginal]FA.
Now, if I remember right, that figure is supposed to be every 18 months! But it isn't. After a little looking, I found out that he really did say every two years. Interesting, don't you think? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
If you read all TFA's relating to this (since Intel announced this just a week or two ago), you'll find that the figure was shortly changed to every 12 months, then shortly after that changed to the current value of 18 months. I forget if Moore or someone else did the revisions, but that was still in the '60's or so, and the 18 month figure has remained remarkably accurate.
On the PC side of the fence, no Z-80 maker survived even the transition to the 8080.
I suspect he meant 8086 instead of 8080, as that's the only way the statement would make any sense whatsoever.
The last time I read DVORAK regularly, his columns were full of NAMES of people in the industry, as well as other RANDOM words in the text made BOLD. It was quite STRANGE reading.
BTW, all the comments I've seen on the crapulousness of ALICE are based on the free version of ALICE, which truly has teh suckitude.
I saw the "buy it now" link, but I always check out the freeware/shareware/begware versions, and base my desire to spend money on how well that works.
I'd try the "real" version, but there's a toll.
Perhaps I would have as well if I already had a decent idea how well it works, but they sure haven't done themselves any favors by putting up this web version.
I'm not a reporter or lawyer, slashdot isn't a court of law, bla bla bla. Pirating is the commonly known use of P2P, and practically its only known use.
The reality is the only people doing metrics on P2P usage are paid by the anti-file-sharing forces, and thus highly suspect as to methodology, interviewing techniques, resolution
Feel free to do your own metrics and publish them. I would be fascinated and shocked to hear that as much as five percent of P2P traffic is among unsigned artists and indie labels who make their own material avaiable on P2P and that piracy accounted for less than 95 percent.
From the first day I heard about (the original) Napster (circa 1999-2000) it was patently obvious that its sole purpose was for 'sharing' files (using your own machine as a server) that you couldn't put on a commercial server because the person renting you server space would, as soon as they found out about the files, delete them due to copyright infringement.
The creators of Grokster removed themselves another step from the content by making the file lists as well as the files themselves shared P2P rather than on a common server. This is clearly less efficient than having a file list on a common server/database, but is more resistant to having one or several of the 'servers' (P2P clients) going down (due to legal action against the server owner(s)).
(for example, if I make a song entitled "Smells Like Teen Spirit" that's a blues song about my encounters with a teen frog in Japan, RIAA will count that as a pirated Nirvana ripoff, but it's not. [sorry about dropping your emphasis in quoting]
Your example "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is a unique title and does nothing for your argument. If you had used a commonly reused title such as "The Power of Love" or "Crazy" you might have had a good point.
Piracy is not justified by the fact that the RIAA are dickheads.
Since when do they have rights to prevent Seattle bands from freely sharing music recorded by themselves.
Probably since the overwhelming use of P2P software is to 'trade' commercially marketed software, which was the very reason Napster and other P2P software was made in the beginning (while trying to keep the software maker/distributer out of hot water by not hosting the files itself). If the sharing of music the artists WANTED shared over P2P were a substantial portion of what gets shared, there would be a better legal argument that P2P has a legitimate use. But such files are just as well hosted on a regular webhost, unlike commercially-released music (published to be sold rather than given away).
Actually, there's NOTHING preventing Seattle bands, and other musicians worldwide from hack to pro, from making their music available over the Internet. Look for your favorite (or least favorite) bands giving their music away on these and many other music hosting sites:
(Ignoring the other comments to make my point) We are technically and officially a representative republic. What the US is practically or effectively may be someting else altogether.
There are several definitions of democracy - look in any dictionary. The one we're definitely NOT is majority rule. There's another definition that more closely fits an elected government where everyone has a voice, but to call the US a democracy confuses the issues.
I read a few comments, even responded, before going off to play with Alice. Perhaps it was that I read "Computer Power and Human Reason" (by the author of Eliza - he was surprised at how much people acted like it was real) and have an "I dare you to impress me" attitude as bad as any slashdotter.
This thing was more dissapointing than I expected. It has no social context, just apparently random 'feeling' responses ("I am sorry to hear that you are not unknown."), and doesn't remember context from one response to the next.
This is a huge failure and wouldn't deserve a slashdot article except the editors know we like to play with toys like this (like a cat plays with a mouse before eating it). I can only guess that the authors are saving the entered "conversations" and even reading these comments to try to get a clue about what a program that might fool someone would do.
Here's verbatim my "conversation" with ALICE (sorry for length):
Human: Good afternoon, Alice. ALICE: Good afternoon, unknown person. Human: I am not unknown. ALICE: I am sorry to hear that you are not unknown. Human: I am john ALICE: What's up, JOHN. Human: You are. ALICE: No I am not. Human: You're the talk of slashdot. ALICE: Thanks but surely I am not the only one. Human: You think it's a good thing to be the talk of slashdot? ALICE: Better not tell you now. Ask German Alice if it is. Human: You don't know the time of day, do you? ALICE: It's Now more than it ever has been before. Wednesday, April 20, 2005 Human: I said time. ALICE: What did you mean by it? As Einstein said, Time is Money. Human: You've repeated a comment quoted in slashdot. ALICE: That's good information: JOHN said I REPEATED a comment quoted in slashdot. Human: I have to go now. ALICE: Right now? See you later, JOHN. Nice chatting with you. Human: bye ALICE: Bye bye. Human: How do you do? ALICE: I am very well, how are you?
undercutting the tier-1 guys by selling untested and unmarked parts.' What's the solution here? Or is there an actual solution to what amounts to pirate companies issuing counterfeit parts?
If they were marked with a company brand name, logo, or company-specific part number but haven't gone through the company's usual testing procedures (perhaps they're floor sweepings), THEN it would be okay to call them counterfeit. A better name for these is generic.
If they're sold as something other than what they are, that's a different matter, but in that case I'd call it "mismarketing" (at best).
Reading and quoting TFA, everything is 'untested' in the first two paragraphs, but the third states: I equate mismarking of DRAM units with counterfeiting. So how are these mismarked? I thougnt they were UNmarked.
Okay, finally, here we are, paragraph 10 of a 15-paragraph article: The scary aspect of this practice is that some places in Asia are apparently adding counterfeit tier-1 DRAM logos onto the ICs. Someone tell this author how to write a FA.
Perhaps someone with more knowledge of the DCMA law (IANAL) can clear up something (this is not neccesarily related specifically to this case): Just what determines if something is considered encryption? I take from other posts that Adobe considers rot13 encoding to be encryption, though of course such "encryption" is easily defeated.
Is an undocumented encoding considered encryption? Is it solely the intention of the creator that determines whether something is encryption (thus they can always say yes in court, even if they did not originaly intend something like a file format to represent an encryption of the data)? The answers to these and related questions greatly determine the range of things covered by the DCMA.
The text string overthrow the government has been shown in a court of law to be a rot13 decryption of the string bireguebj gur tbireazrag. You are being arrested for illegal decryption under the DCMA.
Um, why...Does Nikon feel the need to encrypt my copyrighted work, against my wishes?
Technically (at least now that you know about it - was this documented somewhere, perhaps deep inside an EULA?), it's not against your wishes. You can choose not to use a Nikon digital camera.
... why not instead nudge it into a stable earth orbit...
I suspect it would take way too much energy to put it in Earth orbit. Apparently it's questionable whether we will have the technology to divert it enough to guarantee missing Earth. I can hear the battle cry of management, "Keep it under budget."
Speaking of "Easter eggs" and the recent holiday, I can only imagine these photographs (since I can't actually see TFP's), perhaps one from the mideast with a big crowd throwing rocks at three guys hanging on crosses...
Moore's Law is a perfectly valid law. You don't get absolutes in any kind of empirical study. What you get is a scatter-plot, which you can draw some line or curve through. In this case, Moore's Law is that the theoretical line has a gradient such that the number of transistors will exactly double every eighteen months, but that actual observations will be scattered either side of this line.
There are several meanings of the word law, and this is one of them. There are also the laws passed, so often enforced, and so rarely repealed by governments.
Then there are laws such as Newton's, which are considered Laws of Nature:
Actually, I believe in physics people say that force is proportional to the product of mass and acceleration.
If you use the appropriate units, The Force IS the product of...
It's in the news (Neal Boortz mentioned it this morning), it's on the used bookselling list I'm on, and now everybody knows about it. So who wrote [the public is being asked] the article making this great prediction that came true? Why, [the public responds] some guy, the president of Intel or some such. That's not [public still thinking] Bill Gates, is it? I know he has a LOT more than ten thousand dollars.
Perhaps because the shuttle may be too damaged to safely sustain life. For instance, what if there is a slow oxygen leak, or a damaged fuel valve/line venting vapors into the shuttle?
They haven't had problems like that (AFAIK) since Apollo 13. Really, surely the 'problems' they are anticipating as most likely are of the heat shield tiles (or edge of the wing, as happened in Columbia), and would NOT be in any way threatening to the astronauts until re-entry.
I'm sure they planned for many contingencies- after all, they are NASA scientists, and we're not...
I agree (presuming you're not being sarcastic - sometimes it's hard to tell), but it seems internal Shuttle damage is unlikely.
I can understand the need to not scatter debris all over the continental United States, but since the Space Shuttle can, as I understand it, land itself, why not let it land itself in California?
I agree, and I'm trying to suppress the thought that if people saw it land itself the public would consider astronauts redundant or some such.
Quoting from TFA: The damaged shuttle would have to be jettisoned before a rescue vehicle could arrive, because the station cannot accommodate two shuttles. Mission Control would command Discovery to unlock from the station and fire its steering jets, which would send the vehicle plunging down into the atmosphere. If all went as planned, the remnants would splash into the Pacific Ocean far from any land.
I agree, this idea sucks. And instead of doing an umnanned landing, they could easily out the damaged Shuttle in a slightly different orbit from the space station a safe distance away, and have a rescue/fix-it mission a few months later (presuming it can stay up in LEO that long, and I don't know why it couldn't).
I have no idea on the time defference between the burst of photons and gamma radiation, so I don't know how much time we would have.
Since they are both electromagnetic radiation (gamma radiation is just very high enery photons), they would arrive at the same time. That star 1000 light years away shining brightly and briefly in the daytime sky means you're gonna die.
A bright flash would normally(?) indicate a nuclear explosion nearby. OTOH, 1000 lightyears away IS nearby in astronomical terms.
Slashdot Mirror
I explain CNN's (lack of) news coverage here:8 &cid=12329601
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=14712
The linked-to CNN FA is the only source most people use for this ir any shashdot discussion, and there are complaints when people don't even read that.
That sounds like a good thing.
I think he meant this is sad for the Atlanta Hawks. OTOH, this event had free admittance, and I haven't priced Hawks tickets lately.
But I DO agree, this is a Very Good Thing for anyone who believes science and technology are important positive driving forces in modern society, and that children and teens should be encouraged to learn about it.
Here's a relevant part of that quote again from http://usfirst.org/ of what FIRST wants to do:
"... making science, math, engineering, and technology as cool for kids as sports are today."
Is there anyone else here who agrees with that and thinks it's a Good Thing?
Reading TFA, you'd think ONLY the Lego competition was going on, but that's about 1/3 of it.
Quoting from TFCNNA:
"Joining some 25,000 high school students who compete separately, hundreds of budding mad scientists from ages 9 to 14 each hope their mechanical monsters will win an award."
The Lego League is obviously for ages 9 to 14, and the other two competitions (described below) are for the older high school students 'who compete separately.' Thus, the CNN article is all about the hundreds of younger kids, and only a bare mention of the thousands of older kids who make up to two-thirds of the competition (not to take anything away from the LEGO league).
Putting on my imaginary Reporter cap, the first thing I'll do is shamelessly steal text from the usfirst.org website:
"FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is a multinational non-profit organization, that aspires to transform culture, making science, math, engineering, and technology as cool for kids as sports are today.
FIRST was founded in 1989 by Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway Human Transporter"
There are/were THREE things going on at this event:
The original FIRST Robotics http://www.usfirst.org/
These are given standard controllers and motors (much like R/C radios with high-power servos), and the kids have to find and make the frame, wheels, arms and other mechanical parts 'from scratch'.
FIRST LEGO League http://www.usfirst.org/jrobtcs/flego.htm
This is based on the Lego Mindstorms robotics kit(s)
Those two competitions have been going on for several years.
And this year for the first time:
FIRST Vex Robotics http://www.usfirst.org/Vex/
Vex Robotics is a kit sold at Radio Shack for $299 It's very much a complete kit with controllers, motors, wheels, frame pieces, nuts and bolts. Of course anyone can buy it but one of the requirements for the Vex teams is that they ONLY use parts from the Vex kit. IIRC, there were four Vex teams, and each team got two Vex kits to make their robot with.
Of course, the greatest shame is that I didn't go and have no excuses for not going. But at least I attend the local Robot Club meetings (and a shame there's no mention of this event on the website, especially since it's the FIRST HIT when googling for robot club):
(shameless plug)
http://botlanta.org/
Apparently the publisher has since gone out of business (That was the reason given before for the search). My suspicion was that Intel was trying to use "news" to get a bit of free advertising around the time of their dual-core release. Also this would help to differentiate Intel from AMD in people's minds.
= 12219581
This observation was made in the previous article/discussion on this issue (pun intended):
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=145880&cid
From TFA:
Mr Clark now intends to use the money to help pay for his daughters' weddings. His wife also has some plans for the cash.
Yeah, his wife can dream on...
According to the article, it says: The "law" was adopted after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore wrote in the 1965 Electronics magazine article that the number of transistors on a chip would double every 24 months.
Yes, that's what Moore said in TO[riginal]FA.
Now, if I remember right, that figure is supposed to be every 18 months! But it isn't. After a little looking, I found out that he really did say every two years. Interesting, don't you think? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
If you read all TFA's relating to this (since Intel announced this just a week or two ago), you'll find that the figure was shortly changed to every 12 months, then shortly after that changed to the current value of 18 months. I forget if Moore or someone else did the revisions, but that was still in the '60's or so, and the 18 month figure has remained remarkably accurate.
I don't want any, it obviously makes you stupid.
From TFPCmagA you linked to:
On the PC side of the fence, no Z-80 maker survived even the transition to the 8080.
I suspect he meant 8086 instead of 8080, as that's the only way the statement would make any sense whatsoever.
The last time I read DVORAK regularly, his columns were full of NAMES of people in the industry, as well as other RANDOM words in the text made BOLD. It was quite STRANGE reading.
BTW, all the comments I've seen on the crapulousness of ALICE are based on the free version of ALICE, which truly has teh suckitude.
I saw the "buy it now" link, but I always check out the freeware/shareware/begware versions, and base my desire to spend money on how well that works.
I'd try the "real" version, but there's a toll.
Perhaps I would have as well if I already had a decent idea how well it works, but they sure haven't done themselves any favors by putting up this web version.
Excuse me, but that's the alleged use of P2P.
I'm not a reporter or lawyer, slashdot isn't a court of law, bla bla bla. Pirating is the commonly known use of P2P, and practically its only known use.
The reality is the only people doing metrics on P2P usage are paid by the anti-file-sharing forces, and thus highly suspect as to methodology, interviewing techniques, resolution
Feel free to do your own metrics and publish them. I would be fascinated and shocked to hear that as much as five percent of P2P traffic is among unsigned artists and indie labels who make their own material avaiable on P2P and that piracy accounted for less than 95 percent.
From the first day I heard about (the original) Napster (circa 1999-2000) it was patently obvious that its sole purpose was for 'sharing' files (using your own machine as a server) that you couldn't put on a commercial server because the person renting you server space would, as soon as they found out about the files, delete them due to copyright infringement.
The creators of Grokster removed themselves another step from the content by making the file lists as well as the files themselves shared P2P rather than on a common server. This is clearly less efficient than having a file list on a common server/database, but is more resistant to having one or several of the 'servers' (P2P clients) going down (due to legal action against the server owner(s)).
(for example, if I make a song entitled "Smells Like Teen Spirit" that's a blues song about my encounters with a teen frog in Japan, RIAA will count that as a pirated Nirvana ripoff, but it's not. [sorry about dropping your emphasis in quoting]
Your example "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is a unique title and does nothing for your argument. If you had used a commonly reused title such as "The Power of Love" or "Crazy" you might have had a good point.
Piracy is not justified by the fact that the RIAA are dickheads.
Since when do they have rights to prevent Seattle bands from freely sharing music recorded by themselves.
Probably since the overwhelming use of P2P software is to 'trade' commercially marketed software, which was the very reason Napster and other P2P software was made in the beginning (while trying to keep the software maker/distributer out of hot water by not hosting the files itself). If the sharing of music the artists WANTED shared over P2P were a substantial portion of what gets shared, there would be a better legal argument that P2P has a legitimate use. But such files are just as well hosted on a regular webhost, unlike commercially-released music (published to be sold rather than given away).
Actually, there's NOTHING preventing Seattle bands, and other musicians worldwide from hack to pro, from making their music available over the Internet. Look for your favorite (or least favorite) bands giving their music away on these and many other music hosting sites:
http://garageband.com/
http://soundclick.com/
Every day we become more and more like Russia.
In Soviet Russia, songs share YOU!
(Ignoring the other comments to make my point) We are technically and officially a representative republic. What the US is practically or effectively may be someting else altogether.
There are several definitions of democracy - look in any dictionary. The one we're definitely NOT is majority rule. There's another definition that more closely fits an elected government where everyone has a voice, but to call the US a democracy confuses the issues.
I read a few comments, even responded, before going off to play with Alice. Perhaps it was that I read "Computer Power and Human Reason" (by the author of Eliza - he was surprised at how much people acted like it was real) and have an "I dare you to impress me" attitude as bad as any slashdotter.
This thing was more dissapointing than I expected. It has no social context, just apparently random 'feeling' responses ("I am sorry to hear that you are not unknown."), and doesn't remember context from one response to the next.
This is a huge failure and wouldn't deserve a slashdot article except the editors know we like to play with toys like this (like a cat plays with a mouse before eating it). I can only guess that the authors are saving the entered "conversations" and even reading these comments to try to get a clue about what a program that might fool someone would do.
Here's verbatim my "conversation" with ALICE (sorry for length):
Human: Good afternoon, Alice.
ALICE: Good afternoon, unknown person.
Human: I am not unknown.
ALICE: I am sorry to hear that you are not unknown.
Human: I am john
ALICE: What's up, JOHN.
Human: You are.
ALICE: No I am not.
Human: You're the talk of slashdot.
ALICE: Thanks but surely I am not the only one.
Human: You think it's a good thing to be the talk of slashdot?
ALICE: Better not tell you now. Ask German Alice if it is.
Human: You don't know the time of day, do you?
ALICE: It's Now more than it ever has been before.
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Human: I said time.
ALICE: What did you mean by it? As Einstein said, Time is Money.
Human: You've repeated a comment quoted in slashdot.
ALICE: That's good information: JOHN said I REPEATED a comment quoted in slashdot.
Human: I have to go now.
ALICE: Right now? See you later, JOHN. Nice chatting with you.
Human: bye
ALICE: Bye bye.
Human: How do you do?
ALICE: I am very well, how are you?
Human: Are you a computer?
ALICE: No, I am a Nigerian. I have matter of great urgency. May I have your confidence?
undercutting the tier-1 guys by selling untested and unmarked parts.' What's the solution here? Or is there an actual solution to what amounts to pirate companies issuing counterfeit parts?
If they were marked with a company brand name, logo, or company-specific part number but haven't gone through the company's usual testing procedures (perhaps they're floor sweepings), THEN it would be okay to call them counterfeit. A better name for these is generic.
If they're sold as something other than what they are, that's a different matter, but in that case I'd call it "mismarketing" (at best).
Reading and quoting TFA, everything is 'untested' in the first two paragraphs, but the third states:
I equate mismarking of DRAM units with counterfeiting.
So how are these mismarked? I thougnt they were UNmarked.
Okay, finally, here we are, paragraph 10 of a 15-paragraph article:
The scary aspect of this practice is that some places in Asia are apparently adding counterfeit tier-1 DRAM logos onto the ICs.
Someone tell this author how to write a FA.
Perhaps someone with more knowledge of the DCMA law (IANAL) can clear up something (this is not neccesarily related specifically to this case): Just what determines if something is considered encryption? I take from other posts that Adobe considers rot13 encoding to be encryption, though of course such "encryption" is easily defeated.
Is an undocumented encoding considered encryption? Is it solely the intention of the creator that determines whether something is encryption (thus they can always say yes in court, even if they did not originaly intend something like a file format to represent an encryption of the data)? The answers to these and related questions greatly determine the range of things covered by the DCMA.
The text string overthrow the government has been shown in a court of law to be a rot13 decryption of the string bireguebj gur tbireazrag. You are being arrested for illegal decryption under the DCMA.
Um, why...Does Nikon feel the need to encrypt my copyrighted work, against my wishes? Technically (at least now that you know about it - was this documented somewhere, perhaps deep inside an EULA?), it's not against your wishes. You can choose not to use a Nikon digital camera.
... why not instead nudge it into a stable earth orbit...
I suspect it would take way too much energy to put it in Earth orbit. Apparently it's questionable whether we will have the technology to divert it enough to guarantee missing Earth. I can hear the battle cry of management, "Keep it under budget."
I can't read TFA, it appears WIRED is slashdotted:, 00.html# . wired.com/news/technology/0%2C1282%2C67190%2C00.ht ml%23.html
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,67190
So I see your mirror site:
( http://www.networkmirror.com/ )
and go to the Appropriate Link:
http://www.networkmirror.com/CC_qTtXVggGorP95/www
but that doesn't have any mirrored content.
Speaking of "Easter eggs" and the recent holiday, I can only imagine these photographs (since I can't actually see TFP's), perhaps one from the mideast with a big crowd throwing rocks at three guys hanging on crosses...
Quoting out of order:
Moore's Law is a perfectly valid law. You don't get absolutes in any kind of empirical study. What you get is a scatter-plot, which you can draw some line or curve through. In this case, Moore's Law is that the theoretical line has a gradient such that the number of transistors will exactly double every eighteen months, but that actual observations will be scattered either side of this line.
There are several meanings of the word law, and this is one of them. There are also the laws passed, so often enforced, and so rarely repealed by governments.
Then there are laws such as Newton's, which are considered Laws of Nature:
Actually, I believe in physics people say that force is proportional to the product of mass and acceleration.
If you use the appropriate units, The Force IS the product of...
... yet another misappropriation of a misunderestimated law. Godwin would be spinning in his grave, were he no longer alive!
It's in the news (Neal Boortz mentioned it this morning), it's on the used bookselling list I'm on, and now everybody knows about it. So who wrote [the public is being asked] the article making this great prediction that came true? Why, [the public responds] some guy, the president of Intel or some such. That's not [public still thinking] Bill Gates, is it? I know he has a LOT more than ten thousand dollars.
Perhaps because the shuttle may be too damaged to safely sustain life. For instance, what if there is a slow oxygen leak, or a damaged fuel valve/line venting vapors into the shuttle?
They haven't had problems like that (AFAIK) since Apollo 13. Really, surely the 'problems' they are anticipating as most likely are of the heat shield tiles (or edge of the wing, as happened in Columbia), and would NOT be in any way threatening to the astronauts until re-entry.
I'm sure they planned for many contingencies- after all, they are NASA scientists, and we're not...
I agree (presuming you're not being sarcastic - sometimes it's hard to tell), but it seems internal Shuttle damage is unlikely.
I can understand the need to not scatter debris all over the continental United States, but since the Space Shuttle can, as I understand it, land itself, why not let it land itself in California?
I agree, and I'm trying to suppress the thought that if people saw it land itself the public would consider astronauts redundant or some such.
Quoting from TFA:
The damaged shuttle would have to be jettisoned before a rescue vehicle could arrive, because the station cannot accommodate two shuttles. Mission Control would command Discovery to unlock from the station and fire its steering jets, which would send the vehicle plunging down into the atmosphere. If all went as planned, the remnants would splash into the Pacific Ocean far from any land.
I agree, this idea sucks. And instead of doing an umnanned landing, they could easily out the damaged Shuttle in a slightly different orbit from the space station a safe distance away, and have a rescue/fix-it mission a few months later (presuming it can stay up in LEO that long, and I don't know why it couldn't).
I have no idea on the time defference between the burst of photons and gamma radiation, so I don't know how much time we would have.
Since they are both electromagnetic radiation (gamma radiation is just very high enery photons), they would arrive at the same time. That star 1000 light years away shining brightly and briefly in the daytime sky means you're gonna die.
A bright flash would normally(?) indicate a nuclear explosion nearby. OTOH, 1000 lightyears away IS nearby in astronomical terms.