Check out the Feb. 2006 issue of Astronomy Magazine for an article about astronomical watches. I couldn't find it on their website, only current issue articles were there. But if you can find the magazine you'll love the article if you are into watches. They have descriptions and pictures of watches that can tell you all kinds of astronomical stuff. Simple things like moonrise and set times, up to actual star charts (a planisphere built into the dial) and planet locations. It even describes a watch from a swiss maker that only produces 2 per year. It costs a few hundred thousand dollars and had over 600 parts in it. It's basically a planetarium software program you wear on your wrist. Some of the cheaper ones are only a few hundred bucks so they would be in range of a normal collector.
Bah!
While I have no problems with Aerosmith in general, a MUCH better song with the title "Eat The Rich" was done by Krokus in the early 80's.
Give that one a listen.
I have a T-Mobile phone. The reception in my house is pathetic, I often can't get any signal at all. I called to complain and they claim my house is in a covered area. They said that "construction materials" used in my house must be interfering.
I thought that was total B.S. But I went outside and while the signal strength still isn't great it is enough to connect a call. Has anybody heard of this before? What "materials" are causing the terrible reception? Other people can use their phones even in my basement, so I'm inclined to think even if my house causes some of the problem the main issue is their weak signal in the first place.
Thanks for any suggestions/information you can provide.
That is most definately NOT a stupid question. A star is defined by core nuclear fusion. However, the definition of a planet is quite controversial. In particular what are the limits that differentiate a planet from a brown dwarf on the large end, and from a asteroid or comet on the small end.
Astronomers are having discussions about this right now. It is not entirely clear to me what the final definition will be. The current leading candidate for the brown dwarf/planet dividing line is how they form. If you formed from gaseous contraction like a star you're a brown dwarf. If you formed primarily through accretion around a forming star you're a planet.
On the low end it is even messier. Some say the difference should be if your self gravity makes you into a sphere you'e a planet, and if you're irregular shaped you're a asteroid or comet. But in that case several members of the asteroid belt along with some trans-neptunian icy bodies discovered the past 10 years would both qualify as planets.
Oops, obviously in the first line the should say "One big problem I see with patenting business PROCESSES" . . . not "products".
Sorry. And I even used preview! Amazing how you can miss simple errors like that in reviewing your own writing but they are obvious a few minutes later.
One big problem I see with patenting business products is how do you ever prove you came up with it? In a competitive industry all the businesses will constantly be looking for ways to streamline their procedures to lower expenses. So what gives you the right to patent something everybody in your industry is working on at the same time? Who gets the patent - the guy who first thought of it, the manager who first approved it, or the company who first implemented it? And if my company has written the procedures and plans to implement them next Monday, can you get a patent because you did it first on Friday?
It is too messy. With a physical invention you can make the object, construct diagrams of it, and prove you are the first to invent it. In business processes it is way too "mushy" to define when a process is invented and when it is just a idea in somebody's head.
You may think it seems that way, but you'd be wrong.
Sun has paid a *lot* of money over the years (I think I read $100 Million somewhere) making absolutely sure they have all the intellectual propery rights to everything they sell locked up forever. It would be a foolish waste of resources on their part not to point this out.
I think SCO is probably going to lose (although I don't believe it is 100% rock solid certain the way most of this board does). But the very fact that such questions exist for everybody else and not for Sun is a concrete competitive advantage Sun should pitch to their potential customers.
The big argument against loser pays is that then poor people don't dare sue even if they should win, since in the rare chance they don't they're screwed.
One great way to fix that. . ..
Loser's **LAWYER** pays. If your case is worth a damn the lawyers will still be more than willing to sign up since they know they have a very good chance of winning. But they will reject crap cases since they won't want to pay for the defendant's court costs.
Besides, it shouldn't be up to the person thinking of suing to decide if the case is worth pursuing or not. Loser pays gives the lawyer every incentive to encourage you to go ahead with the suit, since if he loses the case for you, you are stuck with the bill anyway. Let the lawyer be the one at risk and you're way more likely to get honest advice on if it is worth suing or not.
It's true, but of course you don't have to believe me.
The guy was big time into D&D, thus had the decorative sword on the wall since he thought it would be cool. The hooded robe was from his Grim Reaper haloween costume.
Whether they dropped their stuff and ran I have no way to verify. But when he told me the story I believed it. Seeing how huge Aaron was, if he yelled at *me* I'd run away . . . .
I had a friend who did something like that. He was a monster too, 6'6" and well over 300 lbs. His high school football coach benched him for injuring too many opposing players he was so big and strong. One day he noticed the JWs working his block and prepared a suprise.
He shut out all the lights and lit a bunch of candles. He grabed a 6' long decorative sword off the wall. Put on a full length black hooded robe. When they rang his doorbell he ripped open the door, looked down on them, and screamed at the top of his lungs "ARE YOU HERE FOR THE SACRIFICE?!?"
They dropped their crap on his doorstep and took off at a full run. He's never seen them again.
The Turk was a "chess playing automaton" back in the mid 1800's. It was a statue of a Turkish guy with a turban and appropriate costume sitting behind a chess board. The opponent would sit on the other side and play against it.
It wasn't a real robot as a midget chess master was carefully concealed inside. They used mirrors and junk to conceal him so if people opened it up and looked, it looked like just gears and machinery in there. I believe the concealed midget used magnets were used to move the pieces.
But it was one of the first times the IDEA of a robot was ever expressed. I think if there is going to be a robot hall of fame this belongs in it for sure.
I have a idea that just jumped into my head while reading this thread.
Why not make copyrights variable? The author could choose to accept the free default (short) copyright, or pay to register for a longer one. And the extra premium you pay for additional years gets more expensive the longer you want it.
Ok, in order to clarify what I mean, how's this for an example.
That way, if you're a big company like Disney and you have something you think will be big, you can pay more to lock it up longer. But if you're willing to let your stuff go into the public domain sooner you don't pay anything.
Maybe you would allow a copyright holder to change their mind and extend the copyrights later. If you didn't regiser to extend it and your product was a big hit, maybe you could sign up for the longer protection at a later time. Although I think that should be even more expensive than buying the longer copyright protection up front since you could wait till you see how successful your product is before registering (less risk = more cost).
Even better would be a way to make the copyright charge based on the "value" of the property. Like you'd pay more for a long copyright on Star Wars than you would for a long copyright on Battlestar Galactica. I have no idea how that would work, but it would obviously be a better system than a fixed rate since people who make less from their item don't pay as much to register it.
I don't know if even *I* like this idea, but it seemed to me that it might be worth throwing out there. Thoughts?
I don't buy that argument (although you may just be joking).
I'm a Solaris admin and have no love for Microsoft. But even I have to admit that all operating systems need patches. Solaris does, Microsoft does, every version of Linux does. Just changing to another OS won't solve all your patching problems. I'll grant you that Microsoft seems to be worse than average in terms of number of patches needed and the hassle involved so changing may definately be a good idea. It just isn't a complete fix.
The difficult question is whether the costs of patching outweigh the costs of NOT patching. There's a lot to be said for "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" sometimes.
However, with security patches usually you have no choice. The only decision for some security patches is how long do you wait before deploying it. Don't wanna be the first ones to put a bad patch on now, do we?
Ren and Stimpy was cool the first year, but after Space Madness came out everything that followed was lame in comparison.
South Park is pretty cool too, but very inconsistent.
What???? You're talking about that Japanese crap??? Maybe if there were 10,000 free channels it would be worth wasting one on that drivel, but until then keep it off my system! Not worth the raise in rates or losing another channel to make room for it.
In netrek the races you can play are the Federation, the Klingon, the Romulan and the Orion. There are 16 players in the game. Each team has player a through h. So The Federation players are Fa through Fh, Orions are Oa through Oh and so on. There was a text chat box availible to communitate with other players where you would denote other players using that naming scheme.
In the game you tried to conquer enemy planets by landing your troops there. But you had to score a kill on an enemy ship before you were allowed to carry troops.
One guy early on in the history of the game came up with the interesting technique of doing suicide attacks against any enemy ship with a kill recorded. He would cloak, approach the enemy ship, then uncloak, fire like mad, and explode right on top of the guy finishing him off. This kept the enemy team with no guys able to carry troops and thus no way to capture planets. His teammates busily took planets while he attacked the potential troop carriers.
In the first well-known game in which the guy used this technique he was playing the orions, designation Og. His opponents with kills would see his symbol approaching on the strategic map (the whole game board, not the little tactical map where you did the fighting) and do a chat window shout to their teammates OGGGGG! trying to get them to kill Og before Og could kill him.
This is where the term Ogg used to represent a suicide attack came from
Tal - Scout Bomber for team "Tis Only A Flesh Wound", Iowa State University, 1993-4.
I read something a while ago (I don't remember if it was just after they found this recorder, or somebody responding to a question about if shuttles had a "black box" earlier) saying that Columbia had this data recorder on it from very early days when it was first being tested. Challenger, Discovery and Endeavour don't have a similar recorder since they were built later, after this testing was done.
It is somewhat ironic that something that wasn't ever designed to be used in operational shuttles might end up being the best piece of evidence as to what happened.
One movie I remember that nobody I've talked to has heard of is "Eat and Run" It was a sci-fi/horror/comedy movie, but it all took part in a city. This fat bald guy was an alien who came to Earth to eat people. When he got done eating them he spit out the buttons from their clothes, since he couldn't digest those. It was hilarious in a "Spock's Brain" sort of way.
I doubt anybody is still reading this thread, but in case you are here is more information.
The above posts are correct that radiation pressure balances the force of gravity. But luminosity (the amount of radiation) goes up with mass way faster than gravity, so eventually the radiation pressure "wins" and the star gently blows apart. That provides an upper limit to normal stars. When I was taking stellar structure in grad school in the early 90's it was thought the limit is about 60 solar masses. Above that a star rapidly loses mass as radiation pressure carries the outer layers away.
There is a class of stars called Wolf-Rayet stars. They are extremely luminous blue supergiants that have masses in the 80-100 solar mass range. Interestingly, they all have enormously strong stellar winds and are losing mass at very high rates. In a very short time (astronomically speaking) they will drop to 60 solar masses, at which point we assume the Wolf-Rayet mechanism shuts down and the star becomes a "normal" 60 solar mass star.
I don't know how you people all get so much spam. Seriously!
I don't do ANYTHING right according to what you are supposed to do to avoid spam. I use the same Yahoo account I've had for 6 or 7 years. My username is only 8 letters and contains both my initials and home state abbreviation in it. I use that address EVERY TIME I sign up for anything on the web or when I buy something online or whatever. My wife and sisters send me free greeting cards quite frequently using that address. I don't use Yahoo's "bulk mail" folder or "this is spam" button, and haven't turned on any filters.
And still, I only get 2 or 3 pieces of spam a day, at worst. Compared to 10-20 legit pieces of mail.
I don't get it? How am I magically not getting spammed when all the people who are so pissed about spam and are actively trying to protect themselves get tons of it? I'm not denying that OTHER people have major problems with spam, I'm just amazed that I don't and can't figure out why.
ps. Please don't get pissed and add me to some spammer list or anything! I am seriously wondering what it is that makes me appaerntly immune to the problem. If I could figure it out maybe I'd have a useful suggestion for everybody else.
One day my son asked me "why does it rain?" I told him it rained when God was crying. Then he said "why would God cry?" and I told him "Oh, probably because of something you did."
Your "real biology" comment reminded me of a funny incident in college 15 years ago. My fello astronomy major friend and I were walking through the biology area of the science building. Noting several open doors and in a mischevious mood I said in a voice loud enough to be intentionally overheard . ..
"Biology is not science, it's just naming things!"
Man, you should have seen the pissed off looks the profs sticking their heads out of the office to see who said that gave us . ..
Slashdot Mirror
Check out the Feb. 2006 issue of Astronomy Magazine for an article about astronomical watches. I couldn't find it on their website, only current issue articles were there. But if you can find the magazine you'll love the article if you are into watches. They have descriptions and pictures of watches that can tell you all kinds of astronomical stuff. Simple things like moonrise and set times, up to actual star charts (a planisphere built into the dial) and planet locations. It even describes a watch from a swiss maker that only produces 2 per year. It costs a few hundred thousand dollars and had over 600 parts in it. It's basically a planetarium software program you wear on your wrist. Some of the cheaper ones are only a few hundred bucks so they would be in range of a normal collector.
Was that an incredibly awesome reference to "Mostly Harmless", or just lucky?
Bah! While I have no problems with Aerosmith in general, a MUCH better song with the title "Eat The Rich" was done by Krokus in the early 80's. Give that one a listen.
I have a T-Mobile phone. The reception in my house is pathetic, I often can't get any signal at all. I called to complain and they claim my house is in a covered area. They said that "construction materials" used in my house must be interfering.
I thought that was total B.S. But I went outside and while the signal strength still isn't great it is enough to connect a call. Has anybody heard of this before? What "materials" are causing the terrible reception? Other people can use their phones even in my basement, so I'm inclined to think even if my house causes some of the problem the main issue is their weak signal in the first place.
Thanks for any suggestions/information you can provide.
That is most definately NOT a stupid question. A star is defined by core nuclear fusion. However, the definition of a planet is quite controversial. In particular what are the limits that differentiate a planet from a brown dwarf on the large end, and from a asteroid or comet on the small end.
Astronomers are having discussions about this right now. It is not entirely clear to me what the final definition will be. The current leading candidate for the brown dwarf/planet dividing line is how they form. If you formed from gaseous contraction like a star you're a brown dwarf. If you formed primarily through accretion around a forming star you're a planet.
On the low end it is even messier. Some say the difference should be if your self gravity makes you into a sphere you'e a planet, and if you're irregular shaped you're a asteroid or comet. But in that case several members of the asteroid belt along with some trans-neptunian icy bodies discovered the past 10 years would both qualify as planets.
Could you point it at a cute chick and get her phone number?
Would make a trip to the bar way more efficient. No need for all that drink buying and small talk.
Oops, obviously in the first line the should say "One big problem I see with patenting business PROCESSES" . . . not "products".
Sorry. And I even used preview! Amazing how you can miss simple errors like that in reviewing your own writing but they are obvious a few minutes later.
One big problem I see with patenting business products is how do you ever prove you came up with it? In a competitive industry all the businesses will constantly be looking for ways to streamline their procedures to lower expenses. So what gives you the right to patent something everybody in your industry is working on at the same time? Who gets the patent - the guy who first thought of it, the manager who first approved it, or the company who first implemented it? And if my company has written the procedures and plans to implement them next Monday, can you get a patent because you did it first on Friday?
It is too messy. With a physical invention you can make the object, construct diagrams of it, and prove you are the first to invent it. In business processes it is way too "mushy" to define when a process is invented and when it is just a idea in somebody's head.
You may think it seems that way, but you'd be wrong.
Sun has paid a *lot* of money over the years (I think I read $100 Million somewhere) making absolutely sure they have all the intellectual propery rights to everything they sell locked up forever. It would be a foolish waste of resources on their part not to point this out.
I think SCO is probably going to lose (although I don't believe it is 100% rock solid certain the way most of this board does). But the very fact that such questions exist for everybody else and not for Sun is a concrete competitive advantage Sun should pitch to their potential customers.
The big argument against loser pays is that then poor people don't dare sue even if they should win, since in the rare chance they don't they're screwed.
.
One great way to fix that. . .
Loser's **LAWYER** pays. If your case is worth a damn the lawyers will still be more than willing to sign up since they know they have a very good chance of winning. But they will reject crap cases since they won't want to pay for the defendant's court costs.
Besides, it shouldn't be up to the person thinking of suing to decide if the case is worth pursuing or not. Loser pays gives the lawyer every incentive to encourage you to go ahead with the suit, since if he loses the case for you, you are stuck with the bill anyway. Let the lawyer be the one at risk and you're way more likely to get honest advice on if it is worth suing or not.
It's true, but of course you don't have to believe me.
The guy was big time into D&D, thus had the decorative sword on the wall since he thought it would be cool. The hooded robe was from his Grim Reaper haloween costume.
Whether they dropped their stuff and ran I have no way to verify. But when he told me the story I believed it. Seeing how huge Aaron was, if he yelled at *me* I'd run away . . . .
I had a friend who did something like that. He was a monster too, 6'6" and well over 300 lbs. His high school football coach benched him for injuring too many opposing players he was so big and strong. One day he noticed the JWs working his block and prepared a suprise.
He shut out all the lights and lit a bunch of candles. He grabed a 6' long decorative sword off the wall. Put on a full length black hooded robe. When they rang his doorbell he ripped open the door, looked down on them, and screamed at the top of his lungs "ARE YOU HERE FOR THE SACRIFICE?!?"
They dropped their crap on his doorstep and took off at a full run. He's never seen them again.
The Turk was a "chess playing automaton" back in the mid 1800's. It was a statue of a Turkish guy with a turban and appropriate costume sitting behind a chess board. The opponent would sit on the other side and play against it.
It wasn't a real robot as a midget chess master was carefully concealed inside. They used mirrors and junk to conceal him so if people opened it up and looked, it looked like just gears and machinery in there. I believe the concealed midget used magnets were used to move the pieces.
But it was one of the first times the IDEA of a robot was ever expressed. I think if there is going to be a robot hall of fame this belongs in it for sure.
I have a idea that just jumped into my head while reading this thread.
Why not make copyrights variable? The author could choose to accept the free default (short) copyright, or pay to register for a longer one. And the extra premium you pay for additional years gets more expensive the longer you want it.
Ok, in order to clarify what I mean, how's this for an example.
20 years copyright: Free, no registration required.
30 years: $10,000 registration fee
40 years: $25,000 registration fee
50 years: $100,000 registration fee
75 years: $1,000,000 registration fee
That way, if you're a big company like Disney and you have something you think will be big, you can pay more to lock it up longer. But if you're willing to let your stuff go into the public domain sooner you don't pay anything.
Maybe you would allow a copyright holder to change their mind and extend the copyrights later. If you didn't regiser to extend it and your product was a big hit, maybe you could sign up for the longer protection at a later time. Although I think that should be even more expensive than buying the longer copyright protection up front since you could wait till you see how successful your product is before registering (less risk = more cost).
Even better would be a way to make the copyright charge based on the "value" of the property. Like you'd pay more for a long copyright on Star Wars than you would for a long copyright on Battlestar Galactica. I have no idea how that would work, but it would obviously be a better system than a fixed rate since people who make less from their item don't pay as much to register it.
I don't know if even *I* like this idea, but it seemed to me that it might be worth throwing out there. Thoughts?
I don't buy that argument (although you may just be joking).
I'm a Solaris admin and have no love for Microsoft. But even I have to admit that all operating systems need patches. Solaris does, Microsoft does, every version of Linux does. Just changing to another OS won't solve all your patching problems. I'll grant you that Microsoft seems to be worse than average in terms of number of patches needed and the hassle involved so changing may definately be a good idea. It just isn't a complete fix.
The difficult question is whether the costs of patching outweigh the costs of NOT patching. There's a lot to be said for "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" sometimes.
However, with security patches usually you have no choice. The only decision for some security patches is how long do you wait before deploying it. Don't wanna be the first ones to put a bad patch on now, do we?
Especially Beavis and Butthead.
Ren and Stimpy was cool the first year, but after Space Madness came out everything that followed was lame in comparison.
South Park is pretty cool too, but very inconsistent.
What???? You're talking about that Japanese crap??? Maybe if there were 10,000 free channels it would be worth wasting one on that drivel, but until then keep it off my system! Not worth the raise in rates or losing another channel to make room for it.
And once you get it, you are allowed to build the UN for 600 shields.
And your troops outside cities no longer make citizens unhappy. What a deal!
In netrek the races you can play are the Federation, the Klingon, the Romulan and the Orion. There are 16 players in the game. Each team has player a through h. So The Federation players are Fa through Fh, Orions are Oa through Oh and so on. There was a text chat box availible to communitate with other players where you would denote other players using that naming scheme.
In the game you tried to conquer enemy planets by landing your troops there. But you had to score a kill on an enemy ship before you were allowed to carry troops.
One guy early on in the history of the game came up with the interesting technique of doing suicide attacks against any enemy ship with a kill recorded. He would cloak, approach the enemy ship, then uncloak, fire like mad, and explode right on top of the guy finishing him off. This kept the enemy team with no guys able to carry troops and thus no way to capture planets. His teammates busily took planets while he attacked the potential troop carriers.
In the first well-known game in which the guy used this technique he was playing the orions, designation Og. His opponents with kills would see his symbol approaching on the strategic map (the whole game board, not the little tactical map where you did the fighting) and do a chat window shout to their teammates OGGGGG! trying to get them to kill Og before Og could kill him.
This is where the term Ogg used to represent a suicide attack came from
Tal - Scout Bomber for team "Tis Only A Flesh Wound", Iowa State University, 1993-4.
I read something a while ago (I don't remember if it was just after they found this recorder, or somebody responding to a question about if shuttles had a "black box" earlier) saying that Columbia had this data recorder on it from very early days when it was first being tested. Challenger, Discovery and Endeavour don't have a similar recorder since they were built later, after this testing was done.
It is somewhat ironic that something that wasn't ever designed to be used in operational shuttles might end up being the best piece of evidence as to what happened.
One movie I remember that nobody I've talked to has heard of is "Eat and Run" It was a sci-fi/horror/comedy movie, but it all took part in a city. This fat bald guy was an alien who came to Earth to eat people. When he got done eating them he spit out the buttons from their clothes, since he couldn't digest those. It was hilarious in a "Spock's Brain" sort of way.
I doubt anybody is still reading this thread, but in case you are here is more information.
The above posts are correct that radiation pressure balances the force of gravity. But luminosity (the amount of radiation) goes up with mass way faster than gravity, so eventually the radiation pressure "wins" and the star gently blows apart. That provides an upper limit to normal stars. When I was taking stellar structure in grad school in the early 90's it was thought the limit is about 60 solar masses. Above that a star rapidly loses mass as radiation pressure carries the outer layers away.
There is a class of stars called Wolf-Rayet stars. They are extremely luminous blue supergiants that have masses in the 80-100 solar mass range. Interestingly, they all have enormously strong stellar winds and are losing mass at very high rates. In a very short time (astronomically speaking) they will drop to 60 solar masses, at which point we assume the Wolf-Rayet mechanism shuts down and the star becomes a "normal" 60 solar mass star.
I don't know how you people all get so much spam. Seriously!
I don't do ANYTHING right according to what you are supposed to do to avoid spam. I use the same Yahoo account I've had for 6 or 7 years. My username is only 8 letters and contains both my initials and home state abbreviation in it. I use that address EVERY TIME I sign up for anything on the web or when I buy something online or whatever. My wife and sisters send me free greeting cards quite frequently using that address. I don't use Yahoo's "bulk mail" folder or "this is spam" button, and haven't turned on any filters.
And still, I only get 2 or 3 pieces of spam a day, at worst. Compared to 10-20 legit pieces of mail.
I don't get it? How am I magically not getting spammed when all the people who are so pissed about spam and are actively trying to protect themselves get tons of it? I'm not denying that OTHER people have major problems with spam, I'm just amazed that I don't and can't figure out why.
ps. Please don't get pissed and add me to some spammer list or anything! I am seriously wondering what it is that makes me appaerntly immune to the problem. If I could figure it out maybe I'd have a useful suggestion for everybody else.
The best Jack Handey I ever heard went like this:
One day my son asked me "why does it rain?" I told him it rained when God was crying. Then he said "why would God cry?" and I told him "Oh, probably because of something you did."
Your "real biology" comment reminded me of a funny incident in college 15 years ago. My fello astronomy major friend and I were walking through the biology area of the science building. Noting several open doors and in a mischevious mood I said in a voice loud enough to be intentionally overheard . . .
.
"Biology is not science, it's just naming things!"
Man, you should have seen the pissed off looks the profs sticking their heads out of the office to see who said that gave us . .