Is there anybody who's really that excited about fancy graphical window effects, except as a curiosity?
Open source developers want to experiment, and they implement pseudo-features that most regular users neither want or need. For this reason, the latest versions of major desktop environments (Gnome 3 / KDE 4) are fundamentally broken. Wayland simply follows the same trend.
If you're using Firefox it's easy to get rid of all history entries from a given domain. Don't know about other browsers out there, but I guess they should have a similar feature.
"Kepler looks at every star in its field of view."
This is not entirely accurate. Kepler observes each star in its FoV, but doesn't send all the time-series data to Earth - just data concerning a selected subset of stars.
This is a problem with science in general. Many scientists tend to make very bold claims, only to make sure the funding of their research will be continued.
It seems that the Kepler team is starting a campaign to ensure the Kepler mission will be extended.
20 megatons is not a very powerful explosion. Didn't the Russians explode a 57 megaton thermonuclear device back in 1961? Apart from nuclear fallout, nothing particularly catastrophic had happened. Since most of our planet's surface is not populated, the odds of an asteroid hitting a populated area is not very high.
So, our children may witness a 20 megaton explosion in some remote location. Not a big deal.
I noticed a severe slowdown after upgrading from 1.5 to 2.0, but only on one specific machine (AthlonXP 2000+, 1GB RAM). This behaviour puzzles me to this day, as I've been unable to find the source of the problem. So I'm not surprised that some users experience performance issues while others do not.
Another thing worth mentioning is that an e-mail client should not need a state-of-the-art machine to work smoothly. I used to use Thunderbird 2 on a 6 years old Pentium-M laptop (without any performance problems), and I would expect a new version of the same software to run just as well as the previous one. If it doesn't, it's broken and needs fixing.
The Sun will never go nova. It would have to fulfill three conditions:
a) be a white dwarf (which will take a few billion years, but eventually will happen);
b) be in a binary system (it's not);
c) have hydrogen from companion star transferred onto it (which obviously won't happen).
"Using a new technique called gravitational microlensing (...)"
Gravitational lensing itself was predicted by A. Einstein in 1919, and the effect of amplifying the magnitude of a single star by a massive lens was foreseen by F. Zwicky in 1937. Bohdan Paczynski introduced the concept of mass photometry (measuring the brightness of millions of stars, in order to increase the probability of detecting a microlensing event) in 1985. So, the method used to detect the icy planet mentioned in the article, is (at least) 20 years old. In astronomy, that's a lot of time.
Imagine making a virus or a spyware program based on this application, and releasing it into several P2P networks. Since there is no way to tell which files are legal, and which aren't, such spyware would likely delete all media files on the infected computer. This could discourage a lot of people from using P2P applications. Could that be a next step RIAA takes to fight "piracy"?
Slashdot Mirror
TFA is wrong, the planet was discovered from a ground-based observatory back in 2006: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0609335
Is there anybody who's really that excited about fancy graphical window effects, except as a curiosity?
Open source developers want to experiment, and they implement pseudo-features that most regular users neither want or need. For this reason, the latest versions of major desktop environments (Gnome 3 / KDE 4) are fundamentally broken. Wayland simply follows the same trend.
Thanks for releasing stolen passwords for 62000 email accounts. Spammers must be very happy now.
Confiscate the computer with a self-encrypting HDD. Boot a live CD, image the HDD. Analyse the image.
Or am I missing the point?
If you're using Firefox it's easy to get rid of all history entries from a given domain. Don't know about other browsers out there, but I guess they should have a similar feature.
"Kepler looks at every star in its field of view."
This is not entirely accurate. Kepler observes each star in its FoV, but doesn't send all the time-series data to Earth - just data concerning a selected subset of stars.
This is a problem with science in general. Many scientists tend to make very bold claims, only to make sure the funding of their research will be continued.
It seems that the Kepler team is starting a campaign to ensure the Kepler mission will be extended.
20 megatons is not a very powerful explosion. Didn't the Russians explode a 57 megaton thermonuclear device back in 1961? Apart from nuclear fallout, nothing particularly catastrophic had happened. Since most of our planet's surface is not populated, the odds of an asteroid hitting a populated area is not very high.
So, our children may witness a 20 megaton explosion in some remote location. Not a big deal.
I noticed a severe slowdown after upgrading from 1.5 to 2.0, but only on one specific machine (AthlonXP 2000+, 1GB RAM). This behaviour puzzles me to this day, as I've been unable to find the source of the problem. So I'm not surprised that some users experience performance issues while others do not.
Another thing worth mentioning is that an e-mail client should not need a state-of-the-art machine to work smoothly. I used to use Thunderbird 2 on a 6 years old Pentium-M laptop (without any performance problems), and I would expect a new version of the same software to run just as well as the previous one. If it doesn't, it's broken and needs fixing.
Projecting an image of the Sun to a screen is way more convenient - many people may watch at the same time.
It's on arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/0904.0878
Just a side note: isn't that what capitalism is all about?
The Sun will never go nova. It would have to fulfill three conditions:
a) be a white dwarf (which will take a few billion years, but eventually will happen);
b) be in a binary system (it's not);
c) have hydrogen from companion star transferred onto it (which obviously won't happen).
"Using a new technique called gravitational microlensing (...)" Gravitational lensing itself was predicted by A. Einstein in 1919, and the effect of amplifying the magnitude of a single star by a massive lens was foreseen by F. Zwicky in 1937. Bohdan Paczynski introduced the concept of mass photometry (measuring the brightness of millions of stars, in order to increase the probability of detecting a microlensing event) in 1985. So, the method used to detect the icy planet mentioned in the article, is (at least) 20 years old. In astronomy, that's a lot of time.
Imagine making a virus or a spyware program based on this application, and releasing it into several P2P networks. Since there is no way to tell which files are legal, and which aren't, such spyware would likely delete all media files on the infected computer. This could discourage a lot of people from using P2P applications. Could that be a next step RIAA takes to fight "piracy"?