The dominant paradigm since the Apollo Missions was that the Moon was as dry as a bone.
However, a paper was put out recently (before the discovery of water a month ago) proposing a model for water and other volatiles venting out of the interior of the Moon. One of the predictions of this model is that there should be significant subsurface water primarily near the poles. The results from Chandrayaan-1 and LCROSS today confirms that this is true--there is significant subsurface water near the poles. The claims that the water is solely on the surface and due to cometary deposition or solar wind interactions are now blown "out of the water".
This model predicts a lot more water under the surface for potential use in human exploration. w00t!
The water found in these missions is not *necessarily* in small quantities. The research shows that it is present at the near surface, but no one has any clue as to the depth to which it extends. The assumption is being made that the water accumulated there from comet deposition, but there are other mechanisms for water delivery to the surface. A paper posted to the pre-prints server recently shows that there is evidence for water vapor in the interior of the moon that is slowing leaking out along with other volatiles. As the gases reach the upper layers of the regolith, the water freezes out and gets stuck there. Over the course of a few billion years, even a small gas leakage rate could produce large slabs of ice below the surface, exactly the kind of thing that these results confirm. Anyway, it's an interesting idea...
What no one seems to understand here is that just because Google is scanning all of these books, the end-user can NOT see all of the text of a given book. Unlike the online information that Google indexs, where one can search and then connect to the full webpage of any search hits, the library project will only make available the search quotation and the sentence or so around it for context.
For example, if I were to look up: "JubJub Bird", it would return something like this:
----------- Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll (from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872) "Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the frumious Bandersnatch!" -----------
Now is this giving away the entire contents of this copyrighted work? No. It is merely giving the searcher a hint of where to look for more information. In order to give away all of the information in a copyrighted text, one would have to know exactly what to search in sentence after sentence of that text. So it really isn't giving away anything. It most assuredly isn't giving away more information that Amazon.com does when you can open up the book and look at a few sample pages.
In the same way that Google offers a searchable catalog of online web information, it will now offer a super-catalog search for library contents. I, for one, think that this will be an invaluable resource for anyone who does academic research, or a person who merely wants to know all of the references on a particular subject and relevant resources. Have some forsight, publishers of the world! This will only increase your profits when people purchase relevant texts to their interests.
While it is true that peer review and repetition of studies does make science robust against individual researchers fabricating or 'bending' their data to match desired results, it still remains a problem in the scientific world. Just recently I read about a researcher who did particle physics and had fabricated his data on various different studies. Eventually, people discovered the false data, but it took a long time because he was a respected researcher and the project was abstruse and hard to reproduce (particle physics requires supercolliders, of which there are few in the world).
As a graduate student, I feel pressure from my advisor to not mention discrepant data or those conclusions/questions which detract from my overall hypotheses. It is unfortunate that such should occur, but I can see why it does happen. People want to be proven correct. If they set out to prove a hypothesis with a scientific experiment, and then after a few months or years of research, they discover that the evidence points against their hypothesis or that the method which they employed doesn't provide a conclusive solution, it can be tempting to 'throw out' some data. After all, they put in all of that effort, and they want their recognition. Usually, it means more papers, which oftentimes means more notoriety, job security, money, etc.
I'm not justifying this behavior because science should be done for the sake of understanding nature, not for making a paycheck, but I see where these scientists might be coming from.
This is not a chunk of a planet. This is the remaining core of an old star. This is a carbon white dwarf star, which is to say that it is a star that started out at around 4-8 solar masses and is now at the end of its lifetime. Stars with less than ~8 solar masses do not become supernovae (neutron stars or black holes), they become planetary nebulae. They slough off their outer layers of gas and leave only a hot, white core (the white dwarf). The most well-known examples of these objects are the Ring Nebula (M57), Dumbbell Nebula (M27), and Owl Nebula (M97).
In the white dwarf stage, it doesn't fuse like a normal star (unless it accretes material and causes fusion on the surface as when we witness a nova), but it continues to glow like a coal that you have taken out of the fire. It will continue to glow and radiate away its energy until over time, it cools enough that its interior can crystallize. After even more time, it becomes so cool that it stops radiating altogether, a crystallized rock floating through space.
The lifetime of the star (and the elements that it ends up fusing to sustain that lifetime) are determined only by the initial mass of the star. Most stars are low mass stars (it's easier to form smaller clumps of gas), and these stars take a long time to run out of their hydrogen supply (in fact the least massive of these still haven't run out, and won't for several billion years).
As stars run out of hydrogen, they start fusing other elements present in their cores. This takes them through different stages of stellar evolution (red giant, horizontal branch stars, assymptotic branch stars, etc.) They continue to gain energy from this process until they reach iron. When these stars fuse elements heavier than iron, they don't actually get a net energy output from the reaction and thus their pressure source (fusion) cannot sustain the equilibrium against the gravitational force that constantly tries to collapse them. This is when a supernovae event occurs. As the star collapses under its own gravitation, the core rapidly fuses anything it can as the density increases. This is why the previous poster is right in saying that the main source for elements heavier than iron in the universe is supernovae.
His name is Dennis Fong, but he played under the alias Thresh. He was the first really 'professional' gamer. He earned a great deal of notoriety for his skills at Quake1, especially when he won the Red Annihilation tournament, winning the Ferrari of John Romero, who at the time was at Id Software. He later went on to starting Thresh's Firing Squad (firingsquad.gamers.com), a portal for gaming news and industry reviews. Although he still reigns as champion of Quake1 as he was never dethroned, he hasn't been spotted in any sequels. Many people believe that he wants to retain his legendary status and not defame it with his imperfect abilities in other games.
If you got a good test score then be happy, your [sic] working the system nicely...
Although I agree with most of what you have to say about braggarts, I think your argument holds a lot less water than it would if you used proper grammar. Don't be so quick to judge.
Isn't this how it has been in Europe and other countries since the beginning? I remember it costing a lot more to call someone on a cell phone from a landline when I was in England. Just another one of those things that Americans will have to get used to, that everyone else seems to have acclimated to already.
Yes, albums with lots of short, good songs are probably better purchased in the normal fashion. Take for instance: They Might Be Giants' album Apollo 18. That has about 20 song tracks collectively entitled "Fingertips". Each song is 5-20 seconds long, and together they are a great listen, but this and similar albums aren't the best candidates for this service. What I like is that now we have a CHOICE between doing it the old fashioned 'buy the whole cd' way, and just buying the music we want way.
So I'm confused how this works. Is a customer to look at their catalog, decide which songs they want to purchase, select those songs, and then a cd is sent to them that have those custom-selected songs burned on them already (at $.99 / song)? Or is this a situation where if you purchase the songs you get some sort of portable file sent to you over the net? If it is the latter, I wonder what encoding scheme they are using...mp3, wma, ogg? The article was a little low on details.
These aren't exactly the best prices I've ever seen on tracks, but it is nice that one can have the opportunity to only get the tracks they want. I think this is definitely a step in the right direction.
Yes, it is true that the International Space Station has taken a horrendous amount of money that could've been spent on real science. I admit that I'd like to see more money spent on real science missions like probes to Pluto or Europa or on more Space-based telescopes, but unfortunately as these devices increase in size (satellites, space telescopes, probes, etc.) it becomes infeasible to launch them in a confined shuttle (I believe Chandra X-ray telescope reached the volume limits on what could be launched in one piece).
That said, we need to be building an infrastructure for launching larger and more complex devices into space. This requires places where things can be assembled once in orbit, places such as the ISS or another station at a Lagrangian point. In and of themselves, these stations aren't spectacular, they don't produce good science and they are very expensive, but they need to be created to assist other scientific endeavors as our technology continues to develop. As an example, routers, fiber, and transcontinental backbones are expensive and to the layman, they produce no real science or pretty pictures, but they are necessary as an infrastructure over which people can do some really cool things.
Anyway, I think that even if this doesn't get passed by congress or the things run behind schedule, it is good that we are at least PLANNING to do some really cool stuff like this.
I don't have the equation for the gravitational attraction between two bodies. But I know it is a function of the SUM of the masses of the two objects.
Maybe if you did have the equation for the gravitational attraction between two bodies nearby you'd realize that it is a function of the PRODUCT of the masses of the two objects.:>
Yeah, I know, that kind of thing is complex, but I feel we should have that spurious launch capability...god knows it would save us if we ever met something like what hit Jupiter a couple of years back.
I don't think having a spurious (false, unauthentic) launch ability would permit us to escape fiery death at the hands of a rogue shoemaker-levy-like object. Perhaps you mean extemporaneous. All jokes aside, it would be great to have a near-impromptu method for launching, but unfortunately missions are really expensive and require a great deal of planning. With the derth of funds going towards NASA these days, it should be expected that we won't have improvised launches anytime soon.
The reason this discovery is useful and more than 'whoop-de-doo' is because of what was mentioned in the end of the article: it is an extra-terrestrial body that is very close to the Earth. It would not be outside our reach to visit this object with current technology and learn more about the composition of asteroids and other minor planets in the solar system.
It is also intriguing since no 'trojans' have been discovered for the Earth and this could signal that we do in fact have some. Trojans are asteroids that occupy the 4th and 5th Lagrangian points about a larger body (Jupiter has the most, due to its large mass). Because of the physics involved in a 2 body system where any additional bodies have negligible mass compared to the original 2, there are a few 'stable' points where the gravitational forces cancel out...these are known as Lagrangian points. L4 and L5 are co-orbital to the less-massive object (Jupiter, Earth, whatever).
Although this object is not a trojan, since it has a horseshoe orbit and temporarily gets caught up in Earth's orbit, it suggests that there are bodies out there that could be trojans. Perhaps as our detection abilities progress, we will discover some Earth-trojans.
Good point. I mean, why on earth are companies going to go to the trouble/cost of buying false wireless service points (honeypots), when all they need to do is turn on the encryption on their networks or use some decent security protocols? Would it really be that much more work/cost/loss of throughput to turn on the encryption that came with their hardware than to pay for an external company to come and put ghost machines on the network to trap the hacker-villains?
I think the fact that the purveyors of this product keep calling the permissionless people using their wireless protocols hackers is kinda ridiculous. It isn't like these 'hackers' are cracking all of their defenses with nmap, ipspoofing and a hex editor, these people are gaining access to a network that the owners left WIDE OPEN TO EVERYONE.
That is not true, there is strong evidence that Water exists at the poles of Mars and on Europa. In fact, there is evidence that water exists at the poles of the Moon, and Mercury as well.
But it frustrates me that so many scientists always seem to believe that water in a liquid form is a necessity of life. Just because it was required in our form of life doesn't mean that there aren't silicon-based life forms out there, or bacteria that thrive in environments other than H20.
No, actually buying the system and not buying games costs Microsoft more money than if you were to not buy the Xbox at all.
You see, Microsoft is selling the Xbox at about 150 dollars below the cost of manufacturing it. They make up that money by selling games at a profit price, but if you buy the Xbox and then don't buy their games, they have lost money. Thus, people buying Xboxes and then using them as Desktop systems with Linux ends up costing Microsoft in the long run. QED
This is sensationalist journalism. Just because RedHat is in the OS business, and it happens to be somewhat successful does not automatically mean that it is becoming the next Microsoft. Journalists that have little idea of the architecture and licensing behind the two OS's are the only one that could propose this specious metaphor.
Re:Why isnt the world testing deflection technolog
on
A Rock Moves In Space
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually there are contingency plans that we as a planet can do with this much advanced warning.
Most asteroids such as this one are almost black in color and reflect very little incident light; this coupled with their small size make them very difficult to detect. There is a property in physics called albedo (no, not libido) which is basically the 'reflectivity' of an extraterrestrial object (the moon has an albedo of ~.1, ie it reflects ~10% of incident light). If we could find a way to change one side of an earth-collision asteroid to have a higher albedo, perhaps by icing it with water ice, then we have effectively made a motor to push the asteroid off its normal orbit. More light would be reflected on one side than the other, causing a slight difference in the number of photons absorbed on one side compared to the other. This absorption differential would be enough over time to significantly alter the orbit of an asteroid. But this is the sort of thing that won't work in 18 days, it would have to be several years for the photon force to make a real change in the orbit. That is why we have the NEAR program, to determine orbits of near-earth asteroids in advance so we have a lot of time to figure out an appropriate way of dealing with them.
Something like icing an asteroid is much easier than landing a manned crew on it to put a rocket on it or blow it up or the other things suggested in this thread. It could be done using entirely automated systems.
Oh, and I don't believe that methods for avoiding the extinction of our species should be patented...
Wouldnt a large array of telescopes in a grid give you just as much resolution these days? You can integrate the images from lots of smaller mirrors pretty easily in software, and a small mirror is much easier to make than a big one.
While it is true that it is much cheaper to get several small telescopes together than to have one large telescope, it can be misleading. Optical interferometry is not only difficult, but it doesn't provide the sensitivity that one large mirror provides. You get the precision and resolution of having a large mirror, but you can't get the faintest stars that a large mirrorred telescope could detect.
Check out arstechnica for more information on homebrew PC's. They have a lot of information regarding reviews of components of computer systems, as well as letting people on to deals on new components. Good site.
Other good sites that people mentioned in previous responses are: anandtech and toms hardware for component reviews, and pricegrabber and pricewatch for finding the best prices on things online, and newegg is just a great online company that is very reliable and inexpensive for purchasing lots of electronic/computer components.
Switch to electricity? What kind of power source is electricity? Are you suggesting that we harness the power of lightning? Explain more!
As far as nuclear power goes, yes, it will be a good alternative when we get fusion to work. Fission is just too costly for its fuel, (we can run out of uranium and plutonium just as we can run out of oil and gas) and it produces too much hazardous biproducts. Fusion defeats both of these problems by only creating helium, and only requiring hydrogen as its fuel.
This organization focuses on preventing our skies from being polluted with too much light at nighttime. Light pollution is a problem for astronomers the world round, as it makes it difficult to observe the sky when nearby towns are pumping light into the local atmosphere.
Organizations like this one focus on making outdoor lighting point downwards towards the Earth and shielding the bulbs from putting out light into the atmosphere. One might be surprised how much energy is wasted by outdoor lights without shields on them. All it takes is a reflective surface (read: shiny metal) just above a light bulb/tube to reflect the light down instead of skyward. It not only protects our skies from light pollution, but it makes more efficient use of the energy and light.
In this case, the WLEDs are probably not being used outdoors, and even if they were they are a highly directional light source that would cause few light pollution problems due to their limited angular spread (you wouldn't be pointing these things straight up, you'd shine them on your book or whatever).
Of course, if all of our cities had shielded outdoor lighting or LEDs instead, we wouldn't have the pretty nighttime maps of the Earth's surface that show where all the major cities are.
Slashdot Mirror
The dominant paradigm since the Apollo Missions was that the Moon was as dry as a bone.
However, a paper was put out recently (before the discovery of water a month ago) proposing a model for water and other volatiles venting out of the interior of the Moon. One of the predictions of this model is that there should be significant subsurface water primarily near the poles. The results from Chandrayaan-1 and LCROSS today confirms that this is true--there is significant subsurface water near the poles. The claims that the water is solely on the surface and due to cometary deposition or solar wind interactions are now blown "out of the water".
This model predicts a lot more water under the surface for potential use in human exploration. w00t!
Check out the paper here: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/0909.3832
The water found in these missions is not *necessarily* in small quantities. The research shows that it is present at the near surface, but no one has any clue as to the depth to which it extends. The assumption is being made that the water accumulated there from comet deposition, but there are other mechanisms for water delivery to the surface. A paper posted to the pre-prints server recently shows that there is evidence for water vapor in the interior of the moon that is slowing leaking out along with other volatiles. As the gases reach the upper layers of the regolith, the water freezes out and gets stuck there. Over the course of a few billion years, even a small gas leakage rate could produce large slabs of ice below the surface, exactly the kind of thing that these results confirm. Anyway, it's an interesting idea...
Here is the paper:
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/0909.3832
What no one seems to understand here is that just because Google is scanning all of these books, the end-user can NOT see all of the text of a given book. Unlike the online information that Google indexs, where one can search and then connect to the full webpage of any search hits, the library project will only make available the search quotation and the sentence or so around it for context.
For example, if I were to look up: "JubJub Bird", it would return something like this:
-----------
Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll (from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872)
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the frumious Bandersnatch!"
-----------
Now is this giving away the entire contents of this copyrighted work? No. It is merely giving the searcher a hint of where to look for more information. In order to give away all of the information in a copyrighted text, one would have to know exactly what to search in sentence after sentence of that text. So it really isn't giving away anything. It most assuredly isn't giving away more information that Amazon.com does when you can open up the book and look at a few sample pages.
In the same way that Google offers a searchable catalog of online web information, it will now offer a super-catalog search for library contents. I, for one, think that this will be an invaluable resource for anyone who does academic research, or a person who merely wants to know all of the references on a particular subject and relevant resources. Have some forsight, publishers of the world! This will only increase your profits when people purchase relevant texts to their interests.
greenphreak
While it is true that peer review and repetition of studies does make science robust against individual researchers fabricating or 'bending' their data to match desired results, it still remains a problem in the scientific world. Just recently I read about a researcher who did particle physics and had fabricated his data on various different studies. Eventually, people discovered the false data, but it took a long time because he was a respected researcher and the project was abstruse and hard to reproduce (particle physics requires supercolliders, of which there are few in the world).
As a graduate student, I feel pressure from my advisor to not mention discrepant data or those conclusions/questions which detract from my overall hypotheses. It is unfortunate that such should occur, but I can see why it does happen. People want to be proven correct. If they set out to prove a hypothesis with a scientific experiment, and then after a few months or years of research, they discover that the evidence points against their hypothesis or that the method which they employed doesn't provide a conclusive solution, it can be tempting to 'throw out' some data. After all, they put in all of that effort, and they want their recognition. Usually, it means more papers, which oftentimes means more notoriety, job security, money, etc.
I'm not justifying this behavior because science should be done for the sake of understanding nature, not for making a paycheck, but I see where these scientists might be coming from.
This is not a chunk of a planet. This is the remaining core of an old star. This is a carbon white dwarf star, which is to say that it is a star that started out at around 4-8 solar masses and is now at the end of its lifetime. Stars with less than ~8 solar masses do not become supernovae (neutron stars or black holes), they become planetary nebulae. They slough off their outer layers of gas and leave only a hot, white core (the white dwarf). The most well-known examples of these objects are the Ring Nebula (M57), Dumbbell Nebula (M27), and Owl Nebula (M97).
In the white dwarf stage, it doesn't fuse like a normal star (unless it accretes material and causes fusion on the surface as when we witness a nova), but it continues to glow like a coal that you have taken out of the fire. It will continue to glow and radiate away its energy until over time, it cools enough that its interior can crystallize. After even more time, it becomes so cool that it stops radiating altogether, a crystallized rock floating through space.
The lifetime of the star (and the elements that it ends up fusing to sustain that lifetime) are determined only by the initial mass of the star. Most stars are low mass stars (it's easier to form smaller clumps of gas), and these stars take a long time to run out of their hydrogen supply (in fact the least massive of these still haven't run out, and won't for several billion years).
As stars run out of hydrogen, they start fusing other elements present in their cores. This takes them through different stages of stellar evolution (red giant, horizontal branch stars, assymptotic branch stars, etc.) They continue to gain energy from this process until they reach iron. When these stars fuse elements heavier than iron, they don't actually get a net energy output from the reaction and thus their pressure source (fusion) cannot sustain the equilibrium against the gravitational force that constantly tries to collapse them. This is when a supernovae event occurs. As the star collapses under its own gravitation, the core rapidly fuses anything it can as the density increases. This is why the previous poster is right in saying that the main source for elements heavier than iron in the universe is supernovae.
His name is Dennis Fong, but he played under the alias Thresh. He was the first really 'professional' gamer. He earned a great deal of notoriety for his skills at Quake1, especially when he won the Red Annihilation tournament, winning the Ferrari of John Romero, who at the time was at Id Software. He later went on to starting Thresh's Firing Squad (firingsquad.gamers.com), a portal for gaming news and industry reviews. Although he still reigns as champion of Quake1 as he was never dethroned, he hasn't been spotted in any sequels. Many people believe that he wants to retain his legendary status and not defame it with his imperfect abilities in other games.
If you got a good test score then be happy, your [sic] working the system nicely...
Although I agree with most of what you have to say about braggarts, I think your argument holds a lot less water than it would if you used proper grammar. Don't be so quick to judge.
Isn't this how it has been in Europe and other countries since the beginning? I remember it costing a lot more to call someone on a cell phone from a landline when I was in England. Just another one of those things that Americans will have to get used to, that everyone else seems to have acclimated to already.
Yes, albums with lots of short, good songs are probably better purchased in the normal fashion. Take for instance: They Might Be Giants' album Apollo 18. That has about 20 song tracks collectively entitled "Fingertips". Each song is 5-20 seconds long, and together they are a great listen, but this and similar albums aren't the best candidates for this service. What I like is that now we have a CHOICE between doing it the old fashioned 'buy the whole cd' way, and just buying the music we want way.
So I'm confused how this works. Is a customer to look at their catalog, decide which songs they want to purchase, select those songs, and then a cd is sent to them that have those custom-selected songs burned on them already (at $.99 / song)? Or is this a situation where if you purchase the songs you get some sort of portable file sent to you over the net? If it is the latter, I wonder what encoding scheme they are using...mp3, wma, ogg? The article was a little low on details.
These aren't exactly the best prices I've ever seen on tracks, but it is nice that one can have the opportunity to only get the tracks they want. I think this is definitely a step in the right direction.
Yes, it is true that the International Space Station has taken a horrendous amount of money that could've been spent on real science. I admit that I'd like to see more money spent on real science missions like probes to Pluto or Europa or on more Space-based telescopes, but unfortunately as these devices increase in size (satellites, space telescopes, probes, etc.) it becomes infeasible to launch them in a confined shuttle (I believe Chandra X-ray telescope reached the volume limits on what could be launched in one piece).
That said, we need to be building an infrastructure for launching larger and more complex devices into space. This requires places where things can be assembled once in orbit, places such as the ISS or another station at a Lagrangian point. In and of themselves, these stations aren't spectacular, they don't produce good science and they are very expensive, but they need to be created to assist other scientific endeavors as our technology continues to develop. As an example, routers, fiber, and transcontinental backbones are expensive and to the layman, they produce no real science or pretty pictures, but they are necessary as an infrastructure over which people can do some really cool things.
Anyway, I think that even if this doesn't get passed by congress or the things run behind schedule, it is good that we are at least PLANNING to do some really cool stuff like this.
I don't have the equation for the gravitational attraction between two bodies. But I know it is a function of the SUM of the masses of the two objects.
:>
Maybe if you did have the equation for the gravitational attraction between two bodies nearby you'd realize that it is a function of the PRODUCT of the masses of the two objects.
F = (G x m1 x m2)/(r^2)
Yeah, I know, that kind of thing is complex, but I feel we should have that spurious launch capability...god knows it would save us if we ever met something like what hit Jupiter a couple of years back.
I don't think having a spurious (false, unauthentic) launch ability would permit us to escape fiery death at the hands of a rogue shoemaker-levy-like object. Perhaps you mean extemporaneous. All jokes aside, it would be great to have a near-impromptu method for launching, but unfortunately missions are really expensive and require a great deal of planning. With the derth of funds going towards NASA these days, it should be expected that we won't have improvised launches anytime soon.
The reason this discovery is useful and more than 'whoop-de-doo' is because of what was mentioned in the end of the article: it is an extra-terrestrial body that is very close to the Earth. It would not be outside our reach to visit this object with current technology and learn more about the composition of asteroids and other minor planets in the solar system.
It is also intriguing since no 'trojans' have been discovered for the Earth and this could signal that we do in fact have some. Trojans are asteroids that occupy the 4th and 5th Lagrangian points about a larger body (Jupiter has the most, due to its large mass). Because of the physics involved in a 2 body system where any additional bodies have negligible mass compared to the original 2, there are a few 'stable' points where the gravitational forces cancel out...these are known as Lagrangian points. L4 and L5 are co-orbital to the less-massive object (Jupiter, Earth, whatever).
Although this object is not a trojan, since it has a horseshoe orbit and temporarily gets caught up in Earth's orbit, it suggests that there are bodies out there that could be trojans. Perhaps as our detection abilities progress, we will discover some Earth-trojans.
Good point. I mean, why on earth are companies going to go to the trouble/cost of buying false wireless service points (honeypots), when all they need to do is turn on the encryption on their networks or use some decent security protocols? Would it really be that much more work/cost/loss of throughput to turn on the encryption that came with their hardware than to pay for an external company to come and put ghost machines on the network to trap the hacker-villains?
I think the fact that the purveyors of this product keep calling the permissionless people using their wireless protocols hackers is kinda ridiculous. It isn't like these 'hackers' are cracking all of their defenses with nmap, ipspoofing and a hex editor, these people are gaining access to a network that the owners left WIDE OPEN TO EVERYONE.
That is not true, there is strong evidence that Water exists at the poles of Mars and on Europa. In fact, there is evidence that water exists at the poles of the Moon, and Mercury as well.
But it frustrates me that so many scientists always seem to believe that water in a liquid form is a necessity of life. Just because it was required in our form of life doesn't mean that there aren't silicon-based life forms out there, or bacteria that thrive in environments other than H20.
No, actually buying the system and not buying games costs Microsoft more money than if you were to not buy the Xbox at all.
You see, Microsoft is selling the Xbox at about 150 dollars below the cost of manufacturing it. They make up that money by selling games at a profit price, but if you buy the Xbox and then don't buy their games, they have lost money. Thus, people buying Xboxes and then using them as Desktop systems with Linux ends up costing Microsoft in the long run.
QED
This is sensationalist journalism. Just because RedHat is in the OS business, and it happens to be somewhat successful does not automatically mean that it is becoming the next Microsoft. Journalists that have little idea of the architecture and licensing behind the two OS's are the only one that could propose this specious metaphor.
Actually there are contingency plans that we as a planet can do with this much advanced warning.
Most asteroids such as this one are almost black in color and reflect very little incident light; this coupled with their small size make them very difficult to detect. There is a property in physics called albedo (no, not libido) which is basically the 'reflectivity' of an extraterrestrial object (the moon has an albedo of ~.1, ie it reflects ~10% of incident light). If we could find a way to change one side of an earth-collision asteroid to have a higher albedo, perhaps by icing it with water ice, then we have effectively made a motor to push the asteroid off its normal orbit. More light would be reflected on one side than the other, causing a slight difference in the number of photons absorbed on one side compared to the other. This absorption differential would be enough over time to significantly alter the orbit of an asteroid. But this is the sort of thing that won't work in 18 days, it would have to be several years for the photon force to make a real change in the orbit. That is why we have the NEAR program, to determine orbits of near-earth asteroids in advance so we have a lot of time to figure out an appropriate way of dealing with them.
Something like icing an asteroid is much easier than landing a manned crew on it to put a rocket on it or blow it up or the other things suggested in this thread. It could be done using entirely automated systems.
Oh, and I don't believe that methods for avoiding the extinction of our species should be patented...
Wouldnt a large array of telescopes in a grid give you just as much resolution these days? You can integrate the images from lots of smaller mirrors pretty easily in software, and a small mirror is much easier to make than a big one.
While it is true that it is much cheaper to get several small telescopes together than to have one large telescope, it can be misleading. Optical interferometry is not only difficult, but it doesn't provide the sensitivity that one large mirror provides. You get the precision and resolution of having a large mirror, but you can't get the faintest stars that a large mirrorred telescope could detect.
Check out arstechnica for more information on homebrew PC's. They have a lot of information regarding reviews of components of computer systems, as well as letting people on to deals on new components. Good site.
Other good sites that people mentioned in previous responses are: anandtech and toms hardware for component reviews, and pricegrabber and pricewatch for finding the best prices on things online, and newegg is just a great online company that is very reliable and inexpensive for purchasing lots of electronic/computer components.
10 nm == .01 microns last time I looked.
1 nm = 1e-9 m
1 micron = 1e-6 m
Switch to electricity? What kind of power source is electricity? Are you suggesting that we harness the power of lightning? Explain more!
As far as nuclear power goes, yes, it will be a good alternative when we get fusion to work. Fission is just too costly for its fuel, (we can run out of uranium and plutonium just as we can run out of oil and gas) and it produces too much hazardous biproducts. Fusion defeats both of these problems by only creating helium, and only requiring hydrogen as its fuel.
This organization focuses on preventing our skies from being polluted with too much light at nighttime. Light pollution is a problem for astronomers the world round, as it makes it difficult to observe the sky when nearby towns are pumping light into the local atmosphere.
Organizations like this one focus on making outdoor lighting point downwards towards the Earth and shielding the bulbs from putting out light into the atmosphere. One might be surprised how much energy is wasted by outdoor lights without shields on them. All it takes is a reflective surface (read: shiny metal) just above a light bulb/tube to reflect the light down instead of skyward. It not only protects our skies from light pollution, but it makes more efficient use of the energy and light.
In this case, the WLEDs are probably not being used outdoors, and even if they were they are a highly directional light source that would cause few light pollution problems due to their limited angular spread (you wouldn't be pointing these things straight up, you'd shine them on your book or whatever).
Of course, if all of our cities had shielded outdoor lighting or LEDs instead, we wouldn't have the pretty nighttime maps of the Earth's surface that show where all the major cities are.