This is just a small nit-pick with this assertion. Sorry for dragging it out as I have.
The poster never asserted anything about predicting earthquakes based upon the average. The poster just stated that historical data shows a 200 year average, and from that data one could say that one was 'fairly likely in the near future'. That's the way averages work; we may not understand the reason behind the pattern, but if there is enough data to create a pattern, its reasonable to guess that the pattern will continue. Just because the geological time scale is huge doesn't mean that there can't be regular geological events that occur with a short frequency. For a specific example, look at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) test site in Parkfield, California:
Historical data showed earthquakes occurring in 1857, 1881, 1901, 1922, 1934, and 1966. The pattern average showed an earthquake due by around 1993. The next significant earthquake did not happen until 2004, not exactly on time, but dead accurate compared to your time span of 'millions of years'.
Regarding the advice from your friends; a scientist once told me 'Half of everything that scientists teach is wrong, and we don't know which half it is.' Much of current scientific theory is just that, someone's current theory. Take it with a grain of salt.
until an 8th magnitude quake suddenly releases ten times as much energy,
Nope. From the USGS again: "The total amount of energy released by the earthquake, however, goes up by a factor of 32."
Yep, the only issues left are figuring out how to pack your astronaut stuff onto a spaceship 850 microns thick, how to survive the 1010 g launch force,... what was the idea again?
you are wrong UNLESS you compare with proper touch-typing, which hardly anyone can do.
US Dept of Labor reports that the are currently about 4 million secretaries employed in the US. I bet the vast majority know how to touch type. Figure, what, 10 times that many worked as a secretary sometime in the last 30 years and are still alive using computers today? 40 million and that's just one profession in one country. A hundred million touch-typists world-wide would not be hard to imagine. Not a group that I would define as 'hardly anyone'.
I remember an article on this technology in Omni Magazine back in the early 80's. Same stuff, small grid of implants hooked up to a camera embedded in a pair of glasses to enable the blind to see. Did Omni just make this up or did this technology just drop off the face of the earth for 20 years? I couldn't find a reference to the article in a google search but I'm sure I read it. Unfortunatly my Omni collection is about 3000 miles away...
I was guessing that the whole point of doing one photon at a time was that the reciever would be checking the stream one photon at a time and would instantly know if one had been intercepted. At that time you could tell the sending station to shut down, and they have only compromised one or two bits of your data, and this is what would make is secure?
I think that the problem is clearly with taking seals to the moon. I mean, like, aint they endangered species or sumpthen? Of course they are going to corrode up on the moon, they were designed for an ocean environment and there just isn't enough water in the vacumn for them!
I could debate each of your points individually, but that would take more time than you appear to have put into understanding the story.
On your comments about no need for formal risk assessment;
Basically, I don't believe that having a scientific risk assessment done would be all that foolish when deciding between various possibly multi-billion dollar options. It is becoming more and more clear that O'Keefe made the wrong judgement; of the groups that have since looked at the issue, now including the National Academy of Sciences, all have voiced favor for sending the Shuttle to rescue Hubble.
On your comments about the docking system, what were you thinking? The docking system is for between shuttles, an option to allow a rescue mission, to allow safe transfer between shuttles, so astronauts wouldn't have to try and attempt a tether transfer. The same with the supply depot concept, that was to have supplies on location ready to enable a crew to wait for rescue if the need should arise, not to enable a month long Hubble repair mission. None of the previous repair missions required such a duration, why would you think that this one would?
"A bid increment will go higher than the standard increment in two situations:"
To meet the reserve amount
To beat a competing bidder's high bid"
He is not a competing bidder he is himself. And this isn't a reserve auction. That seems like a contradiction to me.
Two different things. What you quoted was talking about the bid INCREMENT, not the amount of the bid itself. His bid went higher, becuase he raised his maximum to a threshold over the next increment amount, but the increment amount stayed the standard amount.
Here is a brief description of some of the GM-Isuzu product sharing that has gone on, going back to the Isuzu Pup, which was imported into the US as a Chevy Luv in 1972:
This is such a horrible medium to hold a conversation in.
I apologize for slighting your programming skills, your experience far outweighs mine. I do have experience trying to write tight code, (learning on a Sinclair with 1K of RAM will teach you that), but I admit that what we were discussing wasn't the most efficient code. I was just striving to make sure it ran bug-free, and at least I just didn't hardcode in zeros!
The computer doesn't know that there is no sales tax for a state until you tell it. It knows that there was a sale to someone with adress x, and that its job is to calculate the sales tax appropriate to that address. It looks at sales tax rate tables for addresses and multiplies them by the sales price. If the sales tax for that address is zero, it calculates zero for the sales tax. I had to tell it that the addresses in that state had a sales tax rate of zero or the system would not have known what to do.
You can't just have the program not calculate sales tax becuase it can't find a rate for it, becuase that means that if there was a mistake in an address it might improperly drop through the routine without a needed sales tax being calculated.
Also, since the program is looking up the rate for all addresses in tables, if one of the zero sales tax states changes its mind, it doesn't take a programmer to come in and change the program, the user just edits a rate in a table.
The burst let off that much engery, but fortunatly for humans Earth only received a tiny fraction of it. My math (admittedly suspect) shows we (the planet as a whole) got about 2268 trillion watts in that tenth of a second. Still sounds like a lot but thats about what the Earth gets in less that 3 hours normaly from the sun, and less than we sometimes get from a solar flare. Not really anything to warm the planet very much.
Even trying to be pedantic you are still wrong. Programmatically I still have to tell the system to calculate zero for zero sales tax states - I still have to 'work' with them. Not to mention looking up the tax laws for the state to verify the specifics with regards to taxes on shipping, use tax, etc. etc.
You apply for a refund for the unused portion of your Mass Use tax. You apply for a refund for your unused car insurance and vehicle registration fees when you sell your car don't you?
Taxes are not bullshit. Governments need money to provide you with services and it has to come from somewhere.
There are laws to prevent you from having to pay tax on the same thing in multiple states, but that doesn't mean you should be able to get away without paying a tax on somthing at all.
Its not that simple. As someone who has worked with sales taxes for all 50 states, I can tell you that there can be multiple tax rates within a given zip code, as well as the tax rates changing by item type, and shipping type.
OK, I went and looked it up, and wouldn't you know it, Tired and Emotional is right. Maybe T&E is a real astronomer.
Anyway, it turns out that all of my assumptions about how the gravitational slingshot works were wrong. Go figure. It turns out that the motion of the planet during the period of gravitational influence (or lack of in the case of this black hole), is the where the speed boost comes from (or doesn't, in the case of this 'stationary' black hole). I always figured that you got the speed boost from being pulled in by the object's gravity and then somehow kept the extra speed on the way out. Doesn't make much sense in hindsight.
Thus my comment about the stars slingshot being similar to our spaceprobe slingshots was wrong. As was my comment about the binary not being critical - as T&E posted above it is probably the only way it could work.
I should have just stuck to saying that you can have really really big black holes.
All of the real astronomers are busy right now. Press 1 to be connected to a geek instead or 2 to leave a message. -1- Thank you. The answer is : Black holes can be compilations of many stars. The one at the center of our galaxy that they are talking about is currently believed to be 3.7 million times the mass of our Sun (give or take 1.5 million). This is just like we slingshot space probes past planets to get a gravitational speed boost, this star got pulled in towards the black hole but barely missed and got a the mother of all gravitational slingshots. I would guess that the fact that it had a companion was unimportant, and could have happened if it had been it had been a single star on the right trajectory.
Slashdot Mirror
http://quake.wr.usgs.gov/research/parkfield/
Historical data showed earthquakes occurring in 1857, 1881, 1901, 1922, 1934, and 1966. The pattern average showed an earthquake due by around 1993. The next significant earthquake did not happen until 2004, not exactly on time, but dead accurate compared to your time span of 'millions of years'.
Regarding the advice from your friends; a scientist once told me 'Half of everything that scientists teach is wrong, and we don't know which half it is.' Much of current scientific theory is just that, someone's current theory. Take it with a grain of salt.
Nope. From the USGS again: "The total amount of energy released by the earthquake, however, goes up by a factor of 32."http://earthquake.usgs.gov/recenteqsww/glossary.ht m#magnitude
Yep, the only issues left are figuring out how to pack your astronaut stuff onto a spaceship 850 microns thick, ...
how to survive the 1010 g launch force,
what was the idea again?
Wannabe grammar nazi (while blathering ad nauseum) utters the words: "asking with Maggie is hot"! :)
Why is that an oxymoron? Or were you just trying for a funny first post and the brain wasn't fully in gear yet?
Yoda Acronym It Is. (YAII)
I remember an article on this technology in Omni Magazine back in the early 80's. Same stuff, small grid of implants hooked up to a camera embedded in a pair of glasses to enable the blind to see. Did Omni just make this up or did this technology just drop off the face of the earth for 20 years? I couldn't find a reference to the article in a google search but I'm sure I read it. Unfortunatly my Omni collection is about 3000 miles away...
Not that I know anything about this, but;
I was guessing that the whole point of doing one photon at a time was that the reciever would be checking the stream one photon at a time and would instantly know if one had been intercepted. At that time you could tell the sending station to shut down, and they have only compromised one or two bits of your data, and this is what would make is secure?
Bzzz.
What is "Illegal Use of an Apostrophe" Alex?
Alex: That's correct!
Troll?
Come on, I laughed! Did you read his URL at the bottom?
I think that the problem is clearly with taking seals to the moon. I mean, like, aint they endangered species or sumpthen? Of course they are going to corrode up on the moon, they were designed for an ocean environment and there just isn't enough water in the vacumn for them!
---------------
Save the Seals from NASA!
I can hear the conversation now:
Me) I would like one personal license please.
SCO) Will you be using this for more than one person?
Me) Well, I'll be using it for less than 2 people, is that ok?
SCO) Profit!
I could debate each of your points individually, but that would take more time than you appear to have put into understanding the story.
On your comments about no need for formal risk assessment;
Basically, I don't believe that having a scientific risk assessment done would be all that foolish when deciding between various possibly multi-billion dollar options. It is becoming more and more clear that O'Keefe made the wrong judgement; of the groups that have since looked at the issue, now including the National Academy of Sciences, all have voiced favor for sending the Shuttle to rescue Hubble.
On your comments about the docking system, what were you thinking? The docking system is for between shuttles, an option to allow a rescue mission, to allow safe transfer between shuttles, so astronauts wouldn't have to try and attempt a tether transfer. The same with the supply depot concept, that was to have supplies on location ready to enable a crew to wait for rescue if the need should arise, not to enable a month long Hubble repair mission. None of the previous repair missions required such a duration, why would you think that this one would?
GM currently owns somewhere around 10% of Isuzu.
l
Here is a brief description of some of the GM-Isuzu product sharing that has gone on, going back to the Isuzu Pup, which was imported into the US as a Chevy Luv in 1972:
http://www.isuzu.co.jp/world/investor/fact/gm.htm
This is such a horrible medium to hold a conversation in.
I apologize for slighting your programming skills, your experience far outweighs mine. I do have experience trying to write tight code, (learning on a Sinclair with 1K of RAM will teach you that), but I admit that what we were discussing wasn't the most efficient code. I was just striving to make sure it ran bug-free, and at least I just didn't hardcode in zeros!
write software much? No?
The computer doesn't know that there is no sales tax for a state until you tell it. It knows that there was a sale to someone with adress x, and that its job is to calculate the sales tax appropriate to that address. It looks at sales tax rate tables for addresses and multiplies them by the sales price. If the sales tax for that address is zero, it calculates zero for the sales tax. I had to tell it that the addresses in that state had a sales tax rate of zero or the system would not have known what to do.
You can't just have the program not calculate sales tax becuase it can't find a rate for it, becuase that means that if there was a mistake in an address it might improperly drop through the routine without a needed sales tax being calculated.
Also, since the program is looking up the rate for all addresses in tables, if one of the zero sales tax states changes its mind, it doesn't take a programmer to come in and change the program, the user just edits a rate in a table.
Why you got modded Redundant is beond me.
Intersting, insightfull - thanks. Thats the stuff that I read slashdot for and it was hiding at -1.
Maybe Sega has mod points here and, no, why would they use Redundant?
I think the idea is that it blows the atmosphere away; not being able to breath is kind of a planet-wide issue, independent of daytime or nighttime.
The burst let off that much engery, but fortunatly for humans Earth only received a tiny fraction of it. My math (admittedly suspect) shows we (the planet as a whole) got about 2268 trillion watts in that tenth of a second. Still sounds like a lot but thats about what the Earth gets in less that 3 hours normaly from the sun, and less than we sometimes get from a solar flare. Not really anything to warm the planet very much.
Even trying to be pedantic you are still wrong. Programmatically I still have to tell the system to calculate zero for zero sales tax states - I still have to 'work' with them. Not to mention looking up the tax laws for the state to verify the specifics with regards to taxes on shipping, use tax, etc. etc.
You apply for a refund for the unused portion of your Mass Use tax. You apply for a refund for your unused car insurance and vehicle registration fees when you sell your car don't you?
Taxes are not bullshit. Governments need money to provide you with services and it has to come from somewhere.
There are laws to prevent you from having to pay tax on the same thing in multiple states, but that doesn't mean you should be able to get away without paying a tax on somthing at all.
Its not that simple. As someone who has worked with sales taxes for all 50 states, I can tell you that there can be multiple tax rates within a given zip code, as well as the tax rates changing by item type, and shipping type.
OK, I went and looked it up, and wouldn't you know it, Tired and Emotional is right. Maybe T&E is a real astronomer.
h ot
Anyway, it turns out that all of my assumptions about how the gravitational slingshot works were wrong. Go figure. It turns out that the motion of the planet during the period of gravitational influence (or lack of in the case of this black hole), is the where the speed boost comes from (or doesn't, in the case of this 'stationary' black hole). I always figured that you got the speed boost from being pulled in by the object's gravity and then somehow kept the extra speed on the way out. Doesn't make much sense in hindsight.
Thus my comment about the stars slingshot being similar to our spaceprobe slingshots was wrong. As was my comment about the binary not being critical - as T&E posted above it is probably the only way it could work.
I should have just stuck to saying that you can have really really big black holes.
Good description of the gravitational slingshot at the wikipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_slings
So, please mod my grandparent response back down to oblivion. Thanks. I will stick to geekdom now and try and avoid orbital mechanics.
All of the real astronomers are busy right now. Press 1 to be connected to a geek instead or 2 to leave a message.
-1-
Thank you.
The answer is : Black holes can be compilations of many stars. The one at the center of our galaxy that they are talking about is currently believed to be 3.7 million times the mass of our Sun (give or take 1.5 million).
This is just like we slingshot space probes past planets to get a gravitational speed boost, this star got pulled in towards the black hole but barely missed and got a the mother of all gravitational slingshots. I would guess that the fact that it had a companion was unimportant, and could have happened if it had been it had been a single star on the right trajectory.
IANAA.