These seemed like valid concerns at first glance, but the numbers just don't add up. It's something we often deal with in physics; it's very hard for humans to compare quantities which are very very large.
The amount of energy we're extracting from the water is miniscule. Take the 5MW sea power station. Water weighs 1 gram / cc, which means 1000kg per m^3. 5 MW in 1 second is the kinetic energy (using E=(1/2)m(v^2)) in 100 cubic meters of water moving at 10 m/s: E=(1/2)(1000gm)(100m/s)^2 = 5e6 joules. 100 cubic meters, even once a second, is NOTHING compared to the rest of the sea. 7/10 of the Earth's surface is covered by water; the seas have an estimated volume of 1.4*(10^18) cubic meters!
Huge solar plants will abosorb their energy from our sun. That energy would have heated our soil, been absorbed by plants, been reflected back into the atmosphere...
The amount of land affected is exactly that in the shadow of the solar array. No more, no less. Even the power we "extract" from that shadow returns to the environment in the form of heat, after it's used in the grid. Remember, energy is always conserved.
Geothermal generation will cool our planets core faster
This one really set me off. Come on people, the Earth is a GIANT BALL OF MOLTEN ROCK. The crust, with all the seas, life, solid rocks and mountain chains, is a few miles on top of it. The radius of the Earth is 4000 miles = 6400km. It has a volume of 1.1*(10^12 cubic KILOMETERS)! You could literally pour every ocean on Earth (10^9 km^3) into the mantle, boil it off into space, and barely make a dent in the temperature. There's a reason it takes billions of years for planets to cool.
Think about replacing a nuclear power plant with a tidal generator. You are sucking an entire nuclear power stations energy output from the ocean! Don't you think that might have some sort of consequences? And that's just one nuclear power plant. There are dozens!
This seems really logical, because to humans a nuclear power plant generates an enormous amount of energy, i.e. many orders of magnitude more than it takes to run your electric razor. But the power in the oceans (7/10 of the Earth covered by VERY dense material moving about) makes those power plants look like coin cells by comparison.
The only solution is to be more efficient, not to try and generate more power.
On this point I agree with you in spirit, but have to point out that it will simply never work. Google for "The Tragedy of the Commons" if you want to know why. Simply put, any person/organization which tries to consume less energy puts himself at a competitive disadvantage. It sucks, but it's the way economics work.
It's really wonderful that we're able to focus on naughty pictures and movies that American citizens legally buy. Obviously all the terrorists, murderers, rapists, Enron execs, and thieving digital pirates are safely behind bars, otherwise we couldn't spare the manpower.
Some people have pointed out already that the division of labor and costs don't work out the way you expect for software. At the risk of being redundant, I think it bears repeating.
Let's say 10 people get together in the "real world" and build a lawnmower. One knows how to design the engine, another can weld, another can coordinate the color scheme, etc. When they're done they have a single lawnmower. If they all share equally, they break even; each can use the mower (1/10) of the time, each having provided (1/10) of the labor.
With software, those 10 people can also contribute (1/10) of the labor, each in their respective areas. However, when the project is done/stable, each person gets their *own* fully functional copy. This is the payoff of open-source development. I'm not donating 100 lines of code to the "geek community;" I'm *paying* 100 lines of code towards a fully functional software product. In return I get thousands or millions of lines of compiled, tested code.
I don't have to contribute, but if I do I get to have a say in the design. And if I don't like something, I can change it. I would usually much rather struggle with C and work with other people to hammer out a piece of software than buy it commercially, because _it's worth more_. I can trust it. I can audit it. I can rip it apart and put it back together again. I can customize it for my needs, share it with my friends, or print it out and paper my room with it.
In other words, in general Free software is better then free. Some things, like games, can get away with being closed. But I'm not using closed, unaudited, unchangable, unverifiable software for anything that's actually important.
Don't use the computer while your roommate is trying to sleep. Really. It's rude. OK, maybe that's a bit harsh, but it's the reason most colleges have quiet hours. Technical solutions (a shirt over the monitor, etc.) are, in my experience, unlikely to work. They can even breed resentment if the problem continues.
I had this same problem last year at university; my roommate would stay up until 3-4am surfing, gaming, and doing nothing in particular. Which annoyed me. And occasionally I would come in and surf during the day, when he was trying to take a nap. Which pissed him off. We eventually decided on clear rules; i.e. he would either read quietly or leave after 1am (when I usually went to bed), and if he was asleep when I got back from class during the day I would take my laptop and go to the library.
Also, ask yourself if you really need to be using the computer at three in the morning. Couldn't you do that paper a couple of days in advance, instead of 5 hours before your class starts next morning? Living with a roommate demands a certain amount of flexibility. You may have to rearrange your time.
The bottom line is that this problem really needs a social solution, not a technical one. You need to talk to your roommate and set clear boundaries that benefit both of you, so you can get your work done and also sleep. For me that made the difference between a great friendship and icy silence, which was the direction things were heading before we worked it out.
It seems from the article that: (1) The tower is disassembled, (2) The paint is toxic and leeching heavy metals into the groundwater, (3) Having been left to rust since 1983, the tower segments are in highly questionable condition and may collapse if put back together, and (4) They may have already disposed of or lost several sections.
If you want to spend over $40 mil, why not build a brand-new replica, from the original designs? It would preserve the scale of the original and also avoid the dangers and expenses incurred by trying to salvage the old pieces. Provided it was built with historical accuracy in mind, does it really matter if the physical pieces are the same? Bear in mind that it doesn't need to be as expensive as the original, because it doesn't actually need to fuel and support a spacecraft; it only needs to look like it does. And you could easily modify the design to accomodate tourists at $25 a head.
Except, of course, for the new generation of ground-based telescopes with better resolving power than the hubble.
This is true but misleading. Although new Earth-based telescopes can correct for the motion of the atmosphere and approach Hubble's resolution, the atmosphere still filters out huge sections of the spectrum. You can't use adaptive optics to fix that. For any observation which looks at those blocked regions you NEED to go into space or you can't see them at all.
It's a very short demonstration, but there's video of a 1964 prototype at Archive.org.
as part of the video "Century 21 Calling." There's also interesting sequences with emerging technologies, including demonstrations of call-waiting and a touch-tone phone.
I see a lot of posts saying "If you don't like it, you don't have to use their website." This is true of most conventional flash-based ads; when you get sent to the page with the huge plugin block you can click "Skip" or close the entire window if you want, and elect to go somewhere else. What't wrong these is that they load in the background BEFORE they are triggered. So if I go to a website using this they automatically suck up all of my bandwidth without so much as a notice that it's happening. Don't want to watch the ad? Fine, close the window, but you've ALREADY paid the bandwidth costs of downloading it. It's not that I necessarily mind paying for a "free" service with bandwidth costs for advertising, it's that they've decided to choose for me.
Anyway, I predict it'll be about a week before this nonsense is stopped in its tracks by the Mozilla/Konqueror teams. And judging by Microsoft's ground-breaking decision to add pop-up blocking to IE, Windows IE users should expect to have it blocked too! In 2009, when Service Pack 2 for Longhorn is released.
This is indeed scary, but ONLY if ALL computers sold incorporate the chip. In a free market, this would never happen, because people are willing to pay a little extra for a non-crippled computer. What's more scary is if it becomes legally mandated. Ever try to plug a DVD player into your VCR to watch a movie? You can't because CONGRESS (you know, the people YOU elected to run YOUR country) mandated that the gain-control chip in VCRs be intentionally flawed, in order to respond to the Macrovision copy-protection in the video signal.
All Congress has to do is pass a law requiring "compliance" chips in all new computers. For a while you can probably get around this by importing stuff from other countries, but eventually they may simply ban possession of such equipment.
Fortunately, you can do something about it; use the democratic process in the way that the founders intended. Make it clear that you and your community won't stand for any more of this bullsh*t, and make it clear to your congresscritter that they're out of a job if they don't listen to the people.
A good friend of mine just got started in Linux and chose SuSE Linux. I've been using Redhat 9 since last year, and had never seen SuSE, so it was a lot of fun to set it up together. Once we got past the FTP install (I'd never done that before), it was a dream. I mean it really blew me away. It found his TV tuner card (Winfast 2000 XP Deluxe, I think) automatically and put a link to a tuner application on his desktop. He literally logged in for the first time, double-clicked and was watching TV, color, sound, everything. This was amazing to me, as I spent two weeks trying to get my Audigy 2 and winmodem to work with RH9 way back when, before finally giving up and deciding You Can't Get There From Here.[1]
It's really slick, polished, and the installer (YAST) is the first thing I've ever seen in a Linux distribution that would make me willing to spend money.[2] This weekend I'm going to wipe RH9 and give it a try. They even have a live-eval CD image if you want to try it out first, before giving up HD space.
[1] Eventually fixed, but if I hear "emu10k.o" one more time I'm going into orbit.
[2] Plus the lizard thing is cute.
The tone I get from the writeup and the linked articles is really misleading; they make it seem like the rover team is claiming to have seen evidence of liquid water *right now* on the surface. I've been watching the daily JPL briefings since touchdown, and they've never made such a claim. The geologists have been using terms such as "mud-like" to express the mechanical behavior of the soil, not its content. The other evidence for carbonates, etc., only hints at liquid water *at some point in the past.* Think many thousands/millions of years ago, not last week.
At each conference they've been careful to explain that there are many competing theories at the moment, only *some* of which require the action of liquid water. I guess that didn't really filter through to the media, though. If you get NASA TV in your area, check out the briefings. They're broadcast live at 9am PST, 12 noon EST, repeated on C-SPAN 1 around 4pm EST (usually), and are very informative, presentations and questions alike. Except for one reporter from Astronomy Magazine, who alternately makes me laugh and throw heavy objects at the screen.
This story pissed me off so much I almost had a seizure... it's complete unadulterated bullsh*t. Here's how it works: the two cameras on the rover are BLACK AND WHITE CAMERAS. They don't see color. They're not designed to see color. They take GRAYSCALE images, through a series of COLOR filters. So what NASA ends up with are a series of black and white images with little tags on them that say "600nm" or "700nm". To give you an impression as to what it would look like "to us", they convert the black and white images to solid color; e.g. the B&W photo with a "red" tag is now just different shades of red. They take a series of these "color-grayscale" images in different regions of the spectrum, overlay them, and voila... a full-color image.
Once again.... THERE ARE NO "ORIGINAL" COLOR IMAGES, just black & whites shot through filter wheels. The best we can do is color transformations and approximations, to give you the best sense possible. As for the paranoid nonsense about the sundial/calibration target changing color, THAT'S SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN! What do you think a "calibration" target is??? You certainly wouldn't expect to see a bright blue spot if you looked at it through a red filter, would you? It will look different depending on what particular filters they used that day, and what color transforms they used to put it on the Internet.
Lastly, that bullcr*p about how the "sky should be blue" is just that---bullcr*p. Mars has almost no atmosphere, and what there is is filled with reddish dust. In the first horizon image we got from Mars (Viking), which the poster referenced, they screwed up the color transformation... it looked too red to be real so they fiddled with the data to make it "look right" [1]. They admitted it right away and all subsequent, peer-reviewed images have shown the correct, reddish sky.
[1] On Mars: Exploration of the Red Planet 1958-1978, p.384 (NASA History Series).
Heh, this looks like a lot of fun, but that board's not going to last long. Look at the picture on the first page. See the capacitors next to the socket with little ice crystals growing on them? Those are electrolytic caps; they use a liquid electrolyte which doesn't take kindly to being frozen solid. I'm amazed they didn't split open. Colder isn't always better; some components will simply fail at liquid-N2 temperatures. At least they took steps to deal with condensation.
Microsoft's patching system makes it a snap to update your computer. Under
Linux I have to groan over long and cryptic commands like "apt-get dist-upgrade" and
lumber off to get a snack while my system is automatically updated. With
Windows Update and a CD writer you can get a clean, protected computer with just a few easy steps.
Allow me to elaborate.
I run a Windows 2000/Redhat 9 system. I got sick of reinstalling the
OS and every single driver, recustomizing, etc, everytime Windows started acting
up. So I came up with a solution. I downloaded Service Pack 4. Then I ran
Windows Update until it had installed all the patches. I went into the
"Add-Remove" programs listing and wrote down the numbers of all the patches I
had installed, then went to Microsoft.com and downloaded the standalone
installers. I burned them all to CD along with my backups and installers for
all the programs I use (OpenOffice, etc) unplugged the network interface, and
reinstalled Windows. Apply SP4, all patches, reboot, shut down. Then I booted
into Linux and used PartImage (which has
decent but experimental NTFS support) to take a snapshot of the installation
(size ~600M with compression), reboot, install all applications, customize,
reboot, shutdown, boot into Linux, take _another_ snapshot of the partition with
all the programs installed (size ~3G). Then I booted into Windows, plugged in
the interface, downloaded the things I had forgotten, and had a working system.
Now when I need to reinstall I just download the new patches and programs, burn them,
unplug, re-image, patch and install, reboot, image, and reboot. If I need to go
back to the pristine image (like if one of the patches has an "incompatibilty" I
don't notice at first before I blow away the old image), I have it on CD.
I was hoping to get a boyfriend this year but I suppose
that'll have to wait. For some reason I never seem to have the time...
Imagine a future where you install your core Linux kernel, then download a ton of different binary modules from different websites, have to hunt in the forums to mix-and-match the right versions, and end up having bugs nobody won't fix....
We have that under Windows! They're called "drivers."
Not to be pedantic, but the classical formula E=(Mv^2)/2 doesn't work in the relativistic regime. Practically speaking, if you want energy values for an object moving at anything over 0.1c in your rest frame you need to use relativity. Also, the kinetic energy of an object goes to infinity as its speed approaches c; that's why interstellar travel is so hard. Depending on the exact speed (0.9c vs. 0.999999999c), your probe might have enough energy to evaporate a starship or the entire solar system.
My elementary school had the same thing against hats, although only for the reason that you couldn't make eye contact. Their solution?
You could wear a ball cap as long as it was on backwards. (i.e. so the bill didn't hang over your face).
Then again, I went to one of those hippie private schools where we solved problems with reason and debate rather than Stalinist decrees.:) I swear the administration itself would have picketed the school had this RFID nonsense been proposed.
The article's annoyingly short, but the book it references (On Mars: Exploration of the Red Planet. 1958-1978) is available for
free download via the web. The Top Ten problems list is in chapter 8.
You can find a huge selection of other NASA-related books (including charts, diagrams and pictures) here.
As SymphonicMan pointed out, you're right in that the fact that the demon _remembers_ the particles doesn't affect the particles themselves, but the process of _erasing_ the information in his memory DOES affect the system's total entropy, which is all the Second Law cares about. The fact that the memory process doesn't affect the particles is completely irrelevant to that part of Bennett's argument.
Memory is just an abstract and entirely arbitrary representation of a measurement, nothing more.
Wrong. Storing information in "memory" really means arranging matter or energy according to some input pattern. It's a physical process subject to physical laws. In this case, there's an entropy increase when those patterns are destroyed.
Maxwell's Demon is a thought experiment designed to show up the second law of thermodynamics (which states that entropy must never decrease in a closed system). In this example the "force field" (the plasma valve) isn't really doing any sorting of particles; it's just sitting as a static barrier between the air on one side and the (expensive-to-maintain) vacuum on the other.
Incidentally, Maxwell's demon doesn't violate either quantum mechanics or the second law of thermodynamics, for the simple reason that he has to _see and remember_ the particles to be able to sort them. Since the demon doesn't accumulate and store an infinite amount of information, he has to forget about each particle after a while. Landauer argued and
Bennett proved (1982) that erasing the demon's memory introduces a tiny amount of entropy that makes up for his devious sorting. Entropy does not decrease, and the second law is preserved.
Maybe this is my fault for being neither a hacker nor a security expert, but exactly what effect would this "standard" have? There are lots of people who don't agree with the idea of sweeping problems under the rug, and lots of them are in a position to find flaws in commonly used software. This resolution certainly doesn't have the force of law; if I find a remote exploit for a Windows server, what's to stop me for publishing it if the company ignores my report?
Maybe this could get woven into corporate contracts, but without broad-based support this "standard" doesn't seem worth the paper it's printed on.
Yes, but if I'm running a small aid organization and I have to pay >$100 per workstation in Windows licenses (plus whatever the hell their "server" OS costs), that's a lot of money that won't find its way to the people I'm trying to help. Same thing with commercial Unices.
In the long run, Linux won't be harmed by this. IBM's too smart (and too pissed) to settle, the code will come out in the discovery phase of the trial, and *even if* it's been illegally copied into the kernel, it'll be replaced faster than you can say "free as in speech." Whatever SCO contributed is dwarfed by the millions of lines of valid, copylefted code that will live on. Linux can't be "damaged," because those who need it the most won't just arbitrarily choose a more expensive version after hearing from some analyst that Linux is "tainted."
Re:Not 41.8 or 43.8 . . .
on
PeltierBeer
·
· Score: 1
Actually, it's roughly what you get when you convert 6.00 deg. C to Farenheit (3 significant figures). Which does seem a bit pretentious to me. Can most refrigerators even maintain a temperature to within +/- 0.005 degrees C?:)
40 deg. Farenheit seems a much more reasonable figure to quote, but then it doesn't convey the same sense of a fine (and therefore temperature-sensitive) product.
All the article said was that they're going to drop a few ground-penetrating probes from orbit... they just use tips engineered for "bunker-busting" bombs so the probe doesn't shatter into thousands of shiny pieces when it hits the surface.
In other words, there are NO EXPLOSIVES, just scientific instruments.
As for childlike, well, most adults will actually read the article before posting.:)
Slashdot Mirror
These seemed like valid concerns at first glance, but the numbers just don't add up. It's something we often deal with in physics; it's very hard for humans to compare quantities which are very very large.
The amount of energy we're extracting from the water is miniscule. Take the 5MW sea power station. Water weighs 1 gram / cc, which means 1000kg per m^3. 5 MW in 1 second is the kinetic energy (using E=(1/2)m(v^2)) in 100 cubic meters of water moving at 10 m/s: E=(1/2)(1000gm)(100m/s)^2 = 5e6 joules. 100 cubic meters, even once a second, is NOTHING compared to the rest of the sea. 7/10 of the Earth's surface is covered by water; the seas have an estimated volume of 1.4*(10^18) cubic meters!
Huge solar plants will abosorb their energy from our sun. That energy would have heated our soil, been absorbed by plants, been reflected back into the atmosphere...
The amount of land affected is exactly that in the shadow of the solar array. No more, no less. Even the power we "extract" from that shadow returns to the environment in the form of heat, after it's used in the grid. Remember, energy is always conserved.
Geothermal generation will cool our planets core faster
This one really set me off. Come on people, the Earth is a GIANT BALL OF MOLTEN ROCK. The crust, with all the seas, life, solid rocks and mountain chains, is a few miles on top of it. The radius of the Earth is 4000 miles = 6400km. It has a volume of 1.1*(10^12 cubic KILOMETERS)! You could literally pour every ocean on Earth (10^9 km^3) into the mantle, boil it off into space, and barely make a dent in the temperature. There's a reason it takes billions of years for planets to cool.
Think about replacing a nuclear power plant with a tidal generator. You are sucking an entire nuclear power stations energy output from the ocean! Don't you think that might have some sort of consequences? And that's just one nuclear power plant. There are dozens!
This seems really logical, because to humans a nuclear power plant generates an enormous amount of energy, i.e. many orders of magnitude more than it takes to run your electric razor. But the power in the oceans (7/10 of the Earth covered by VERY dense material moving about) makes those power plants look like coin cells by comparison.
The only solution is to be more efficient, not to try and generate more power.
On this point I agree with you in spirit, but have to point out that it will simply never work. Google for "The Tragedy of the Commons" if you want to know why. Simply put, any person/organization which tries to consume less energy puts himself at a competitive disadvantage. It sucks, but it's the way economics work.
It's really wonderful that we're able to focus on naughty pictures and movies that American citizens legally buy. Obviously all the terrorists, murderers, rapists, Enron execs, and thieving digital pirates are safely behind bars, otherwise we couldn't spare the manpower.
Wait... what?
Some people have pointed out already that the division of labor and costs don't work out the way you expect for software. At the risk of being redundant, I think it bears repeating.
Let's say 10 people get together in the "real world" and build a lawnmower. One knows how to design the engine, another can weld, another can coordinate the color scheme, etc. When they're done they have a single lawnmower. If they all share equally, they break even; each can use the mower (1/10) of the time, each having provided (1/10) of the labor.
With software, those 10 people can also contribute (1/10) of the labor, each in their respective areas. However, when the project is done/stable, each person gets their *own* fully functional copy. This is the payoff of open-source development. I'm not donating 100 lines of code to the "geek community;" I'm *paying* 100 lines of code towards a fully functional software product. In return I get thousands or millions of lines of compiled, tested code.
I don't have to contribute, but if I do I get to have a say in the design. And if I don't like something, I can change it. I would usually much rather struggle with C and work with other people to hammer out a piece of software than buy it commercially, because _it's worth more_. I can trust it. I can audit it. I can rip it apart and put it back together again. I can customize it for my needs, share it with my friends, or print it out and paper my room with it.
In other words, in general Free software is better then free. Some things, like games, can get away with being closed. But I'm not using closed, unaudited, unchangable, unverifiable software for anything that's actually important.
Don't use the computer while your roommate is trying to sleep. Really. It's rude. OK, maybe that's a bit harsh, but it's the reason most colleges have quiet hours. Technical solutions (a shirt over the monitor, etc.) are, in my experience, unlikely to work. They can even breed resentment if the problem continues.
I had this same problem last year at university; my roommate would stay up until 3-4am surfing, gaming, and doing nothing in particular. Which annoyed me. And occasionally I would come in and surf during the day, when he was trying to take a nap. Which pissed him off. We eventually decided on clear rules; i.e. he would either read quietly or leave after 1am (when I usually went to bed), and if he was asleep when I got back from class during the day I would take my laptop and go to the library.
Also, ask yourself if you really need to be using the computer at three in the morning. Couldn't you do that paper a couple of days in advance, instead of 5 hours before your class starts next morning? Living with a roommate demands a certain amount of flexibility. You may have to rearrange your time.
The bottom line is that this problem really needs a social solution, not a technical one. You need to talk to your roommate and set clear boundaries that benefit both of you, so you can get your work done and also sleep. For me that made the difference between a great friendship and icy silence, which was the direction things were heading before we worked it out.
It seems from the article that:
(1) The tower is disassembled,
(2) The paint is toxic and leeching heavy metals into the groundwater,
(3) Having been left to rust since 1983, the tower segments are in highly questionable condition and may collapse if put back together, and
(4) They may have already disposed of or lost several sections.
If you want to spend over $40 mil, why not build a brand-new replica, from the original designs? It would preserve the scale of the original and also avoid the dangers and expenses incurred by trying to salvage the old pieces. Provided it was built with historical accuracy in mind, does it really matter if the physical pieces are the same? Bear in mind that it doesn't need to be as expensive as the original, because it doesn't actually need to fuel and support a spacecraft; it only needs to look like it does. And you could easily modify the design to accomodate tourists at $25 a head.
Except, of course, for the new generation of ground-based telescopes with better resolving power than the hubble.
This is true but misleading. Although new Earth-based telescopes can correct for the motion of the atmosphere and approach Hubble's resolution, the atmosphere still filters out huge sections of the spectrum. You can't use adaptive optics to fix that. For any observation which looks at those blocked regions you NEED to go into space or you can't see them at all.
It's a very short demonstration, but there's video of a 1964 prototype at Archive.org. as part of the video "Century 21 Calling." There's also interesting sequences with emerging technologies, including demonstrations of call-waiting and a touch-tone phone.
I see a lot of posts saying "If you don't like it, you don't have to use their website." This is true of most conventional flash-based ads; when you get sent to the page with the huge plugin block you can click "Skip" or close the entire window if you want, and elect to go somewhere else. What't wrong these is that they load in the background BEFORE they are triggered. So if I go to a website using this they automatically suck up all of my bandwidth without so much as a notice that it's happening. Don't want to watch the ad? Fine, close the window, but you've ALREADY paid the bandwidth costs of downloading it. It's not that I necessarily mind paying for a "free" service with bandwidth costs for advertising, it's that they've decided to choose for me.
Anyway, I predict it'll be about a week before this nonsense is stopped in its tracks by the Mozilla/Konqueror teams. And judging by Microsoft's ground-breaking decision to add pop-up blocking to IE, Windows IE users should expect to have it blocked too! In 2009, when Service Pack 2 for Longhorn is released.
This is indeed scary, but ONLY if ALL computers sold incorporate the chip. In a free market, this would never happen, because people are willing to pay a little extra for a non-crippled computer. What's more scary is if it becomes legally mandated. Ever try to plug a DVD player into your VCR to watch a movie? You can't because CONGRESS (you know, the people YOU elected to run YOUR country) mandated that the gain-control chip in VCRs be intentionally flawed, in order to respond to the Macrovision copy-protection in the video signal.
All Congress has to do is pass a law requiring "compliance" chips in all new computers. For a while you can probably get around this by importing stuff from other countries, but eventually they may simply ban possession of such equipment.
Fortunately, you can do something about it; use the democratic process in the way that the founders intended. Make it clear that you and your community won't stand for any more of this bullsh*t, and make it clear to your congresscritter that they're out of a job if they don't listen to the people.
A good friend of mine just got started in Linux and chose SuSE Linux. I've been using Redhat 9 since last year, and had never seen SuSE, so it was a lot of fun to set it up together. Once we got past the FTP install (I'd never done that before), it was a dream. I mean it really blew me away. It found his TV tuner card (Winfast 2000 XP Deluxe, I think) automatically and put a link to a tuner application on his desktop. He literally logged in for the first time, double-clicked and was watching TV, color, sound, everything. This was amazing to me, as I spent two weeks trying to get my Audigy 2 and winmodem to work with RH9 way back when, before finally giving up and deciding You Can't Get There From Here.[1]
It's really slick, polished, and the installer (YAST) is the first thing I've ever seen in a Linux distribution that would make me willing to spend money.[2] This weekend I'm going to wipe RH9 and give it a try. They even have a live-eval CD image if you want to try it out first, before giving up HD space.
[1] Eventually fixed, but if I hear "emu10k.o" one more time I'm going into orbit.
[2] Plus the lizard thing is cute.
The tone I get from the writeup and the linked articles is really misleading; they make it seem like the rover team is claiming to have seen evidence of liquid water *right now* on the surface. I've been watching the daily JPL briefings since touchdown, and they've never made such a claim. The geologists have been using terms such as "mud-like" to express the mechanical behavior of the soil, not its content. The other evidence for carbonates, etc., only hints at liquid water *at some point in the past.* Think many thousands/millions of years ago, not last week.
At each conference they've been careful to explain that there are many competing theories at the moment, only *some* of which require the action of liquid water. I guess that didn't really filter through to the media, though. If you get NASA TV in your area, check out the briefings. They're broadcast live at 9am PST, 12 noon EST, repeated on C-SPAN 1 around 4pm EST (usually), and are very informative, presentations and questions alike. Except for one reporter from Astronomy Magazine, who alternately makes me laugh and throw heavy objects at the screen.
This story pissed me off so much I almost had a seizure... it's complete unadulterated bullsh*t. Here's how it works: the two cameras on the rover are BLACK AND WHITE CAMERAS. They don't see color. They're not designed to see color. They take GRAYSCALE images, through a series of COLOR filters. So what NASA ends up with are a series of black and white images with little tags on them that say "600nm" or "700nm". To give you an impression as to what it would look like "to us", they convert the black and white images to solid color; e.g. the B&W photo with a "red" tag is now just different shades of red. They take a series of these "color-grayscale" images in different regions of the spectrum, overlay them, and voila... a full-color image.
Once again.... THERE ARE NO "ORIGINAL" COLOR IMAGES, just black & whites shot through filter wheels. The best we can do is color transformations and approximations, to give you the best sense possible. As for the paranoid nonsense about the sundial/calibration target changing color, THAT'S SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN! What do you think a "calibration" target is??? You certainly wouldn't expect to see a bright blue spot if you looked at it through a red filter, would you? It will look different depending on what particular filters they used that day, and what color transforms they used to put it on the Internet.
Lastly, that bullcr*p about how the "sky should be blue" is just that---bullcr*p. Mars has almost no atmosphere, and what there is is filled with reddish dust. In the first horizon image we got from Mars (Viking), which the poster referenced, they screwed up the color transformation... it looked too red to be real so they fiddled with the data to make it "look right" [1]. They admitted it right away and all subsequent, peer-reviewed images have shown the correct, reddish sky.
[1] On Mars: Exploration of the Red Planet 1958-1978, p.384 (NASA History Series).
Heh, this looks like a lot of fun, but that board's not going to last long. Look at the picture on the first page. See the capacitors next to the socket with little ice crystals growing on them? Those are electrolytic caps; they use a liquid electrolyte which doesn't take kindly to being frozen solid. I'm amazed they didn't split open. Colder isn't always better; some components will simply fail at liquid-N2 temperatures. At least they took steps to deal with condensation.
Microsoft's patching system makes it a snap to update your computer. Under Linux I have to groan over long and cryptic commands like "apt-get dist-upgrade" and lumber off to get a snack while my system is automatically updated. With Windows Update and a CD writer you can get a clean, protected computer with just a few easy steps. Allow me to elaborate.
I run a Windows 2000/Redhat 9 system. I got sick of reinstalling the OS and every single driver, recustomizing, etc, everytime Windows started acting up. So I came up with a solution. I downloaded Service Pack 4. Then I ran Windows Update until it had installed all the patches. I went into the "Add-Remove" programs listing and wrote down the numbers of all the patches I had installed, then went to Microsoft.com and downloaded the standalone installers. I burned them all to CD along with my backups and installers for all the programs I use (OpenOffice, etc) unplugged the network interface, and reinstalled Windows. Apply SP4, all patches, reboot, shut down. Then I booted into Linux and used PartImage (which has decent but experimental NTFS support) to take a snapshot of the installation (size ~600M with compression), reboot, install all applications, customize, reboot, shutdown, boot into Linux, take _another_ snapshot of the partition with all the programs installed (size ~3G). Then I booted into Windows, plugged in the interface, downloaded the things I had forgotten, and had a working system. Now when I need to reinstall I just download the new patches and programs, burn them, unplug, re-image, patch and install, reboot, image, and reboot. If I need to go back to the pristine image (like if one of the patches has an "incompatibilty" I don't notice at first before I blow away the old image), I have it on CD.
I was hoping to get a boyfriend this year but I suppose that'll have to wait. For some reason I never seem to have the time...
Hell, even my ol' Windows 98 compaq armada runs Java fine.
Wow, I didn't even know Win98 could do clustering.
Imagine a future where you install your core Linux kernel, then download a ton of different binary modules from different websites, have to hunt in the forums to mix-and-match the right versions, and end up having bugs nobody won't fix....
We have that under Windows! They're called "drivers."
Not to be pedantic, but the classical formula E=(Mv^2)/2 doesn't work in the relativistic regime. Practically speaking, if you want energy values for an object moving at anything over 0.1c in your rest frame you need to use relativity. Also, the kinetic energy of an object goes to infinity as its speed approaches c; that's why interstellar travel is so hard. Depending on the exact speed (0.9c vs. 0.999999999c), your probe might have enough energy to evaporate a starship or the entire solar system.
My elementary school had the same thing against hats, although only for the reason that you couldn't make eye contact. Their solution?
You could wear a ball cap as long as it was on backwards. (i.e. so the bill didn't hang over your face).
Then again, I went to one of those hippie private schools where we solved problems with reason and debate rather than Stalinist decrees. :) I swear the administration itself would have picketed the school had this RFID nonsense been proposed.
You can find a huge selection of other NASA-related books (including charts, diagrams and pictures) here.
As SymphonicMan pointed out, you're right in that the fact that the demon _remembers_ the particles doesn't affect the particles themselves, but the process of _erasing_ the information in his memory DOES affect the system's total entropy, which is all the Second Law cares about. The fact that the memory process doesn't affect the particles is completely irrelevant to that part of Bennett's argument.
Memory is just an abstract and entirely arbitrary representation of a measurement, nothing more.
Wrong. Storing information in "memory" really means arranging matter or energy according to some input pattern. It's a physical process subject to physical laws. In this case, there's an entropy increase when those patterns are destroyed.
Maxwell's Demon is a thought experiment designed to show up the second law of thermodynamics (which states that entropy must never decrease in a closed system). In this example the "force field" (the plasma valve) isn't really doing any sorting of particles; it's just sitting as a static barrier between the air on one side and the (expensive-to-maintain) vacuum on the other.
Incidentally, Maxwell's demon doesn't violate either quantum mechanics or the second law of thermodynamics, for the simple reason that he has to _see and remember_ the particles to be able to sort them. Since the demon doesn't accumulate and store an infinite amount of information, he has to forget about each particle after a while. Landauer argued and Bennett proved (1982) that erasing the demon's memory introduces a tiny amount of entropy that makes up for his devious sorting. Entropy does not decrease, and the second law is preserved.
Maybe this is my fault for being neither a hacker nor a security expert, but exactly what effect would this "standard" have? There are lots of people who don't agree with the idea of sweeping problems under the rug, and lots of them are in a position to find flaws in commonly used software. This resolution certainly doesn't have the force of law; if I find a remote exploit for a Windows server, what's to stop me for publishing it if the company ignores my report?
Maybe this could get woven into corporate contracts, but without broad-based support this "standard" doesn't seem worth the paper it's printed on.
Yes, but if I'm running a small aid organization and I have to pay >$100 per workstation in Windows licenses (plus whatever the hell their "server" OS costs), that's a lot of money that won't find its way to the people I'm trying to help. Same thing with commercial Unices.
In the long run, Linux won't be harmed by this. IBM's too smart (and too pissed) to settle, the code will come out in the discovery phase of the trial, and *even if* it's been illegally copied into the kernel, it'll be replaced faster than you can say "free as in speech." Whatever SCO contributed is dwarfed by the millions of lines of valid, copylefted code that will live on. Linux can't be "damaged," because those who need it the most won't just arbitrarily choose a more expensive version after hearing from some analyst that Linux is "tainted."
Actually, it's roughly what you get when you convert 6.00 deg. C to Farenheit (3 significant figures). Which does seem a bit pretentious to me. Can most refrigerators even maintain a temperature to within +/- 0.005 degrees C? :)
40 deg. Farenheit seems a much more reasonable figure to quote, but then it doesn't convey the same sense of a fine (and therefore temperature-sensitive) product.
They're NOT GOING TO BOMB THE MOON!
All the article said was that they're going to drop a few ground-penetrating probes from orbit... they just use tips engineered for "bunker-busting" bombs so the probe doesn't shatter into thousands of shiny pieces when it hits the surface.
In other words, there are NO EXPLOSIVES, just scientific instruments.
As for childlike, well, most adults will actually read the article before posting. :)