As Syousef already pointed out, nothing beats an up-close look. Hubble only sees Pluto as a smudge across a couple of pixels. It's so small and so far away, it reflects very little light.
More to the point, however, is that Kepler is the wrong instrument for the job. Kepler can not "zoom" in on Pluto or any other planet. Kepler isn't designed to do that. It is designed to monitor the stars in a patch of sky, (about 100,000 stars in all) and watch for subtle variations in intensity. It can not "see" the planets but should give us an estimate of how many we can expect to find in the future as well as give us a few specific targets to concentrate our efforts on. I believe the expectation is Kepler may find a few hundred planets within it's 2-3 year life expectancy. Wikipedia has a reasonably good description of it.
Hubble and Keck(?) have managed to capture a couple of images of planets around nearby stars like Gliese 581. It's only been possible because the stars in question are fairly dim, the planets are really big and/or really close so they reflect a LOT of light (relatively speaking). It helped that in once case it was a planetary nebula with a convenient gap in the disk, kind of like the gaps in Saturn's rings. Basically a great big sign that read "LOOK HERE".
In the not to distant future, there's a mission planned that's euphamistically called the Terrestrial Planet Finder. It's currently on hold, a project with no funding. This should be able to image Earth sized planets in the habitable zone around nearby stars. Please keep in mind that when I say "image" I mean a discernable handful of pixels, enough to get a spectrograph from. It's be nice just to positively know it's there, and know what the atmosphere's main chemical components are.
We're talking about astronomy here... Average distance between stars is 3-4 light years. 10's of light years is rock-throwing distance. (as in: I bet I can throw a rock and hit it, from here).
It's a red dwarf, not a white dwarf. Red dwarfs could be thought of as small low-energy stars. They're more numerous and last longer than Sun-like stars. It's a gimme -- because it's nearby, less massive, and produces less light, it's easier to see stuff around it.
The significance is that our methodology is improving. Only in the past decade or so have we been able to identify stars with possible planets. Only in the past year or two have we been able to directly image a planet (or separate it's image from the parent star). What we know of the planets is based on how close it's orbit is to the star, it's estimated mass, and in a few recent cases, based on limited spectroscopic information.
Now that Kepler's working, over the next 2-3 years we should have a flood of these reports. (keep in mind Kepler's only imaging a 10 x 10 degree patch of sky) In the next decade we will develop the means to directly image a nearby terrestrial sized planet.
All of the planets imaged so far are relatively close, on a galactic scale. A few 10's of light years. There's more than enough information out there to explain how far that is from a human perspective. Let's just say, that based on current technology, none of our great-grand children will get an up close look. (although I suppose we could do a fly by of something like the Gliese 581 system, with a probe, in the next 3-4 generations, if we tried hard enough.
ok, so that would be cool. And increadibly expensive with all the R&D and testing that would be needed. then you'd have to build out a whole new infrastructure. Not gonna happen.
OK, so I know this is/. If you read the article you'd see that's essentially what they're suggesting -- that we improve the inter-city corridors used by Amtrak already, buy some better trains (Acela anyone?), and run them.
Monorail will never happen. Neither will Mag-Lev in the near-reasonable future. We already have infrastructure for the standard gauge 4 ft 9 in track, both installed base and support equipment. We also already have a high-speed train rated to 200mph -- Acella, so there's no design effort required. We just have to buy more Acella train-sets, upgrade & add tracks along existing corridors, and run them.
It's not all about congestion in the cities. It's about inter-city congestion. Plus, if you reduce the number of people driving from city 1 to city 2, you will inherently reduce the congestion in the cities by that number of cars (They are in the city at the start and end of their journey). Living in south-eastern VA I find getting into DC is hell sometimes. I would rather catch a train and walk to my destination, or take a cab, than drive on some days.
For long distances it's not efficient for a single person to drive a 3000lb+ car. Obama is probably being told we (the U.S.) can reduce emissions if we provide more efficient, faster, inter-city transport methods, and then convince people to use them -- and that would not be wrong. The key to convincing people is making it fast and convenient. Rail can't match the speed of a plane, but can certainly achieve near 200mph. Acella runs between 90 and 150mph right now because of the legacy of old track and shared tracks it runs on but was designed to do 200mph in ideal conditions (newer well maintained dedicated track with no grade-level crossings)
I'm not surprised there's a backlash, I just read the report for the first time and I found it absurd
Let me state for the record that I use a mix of Window and Linux; that I own a Dell, two HP's, and an iPod; I write software for the Windows platform for a living. Let me also state that I do believe that Apple machines are more expensive than a typical HP or Dell box -- what your paying for is industrial design aka "style"; and, if you find a comparable HP or Dell desktop they're usually on par or pretty close to the Apple price, with the laptops still being slightly pricier. Having gotten that out of the way...
The report has the family buying a Mac Pro -- a workstation class machine???
For hardware upgrades, Apple's online store prices are quoted and then compared to Newegg prices, instead of HP or Dell online store prices.
It quotes an external Bluray drive to upgrade the Mac -- even though they have a Pro chassis to stuff an internal drive into
The report includes the cost for the Apple user to subscribe to Mobile Me, a service they can get for free from somewhere else like
Google. It assumes the PC user will use MSN for free...
It has the Apple user buying home office software but not the PC user, you need to buy at least the basic Office pkg
The Apple price includes buying Quicken, software which is not included in the PC price
The cost includes an upgrade for the software on the Apple, but does not include any upgrade costs on the PC
The Apple user pays for software support, the PC user does not
The "Apple Tax" should amount to at most a few hundred dollars, if the report was honest.
Yes they are. *checks* One of my local TV stations transmits a 316kW analog carrier and a 1000kW digital signal. Even the 316kW is a sizeable amount of power if you can re-capture it.
If a transmitter of the same power as, say, a TV station, is fed into a tightly focused directional antenna and another antenna is located in the beam path, you could get fairly good energy transfer. This is the same principle (different frequency) that they're going to use to beam the energy back to Earth.
Does it assume that the forward tumble means go forward fast? What happens as the Wiimote rolls across the ground? What happens if someone calls your name and you spin around to see who it was? A lawn mower seems to be kind of a dangerous device to have tethered to a remote that responds to hand/body motion. I tend to be in favor of having a human directly in control of a lawn mower.
Unfortunately, manufacturing concrete produces crapacious amounts of CO2. I'm not saying asphalt is better but technically it's a byproduct of the refining process, is considerably cheaper to work with, and is easily recycled. One thing you can do though is put a layer of aggregate on the top of the asphalt. If it's light coloured it will have a similar effect.
- Lighting up vast, unused/empty open areas at night with an insane amount of light (e.g. empty carparks, car dealerships lit floodlights that would be more at home in a football stadium etc). Not only that but the lights used are often non-directional, sending at least 50% of that blazing light uselessly up into the night sky. No wonder you guys can't see the stars. Use dimmer, more directional lights... or just turn the damn things off after midnight or something!
Ok, I can't abide by the non-directional lighting either, it's just stupid... The lights are left on at night to prevent attacks or to prevent the cars being damaged. It may seem senseless, but, in this country, the owner of the lot can be sued for not having lights if someone is attacked on their property in the dark. So rather than risk litigation, they typically pay to leave the lights on all night.
- Close to zero use of reusable fabric/hessian bags for grocery shopping. This might vary from state to state though. But where I come from, traditional paper/plastic grocery bags rapidly falling out of favour and probably are used by less than one-third of shoppers now. Frankly, cloth bags are better anyway - they don't tear/rip and are more comfortable to carry.
The plastic bags were a cost savings measure by the chain stores. No one likes them. Because they cause so many problems they are being slowly being made illegal to use.
- Big big houses with a lot of bathrooms. Sometimes up to one bathroom per resident (!?). Honestly, is that really necessary? Ok so this doesn't necessarily mean the total volume of water consumed is greater, it's just spread out over more rooms. But more energy has to go to heating/cooling/building these larger dwellings.
This is a recent problem related to the housing bubble. Yeah, it's an American problem. They get referred to as McMansions when poking fun at them -- So, yes, we acknowledge the excess. Not everyone lives in those houses though, so don't characterize it as all Americans live that way. I live in a much smaller house built in 1950 and am in the process of bringing it up to modern energy efficiency standards.
Realistically, I don't think we'll ever get rid of all of them. As was noted, it's impossible to convince everyone to eliminate and not seek nuclear weapons. It would be nice, though, to get the US & Russian stockpile numbers down around 100 or so. With modern weapons that's more than enough to make a real mess out of any country. Just saying...
China couldn't care less about any nukes North Korea might build. China could be seen as the cool headed negotiator in this situation right now. If they want to exert influence, all they have to do is turn off the gas and oil flowing into North Korea. No fuel == no power and transportation. However, if North Korea ever did begin attacking its neighbors, and became a threat to China, I have no doubt China would squash them like a bug.
See my comment above. Rackable is picking up $390 million in assets for $25 million + liabilities associated with the assets. I am assuming that that liability is the existing secured debt of approximately $162 million and possibly some fraction of the remaining unsecured debt (SGI's total debt is $526 million according to Bloomberg).
Rackable Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:RACK), a leading provider of servers and storage products for medium to large-scale data centers, today announced its agreement to acquire substantially all the assets of Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) (NASDAQ: SGIC) for approximately $25 million in cash, subject to adjustment in certain circumstances, plus the assumption of certain liabilities associated with the acquired assets.
Note the statement about assumption of liabilities. They may not end up with all of SGI's debt. According to Bloomberg
The new Chapter 11 petition, filed today in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan, listed assets of $390 million against debt of $526 million. Liabilities include $141.5 million on a secured term loan and $20.7 million on a secured revolving credit.
The assets cannot be sold without the secured debt holders being satisfied. They may not end up with all of the debt. In the past bankruptcy SGI's unsecured debt was reduced to 26 cents on the dollar. A similar reduction may occur this time.
It doesn't sound like Rackable is paying much for SGI's assets; but, they are picking up SGI's considerable debt, several hundred million dollars, in the deal. So, the up front $25 million cash is only a small part of the total "cost" of the transaction.
Slashdot Mirror
As Syousef already pointed out, nothing beats an up-close look. Hubble only sees Pluto as a smudge across a couple of pixels. It's so small and so far away, it reflects very little light.
More to the point, however, is that Kepler is the wrong instrument for the job. Kepler can not "zoom" in on Pluto or any other planet. Kepler isn't designed to do that. It is designed to monitor the stars in a patch of sky, (about 100,000 stars in all) and watch for subtle variations in intensity. It can not "see" the planets but should give us an estimate of how many we can expect to find in the future as well as give us a few specific targets to concentrate our efforts on. I believe the expectation is Kepler may find a few hundred planets within it's 2-3 year life expectancy. Wikipedia has a reasonably good description of it.
Hubble and Keck(?) have managed to capture a couple of images of planets around nearby stars like Gliese 581. It's only been possible because the stars in question are fairly dim, the planets are really big and/or really close so they reflect a LOT of light (relatively speaking). It helped that in once case it was a planetary nebula with a convenient gap in the disk, kind of like the gaps in Saturn's rings. Basically a great big sign that read "LOOK HERE".
In the not to distant future, there's a mission planned that's euphamistically called the Terrestrial Planet Finder. It's currently on hold, a project with no funding. This should be able to image Earth sized planets in the habitable zone around nearby stars. Please keep in mind that when I say "image" I mean a discernable handful of pixels, enough to get a spectrograph from. It's be nice just to positively know it's there, and know what the atmosphere's main chemical components are.
No.
We're talking about astronomy here... Average distance between stars is 3-4 light years. 10's of light years is rock-throwing distance. (as in: I bet I can throw a rock and hit it, from here).
It's a red dwarf, not a white dwarf. Red dwarfs could be thought of as small low-energy stars. They're more numerous and last longer than Sun-like stars. It's a gimme -- because it's nearby, less massive, and produces less light, it's easier to see stuff around it.
The significance is that our methodology is improving. Only in the past decade or so have we been able to identify stars with possible planets. Only in the past year or two have we been able to directly image a planet (or separate it's image from the parent star). What we know of the planets is based on how close it's orbit is to the star, it's estimated mass, and in a few recent cases, based on limited spectroscopic information.
Now that Kepler's working, over the next 2-3 years we should have a flood of these reports. (keep in mind Kepler's only imaging a 10 x 10 degree patch of sky) In the next decade we will develop the means to directly image a nearby terrestrial sized planet.
All of the planets imaged so far are relatively close, on a galactic scale. A few 10's of light years. There's more than enough information out there to explain how far that is from a human perspective. Let's just say, that based on current technology, none of our great-grand children will get an up close look. (although I suppose we could do a fly by of something like the Gliese 581 system, with a probe, in the next 3-4 generations, if we tried hard enough.
ok, so that would be cool. And increadibly expensive with all the R&D and testing that would be needed. then you'd have to build out a whole new infrastructure. Not gonna happen.
OK, so I know this is /. If you read the article you'd see that's essentially what they're suggesting -- that we improve the inter-city corridors used by Amtrak already, buy some better trains (Acela anyone?), and run them.
They're adding wi-fi -- it's just not there yet...
I know you're trolling but...
Monorail will never happen. Neither will Mag-Lev in the near-reasonable future. We already have infrastructure for the standard gauge 4 ft 9 in track, both installed base and support equipment. We also already have a high-speed train rated to 200mph -- Acella, so there's no design effort required. We just have to buy more Acella train-sets, upgrade & add tracks along existing corridors, and run them.
It's not all about congestion in the cities. It's about inter-city congestion. Plus, if you reduce the number of people driving from city 1 to city 2, you will inherently reduce the congestion in the cities by that number of cars (They are in the city at the start and end of their journey). Living in south-eastern VA I find getting into DC is hell sometimes. I would rather catch a train and walk to my destination, or take a cab, than drive on some days.
For long distances it's not efficient for a single person to drive a 3000lb+ car. Obama is probably being told we (the U.S.) can reduce emissions if we provide more efficient, faster, inter-city transport methods, and then convince people to use them -- and that would not be wrong. The key to convincing people is making it fast and convenient. Rail can't match the speed of a plane, but can certainly achieve near 200mph. Acella runs between 90 and 150mph right now because of the legacy of old track and shared tracks it runs on but was designed to do 200mph in ideal conditions (newer well maintained dedicated track with no grade-level crossings)
I'm not surprised there's a backlash, I just read the report for the first time and I found it absurd
Let me state for the record that I use a mix of Window and Linux; that I own a Dell, two HP's, and an iPod; I write software for the Windows platform for a living. Let me also state that I do believe that Apple machines are more expensive than a typical HP or Dell box -- what your paying for is industrial design aka "style"; and, if you find a comparable HP or Dell desktop they're usually on par or pretty close to the Apple price, with the laptops still being slightly pricier. Having gotten that out of the way...
The report has the family buying a Mac Pro -- a workstation class machine???
For hardware upgrades, Apple's online store prices are quoted and then compared to Newegg prices, instead of HP or Dell online store prices.
It quotes an external Bluray drive to upgrade the Mac -- even though they have a Pro chassis to stuff an internal drive into
The report includes the cost for the Apple user to subscribe to Mobile Me, a service they can get for free from somewhere else like Google. It assumes the PC user will use MSN for free...
It has the Apple user buying home office software but not the PC user, you need to buy at least the basic Office pkg
The Apple price includes buying Quicken, software which is not included in the PC price
The cost includes an upgrade for the software on the Apple, but does not include any upgrade costs on the PC
The Apple user pays for software support, the PC user does not
The "Apple Tax" should amount to at most a few hundred dollars, if the report was honest.
Basically they chose to ignore the poll. The name they chose, "Tranquility", was like in 8th place.
Although, it is a linux story, this could have just as easily been Windows and cmd.exe. This is ridiculously stupid.
By 2016 is kind of optimistic there... As soon as 2016 maybe. That is unless they're waaayy ahead of where they claim to be.
Perhaps you are not aware that microwaves areradio waves of a short wavelength.
Yes they are. *checks* One of my local TV stations transmits a 316kW analog carrier and a 1000kW digital signal. Even the 316kW is a sizeable amount of power if you can re-capture it.
If a transmitter of the same power as, say, a TV station, is fed into a tightly focused directional antenna and another antenna is located in the beam path, you could get fairly good energy transfer. This is the same principle (different frequency) that they're going to use to beam the energy back to Earth.
Now that you've jogged my memory -- Your are absolutely right. Save the trees *scoffs*
Does it assume that the forward tumble means go forward fast? What happens as the Wiimote rolls across the ground? What happens if someone calls your name and you spin around to see who it was? A lawn mower seems to be kind of a dangerous device to have tethered to a remote that responds to hand/body motion. I tend to be in favor of having a human directly in control of a lawn mower.
Unfortunately, manufacturing concrete produces crapacious amounts of CO2. I'm not saying asphalt is better but technically it's a byproduct of the refining process, is considerably cheaper to work with, and is easily recycled. One thing you can do though is put a layer of aggregate on the top of the asphalt. If it's light coloured it will have a similar effect.
- Lighting up vast, unused/empty open areas at night with an insane amount of light (e.g. empty carparks, car dealerships lit floodlights that would be more at home in a football stadium etc). Not only that but the lights used are often non-directional, sending at least 50% of that blazing light uselessly up into the night sky. No wonder you guys can't see the stars. Use dimmer, more directional lights ... or just turn the damn things off after midnight or something!
Ok, I can't abide by the non-directional lighting either, it's just stupid... The lights are left on at night to prevent attacks or to prevent the cars being damaged. It may seem senseless, but, in this country, the owner of the lot can be sued for not having lights if someone is attacked on their property in the dark. So rather than risk litigation, they typically pay to leave the lights on all night.
- Close to zero use of reusable fabric/hessian bags for grocery shopping. This might vary from state to state though. But where I come from, traditional paper/plastic grocery bags rapidly falling out of favour and probably are used by less than one-third of shoppers now. Frankly, cloth bags are better anyway - they don't tear/rip and are more comfortable to carry.
The plastic bags were a cost savings measure by the chain stores. No one likes them. Because they cause so many problems they are being slowly being made illegal to use.
- Big big houses with a lot of bathrooms. Sometimes up to one bathroom per resident (!?). Honestly, is that really necessary? Ok so this doesn't necessarily mean the total volume of water consumed is greater, it's just spread out over more rooms. But more energy has to go to heating/cooling/building these larger dwellings.
This is a recent problem related to the housing bubble. Yeah, it's an American problem. They get referred to as McMansions when poking fun at them -- So, yes, we acknowledge the excess. Not everyone lives in those houses though, so don't characterize it as all Americans live that way. I live in a much smaller house built in 1950 and am in the process of bringing it up to modern energy efficiency standards.
Realistically, I don't think we'll ever get rid of all of them. As was noted, it's impossible to convince everyone to eliminate and not seek nuclear weapons. It would be nice, though, to get the US & Russian stockpile numbers down around 100 or so. With modern weapons that's more than enough to make a real mess out of any country. Just saying...
China couldn't care less about any nukes North Korea might build. China could be seen as the cool headed negotiator in this situation right now. If they want to exert influence, all they have to do is turn off the gas and oil flowing into North Korea. No fuel == no power and transportation. However, if North Korea ever did begin attacking its neighbors, and became a threat to China, I have no doubt China would squash them like a bug.
See my comment above. Rackable is picking up $390 million in assets for $25 million + liabilities associated with the assets. I am assuming that that liability is the existing secured debt of approximately $162 million and possibly some fraction of the remaining unsecured debt (SGI's total debt is $526 million according to Bloomberg).
from the press release on SGI's site:
Rackable Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:RACK), a leading provider of servers and storage products for medium to large-scale data centers, today announced its agreement to acquire substantially all the assets of Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) (NASDAQ: SGIC) for approximately $25 million in cash, subject to adjustment in certain circumstances, plus the assumption of certain liabilities associated with the acquired assets.
Note the statement about assumption of liabilities. They may not end up with all of SGI's debt. According to Bloomberg
The new Chapter 11 petition, filed today in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan, listed assets of $390 million against debt of $526 million. Liabilities include $141.5 million on a secured term loan and $20.7 million on a secured revolving credit.
The assets cannot be sold without the secured debt holders being satisfied. They may not end up with all of the debt. In the past bankruptcy SGI's unsecured debt was reduced to 26 cents on the dollar. A similar reduction may occur this time.
It doesn't sound like Rackable is paying much for SGI's assets; but, they are picking up SGI's considerable debt, several hundred million dollars, in the deal. So, the up front $25 million cash is only a small part of the total "cost" of the transaction.