Well to add to the collection, I was upgrading the RAM in a Sun some years ago and failed to notice that the power was still on (the fan was very quiet and drowned out by thw A/C).
Despite the sparking, the SIMMs survived, and the machine came up fine after a reset. Funnily enough, I was even wearing a grounding strap...
I have a number of old photographs of members of my family taken in the 1940's and 1950's by professional photographers - these have been printed on paper which has the photographer's logo (usually a signature) physically embossed on it in a corner.
To be cynical, I rather doubt that the police would be waiting down a dark, quiet sidestreet at 1am just to catch a driver slightly over the limit. If they were, that would suggest the road was a little busier and thus more dangerous.
But anyway, in your example, perhaps losing his license might seem harsh in those particular circumastances, but there are several things to consider:
Firstly, maybe in your example 99 times out of 100 he'll get home safelyv on an empty road. But what about that one time there's a cyclist? Or a pedestrian in dark clothes? Or it's raining and visibility is reduced?
Secondly, there's the slippery slope -- "Hey, I made it safely last night at 0.09, maybe I can do it tonight at 0.11?". With alcohol it's hard to make judgements like that. If someone knows they're liable to lose their license for even slightly exceeding the limit, they might think twice about driving after drinking more. The deterrent effect is important here.
Thirdly, I think you'll find that in practice the situation you describe will draw the minimal penalty in most jurisdictions -- loss of license for a short time, and a fine. The person causing a fatal crash while DUI will get a much more severe sentence.
Finally, with the law, a line has to be drawn somewhere, and once you've drawn the line you have to apply it to everybody. With alcohol it is extremely difficult for police in the field to judge how much a given persons ability to drive has been impaired, whereas they can easily measure BAC and set a limit, so that's what they do. Maybe it's not ideal, but if it saves even one life...?
You are, of course, quite right about phones and such -- which is why in many places these days using phones while driving is banned and results in much the same penalties as being over the legal alcohol limit, particularly if you cause an accident while on the phone.
As some of the other replies have hinted, this is a very dangerous attitude to take.
Even a small amount of alchohol can slow your reactions considerably, and there is a great difference between "driving sensibly" as you put it, and being able to react fast enough in an emergency to avoid an accident.
Driving after drinking has two aspects -- one is the weaving-all-over-the-road, crash into a lampost one, which I'll accept you might not do even when twice over the limit. But the other is being able to react quickly and effectively to a child running out into the road, or another car turning unexpectedly out of a side road, or hitting an ice patch and skidding.
I don't know it you did an "emergency stop" type maneuver when learning to drive where you are -- its simple enough: drive with a passenger who will suddenly and without warning tell you to stop. Try this when sober and when twice over the limit and see if you stop in the same distance. Or try driving as quickly as possible through a line of traffic cones (slalom around them). You might be surprised with the result.
Apparently when doing the previews of one of the early space-based SFs (it may have been the original Star Trek series, I forget) the audience reacted very negatively to the silence as the ships flew by and thought it "wrong" (go figure, but that's a lay audience for you...) so the producers put in noise. to satisfy them.
The only way for ground-based telescopes as a class to "adjust" to increasing contaminants and light pollution and to compensate for natural absorption (a lot of which is due to water vapour), scattering and emission in the atmosphere is to build them higher, dryer and more remote.
Early observatories were built near (or within!) cities. With each subsequent generation they were moved further away and to higher altitudes to get away from pollution (light and chemical) and above as much of the atmosphere as possible.
The current generation of top telescopes is to be found in places like central Chile at altitudes of about 2000m. The next generation will be in places like the high Atacama desert (further north in Chile) or even in Antarctica, both at altitudes of 3500-4000m -- even more remote and even drier (yes, the air in central Antarctica is very dry).
Re:Adaptive Optics
on
Hope for Hubble
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· Score: 5, Informative
JWST is an infrared telescope, able to observe at wavelengths in the range 0.6 - 28 microns. Hubble (depending on the instrument) can go to about 8 microns - so not as far as JWST - but it can also see in the visible and near-UV, which JWST can't do.
As for ground-based telescopes, any space-based instrument has access to the continuous range of wavelengths, whereas ground-based telescopes (even with adaptive optics) are limited by the absorption and scattering in the atmosphere in the UV and infrared. They also don't have to deal with sky glow, which restricts both how long you can take an exposure for -- eventually the background will saturate your detector -- and also the contrast between the thing you're trying to detect and the background (think picking out a small light on a white background against on a dark background).
This is also why Earth-based telescopes are put on mountains -- to get above as much of the atmosphere as possible. Adaptive optics can improve the "seeing" (blurring caused by turbulence) and, coupled with large-diameter mirrors possible on ground-based telescopes, it will improve the resolution, but it can't deal with the other effects,
The famous physicist Richard Feynman, who was on the investigation panel after the Challenger explosion, estimated the failure rate to be "of the order of one percent", or 1 in 100. when at the time NASA management (not the engineers) had been claiming a rate of 1 in 100000. He based his reasoning on estimates of the failure rates of the individual subystems. You can read his arguments here.
The specifically chose not to have any redundancy for the doppler data, for reasons I don't know of.
The 'doppler data' wasn't actually being 'sent' as such, it came from measurements of the subtle variation in the frequency of the carrier wave of one of the channels which was trasmitting the images and other data from Huygens. They chose the channel A carrier as that channel had a more stable transmitter (why that was the case, I don't know however).
I would guess that they only tried to measure the frequency variations of one channel becuase those measurements would have required extra equipment in the receiver and they could only go with one set. But that's just my guess...
Question to those who might know this - assuming the ITU agrees to these restrictions, how would they enforce them? The radar frequency was presumably sold by a national agency (a la FCC) which is clearly making money off the sale and doesn't seem to care about the reasons. So how would the ITU go about forcing them to behave?
Re::Availability-A Model for everyone.
on
TV Piracy is Next
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· Score: 1
Aside from arguments along the lines of "who are you to tell me what to do with my resources?", my suggestion doesn't exclude CDs, DVDs, cassettes, cheap personal stereos, VHS or anything else. I have all of those too, and I use them occarionally.
I'm suggesting something additional, a service which doesn't exist at the moment. What's more, I'm talking about regions like mine where the TV I want to watch isn't being beamed to me or sold on DVD or VHS. I can't get it on my TV. I can't go to a store and get it, becuase the networks won't sell it to me. Therefore the only way to get it is via the Net (which I, and an increasing number of people in various parts of the world, happen to have access to), and the networks could make money on that if they chose to.
Downloading in my part of the world doesn't use significant resources, it doesn't waste my time, it happens in the background. I can still contribute to curing cancer. And if the quality is acceptable (HDTV quality, usually) then why not?
Re:It's scarey they think that is a solution
on
Tin Foil Passports?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Actually, no, you don't have to bring your passport. You just need legal ID, which in most EU countries means a national ID card. It's quite enough to move around in the EU with.
As has been said by some of the earlier posters, a lot of shows are not available in many parts of the world, where they would have an audience but for whatever reason the local networks are unwilling to show them.
This is particularly true of the SF shows such as Start Trek, Stargate SG-1 etc. which are often considered "niche" compared to comedy or soap opera. As an example, where I live, the local networks either don't bother to buy the shows or sometimes buy one season, show it at a ridiculous time like 11am or 12pm, then axe it while complaining that nobody watches it (happened to SG-1, Voyager, Nikita). Unfortunately that way everbody loses.
What the producers don't seem to understand is that they could actually profit from putting these shows online themselves, bypassing the local networks, either at a nominal fee (one or two USD) or even with advertising included (which could be generated automatically and targeted to the downloaders's region). Alternatively, using Bittorent or the like their bandwithd and distrbution costs would be minimal and they could push mechandise (T-shirts, DVDs whatever) as a profit source.
With the right model there is a a huge market and a lot of money to be made, just the networks seem to be stuck in a mental rut, anthe rest of us download TV rips
I'm not normally one to nitpick, and this will probably go down as "offtopic", but the misconceptions behind this post crop up far too often to stand uncorrected.
1. I'm sure you're speaking figuratively, but for those who don't know, the Polish Cavalry didn't declare war, they were defending their country against invasion. "Going up against" might have been a better phrase.
2. Cavalry wasn't in fact obsolete in 1939 as is often made out. In fact, if you watch the newsreels of German troops entering Czechoslovakia in 1938 many are on horseback, with horse-drawn carts. The Polish cavalry of the time was similar, the units fought as dragoons, using the horses for transport (which was actually advantageous, as many of the roads in all of Eastern Europe were just unsurfaced mud tracks at the time, and vehicles would often get bogged down) and dismounting for battle. They used rifles, machine-guns and horse-drawn artillery. In fact the Polish cavalry had a particularly effective anti-tank gun.
3. The Panzers actually suffered considerable losses in the '39 campaign, the tanks were not the Tigers or Panthers of later years, but light tanks, and in the woods and fields of Poland often suffered at the hands of infantry and cavalry antitank weapons.
Standard Oil was actually a conglomerate of a number of smaller companies, many called Standard Oil of XYZ. Standard Oil of New Jersey became Esso, which is still the international brand of ExxonMobil. But Standard Oil of Indiana indeed became Amoco, now part of British Petroleum (BP).
As it happens, a friend of mine, Tomasz Kobak, a PhD astronomer who was also very much into amateur rocketry, was killed last week when the engine he was test firing broke free from its moorings. I agree with your last sentence - at least he went out doing what he loved.
Suborbital flight is much easier to achieve, which is why the X-Prize specified it. The velocities required are much lower, which means less fuel needs to be carried, the aerodynamics are simpler and the return journey doesn't require nearly as much heat shielding to protect the passengers while the ship burns off the excess velocity.
The loss of the Sheffield due to burning aluminium is a myth, aluminium does not burn except under very special circumstances. Besides which, the Type 42 ships like the Sheffield were built of steel. Aluminium is sometimes used in ships, such as the Type 21, because of its lower weight and better resistance to corrosion, but usually for superstructure rather than hulls. Of course in high-speed catamarans weight is very important.
In any case, the problem with aluminium is that it is softer and melts more easily, which is also part of what happened to Columbia.
There's more on aluminium in ships here.
If you have powdered alumimium (or indeed most metals, including iron) and preferably a strong oxidiser mixed with it, then you can get aluminium to burn. In a thermite reaction, powdered aluminium reacts directly with powdered iron oxide in an extremely exothermic reaction which is self-sustaining. But these aren't the conditions you'd get on a ship under attack.
Realistically, the missile and or explosion would just rip more easily through the softer metal, and any resulting fire would weaken the structure. In a vessel of that size and with the thinner dual hulls, that would be fatal enough even with a steel hull. A ship like this really has to rely on stealth or countermeasures to survive.
There is another worry though - the extra two years in space also significantly increases the risk of the probe or its instruments being damaged by solar flares (as happened to Mars Odyssey, radiation, temperature changes and debris.
The best would have been Peter Jones, the narrator from both the original radio series and the TV series. He had a particularly distinctive voice which made him wonderful as The Book (the narration in the HHG is actually the voice of the Guide itself), so much so that a number of documentaries even had their narration done in the same style with him reading it.
Unfortunately, he died in 2000, but there are so many recordings of him, including all the right fragments from the radio series, that if they really wanted to they could use his voice anyway.
They should send up an automated Rover Wash next time; every once in a while Spirit could drive in for a full wash'n'wax (and maybe check the tyres)...
You don't need a drive to use of an encoder. There are hand controllers which take input from encoders, but provide instructions, left/right/up/down x units, so that a human user can point the thing in the right direction.
Quite true. A particularly nice example exists on the old 74" telescope at the David Dunlap Observatory. The encoders feed into a computer which displays not the absolute position but the difference between the current position and where you want to point to. All you have to do is move the telescope until the display shows zero. (The 1920's design of the telescope makes it impractical to fully automate, large movements are done by hand, once the telescope has been roughly pointed the automatic guiding system takes over. The offset encoder system is very accurate though.)
My original point was that the price list seems to have little relation to the telescope itself. Neither the photos nor the list of dissasembled parts shows an encoder, hand controller or the like. I'd be interested to read your ATM mentors comments, perhaps you could post them up here as reply when you have them.
Slashdot Mirror
Despite the sparking, the SIMMs survived, and the machine came up fine after a reset. Funnily enough, I was even wearing a grounding strap ...
I have a number of old photographs of members of my family taken in the 1940's and 1950's by professional photographers - these have been printed on paper which has the photographer's logo (usually a signature) physically embossed on it in a corner.
But anyway, in your example, perhaps losing his license might seem harsh in those particular circumastances, but there are several things to consider:
Firstly, maybe in your example 99 times out of 100 he'll get home safelyv on an empty road. But what about that one time there's a cyclist? Or a pedestrian in dark clothes? Or it's raining and visibility is reduced?
Secondly, there's the slippery slope -- "Hey, I made it safely last night at 0.09, maybe I can do it tonight at 0.11?". With alcohol it's hard to make judgements like that. If someone knows they're liable to lose their license for even slightly exceeding the limit, they might think twice about driving after drinking more. The deterrent effect is important here.
Thirdly, I think you'll find that in practice the situation you describe will draw the minimal penalty in most jurisdictions -- loss of license for a short time, and a fine. The person causing a fatal crash while DUI will get a much more severe sentence.
Finally, with the law, a line has to be drawn somewhere, and once you've drawn the line you have to apply it to everybody. With alcohol it is extremely difficult for police in the field to judge how much a given persons ability to drive has been impaired, whereas they can easily measure BAC and set a limit, so that's what they do. Maybe it's not ideal, but if it saves even one life ...?
You are, of course, quite right about phones and such -- which is why in many places these days using phones while driving is banned and results in much the same penalties as being over the legal alcohol limit, particularly if you cause an accident while on the phone.
Even a small amount of alchohol can slow your reactions considerably, and there is a great difference between "driving sensibly" as you put it, and being able to react fast enough in an emergency to avoid an accident.
Driving after drinking has two aspects -- one is the weaving-all-over-the-road, crash into a lampost one, which I'll accept you might not do even when twice over the limit. But the other is being able to react quickly and effectively to a child running out into the road, or another car turning unexpectedly out of a side road, or hitting an ice patch and skidding.
I don't know it you did an "emergency stop" type maneuver when learning to drive where you are -- its simple enough: drive with a passenger who will suddenly and without warning tell you to stop. Try this when sober and when twice over the limit and see if you stop in the same distance. Or try driving as quickly as possible through a line of traffic cones (slalom around them). You might be surprised with the result.
Apparently when doing the previews of one of the early space-based SFs (it may have been the original Star Trek series, I forget) the audience reacted very negatively to the silence as the ships flew by and thought it "wrong" (go figure, but that's a lay audience for you ...) so the producers put in noise. to satisfy them.
Early observatories were built near (or within!) cities. With each subsequent generation they were moved further away and to higher altitudes to get away from pollution (light and chemical) and above as much of the atmosphere as possible.
The current generation of top telescopes is to be found in places like central Chile at altitudes of about 2000m. The next generation will be in places like the high Atacama desert (further north in Chile) or even in Antarctica, both at altitudes of 3500-4000m -- even more remote and even drier (yes, the air in central Antarctica is very dry).As for ground-based telescopes, any space-based instrument has access to the continuous range of wavelengths, whereas ground-based telescopes (even with adaptive optics) are limited by the absorption and scattering in the atmosphere in the UV and infrared. They also don't have to deal with sky glow, which restricts both how long you can take an exposure for -- eventually the background will saturate your detector -- and also the contrast between the thing you're trying to detect and the background (think picking out a small light on a white background against on a dark background).
This is also why Earth-based telescopes are put on mountains -- to get above as much of the atmosphere as possible. Adaptive optics can improve the "seeing" (blurring caused by turbulence) and, coupled with large-diameter mirrors possible on ground-based telescopes, it will improve the resolution, but it can't deal with the other effects,
Yes.
The famous physicist Richard Feynman, who was on the investigation panel after the Challenger explosion, estimated the failure rate to be "of the order of one percent", or 1 in 100. when at the time NASA management (not the engineers) had been claiming a rate of 1 in 100000. He based his reasoning on estimates of the failure rates of the individual subystems. You can read his arguments here.
The 'doppler data' wasn't actually being 'sent' as such, it came from measurements of the subtle variation in the frequency of the carrier wave of one of the channels which was trasmitting the images and other data from Huygens. They chose the channel A carrier as that channel had a more stable transmitter (why that was the case, I don't know however).
I would guess that they only tried to measure the frequency variations of one channel becuase those measurements would have required extra equipment in the receiver and they could only go with one set. But that's just my guess ...
Question to those who might know this - assuming the ITU agrees to these restrictions, how would they enforce them? The radar frequency was presumably sold by a national agency (a la FCC) which is clearly making money off the sale and doesn't seem to care about the reasons. So how would the ITU go about forcing them to behave?
I'm suggesting something additional, a service which doesn't exist at the moment. What's more, I'm talking about regions like mine where the TV I want to watch isn't being beamed to me or sold on DVD or VHS. I can't get it on my TV. I can't go to a store and get it, becuase the networks won't sell it to me. Therefore the only way to get it is via the Net (which I, and an increasing number of people in various parts of the world, happen to have access to), and the networks could make money on that if they chose to.
Downloading in my part of the world doesn't use significant resources, it doesn't waste my time, it happens in the background. I can still contribute to curing cancer. And if the quality is acceptable (HDTV quality, usually) then why not?
Actually, no, you don't have to bring your passport. You just need legal ID, which in most EU countries means a national ID card. It's quite enough to move around in the EU with.
This is particularly true of the SF shows such as Start Trek, Stargate SG-1 etc. which are often considered "niche" compared to comedy or soap opera. As an example, where I live, the local networks either don't bother to buy the shows or sometimes buy one season, show it at a ridiculous time like 11am or 12pm, then axe it while complaining that nobody watches it (happened to SG-1, Voyager, Nikita). Unfortunately that way everbody loses.
What the producers don't seem to understand is that they could actually profit from putting these shows online themselves, bypassing the local networks, either at a nominal fee (one or two USD) or even with advertising included (which could be generated automatically and targeted to the downloaders's region). Alternatively, using Bittorent or the like their bandwithd and distrbution costs would be minimal and they could push mechandise (T-shirts, DVDs whatever) as a profit source.
With the right model there is a a huge market and a lot of money to be made, just the networks seem to be stuck in a mental rut, anthe rest of us download TV rips
1. I'm sure you're speaking figuratively, but for those who don't know, the Polish Cavalry didn't declare war, they were defending their country against invasion. "Going up against" might have been a better phrase.
2. Cavalry wasn't in fact obsolete in 1939 as is often made out. In fact, if you watch the newsreels of German troops entering Czechoslovakia in 1938 many are on horseback, with horse-drawn carts. The Polish cavalry of the time was similar, the units fought as dragoons, using the horses for transport (which was actually advantageous, as many of the roads in all of Eastern Europe were just unsurfaced mud tracks at the time, and vehicles would often get bogged down) and dismounting for battle. They used rifles, machine-guns and horse-drawn artillery. In fact the Polish cavalry had a particularly effective anti-tank gun.
3. The Panzers actually suffered considerable losses in the '39 campaign, the tanks were not the Tigers or Panthers of later years, but light tanks, and in the woods and fields of Poland often suffered at the hands of infantry and cavalry antitank weapons.
You might like to have a look at (for example, just a quick trawl through Google) this page or this one or this one or this one.
Standard Oil was actually a conglomerate of a number of smaller companies, many called Standard Oil of XYZ. Standard Oil of New Jersey became Esso, which is still the international brand of ExxonMobil. But Standard Oil of Indiana indeed became Amoco, now part of British Petroleum (BP).
See Wiklipedia.
Thanks. He was. I'd post a link to some of the stuff he did, but his server is (understandably) down.
As it happens, a friend of mine, Tomasz Kobak, a PhD astronomer who was also very much into amateur rocketry, was killed last week when the engine he was test firing broke free from its moorings. I agree with your last sentence - at least he went out doing what he loved.
Suborbital flight is much easier to achieve, which is why the X-Prize specified it. The velocities required are much lower, which means less fuel needs to be carried, the aerodynamics are simpler and the return journey doesn't require nearly as much heat shielding to protect the passengers while the ship burns off the excess velocity.
In any case, the problem with aluminium is that it is softer and melts more easily, which is also part of what happened to Columbia. There's more on aluminium in ships here.
If you have powdered alumimium (or indeed most metals, including iron) and preferably a strong oxidiser mixed with it, then you can get aluminium to burn. In a thermite reaction, powdered aluminium reacts directly with powdered iron oxide in an extremely exothermic reaction which is self-sustaining. But these aren't the conditions you'd get on a ship under attack.
Realistically, the missile and or explosion would just rip more easily through the softer metal, and any resulting fire would weaken the structure. In a vessel of that size and with the thinner dual hulls, that would be fatal enough even with a steel hull. A ship like this really has to rely on stealth or countermeasures to survive.
There is another worry though - the extra two years in space also significantly increases the risk of the probe or its instruments being damaged by solar flares (as happened to Mars Odyssey, radiation, temperature changes and debris.
It's a pity you're AC, I don't know who to thank for that info. And not much chance of a mod either.
Unfortunately, he died in 2000, but there are so many recordings of him, including all the right fragments from the radio series, that if they really wanted to they could use his voice anyway.
They should send up an automated Rover Wash next time; every once in a while Spirit could drive in for a full wash'n'wax (and maybe check the tyres) ...
Quite true. A particularly nice example exists on the old 74" telescope at the David Dunlap Observatory. The encoders feed into a computer which displays not the absolute position but the difference between the current position and where you want to point to. All you have to do is move the telescope until the display shows zero. (The 1920's design of the telescope makes it impractical to fully automate, large movements are done by hand, once the telescope has been roughly pointed the automatic guiding system takes over. The offset encoder system is very accurate though.)
My original point was that the price list seems to have little relation to the telescope itself. Neither the photos nor the list of dissasembled parts shows an encoder, hand controller or the like. I'd be interested to read your ATM mentors comments, perhaps you could post them up here as reply when you have them.