Follow the link to the wikipedia article on quasars.
"Quasar" is short for "Quasi-stellar object" which is what they were called when they were first discovered. At the time, they were unresolved sources a bit like, but clearly not, stars. Since then it has been discovered that quasars are one form of active galaxy, where accretion onto the black hole in the nucleus of the galaxy releases a lot of energy. So in this sense "galaxy" is accurate. If someone wants to specifically talk about the rest of the galaxy outside the nucleus they use the words "host galaxy".
These sorts of long-baseline radio observations are aimed at mapping the jets released from the nucleus, which are the source of the radio emission. Longer baselines means getting to see closer to the source of the jets (the black hole).
Depends on the situation. Will the patient die if the operation is not performed immediately? Is the aircraft already in the air?
Usually there is another surgeon available at short delay, and a copilot on the plane to take over, or at least an autopilot until the drunk pilot sobers up.
In an emergency situation, where the risks are outweighed by the benefits, sure: let the surgeon operate. In an emergency situation, such as being the only person available to take someone critically ill to hospital, I would not prosecute the drunk driver (although if stopped by the police, then that no longer applies as the police can take the ill person). But in most cases the situation is not an emergency, either for the surgeon, the pilot or the driver. In those cases they should be prevented from continuing at least until they are sober, and face sanction for endangering others.
If you're driving erratically, the police should have the right to take you out of your car and deliver you home, leaving your car, locked, on the side of the road. Being charged for a crime that *might* have occurred is just wrong.
Let's look at it this way. You pass the driving test and get a license on the tacit basis that your judgement and reaction times are within certain norms. Alcohol reduces reaction time (measurably) and affects judgement (measurably). So driving under the influence, even if you are not driving erratically at the time, you are no longer driving within the terms under which your licence was issued. This is equivalent to driving without a licence.
Let me ask another question: would you be willing to let a surgeon found trying to operate continue? Or would you have him stopped and removed from theatre, even if he appeared to be behaving normally? Or an airline pilot?
The Atlantic is much bigger than the desert areas and much less populated, so there is even more of a safety margin if something comes down. More significantly though, it is close to the equator, where the velocity boost from the rotation of the Earth is greater, so larger payloads can be carried. This is more significant than the slightly thinner air in the high desert.
Hemp isn't used for paper in China, where I reside, either. Hemp is not cultivated as anything more than a niche item in any country, even though the 1937 law you mentioned only affected the US.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemp#Major_hemp_produ cing_countries says you're wrong:
Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany all resumed commercial production in the 1990s. British production is mostly used as bedding for horses; other uses are under development. The largest outlet for German fibre is composite automotive panels. Companies in Canada, UK, US and Germany among many others process hemp seed into a growing range of food products and cosmetics; many traditional growing countries still continue to produce textile grade fibre.
Hemp is illegal to freely grow in the US... hemp is imported from China and the Philippines....
In 2006, hemp was Canada's most profitable crop...
I was about to say the same thing. What is it about Americans and acronyms? It seems everything has to have one. Titles get twisted to form a pronounceable acronym (like PERFORM); contrived expansions are invented to make perfectly good existing names into acronyms (like AMBER Alert). No other country has this fascination with acronyms. What gives?
Exactly. I'm getting tired of this 'Gnome is for newbies, KDE is for power users' argument that gets trotted out over and over again. I'm a 'power user', I've tried every KDE version to date and always gone back to GNOME, because it just works the way I want it to without having to change anything, and stays out of my way. KDE 3.3 and beyond are much better than older versions, but still I prefer Gnome. But then I always preferred MacOS over Windows.
Sometimes, I get the impression that the bulk of KDE fans are the same sort of people who load up Windows with all sorts of extensions, cursor animators, funny fonts and the like, which to me are just distraction.
Even though it is not a chemical element, the free neutron is often included in tables of nuclides.
(Interestingly, if you click on the link to the full table of isotopes in that Wikipedia article, it doesn't actually include the neutron at all, despite the small view implying it.)
This reminds me of an old Dr. Dobb's Journal article that I read more than a decade ago entitled "Personal Supercomputing" (I believe it was back in 1992 or thereabouts) where the author found a good use for a 486+i860 (remember that chip?) combo that involved making the i860 a computation engine and the 486 sort of like an I/O processor, and IIRC it was called PORT.
Stephen S. Fried, "Personal Supercomputing. with the Intel i860", though Google supplies BYTE Jan 1991 as the source.
We had a similar setup with a SPARC feeding 4 i860s in a custom built rig to do reconstuction of medical tomography images in about 1994. It did it about 10x faster than a SPARC II workstation (about 3 hours rather than 30).
After having carefully researched the various options a while back, I've now been using this combination for over 3 years now at home, and for 2-3 years on the machines I look after at work, with excellent results. I have also recommended it to a fair number of people, with no negative responses either.
Avast is really very good: it updates regularly, can scan mail, P2P, IM, downloads on the fly and, unlike many other background scanners, it is very light on resources. Spybot, particularly with the immunise function and IE protection, takes care of any browser spy/malware which might try to slip through Avast, and is also very lightweight. Spybot is free everywhere, Avast is free for home use, which is a major point. Of the free scanners it is certainly one of (if not the) most capable. The Pro version licenses are also very competitively priced, and it has a 30 or 60 day (I forget exactly) tryout period.
I have also seen AVG and AntiVir, but prefer Avast.
Yeah, I've had that too:) It rather depends on the kind of game, though. For example (showing my age) Descent was great like that, while Spaceward Ho! didn't have missions as such, just acheiving galactic domination. Different types of games, different kinds of pleasure.
Well, yes and no. If its done well, then fine. But often it is done badly, and then is simply frustrating. Like when the computer overwhelms you with a fleet of [whatever] which you know is simply impossible for it to have built without cheating in the time available, based on rates of production and technology development (for simpler games this can be calculated easily enough).
Worse, in some games the jump in difficulty due to this kind of cheating means that on one difficulty setting you defeat the computer easily, but on the next, same AI but with cheating, there is no way you can defeat it no matter how good you are.
The game then ceases to be one of strategy and becomes a race, or worse, a game of chance (who hits who first).
When people whine about not having good opponents they're really whining about not having the ability to show off their talents in mastering something worthwhile;... The real competition has always been between people, either indirectly in the case of arcade games like space invaders or directly in the modern multiplayer arena.
There is some truth in what you say, but not entirely. I play against humans and enjoy it, but more often play on my own, against the computer. Its like watching TV or reading a book; I do it to relax, to while away some time because I can't be bothered to go to sleep, or just because I've had a hard day and want to kick some ass. I may just want to play a favourite map/level, or there may not be anyone available to play against, or I may be in the mood for a different game than anyone else. In these cases my scores matter only to me. There are many reasons to play games and not all of them are directly competitive, and in these cases a good AI makes the gameplay much more enjoyable and less frustrating (and thus more effective for its purpose).
Nobody has meantioned Creatures yet... simple neural net brains, genetics, learning (even from each other!) and all sorts of other behaviour, all done some ten years ago.
Unfortunately, all the current FPS/RTS etc etc games have ignored this completely.
My personal preference is for RTS type games -- StarCraft, Age of... series and the like -- and to be honest the AI in most of them is pretty poor (actually StarCraft is one of the better ones, despite it's age).
So poor in fact, that on higher difficulty levels most of them resort to cheating in one way or another -- most commonly by upping the resource gathering/production rates (I've studied this by using cheat codes to show everything). Also, in many such games the AI plays 'perfectly' -- no mistakes as to when to develop which technologies, no problems controlling large numbers of units, and uncannily sending units just where I happened to be weakest for no reason (Age of Mythology seemed to be particularly bad at these sort of tricks). Having the computer cheat was no more fun than playing against a human who was using cheat codes, it ceases to be a battle of wits, which to me is what an RTS should be about.
Doesn't sound like they really need more computer equipment than the state auditor's office would given the department's duties.
I work in the Physics/Astronomy department of a university. We flog our computers hard, data analysis, modeling, number crunching of all sorts all the time. But who has the newest, latest computers, with shiny P4s, laptops, projectors and all sorts? Humanities. Who use Word and PowerPoint.
Why?
Because every year we and they have to spend our budgets fully, otherwise next year the budget gets cut (according to the you-didn't-spend-it-so-you-don't-need-it logic). Now, even though our budgets are larger, we spend lots on other kinds of hardware -- experimental equipment, instruments, that sort of thing. Whereas pretty much all they can spend it on is newer computers. So they do.
Now, whether the same sort of thing happens here, I don't know, but given the (il)logic of beaurocracy everywhere, I wouldn't be at all surprised.
I agree with your first point, but out of respect for the Russian crew I'll point out that they ignored the collision avoidance system because they were following orders from Air Traffic Control, which was telling them to do the exact opposite. The air traffic controller was later found to have been seriously overworked, leading to his mistake. Have a look at the Wikipedia article.
Seeing is a measure of the blurring of the images of stars due to movement of air in the atmosphere above the telescope. If you think of the blurring as a gaussian filter applied to the image, then the number quoted is the width of the gaussian (bell) curve at half its height - so the actual size of the blurred image would be rather larger as the gaussian curve flares out at the bottom.
Which means that (thanks to adaptive optics) they've managed to achieve images of stars which are perhaps 2-3 times sharper than the atmospheric effects at the site would normally allow.
Similar story. There I am in the library late at night typing away on something by myself (We had a couple of networked computers in there, and it was nicer than the computer lab, wood panels and all).
So, in comes a guy I vaguely knew from my year, obviously completely drunk, sits down at the machine next to me, stares blankly at it for a moment, and falls asleep on the keyboard.
mmmkay, whatever. I keep doing whatever it is I'm doing.
Suddenly, he wakes up and throws up all over the keyboard. (Ewwww!). Fortunately, this brings back some form of consciousness, and he stares in horror at the mess (this is the library, remember). There's a washroom nearby, to I told ld him to uplug the keyboard and wash it out thoroughly and leave it to dry, which he did. By the morning everything was clean and dry and worked fine, and nobody was the wiser...
Slashdot Mirror
4000 or 6000 litres depending on the cartridge. Water is pumped through with a hand pump which stopw working when the cartidge is used up.
"Quasar" is short for "Quasi-stellar object" which is what they were called when they were first discovered. At the time, they were unresolved sources a bit like, but clearly not, stars. Since then it has been discovered that quasars are one form of active galaxy, where accretion onto the black hole in the nucleus of the galaxy releases a lot of energy. So in this sense "galaxy" is accurate. If someone wants to specifically talk about the rest of the galaxy outside the nucleus they use the words "host galaxy".
These sorts of long-baseline radio observations are aimed at mapping the jets released from the nucleus, which are the source of the radio emission. Longer baselines means getting to see closer to the source of the jets (the black hole).
Usually there is another surgeon available at short delay, and a copilot on the plane to take over, or at least an autopilot until the drunk pilot sobers up.
In an emergency situation, where the risks are outweighed by the benefits, sure: let the surgeon operate. In an emergency situation, such as being the only person available to take someone critically ill to hospital, I would not prosecute the drunk driver (although if stopped by the police, then that no longer applies as the police can take the ill person). But in most cases the situation is not an emergency, either for the surgeon, the pilot or the driver. In those cases they should be prevented from continuing at least until they are sober, and face sanction for endangering others.
Let me ask another question: would you be willing to let a surgeon found trying to operate continue? Or would you have him stopped and removed from theatre, even if he appeared to be behaving normally? Or an airline pilot?
In the Harrison Ford movie Air Force One, the security people had a laptop which scanned fingerprints on its screen: http://perso.orange.fr/fingerchip/biometrics/movie s_1997.htm I had a laugh about it at the time ... oh well.
The Atlantic is much bigger than the desert areas and much less populated, so there is even more of a safety margin if something comes down. More significantly though, it is close to the equator, where the velocity boost from the rotation of the Earth is greater, so larger payloads can be carried. This is more significant than the slightly thinner air in the high desert.
Hemp is illegal to freely grow in the US ... hemp is imported from China and the Philippines. ...
In 2006, hemp was Canada's most profitable crop ...
*grin*
I was about to say the same thing. What is it about Americans and acronyms? It seems everything has to have one. Titles get twisted to form a pronounceable acronym (like PERFORM); contrived expansions are invented to make perfectly good existing names into acronyms (like AMBER Alert). No other country has this fascination with acronyms. What gives?
Sometimes, I get the impression that the bulk of KDE fans are the same sort of people who load up Windows with all sorts of extensions, cursor animators, funny fonts and the like, which to me are just distraction.
Even though it is not a chemical element, the free neutron is often included in tables of nuclides.
(Interestingly, if you click on the link to the full table of isotopes in that Wikipedia article, it doesn't actually include the neutron at all, despite the small view implying it.)
Stephen S. Fried, "Personal Supercomputing. with the Intel i860", though Google supplies BYTE Jan 1991 as the source.
We had a similar setup with a SPARC feeding 4 i860s in a custom built rig to do reconstuction of medical tomography images in about 1994. It did it about 10x faster than a SPARC II workstation (about 3 hours rather than 30).
Not only that, elements are defined by the number of protons, not neutrons.
Avast is really very good: it updates regularly, can scan mail, P2P, IM, downloads on the fly and, unlike many other background scanners, it is very light on resources. Spybot, particularly with the immunise function and IE protection, takes care of any browser spy/malware which might try to slip through Avast, and is also very lightweight. Spybot is free everywhere, Avast is free for home use, which is a major point. Of the free scanners it is certainly one of (if not the) most capable. The Pro version licenses are also very competitively priced, and it has a 30 or 60 day (I forget exactly) tryout period.
I have also seen AVG and AntiVir, but prefer Avast.
Well, true :) but Freespace looks cool too (I have the free source on disk, juzt no time to do anything with it).
Yeah, I've had that too :) It rather depends on the kind of game, though. For example (showing my age) Descent was great like that, while Spaceward Ho! didn't have missions as such, just acheiving galactic domination. Different types of games, different kinds of pleasure.
Worse, in some games the jump in difficulty due to this kind of cheating means that on one difficulty setting you defeat the computer easily, but on the next, same AI but with cheating, there is no way you can defeat it no matter how good you are.
The game then ceases to be one of strategy and becomes a race, or worse, a game of chance (who hits who first).
There is some truth in what you say, but not entirely. I play against humans and enjoy it, but more often play on my own, against the computer. Its like watching TV or reading a book; I do it to relax, to while away some time because I can't be bothered to go to sleep, or just because I've had a hard day and want to kick some ass. I may just want to play a favourite map/level, or there may not be anyone available to play against, or I may be in the mood for a different game than anyone else. In these cases my scores matter only to me. There are many reasons to play games and not all of them are directly competitive, and in these cases a good AI makes the gameplay much more enjoyable and less frustrating (and thus more effective for its purpose).
Unfortunately, all the current FPS/RTS etc etc games have ignored this completely.
So poor in fact, that on higher difficulty levels most of them resort to cheating in one way or another -- most commonly by upping the resource gathering/production rates (I've studied this by using cheat codes to show everything). Also, in many such games the AI plays 'perfectly' -- no mistakes as to when to develop which technologies, no problems controlling large numbers of units, and uncannily sending units just where I happened to be weakest for no reason (Age of Mythology seemed to be particularly bad at these sort of tricks). Having the computer cheat was no more fun than playing against a human who was using cheat codes, it ceases to be a battle of wits, which to me is what an RTS should be about.
I work in the Physics/Astronomy department of a university. We flog our computers hard, data analysis, modeling, number crunching of all sorts all the time. But who has the newest, latest computers, with shiny P4s, laptops, projectors and all sorts? Humanities. Who use Word and PowerPoint.
Why?
Because every year we and they have to spend our budgets fully, otherwise next year the budget gets cut (according to the you-didn't-spend-it-so-you-don't-need-it logic). Now, even though our budgets are larger, we spend lots on other kinds of hardware -- experimental equipment, instruments, that sort of thing. Whereas pretty much all they can spend it on is newer computers. So they do.
Now, whether the same sort of thing happens here, I don't know, but given the (il)logic of beaurocracy everywhere, I wouldn't be at all surprised.
Ah, but the "S" is not enough - there must be a hyphen to drop, as well.
I agree with your first point, but out of respect for the Russian crew I'll point out that they ignored the collision avoidance system because they were following orders from Air Traffic Control, which was telling them to do the exact opposite. The air traffic controller was later found to have been seriously overworked, leading to his mistake. Have a look at the Wikipedia article.
Which means that (thanks to adaptive optics) they've managed to achieve images of stars which are perhaps 2-3 times sharper than the atmospheric effects at the site would normally allow.
So, in comes a guy I vaguely knew from my year, obviously completely drunk, sits down at the machine next to me, stares blankly at it for a moment, and falls asleep on the keyboard.
mmmkay, whatever. I keep doing whatever it is I'm doing.
Suddenly, he wakes up and throws up all over the keyboard. (Ewwww!). Fortunately, this brings back some form of consciousness, and he stares in horror at the mess (this is the library, remember). There's a washroom nearby, to I told ld him to uplug the keyboard and wash it out thoroughly and leave it to dry, which he did. By the morning everything was clean and dry and worked fine, and nobody was the wiser ...