The global population of people has also multiplied and skyrocketed over the years, no thanks to technology. It rather cancels out the gains in agricultural production.
Farmers are reducing the amount of food they produce in the UK, in fact, they're being subsidised by the EU not to produce food.
We actually produce far more food than we need, the western industrialised nations have a massive food surplus, the reason people are starving in the third world has nothing to do with a lack of food its all down to political and economic issues.
You're being taxed to subsidize mass transit. higher fuel costs make mass transit more attractive, and more people using mass transit makes mass transit affordable.
Actually most people (including me) wouldn't mind having such a high petrol prices, or toll motorways, as well as our (also quite high) road tax, if the public transit system in the UK actually worked! Considering how centrally concentrated most of the UK population is the rail and bus networks are abysmal.
Actually, this would be a bargain. AVGas occasionally sells for as much as $12 per US gallon...
Heck, petrol runs at $5 per US gallon (okay, so most of that is tax) in the UK. Charge the idiot $100 a gallon and get him off the sofa in the refueling shed.
The only problem here is to keep track of what is what. After a couple of files, it's going to be a pain to remember which file has your pr0n site passwords in it, versus Gramma's cookie recipe.
Well obviously you only have to keep track of one file, the one which holds the list of all the other files you've got with encrypted content.
Read Marx on the subject, and see his use of the terms. You equate Marx with McCarthy? How....odd.
No I just fundamentally object to the normal American practice of equating the mild, left leaning, Socialism of the Western and Northern European states with encoroaching Communism. Hence my reference to McCarthy.
This likely differs your country from the truly socialist societies that existed in Eastern Europe, in which the state, not the people, controlled the economy.
Err, you do actually understand the difference between Communisit and Socialist, right? Depsite what McCarthy had to say on the subject there is a big difference.
Please explain this to me. Someone purchases a house with walls that aren't very sound proof. They presumably knew this at the time of purchase, it would be ridiculous to think otherwise. Someone else spends the time to investigate their choices, and eventually spends more money on a house with more sound proof walls. Why should the person who spent extra to buy a house with soundproof walls now have to pay additional taxes to soundproof someone else's home - someone else who didn't care enough about it to shop for that feature in the first place?
Welcome to the difference between a pure capitalist economy, and a one where some remenants of socialism still remain. The person buying the sub-standard house might not be able to afford a better one? Why shouldn't our tax money be used to improve their standard of living?
All this does is encourage people to do the cheapest thing possible, then use some ill concieved government program to clean up the mess afterwards.
No, it doesn't. The "ill concieved government program" is helping improve the country's housing stock. Eventually all houses will be well sound proofed and you've improved everyone's standard of living. What's wrong with that?
The problem with far right and the far left is that there are things wrong with both capitalism and socialism. Ayn Rand is just as bad a Karl Marx.
I am a little concerned, though, that this kind of technology might fall into the wrong hands. For instance, have the manufacturers considered the applications for which terrorists might use these? I hardly think that the NAH6 would like to see their products used to slaughter innocent Americans...
..and the really bad thing? It took me way to long to figure out you were joking, I've been hearing far to much of that line of arguement for real lately. *sigh*
I think the HST is too heavy for the shuttle to bring down. The mass that they can lift is significantly larger than the mass that they can return to Earth.
Actually it was designed to be brought back to Earth in the shuttle cargo bay for servicing, repair, and later relaunch. However later (not even the most recent) safety add-ons meant that the shuttle is now unable to retrieve it from orbit.
Is this opposed to, say, the "do it all at once" approach?
Since this is the approach the US used from a similar starting point, the Gemini & Mercury era, yes, as opposed to the "do it all at once" approach!
The Chinese have put a man into orbit. That's a great success for them, considering there ain't too many other countries that have done it...
Only two other countries, the USA and Russia. Three if you want to count the now defunct USSR and Russia seperately. Nobody else has built the hardware to put a man in orbit. Nationals from other countries have hitched a ride with one of the two. Its argueable that the addition of China to the club means that the US is once again no longer alone as the "only" super power.
It wasn't clear to me from the article how much reduction these agents are doing to the telescope output, but I imagine there's a good deal of difference between what they are doing and the process you follow in a thorough post-event analysis of the images/spectra/etc?
Actually, no. These days most of the research class telescopes (including UKIRT and the JCMT at the Joint Astronomy Centre in Hawaii) have real time data reduction pipelines. These output publishable quality data, the days of spending six months reducing your data after coming back from an observing run aren't over yet, but we're getting there.
The agents themselves pull the results directly off the data reduction pipeline, and perform real time analysis to see if there is anything interesting by data mining online catalogues and meta-data databases (such as CDS SIMBAD). They they can make a decision to make further observations.
Have a look at the project website for more information.
Is this so urgent AND important results can't wait?
I mean, yes nice to have that pic right away, but are you gonna rush to work because some nice results came in? or do you decide it can wait till tomorrow and regular hour days?
It can be. Some astronomical events happen very quickly, reacting fast enough could make the difference between having no data and having something that could get you a nobel. Finding an exo-planet microlensing event, or a gamma-ray quiet gamma ray burster could make someones career. Thats sort of worth gettting woken up at 4am in the morning and asked to make a go/no-go decision.
The other reason is that telescope time is expensive, really expensive, the current generation of 8m telescopes can cost $10 per second to run (yes, really!). You don't want to waste something that expensive (and hard to get in the first place).
There's more technical information about the system on the eSTAR project home page, including screenshots and more specific details about the software.
...and due to the slashdot effect we also have a mirror.
I don't see it listed at www.x-prize.org, but I wonder if they've already collected the $10M? If they haven't, then what happens if the prize is won, and they only have $8M?
I believe the prize is actually funded through an insurace policy. The insurace company pays out if someone actually wins the prize, all the X-Prize people had to come up with was the premium. I could be wrong, but thats my recollection anyway...
I, for one, will welcome our new ________ overlords.
Kent Brockman on the Simpsons, "I for one welcome our new insect overlords". Although I've got a niggling suspicion that like alot of things on the Simpsons its a cultural referecne to something a bit older. Anyone?
...but I guess that since Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire won a Hugo
Accompanied by alot of the old school fans being violently sick, me amougst them. There is no way that a Harry Potter novel should ever have won the Hugo, just because its popular doesn't mean its good writing, or had anything profound to say abotu the world. Put it along side something like "Fire Upon the Deep" or "Ender's Game" and it pales in comparison.
What do you have against Wired? Granted they don't get as technical as many scientific journals...
Okay as a scientist, someone who actually gets paid to do physics for a living, I can tell you that no matter what Wired is, it isn't a scientific journal. It has no peer review, it is therefore not a scientific journal. QED.
Wierd is (at best) popular science press, the chaps that get everything wrong all the time and are more interested in a story than the actual scientific content of the thing they're reporting.
Trouble is, I'm on a Mac. I couldn't be infected with SoBig.F if I wanted to...
I'm on Linux, and I've had far more bounce messages telling me I've just sent an infected email than copies of SoBig-F, and my spam filter has caught well over 400 copies of SoBig-F now...
There is at least on pure Javaimplementation of SSH, MindTerm. Its pretty reasonable. How it is portable to MIDP, which is presuambly the flavour of Java we're talking about here is questionable...
These analysts can't seem to wrap their minds around the fact that "Linux" is not just another company out to rule the desktop.
Right, I simply don't care whether Linux becomes a dominant force in the desktop market, and why should I? It does everything I need it to do right now.
I use neither GNOME, nor KDE, prefering to use a much simpler window manager on its own. All I want X windows for is for somewhere to put xterm's and editor windows, and for its network transparency. Click and drool graphics are no concern of mine, I have no idea why people feel the need to try and load down a perfectly good UNIX with all that junk.
Slashdot Mirror
The global population of people has also multiplied and skyrocketed over the years, no thanks to technology. It rather cancels out the gains in agricultural production.
Farmers are reducing the amount of food they produce in the UK, in fact, they're being subsidised by the EU not to produce food.
We actually produce far more food than we need, the western industrialised nations have a massive food surplus, the reason people are starving in the third world has nothing to do with a lack of food its all down to political and economic issues.
We could feed them if we wanted to...
Al.You're being taxed to subsidize mass transit. higher fuel costs make mass transit more attractive, and more people using mass transit makes mass transit affordable.
Actually most people (including me) wouldn't mind having such a high petrol prices, or toll motorways, as well as our (also quite high) road tax, if the public transit system in the UK actually worked! Considering how centrally concentrated most of the UK population is the rail and bus networks are abysmal.
Al.Actually, this would be a bargain. AVGas occasionally sells for as much as $12 per US gallon...
Heck, petrol runs at $5 per US gallon (okay, so most of that is tax) in the UK. Charge the idiot $100 a gallon and get him off the sofa in the refueling shed.
Al.The only problem here is to keep track of what is what. After a couple of files, it's going to be a pain to remember which file has your pr0n site passwords in it, versus Gramma's cookie recipe.
Well obviously you only have to keep track of one file, the one which holds the list of all the other files you've got with encrypted content.
. Al.Read Marx on the subject, and see his use of the terms. You equate Marx with McCarthy? How....odd.
No I just fundamentally object to the normal American practice of equating the mild, left leaning, Socialism of the Western and Northern European states with encoroaching Communism. Hence my reference to McCarthy.
Al.This likely differs your country from the truly socialist societies that existed in Eastern Europe, in which the state, not the people, controlled the economy.
Err, you do actually understand the difference between Communisit and Socialist, right? Depsite what McCarthy had to say on the subject there is a big difference.
Al.Please explain this to me. Someone purchases a house with walls that aren't very sound proof. They presumably knew this at the time of purchase, it would be ridiculous to think otherwise. Someone else spends the time to investigate their choices, and eventually spends more money on a house with more sound proof walls. Why should the person who spent extra to buy a house with soundproof walls now have to pay additional taxes to soundproof someone else's home - someone else who didn't care enough about it to shop for that feature in the first place?
Welcome to the difference between a pure capitalist economy, and a one where some remenants of socialism still remain. The person buying the sub-standard house might not be able to afford a better one? Why shouldn't our tax money be used to improve their standard of living?
All this does is encourage people to do the cheapest thing possible, then use some ill concieved government program to clean up the mess afterwards.
No, it doesn't. The "ill concieved government program" is helping improve the country's housing stock. Eventually all houses will be well sound proofed and you've improved everyone's standard of living. What's wrong with that?
The problem with far right and the far left is that there are things wrong with both capitalism and socialism. Ayn Rand is just as bad a Karl Marx.
Al.Also, I don't get the whole "two ten / tooting" reference. Why was she saying tooting when asked her address?
Oh dear, Tooting is an area in London.
Al.I am a little concerned, though, that this kind of technology might fall into the wrong hands. For instance, have the manufacturers considered the applications for which terrorists might use these? I hardly think that the NAH6 would like to see their products used to slaughter innocent Americans...
..and the really bad thing? It took me way to long to figure out you were joking, I've been hearing far to much of that line of arguement for real lately. *sigh*
Al.I think the HST is too heavy for the shuttle to bring down. The mass that they can lift is significantly larger than the mass that they can return to Earth.
Actually it was designed to be brought back to Earth in the shuttle cargo bay for servicing, repair, and later relaunch. However later (not even the most recent) safety add-ons meant that the shuttle is now unable to retrieve it from orbit.
Al.Is this opposed to, say, the "do it all at once" approach?
Since this is the approach the US used from a similar starting point, the Gemini & Mercury era, yes, as opposed to the "do it all at once" approach!
The Chinese have put a man into orbit. That's a great success for them, considering there ain't too many other countries that have done it...
Only two other countries, the USA and Russia. Three if you want to count the now defunct USSR and Russia seperately. Nobody else has built the hardware to put a man in orbit. Nationals from other countries have hitched a ride with one of the two. Its argueable that the addition of China to the club means that the US is once again no longer alone as the "only" super power.
Al.First of all, irradiating the atmosphere with microwaves is far more dangerous than a nuclear power plant.
Prove it?
Al.It wasn't clear to me from the article how much reduction these agents are doing to the telescope output, but I imagine there's a good deal of difference between what they are doing and the process you follow in a thorough post-event analysis of the images/spectra/etc?
Actually, no. These days most of the research class telescopes (including UKIRT and the JCMT at the Joint Astronomy Centre in Hawaii) have real time data reduction pipelines. These output publishable quality data, the days of spending six months reducing your data after coming back from an observing run aren't over yet, but we're getting there.
The agents themselves pull the results directly off the data reduction pipeline, and perform real time analysis to see if there is anything interesting by data mining online catalogues and meta-data databases (such as CDS SIMBAD). They they can make a decision to make further observations.
Have a look at the project website for more information.
Al.Is this so urgent AND important results can't wait? I mean, yes nice to have that pic right away, but are you gonna rush to work because some nice results came in? or do you decide it can wait till tomorrow and regular hour days?
It can be. Some astronomical events happen very quickly, reacting fast enough could make the difference between having no data and having something that could get you a nobel. Finding an exo-planet microlensing event, or a gamma-ray quiet gamma ray burster could make someones career. Thats sort of worth gettting woken up at 4am in the morning and asked to make a go/no-go decision.
The other reason is that telescope time is expensive, really expensive, the current generation of 8m telescopes can cost $10 per second to run (yes, really!). You don't want to waste something that expensive (and hard to get in the first place).
Al.Here is what an agent is: An agent is made up of Sensors...
Err, no. Loosely, an agent is a computational entity which:
See "Software Agents: A Review", 1997, Green S., Hurst L., Nangle B, Cunningham P., Somers F., Evans R. for more details.
Al.There's more technical information about the system on the eSTAR project home page, including screenshots and more specific details about the software.
...and due to the slashdot effect we also have a mirror.
Al.I don't see it listed at www.x-prize.org, but I wonder if they've already collected the $10M? If they haven't, then what happens if the prize is won, and they only have $8M?
I believe the prize is actually funded through an insurace policy. The insurace company pays out if someone actually wins the prize, all the X-Prize people had to come up with was the premium. I could be wrong, but thats my recollection anyway...
Al.Isn't this also the case in the center of Portland or Seattle? One of those rainy cities, anyway.
Yes, there is a "free ride" area in Portland that covers most of the central city area.
Al.I, for one, will welcome our new ________ overlords.
Kent Brockman on the Simpsons, "I for one welcome our new insect overlords". Although I've got a niggling suspicion that like alot of things on the Simpsons its a cultural referecne to something a bit older. Anyone?
Al.Accompanied by alot of the old school fans being violently sick, me amougst them. There is no way that a Harry Potter novel should ever have won the Hugo, just because its popular doesn't mean its good writing, or had anything profound to say abotu the world. Put it along side something like "Fire Upon the Deep" or "Ender's Game" and it pales in comparison.
Al.What do you have against Wired? Granted they don't get as technical as many scientific journals...
Okay as a scientist, someone who actually gets paid to do physics for a living, I can tell you that no matter what Wired is, it isn't a scientific journal. It has no peer review, it is therefore not a scientific journal. QED.
Wierd is (at best) popular science press, the chaps that get everything wrong all the time and are more interested in a story than the actual scientific content of the thing they're reporting.
Al.Don't be silly, why on Earth would you want to be able to do that?
Al.Trouble is, I'm on a Mac. I couldn't be infected with SoBig.F if I wanted to...
I'm on Linux, and I've had far more bounce messages telling me I've just sent an infected email than copies of SoBig-F, and my spam filter has caught well over 400 copies of SoBig-F now...
Al.Not unless there is one written in Java.
There is at least on pure Javaimplementation of SSH, MindTerm. Its pretty reasonable. How it is portable to MIDP, which is presuambly the flavour of Java we're talking about here is questionable...
Al.These analysts can't seem to wrap their minds around the fact that "Linux" is not just another company out to rule the desktop.
Right, I simply don't care whether Linux becomes a dominant force in the desktop market, and why should I? It does everything I need it to do right now.
I use neither GNOME, nor KDE, prefering to use a much simpler window manager on its own. All I want X windows for is for somewhere to put xterm's and editor windows, and for its network transparency. Click and drool graphics are no concern of mine, I have no idea why people feel the need to try and load down a perfectly good UNIX with all that junk.
Al.