The parent is a troll, or at least off-topic and probably also redundant.
Look at the last line. If you don't know what that acronym is, scan at -1.
It appears that this is a copy of an old message from back in the August 2003 time-frame.
Re:The whole solar thing...
on
Mars Rovers Update
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Why did NASA stray from 'nuclear' batteries, like they've used with the Pioneer, Galileo, Voyager and Cassini missions?
First of all, those are all non-landing missions to the outer solar system (and beyond).
This mission is a landing mission in the inner solar system, where the sun is bright enough to power the landers.
Second, the use of radioelectric power generators is risky, dangerous and expensive. If there's a less risky, less dangerous and less expensive option, NASA will gladly take it.
No power supply problem, just less power
on
Mars Rovers Update
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· Score: 4, Insightful
"In other news, the rovers are beginning to experience power supply problems due to the accumulation of dust on their solar panels"
This makes things sound worse than they actually are. They are not beginning to experience power supply problems -- they are simply getting less power than they were when it first landed, and they are taking some steps to operate more efficiently.
"The amount of power Opportunity is able to generate continues to dwindle due to the decreasing amount of sunlight (energy) reaching the solar panels during the Martian seasonal transition to winter."
"NASA's two robotic rovers on Mars have begun scaling back their working hours as the approach of autumn on the Red Planet and dust on their solar panels slowly chokes off their power supplies, a NASA official said on Friday."
What the NASA official (Richard Cook) actually said was: "The vehicle is continuing to perform fine but we are starting to modify our daily process to respond to the decreasing power."
Both the dust accumulation and the decrease of sunlight were anticipated. The lifetime (designed to be 90 days) of each Rover is determined when the batteries can no longer be charged enough to survive the cold nights. Spirit is already 54 days into its 90-day "death sentence".
The density of the collapsed, degenerate-matter object (ie., the neutron star) is enormously greater than the density of the normal-matter crust, that the crust behaves almost like a very thin and very dense "atmosphere" above the neutron star.
As pointed out, when enough debris accumulates in this crust, all sorts of interesting things can happen:
a) Some of it fuses into higher elements (as reported in the article). This fusion releases tremendous amounts of energy.
b) Some of it undoubtedly collapses into degenerate matter, releasing tremendous amounts of energy.
In fact, probably a) or b) can kick off the other process as well.
It should also be noted that neutron stars are left-over cores of supernovae. A supernova occurs when the normal-matter core of a very large star suddenly collapses into a degenerate object.
This collapse is on an astronomical scale: Something about the size and mass of the sun collapses into an object 10 miles across, with the same mass.
(The sun itself is too small for this to happen).
The collapse results in a star blowing off most of its mass in an enormous implosion-explosion.
The neutron star is what's left over. If it's massive enough, an event horizon forms around the neutron star, turning it into a black hole.
Re:Be careful
on
Brine on Mars?
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· Score: 4, Informative
Right.
The brine speculation is coming from people not involved on the project, which space.com is reporting uncritically. The news conference where the project scientists are presenting their information mention nothing about brine.
It should be pointed out that the singularity is not a physical object. It is where the mathematics breaks down (eg., divide by zero).
What happens physically is that different or modified physical laws take over before the singularity is reached, and the result is that there is no longer a singularity.
Example: In a simple Newtonian gravitational model of the Earth, assume the Earth is a point mass. The center of the force (ie., at the center of the earth) is, in fact, a singularity.
In reality, the Earth has some extent, and what you find happening when you start burrowing into the Earth to get to the "singularity" is that the gravitational force begins actually decreasing as you get closer and closer to the center (because any mass of the earth that is further from the center than you are exerts no net force on you).
The result is at the center there is no longer any singularity, because the model has changed.
The article clearly states the piece was from the Progress or Soyuz spacecraft docked to the Space Station. It is a part that locks down the solar panels on these craft.
I find it hard to worry about extinction of languages.
Extinction is a natural part of life, and the only things that become extinct are things that, for one reason or another, cannot manage to survive.
In the case of languages, the causes of extinction would be lack of utility, lack of speakers or something else.
Why would anyone want to incorporate what might be unsuccessful features in a computer language?
Implying that there would be a loss to Computer Science from a loss of a language seems like quite a stretch. At worst, it would seem that the loss would be positive for Computer Science, in the sense of, "Look what would happen to your language if you had concepts of time like this dead language!"
Also, an extinct language should not be confused with a dead language. Latin, for example, still has tremendous utility and value in the world, partly because it is dead and unchanging. It is the base for many living languages, and is a universal language for a universal church.
Re:Scooby Snacks: Think of the butter
on
SCOoby Snacks
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· Score: 5, Interesting
First, butter is probably a bad analogy, because it loses its independent identity when it is mixed into the cake and cooked.
Contributions to Linux are discreet and each component can be uniquely identified and its heritage proved.
Second, stipulating that SCO did indeed own certain discreet elements which have gotten incorporated into Linux, then I agree.
Components that are provably owned by SCO can be removed.
The actual argument in court is about whether SCO did, in fact, own these things that got incorporated into Linux. SCO claims they do, IBM claims they don't.
Currently, IBM and the court are waiting for SCO to show what they owned, so that the ownership claim can be evaluated properly.
SCO hasn't shown it yet, and the little they have shown outside court has been proved not to be owned by them. But since that occurred outside court, it doesn't matter to the case.
I think SCO's basic problem is that they are pursuing this case under some presuppositions that are clearly false, and will be proved to be false in court. But that day is still a long way off, since the case is still in the discovery phase.
An Ignorant American writes "Perusing an Air & Space magazine the other day, I came across an article about Russian Moon Rovers during the space-race era. Thanks to my American science education, I had never heard of this feat.
I remember these buggies. They were front page news in the newspapers and magazines at the time. I was in an American high-school, enjoying a good science education.
I don't remember seeing 'em on tee vee. Maybe that's why you missed 'em.
No, it continues removing the pollution, but instead of the nitric acid reacting with the carbonate to produce carbon dioxide and water, nitric acid just oozes down your hood and door, taking the paint with it.
According to the article, after the carbonate runs out after about 5 years in a heavily polluted city, "the titanium dioxide will continue to break down NOx, but the acid this produces will discolour the paint."
Actually since the digits of PI are non-repeating and non-terminating, in theory every possible message (including representations of *your* DNA code, works of Shakespeare, etc.) should be present within it an infinite number of times.
Yes, of course (assuming that they are also uniformly and randomly distributed, which appears to be the case).
This is an even bigger hole in Sagan's hypothesis! The best that could be hoped for would be that such a message occurs improbably soon in the sequence of digits.
This would only decrease the probability that such a message was actually random, not eliminate it.
Debunking constants
on
The Golden Ratio
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Livio squarely debunks the idea that the Golden Ratio is present in many famous paintings and architecture that has been postulated in previous books.
This doesn't sound exactly right.
I think it may be the case that writers have attributed the use of phi in art when there was no such intentional use by the artist.
But the very nature of phi makes it unlikely not to appear in certain contexts.
Same with pi.
The thing I love about math is that it has utterly nothing to do with reality or the universe or anything at all.
Typically, however, physicists make assumptions that match, more or less closely, to what is happening in the real world, so the conclusions from such assumptions match, more or less closely, to what is actually happening in the real world.
But there is no reason why some utterly alien intelligence can't make a set of assumptions that match their reality, which would be utterly alien to us, yet still valid, and still recognizable by mathematicians, if not physicists.
This is the giant flaw at the end of the book Contact, by Carl Sagan. Ellie discovers a message in the constant pi, placed there by an intelligence. If this were a constant of physics, that would imply the existence of some incredibly advanced intelligence that engineered the universe to contain a constant with precisely that value. This is somewhat plausible, and I believe it was Sagan's intent.
But he picked pi, which actually has nothing at all to do with this or any other universe.
What kind of incredibly advanced intelligence can possibly engineer that? I can only think of One.
"It's not that the crew was unprofessional or ill, but on certain considerations it was not ready," the spokesman said.
"The crew members should understand each other's words and opinions...they should get on like good friends."
Well, it just shows how difficult any Mars trip is going to be, with the astronauts having to be in close quarters for 2-3 years, rather than simply 6 months.
Also, if incompatibilities develop during the flight, they will obviously have to be dealt with, rather than just getting a replacement.
They don't *need* the Large Hadron Collider to confirm it, but if they did use it, they could not only confirm it, but refine the measurements further and probably learn all kinds of other things at the same time.
It's like using a small telescope vs using a large one: A small telescope may confirm something, but a larger one will tell you a lot more about it.
A "well crafted experiment at a smaller collider could" indeed positively confirm it.
This is false. They didn't need the SCSC to make this discovery. They did it at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, which does not have a particularly high energy collider.
All they did was refine some data from the 1970s experiment, which leads to the startling conclusion that the Standard Model is not a perfect description.
Most tee vee shows like Nova assume that the only way to show that the Standard Model is not a perfect description is by using higher and higher energy colliders (like the SCSC).
"...top-level and middle-level executives from the United States and Britain exploring job opportunities in top technology firms. This is in addition to regular middle-level and top-level management positions held by foreigners in multinational companies that have large operations [in India]."
It should be noted that the Indian jobs starting to be filled by foreigners are middle- and upper-level management jobs--not software or hardware engineers!
It's a slow process. The whole thing is like a big trainwreck happening in painfully slow motion. But this shows that even they have lost some confidence in their primary strategy of filing lawsuits. I think that is significant.
The "end of the end" will probably happen years from now when SCO is bankrupt and has lost a bunch of lawsuits and the management is completely different.
Slashdot Mirror
The original non-troll post is here
The parent is a troll, or at least off-topic and probably also redundant.
Look at the last line. If you don't know what that acronym is, scan at -1.
It appears that this is a copy of an old message from back in the August 2003 time-frame.
This mission is a landing mission in the inner solar system, where the sun is bright enough to power the landers.
Second, the use of radioelectric power generators is risky, dangerous and expensive. If there's a less risky, less dangerous and less expensive option, NASA will gladly take it.
This makes things sound worse than they actually are. They are not beginning to experience power supply problems -- they are simply getting less power than they were when it first landed, and they are taking some steps to operate more efficiently.
From SpaceFlightNow, in the report for THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2004 2215 GMT (5:15 p.m. EST):
From the Reuters report:
What the NASA official (Richard Cook) actually said was: "The vehicle is continuing to perform fine but we are starting to modify our daily process to respond to the decreasing power."
Both the dust accumulation and the decrease of sunlight were anticipated. The lifetime (designed to be 90 days) of each Rover is determined when the batteries can no longer be charged enough to survive the cold nights. Spirit is already 54 days into its 90-day "death sentence".
Right.
The density of the collapsed, degenerate-matter object (ie., the neutron star) is enormously greater than the density of the normal-matter crust, that the crust behaves almost like a very thin and very dense "atmosphere" above the neutron star.
As pointed out, when enough debris accumulates in this crust, all sorts of interesting things can happen:
a) Some of it fuses into higher elements (as reported in the article). This fusion releases tremendous amounts of energy.
b) Some of it undoubtedly collapses into degenerate matter, releasing tremendous amounts of energy.
In fact, probably a) or b) can kick off the other process as well.
It should also be noted that neutron stars are left-over cores of supernovae. A supernova occurs when the normal-matter core of a very large star suddenly collapses into a degenerate object.
This collapse is on an astronomical scale: Something about the size and mass of the sun collapses into an object 10 miles across, with the same mass.
(The sun itself is too small for this to happen).
The collapse results in a star blowing off most of its mass in an enormous implosion-explosion.
The neutron star is what's left over. If it's massive enough, an event horizon forms around the neutron star, turning it into a black hole.
Right.
m l.
The brine speculation is coming from people not involved on the project, which space.com is reporting uncritically. The news conference where the project scientists are presenting their information mention nothing about brine.
See the entry for Thursday, February 19, 2004 at http://www.spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/status.ht
It should be pointed out that the singularity is not a physical object. It is where the mathematics breaks down (eg., divide by zero).
What happens physically is that different or modified physical laws take over before the singularity is reached, and the result is that there is no longer a singularity.
Example: In a simple Newtonian gravitational model of the Earth, assume the Earth is a point mass. The center of the force (ie., at the center of the earth) is, in fact, a singularity.
In reality, the Earth has some extent, and what you find happening when you start burrowing into the Earth to get to the "singularity" is that the gravitational force begins actually decreasing as you get closer and closer to the center (because any mass of the earth that is further from the center than you are exerts no net force on you).
The result is at the center there is no longer any singularity, because the model has changed.
The article clearly states the piece was from the Progress or Soyuz spacecraft docked to the Space Station. It is a part that locks down the solar panels on these craft.
I find it hard to worry about extinction of languages.
Extinction is a natural part of life, and the only things that become extinct are things that, for one reason or another, cannot manage to survive.
In the case of languages, the causes of extinction would be lack of utility, lack of speakers or something else.
Why would anyone want to incorporate what might be unsuccessful features in a computer language?
Implying that there would be a loss to Computer Science from a loss of a language seems like quite a stretch. At worst, it would seem that the loss would be positive for Computer Science, in the sense of, "Look what would happen to your language if you had concepts of time like this dead language!"
Also, an extinct language should not be confused with a dead language. Latin, for example, still has tremendous utility and value in the world, partly because it is dead and unchanging. It is the base for many living languages, and is a universal language for a universal church.
First, butter is probably a bad analogy, because it loses its independent identity when it is mixed into the cake and cooked.
Contributions to Linux are discreet and each component can be uniquely identified and its heritage proved.
Second, stipulating that SCO did indeed own certain discreet elements which have gotten incorporated into Linux, then I agree.
Components that are provably owned by SCO can be removed.
The actual argument in court is about whether SCO did, in fact, own these things that got incorporated into Linux. SCO claims they do, IBM claims they don't.
Currently, IBM and the court are waiting for SCO to show what they owned, so that the ownership claim can be evaluated properly.
SCO hasn't shown it yet, and the little they have shown outside court has been proved not to be owned by them. But since that occurred outside court, it doesn't matter to the case.
I think SCO's basic problem is that they are pursuing this case under some presuppositions that are clearly false, and will be proved to be false in court. But that day is still a long way off, since the case is still in the discovery phase.
Hey, I like your user id!
But you rounded the last digit wrong.
The value is
3.14159265358979...
so, rounding to 13 decimal digits (after the decimal point) and removing the decimal would yield 31415926535898
I remember these buggies. They were front page news in the newspapers and magazines at the time. I was in an American high-school, enjoying a good science education.
I don't remember seeing 'em on tee vee. Maybe that's why you missed 'em.
No, it continues removing the pollution, but instead of the nitric acid reacting with the carbonate to produce carbon dioxide and water, nitric acid just oozes down your hood and door, taking the paint with it.
According to the article, after the carbonate runs out after about 5 years in a heavily polluted city, "the titanium dioxide will continue to break down NOx, but the acid this produces will discolour the paint."
Doesn't sound very good.
Yes, of course (assuming that they are also uniformly and randomly distributed, which appears to be the case).
This is an even bigger hole in Sagan's hypothesis! The best that could be hoped for would be that such a message occurs improbably soon in the sequence of digits.
This would only decrease the probability that such a message was actually random, not eliminate it.
This doesn't sound exactly right.
I think it may be the case that writers have attributed the use of phi in art when there was no such intentional use by the artist.
But the very nature of phi makes it unlikely not to appear in certain contexts.
Same with pi.
The thing I love about math is that it has utterly nothing to do with reality or the universe or anything at all.
Typically, however, physicists make assumptions that match, more or less closely, to what is happening in the real world, so the conclusions from such assumptions match, more or less closely, to what is actually happening in the real world.
But there is no reason why some utterly alien intelligence can't make a set of assumptions that match their reality, which would be utterly alien to us, yet still valid, and still recognizable by mathematicians, if not physicists.
This is the giant flaw at the end of the book Contact, by Carl Sagan. Ellie discovers a message in the constant pi, placed there by an intelligence. If this were a constant of physics, that would imply the existence of some incredibly advanced intelligence that engineered the universe to contain a constant with precisely that value. This is somewhat plausible, and I believe it was Sagan's intent.
But he picked pi, which actually has nothing at all to do with this or any other universe.
What kind of incredibly advanced intelligence can possibly engineer that? I can only think of One.
Newton was an asshole. Is Wolfram trying to distance himself from Newton?
Well, it just shows how difficult any Mars trip is going to be, with the astronauts having to be in close quarters for 2-3 years, rather than simply 6 months.
Also, if incompatibilities develop during the flight, they will obviously have to be dealt with, rather than just getting a replacement.
They don't *need* the Large Hadron Collider to confirm it, but if they did use it, they could not only confirm it, but refine the measurements further and probably learn all kinds of other things at the same time.
It's like using a small telescope vs using a large one: A small telescope may confirm something, but a larger one will tell you a lot more about it.
A "well crafted experiment at a smaller collider could" indeed positively confirm it.
This is false. They didn't need the SCSC to make this discovery. They did it at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, which does not have a particularly high energy collider.
All they did was refine some data from the 1970s experiment, which leads to the startling conclusion that the Standard Model is not a perfect description.
Most tee vee shows like Nova assume that the only way to show that the Standard Model is not a perfect description is by using higher and higher energy colliders (like the SCSC).
It should be noted that the Indian jobs starting to be filled by foreigners are middle- and upper-level management jobs--not software or hardware engineers!
I think so.
Check out this recent Slashdot article.
Don't get mad at Microsoft; get mad at eWeek for placing the the silly ad where they placed it.
I thought it was hilarious for the ad to be completely surrounded by the article about the Linux Kernel release.
Almost makes you wish SCO was in the news business....
Yeah, I realize that.
It's a slow process. The whole thing is like a big trainwreck happening in painfully slow motion. But this shows that even they have lost some confidence in their primary strategy of filing lawsuits. I think that is significant.
The "end of the end" will probably happen years from now when SCO is bankrupt and has lost a bunch of lawsuits and the management is completely different.
Heck, they might even suddenly turn "nice".
That would definitely be the "end of the end".
This is a sign that SCO believes they might not win in the courts with existing laws, and so must lobby to change the laws to their benefit.
How they can hope to do this in the face of much better funded and more experienced lobbyists who are opposed to them is a mystery.
I think it's also a sign that their whole strategy is running out of steam.