What if the users explicitly agreed to this spying in their rental contracts?
Contracts written by lawyers but signed by the illiterate? You're not dealing with educated customers, or even trained customers.
Also there are plenty of "rights" you categorically cannot sign away in a contract. Its not as simple as Disney movie magic where the evil witch can write anything on a piece of paper and once the victim signs it, it has to happen that way.
Also there's usually a lemon law provision. Renting something you know is not private enough to use online for medical and financial transactions equals being ripped off. Thats not a laptop, thats a laptop minus all commerce and privacy. Now if they marketed it as a gaming and (free-)pr0n appliance rather than a general purpose PC, then maybe...
shows the Apple Inc. cofounder in a relaxed position, arms crossed loosely over his chest, with a pair of silver-rimmed Lunor glasses perched on his face and wearing a black cotton turtle neck, Levi 501 jeans and New Balance trainers.
I heard they're doing the android devs too, and the android devs looked awesome, but they insisted on skinning the android guys with an extra layer of solid lead shaped into a bad kmart/walmart imitation of Steve's outfit "because the customers like it that way".
I wish the almighty GOOG would lay the smack down on that practice. I currently have a nice almost entirely stock android phone at this time and I'm worried about upgrading to "nicer" phone with the unfortunate crippling disability of an unremovable coating of "Microsoft Bob" smeared as a layer covering up the android goodness.
The company says a team of artists spent three months working on the wax figure, inserting each strand of hair one by one into the wax head using a forked needle, and using fine silk threads to recreate the subtle veining in the whites of his eyes.
yeah whatever. Whats important is if they used rounded corners in their design, they are soooo screwed.
Also, did you know the figurine was animated, but the battery inside wore down and they don't design those things to be opened up and have their batteries replaced, so..
Version control is a critical basic dev and admin tool.
Once you figure that out, schedule a 8 hour meeting with all stakeholders and several layers of management to see if you're allowed to adjust the brightness and contrast settings on your monitor despite not being A+ certified, and/or if you're allowed to use the new fangled pageup/pagedown keys instead of hitting up and down arrow a lot of times, after all the IT helpdesk will require extensive training and documentation on how to be responsible for pgup/pgdn and its not written into any existing procedures nor are there tracked, graphed, and reported performance metrics on the use of pgup/pgdown keys. Also ask for permission to wear light gray socks instead of regular gray socks, that might have to go up to CEO level for approval of course.
If you don't see where I'm going, your boss Might be a micromanager so start looking for work. Emphasis on Might because reality could vary from "hey cool I just wanna learn more" all the way to "thou shalt hit the exact keystrokes your lord and master has specified in the exact order at the exact time", and there's no way to tell on slashdot.
Or just tell the boss, the other devs will laugh at you and steal your lunch money unless you install and use git, which happens to be free...
In my experience this is the exact opposite. Much free source control software has documentation 'when the developers get around to it'.
In late 2005, git documentation was kinda lacking.
Seven years later in 2012 you buy a copy of "pragmatic guide to git" from you know who, I think there's an oreilly book, Scott Chacon's book is CC licensed and freely downloadable at the link below, but the kernel wiki at the link below is really all you need.
If you have too much money and want literal hand holding I believe there are in-person classes and seminars available. A majority (all?) modern devs already use some form of version control and much like languages learning the 3rd takes about 5% the time of learning the 1st, so simply ask a more experienced coworker. I can teach someone the basics of "how to use git at $work with the cheat sheet" in, eh, 5, 10 minutes tops. If they're too dumb to figure it out given a sheet that shows exactly what to type at exactly what time, I don't want to be stuck cleaning up the mess they would make of the code, so its excellently self limiting in that manner.
A week? If it takes you a whole week to save the time required to "git init --bare; cp -r orig_code_location/*./; git add.; git commit -a -m 'initial commit'" you are doing something wrong.
Why yes, a simple and intuitive command line like that one practically types itself. It's the first thing any source-control newbie would think of!;)
He's doing it the hard way, or maybe trolling to make it look as hard as possible, assuming you find cp commands hard or intimidating... If you're willing to turn this copy of the code that you've cd'd into, into a git repo, the intimidating command line is:
git init
Thats it. Obviously your first (of millions?) of add/commit/push cycles is going to be a monster rather than just one or two files/lines. Also most people like modifying the defaults in new.git/config file (at the very least most people like to customize the remote origin url to make pushing easier) and most people want "something" in their.gitignore file unless they're got the worlds cleanest "make clean" makefile.
Go get SVN, which is free and simple. GIT is more powerful
I warn you, you'll regret it.... you can emulate svn in git merely by typing different command lines in a nearly 1:1 manner. If I recall SVN correctly, its been a few years, something like "svn update" is exactly coincident with "git pull". I think the absolute worst case scenario is where you used to "svn commit" in git you have to "git commit" and then "git push" to shove it up to a central repo...
The killer feature for GIT is when you understand branches and either use GIT-flow or doom yourself to reimplementing GIT-flow imperfectly. If you do branching "correctly" then you pretty much end up doing it the git-flow way so you may as well use git flow to automate the steps.
Nobody who switches to GIT later says to themselves, "man, I wish I had used SVN longer before switching"
Also while you're in the apt-get mood, may as well setup gitolite and gitweb and gitstats and a cron job to run gitstats on all your repos. gitweb and gitstats do what you'd guess. gitolite is basically a git hosting "service" for multi-users and multiple project that is configured, itself, in a git repo. If you start using git by having everyone ssh into some endusers account you'll inevitably WTF and either switch to gitolite or painfully reimplement gitolite.
Finally... backups... you need to backup the SVN server... however anyone (or anything) with a recently pulled git repo IS a backup, plus or minus some branch issues. People look at me weirdly when I explain I have over two dozen backups across the country of the total history of all my stuff automatically.
You missed the lifetime of the LED being about quintuple the lifetime of the filament bulbs. This is no bull, they really do last seemingly forever.
I've broken plenty of glass bulbs in my life but never shattered a LED outside a lab environment (smoke emitting diodes, etc). I've replaced LEDs for phosphor shift/wear and dimness but thats an annoyance rather than completely broken like a shattered glass bulb.
I think its interesting that 90% of the comments are that its illegal to work on a tourist visa so a VPN back home is illegal. In a minute or two I couldn't find the relevant legal defs for China, and that's all that really matters.
But in general, the extreme simplification has nothing to do with the claim. Generally a business visa means you're there doing commerce with a local while not employed by a local... signing contracts, sales visits, demos. Unless your VPN back home is to download the sales pitch powerpoint to show to a local you're probably OK. Generally a work visa means you're there working for a local as just another employee. From shoveling dirt to shoveling bits to pulling cable. The only way a VPN back home would matter would be getting accused of industrial espionage, or having two employers means a conflict of interest. Generally journalists get a special visa solely so customs does not F with them as much resulting in bad PR, or if there's not many in the country, for internal security to track where outsiders are watching them (so.. machine gun the protesters in this city, but not that city where the journalists are, for example)
It would generally appear that generically fooling with a VPN back home for your back home employer has nothing to do with signing contracts with the locals, or working for a local, so a tourist visa generically would be OK for casual logins. Now a firewall violating VPN might be completely illegal, but it wouldn't be a violation of the visa. Since you're going to China and not "generic-land" you need to read their exact laws to make sure.
Generally visas are very interested in how you plan to interact with the locals. If, while sleepless laying in the hotel bed, you think of a new TPS report header for back home, even if you call home to tell people about your amazing new TPS header, as a general rule visas are not designed to care about that, as long as the locals have absolutely nothing to do with it.
Where visas get fuzzy is two foreigners meet at the hotel bar and start talking about a biz deal between two foreign firms, no locals involved... do they seriously expect the host country to enforce the local version of contract law for free? It can get messy.
I'm curious about the statement that some we are seeing around 500M y.o. Can someone tell me what that is based upon?
How'd they do it? Donno. Maybe just assumptions based on redshift, maybe something else.
How would I do it? Wikipedia for metallicity. If it takes 14 billion years to nucleosynthesize this much carbon and stuff here in our galaxy, then if you see about 1/28th as much carbon and stuff over there then its probably only 1/28th the age or 500 Myr old.
Silly me I forgot to mention why you stack instead of stare. If you stare then looking at the physics of a CCD imager the photon, err, its resulting charge, that arrived 10% of the way thru the exposure, is going to start leaking thru the gate insulator. So is a digital result of 12345 equivalent to 12345 photons arriving the instant before you read the array out, or 98765 photons a long time ago that leaked outta the array? But if you take nice short exposures you don't have that issue.
Ask an EE... there is no such thing as a perfect capacitor or perfect insulator... Close, but not perfect. You need to sample often enough that non-linear imperfections are not relevant.
Think about it... a big ole 80s eprom that you smack the heck out of on the ground will leak its charge away in just a decade... a wimpy galaxy's worth of light is going to have issues much sooner especially since you want analog not digital threshold result. The physics are slightly different but this is close enough analogy.
2 million seconds is 33,333 minutes which is 555 hours which is 23 days. You mean they took an exposure for 23 days to get this image?
I'm not saying it can't be done, only that this seems a bit off.
Stacking. You can do this at home with a little scope and a CCD. Obviously this is an art requiring extensive signal processing expertise.
I'm guessing off the top of my head its a heck of a lot more like 3000 ten minute exposures stacked up. And probably a heck of a lot of rounding (like not 2 million but precisely 1834101.2352 seconds). So if you get an orbit every two hours, and each orbit you grabbed data for 10 mins, it would take like a year to gather the data and then stack em up.
Obviously if you're looking at planets or variable stars this is pretty meaningless, but entire galaxies probably average out plus or minus some supernovas.
Which screws it up even worse, since the labor force participation rate is low and dropping fast. Soon, we'll be a minority of population working country.
Better to take median annual income than median wage, since only about sixty percent of the population currently has a job.
There are countries with higher, and lower, labor force participation rates. Beer consumption is not limited to wage earners, in fact it tends toward non-wage earners, which has some secondary price forcing effect, in that if your consumers are unemployed and students and retired people, expensive good stuff isn't going to sell.
How about a cosmetic skingraft industry to leatherize your skin? I can hear the tv commercials now "You could spend a decade suntanning to achieve the trendy new leatherskin(tm) look but now after a simple operation at your doctors office...". You could pick your leatherized skin color, maybe even fake alligator...
Never underestimate the ability of young people to spend large amounts of money to do stupid things in the name of "rebellion". This could be the next "tattoo" or the next "piercing". We're getting close to the point where the early adopters of those fads have kids who need to rebel against them... Leatherskin could be the answer.... Hmm you could look like a Dune stillsuit when you're naked or motorcycle leathers... this could work and make a lot of money for people who invest early...
From a "value engineering" "profit engineering" standpoint the best solution for the vendor is a coffee pot style fusible link so the instant the bulb hits 160 degrees F it permanently shuts off. Still cooler than an old fashioned filament bulb so don't freak about fire danger. Nothing burns down and profit goes up.
If I were designing a LED drive ckt, sure, constant current source feeds a constant temp source, or more likely the other way around. But that's not "value engineered for profit in China" thinking.
In a decade+ of fooling around with alternative lighting, I've found its usually cheaper to buy new fixtures and a dimmer than to fool with the very limited availability of 3-way alternative lighting products. Modern and future experience might vary. You don't technically have to replace the 3-way fixture if you leave it on a setting where the bulb works and if you need dimming, slap a dimmer inline. Need to decide if the style matters more or the dimming matters more. Also you can replace a 3-way socket with a 2-way socket (and vice versa) if the design of the lamp is reasonable and you have some minimal electromechanical skills. Been there done that in the olden days back when TRS-80s were new. Try not to electrify (electri-fry?) a metal lamp by sloppy wiring if you go the socket replacement route.
The problem selling us on LEDs is you're fighting the propaganda spread by the CFL folks
Uh?
Like I wrote, I'm an early adopter with arrows in my back. The arrows in my back are all CFLs. One side of my basement has modern CFLs (laundry room) one side has modern LEDs (work room). In a "survival of the fittest" competition, side by side, its just no contest. I would not predict a bright future for CFLs (sorry for the bad pun).
Democrats want to get rid of the free market by govt regulation Republicans want to get rid of the free market by creating corporate monopolies (rich get richer) and outsourcing everything to China.
Republicans like to say they hate regulation, but they actually love regulation... look at SOX. For a F50 megacorp compliance cost is pocket change. For a small company the compliance cost knocks them outta the market.
Operating under the assumption you live and shop in a free market. Wake me up when that happens. If bulb choice were free, it would be practically the only free market out there.
LOL I had 16 seventy five watt bulbs in my basement workroom / lab and it still had some troublesome shadows and dark corners. Yes that would be a little bright for a bathroom or closet. Used to get hot in the summer but the LEDs keep it cool now. Yes, that was a rather expensive LED conversion project. CFLs make too much electrical noise for some of my electronics projects so it had to be RF-quiet LEDs. 40 feet along one side and 30 along the other that's just not as much light intensity as you'd think.
LED lights would save more electricity, last a LOT longer, but cost a LOT more. Thanks, guys.
Lets buy five 2000 hour 100 watt old fashioned filament bulbs for $5 100 watts / 1000 watts per KW * 0.10 dollars per KWh * 10000 hours total use = energy cost of $100 of highly govt subsidized electricity (real cost probably higher)
Lets buy the equivalent number of lumens in a 10000 hour LED I donno 8 watts or something for $50. 8 watts / 1000 * 0.10 * 10000 = $8 of highly subsidized electricity
Old fashioned total cost is $105. LED total cost is $58.
There's some cultural socioeconomic stuff going on too. I wouldn't be caught dead buying filament bulbs because that's poor people budgeting prioritizing up front cost over long term cost (look, its only $1 upfront instead of $50, that means you could buy $49 of malt liquor today, that kind of brilliant budgeting helps poor people stay poor).
I've been fooling around with LED lightbulbs (sometimes, unfortunately at great cost) for a decade or so. AKA I've been one of those early adopters with arrows in my back so you cheap bastards can now pay $25 for something better than I paid $150 for as a novelty a decade ago. They really do last 10000 hours when not abused. Two great ways to destroy a LED bulb : 1) Never dust it, because it never burns out so you ignore it, until its encrusted in a thick layer of dust, over heats, and poof. 2) Enclosed fixture, even worse outdoors in hot summer right after sunset, that's just not gonna live long Avoid those two scenarios and they really are a better, cheaper solution.
Its also weird as a lifestyle thing where in a big enough house you burn out a couple old fashioned bulbs every month, so you keep a stockpile and buy them at the food store as a regular purchase. Once you go LED they burn out so rarely that 1) Its a noteworthy event 2) you don't keep a stock on hand of replacements (well, you could I guess, but just like I don't keep spare major appliances around... Although a RAID array of clothes washers would help when a backlog accumulates)
While the reprocessing plant Sellafield and La Hague had their issues, none of them have been converted to superfund sites.
Yeah, as far as you know. See below:
Also whenever you have "security" it inevitably devolves into "security... provided to coverup the environmental contamination". Combine that with a profit motive and you're got a recipe for disaster.
If you think basic human nature is magically different in Sellafield and La Hague, we'll send our stuff over for reprocessing... I'm thinking its more wishful thinking...
The funny part is the attempt to cover up "real" data mining. Eh, data mining, don't worry about it, it just means collecting a mailing list.
Its all to cover up real data mining... mushing your private gmail emailing patterns against your amazon purchases combined with a detailed analysis of every other website you've ever visited and all your facebook friends.
I wouldn't worry about a guy creating or purchasing an email list. I'd worry about trivializing 1984 style surveillance by calling that action "data mining".
They are inherently breeder reactors and that raises concerns about nuclear proliferation. U-232 contamination makes it actually rather difficult to use a Thorium reactor to make bomb material
Close but wrong. All you need to make Pu is some U (no big deal) and some excess neutrons laying around for the U to soak up... like from a Th reactor.
A Th reactor can cook above delayed critical (obviously, otherwise how does it power up?, think about it). So you have a convenient controllable source of excess of neutrons laying around, and its no great technical achievement to shove a U target in there to soak up the excess neutrons thus making yummy Pu.
You have a really awkward situation of trying to prove they're not operating sloppily given the burnup vs claimed power output ratio. Its like using a town's Census and GDP figures to prove there's a meth cook in the town based on monetary flow rates or something... its just not gonna happen.
Or you can play around with making a design thats barely critical when you crank out all the stops, which is going to be an unholy PITA to operate and probably not terribly stable.
Hilariously, if you build a dual purpose reactor made to generate power and have a facility for neutron activation (research, hospital radiation therapy, etc) then all you need to do is stick a chunk of U in the neutron activation pig (usually pneumatic like a bank drive thru window) and pop that dude in the reactor and you'll get SOME Pu. Now you'll need more than a research pig to make a big Pu powered boom anytime this century, but this can be scaled up and this gives you an idea whats up.
It'll be slow and non-productive, but some big booms are worth waiting for.
Slashdot Mirror
What if the users explicitly agreed to this spying in their rental contracts?
Contracts written by lawyers but signed by the illiterate? You're not dealing with educated customers, or even trained customers.
Also there are plenty of "rights" you categorically cannot sign away in a contract. Its not as simple as Disney movie magic where the evil witch can write anything on a piece of paper and once the victim signs it, it has to happen that way.
Also there's usually a lemon law provision. Renting something you know is not private enough to use online for medical and financial transactions equals being ripped off. Thats not a laptop, thats a laptop minus all commerce and privacy. Now if they marketed it as a gaming and (free-)pr0n appliance rather than a general purpose PC, then maybe...
shows the Apple Inc. cofounder in a relaxed position, arms crossed loosely over his chest, with a pair of silver-rimmed Lunor glasses perched on his face and wearing a black cotton turtle neck, Levi 501 jeans and New Balance trainers.
I heard they're doing the android devs too, and the android devs looked awesome, but they insisted on skinning the android guys with an extra layer of solid lead shaped into a bad kmart/walmart imitation of Steve's outfit "because the customers like it that way".
I wish the almighty GOOG would lay the smack down on that practice. I currently have a nice almost entirely stock android phone at this time and I'm worried about upgrading to "nicer" phone with the unfortunate crippling disability of an unremovable coating of "Microsoft Bob" smeared as a layer covering up the android goodness.
The company says a team of artists spent three months working on the wax figure, inserting each strand of hair one by one into the wax head using a forked needle, and using fine silk threads to recreate the subtle veining in the whites of his eyes.
yeah whatever. Whats important is if they used rounded corners in their design, they are soooo screwed.
Also, did you know the figurine was animated, but the battery inside wore down and they don't design those things to be opened up and have their batteries replaced, so..
Version control is a critical basic dev and admin tool.
Once you figure that out, schedule a 8 hour meeting with all stakeholders and several layers of management to see if you're allowed to adjust the brightness and contrast settings on your monitor despite not being A+ certified, and/or if you're allowed to use the new fangled pageup/pagedown keys instead of hitting up and down arrow a lot of times, after all the IT helpdesk will require extensive training and documentation on how to be responsible for pgup/pgdn and its not written into any existing procedures nor are there tracked, graphed, and reported performance metrics on the use of pgup/pgdown keys. Also ask for permission to wear light gray socks instead of regular gray socks, that might have to go up to CEO level for approval of course.
If you don't see where I'm going, your boss Might be a micromanager so start looking for work. Emphasis on Might because reality could vary from "hey cool I just wanna learn more" all the way to "thou shalt hit the exact keystrokes your lord and master has specified in the exact order at the exact time", and there's no way to tell on slashdot.
Or just tell the boss, the other devs will laugh at you and steal your lunch money unless you install and use git, which happens to be free...
In my experience this is the exact opposite. Much free source control software has documentation 'when the developers get around to it'.
In late 2005, git documentation was kinda lacking.
Seven years later in 2012 you buy a copy of "pragmatic guide to git" from you know who, I think there's an oreilly book, Scott Chacon's book is CC licensed and freely downloadable at the link below, but the kernel wiki at the link below is really all you need.
http://git-scm.com/book
https://git.wiki.kernel.org/
If you have too much money and want literal hand holding I believe there are in-person classes and seminars available. A majority (all?) modern devs already use some form of version control and much like languages learning the 3rd takes about 5% the time of learning the 1st, so simply ask a more experienced coworker. I can teach someone the basics of "how to use git at $work with the cheat sheet" in, eh, 5, 10 minutes tops. If they're too dumb to figure it out given a sheet that shows exactly what to type at exactly what time, I don't want to be stuck cleaning up the mess they would make of the code, so its excellently self limiting in that manner.
A week? If it takes you a whole week to save the time required to "git init --bare; cp -r orig_code_location/* ./; git add .; git commit -a -m 'initial commit'" you are doing something wrong.
Why yes, a simple and intuitive command line like that one practically types itself. It's the first thing any source-control newbie would think of! ;)
He's doing it the hard way, or maybe trolling to make it look as hard as possible, assuming you find cp commands hard or intimidating... If you're willing to turn this copy of the code that you've cd'd into, into a git repo, the intimidating command line is:
git init
Thats it. Obviously your first (of millions?) of add/commit/push cycles is going to be a monster rather than just one or two files/lines. Also most people like modifying the defaults in new .git/config file (at the very least most people like to customize the remote origin url to make pushing easier) and most people want "something" in their .gitignore file unless they're got the worlds cleanest "make clean" makefile.
Go get SVN, which is free and simple. GIT is more powerful
I warn you, you'll regret it.... you can emulate svn in git merely by typing different command lines in a nearly 1:1 manner. If I recall SVN correctly, its been a few years, something like "svn update" is exactly coincident with "git pull". I think the absolute worst case scenario is where you used to "svn commit" in git you have to "git commit" and then "git push" to shove it up to a central repo...
The killer feature for GIT is when you understand branches and either use GIT-flow or doom yourself to reimplementing GIT-flow imperfectly. If you do branching "correctly" then you pretty much end up doing it the git-flow way so you may as well use git flow to automate the steps.
Nobody who switches to GIT later says to themselves, "man, I wish I had used SVN longer before switching"
Also while you're in the apt-get mood, may as well setup gitolite and gitweb and gitstats and a cron job to run gitstats on all your repos. gitweb and gitstats do what you'd guess. gitolite is basically a git hosting "service" for multi-users and multiple project that is configured, itself, in a git repo. If you start using git by having everyone ssh into some endusers account you'll inevitably WTF and either switch to gitolite or painfully reimplement gitolite.
Finally... backups... you need to backup the SVN server... however anyone (or anything) with a recently pulled git repo IS a backup, plus or minus some branch issues. People look at me weirdly when I explain I have over two dozen backups across the country of the total history of all my stuff automatically.
You missed the lifetime of the LED being about quintuple the lifetime of the filament bulbs. This is no bull, they really do last seemingly forever.
I've broken plenty of glass bulbs in my life but never shattered a LED outside a lab environment (smoke emitting diodes, etc). I've replaced LEDs for phosphor shift/wear and dimness but thats an annoyance rather than completely broken like a shattered glass bulb.
I think its interesting that 90% of the comments are that its illegal to work on a tourist visa so a VPN back home is illegal.
In a minute or two I couldn't find the relevant legal defs for China, and that's all that really matters.
But in general, the extreme simplification has nothing to do with the claim.
Generally a business visa means you're there doing commerce with a local while not employed by a local... signing contracts, sales visits, demos. Unless your VPN back home is to download the sales pitch powerpoint to show to a local you're probably OK.
Generally a work visa means you're there working for a local as just another employee. From shoveling dirt to shoveling bits to pulling cable. The only way a VPN back home would matter would be getting accused of industrial espionage, or having two employers means a conflict of interest.
Generally journalists get a special visa solely so customs does not F with them as much resulting in bad PR, or if there's not many in the country, for internal security to track where outsiders are watching them (so.. machine gun the protesters in this city, but not that city where the journalists are, for example)
It would generally appear that generically fooling with a VPN back home for your back home employer has nothing to do with signing contracts with the locals, or working for a local, so a tourist visa generically would be OK for casual logins. Now a firewall violating VPN might be completely illegal, but it wouldn't be a violation of the visa. Since you're going to China and not "generic-land" you need to read their exact laws to make sure.
Generally visas are very interested in how you plan to interact with the locals. If, while sleepless laying in the hotel bed, you think of a new TPS report header for back home, even if you call home to tell people about your amazing new TPS header, as a general rule visas are not designed to care about that, as long as the locals have absolutely nothing to do with it.
Where visas get fuzzy is two foreigners meet at the hotel bar and start talking about a biz deal between two foreign firms, no locals involved... do they seriously expect the host country to enforce the local version of contract law for free? It can get messy.
I'm curious about the statement that some we are seeing around 500M y.o. Can someone tell me what that is based upon?
How'd they do it? Donno. Maybe just assumptions based on redshift, maybe something else.
How would I do it? Wikipedia for metallicity. If it takes 14 billion years to nucleosynthesize this much carbon and stuff here in our galaxy, then if you see about 1/28th as much carbon and stuff over there then its probably only 1/28th the age or 500 Myr old.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallicity
I don't think these guys did a metallicity analysis, but someone else probably did at an extrapolated redshift...
Silly me I forgot to mention why you stack instead of stare.
If you stare then looking at the physics of a CCD imager the photon, err, its resulting charge, that arrived 10% of the way thru the exposure, is going to start leaking thru the gate insulator. So is a digital result of 12345 equivalent to 12345 photons arriving the instant before you read the array out, or 98765 photons a long time ago that leaked outta the array? But if you take nice short exposures you don't have that issue.
Ask an EE... there is no such thing as a perfect capacitor or perfect insulator... Close, but not perfect. You need to sample often enough that non-linear imperfections are not relevant.
Think about it... a big ole 80s eprom that you smack the heck out of on the ground will leak its charge away in just a decade... a wimpy galaxy's worth of light is going to have issues much sooner especially since you want analog not digital threshold result. The physics are slightly different but this is close enough analogy.
2 million seconds is 33,333 minutes which is 555 hours which is 23 days. You mean they took an exposure for 23 days to get this image?
I'm not saying it can't be done, only that this seems a bit off.
Stacking. You can do this at home with a little scope and a CCD. Obviously this is an art requiring extensive signal processing expertise.
I'm guessing off the top of my head its a heck of a lot more like 3000 ten minute exposures stacked up. And probably a heck of a lot of rounding (like not 2 million but precisely 1834101.2352 seconds). So if you get an orbit every two hours, and each orbit you grabbed data for 10 mins, it would take like a year to gather the data and then stack em up.
Obviously if you're looking at planets or variable stars this is pretty meaningless, but entire galaxies probably average out plus or minus some supernovas.
And that's only because American wages are high
Which screws it up even worse, since the labor force participation rate is low and dropping fast. Soon, we'll be a minority of population working country.
Better to take median annual income than median wage, since only about sixty percent of the population currently has a job.
There are countries with higher, and lower, labor force participation rates. Beer consumption is not limited to wage earners, in fact it tends toward non-wage earners, which has some secondary price forcing effect, in that if your consumers are unemployed and students and retired people, expensive good stuff isn't going to sell.
I'd be more interested in a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Dishwashers.
I have a RAID 1 array of those AKA children. Really Fing expensive, trust me there. I can get the kids to do dishes by hand, but laundry by hand? No.
How about a cosmetic skingraft industry to leatherize your skin? I can hear the tv commercials now "You could spend a decade suntanning to achieve the trendy new leatherskin(tm) look but now after a simple operation at your doctors office...". You could pick your leatherized skin color, maybe even fake alligator...
Never underestimate the ability of young people to spend large amounts of money to do stupid things in the name of "rebellion". This could be the next "tattoo" or the next "piercing". We're getting close to the point where the early adopters of those fads have kids who need to rebel against them... Leatherskin could be the answer.... Hmm you could look like a Dune stillsuit when you're naked or motorcycle leathers... this could work and make a lot of money for people who invest early...
From a "value engineering" "profit engineering" standpoint the best solution for the vendor is a coffee pot style fusible link so the instant the bulb hits 160 degrees F it permanently shuts off. Still cooler than an old fashioned filament bulb so don't freak about fire danger. Nothing burns down and profit goes up.
If I were designing a LED drive ckt, sure, constant current source feeds a constant temp source, or more likely the other way around. But that's not "value engineered for profit in China" thinking.
Do they offer the 3-way LED bulbs yet?
In a decade+ of fooling around with alternative lighting, I've found its usually cheaper to buy new fixtures and a dimmer than to fool with the very limited availability of 3-way alternative lighting products. Modern and future experience might vary. You don't technically have to replace the 3-way fixture if you leave it on a setting where the bulb works and if you need dimming, slap a dimmer inline. Need to decide if the style matters more or the dimming matters more. Also you can replace a 3-way socket with a 2-way socket (and vice versa) if the design of the lamp is reasonable and you have some minimal electromechanical skills. Been there done that in the olden days back when TRS-80s were new. Try not to electrify (electri-fry?) a metal lamp by sloppy wiring if you go the socket replacement route.
The problem selling us on LEDs is you're fighting the propaganda spread by the CFL folks
Uh?
Like I wrote, I'm an early adopter with arrows in my back. The arrows in my back are all CFLs. One side of my basement has modern CFLs (laundry room) one side has modern LEDs (work room). In a "survival of the fittest" competition, side by side, its just no contest. I would not predict a bright future for CFLs (sorry for the bad pun).
Democrats want to get rid of the free market by govt regulation
Republicans want to get rid of the free market by creating corporate monopolies (rich get richer) and outsourcing everything to China.
Republicans like to say they hate regulation, but they actually love regulation... look at SOX. For a F50 megacorp compliance cost is pocket change. For a small company the compliance cost knocks them outta the market.
It's just freedom
Operating under the assumption you live and shop in a free market. Wake me up when that happens. If bulb choice were free, it would be practically the only free market out there.
LOL I had 16 seventy five watt bulbs in my basement workroom / lab and it still had some troublesome shadows and dark corners. Yes that would be a little bright for a bathroom or closet. Used to get hot in the summer but the LEDs keep it cool now. Yes, that was a rather expensive LED conversion project. CFLs make too much electrical noise for some of my electronics projects so it had to be RF-quiet LEDs. 40 feet along one side and 30 along the other that's just not as much light intensity as you'd think.
LED lights would save more electricity, last a LOT longer, but cost a LOT more. Thanks, guys.
Lets buy five 2000 hour 100 watt old fashioned filament bulbs for $5
100 watts / 1000 watts per KW * 0.10 dollars per KWh * 10000 hours total use = energy cost of $100 of highly govt subsidized electricity (real cost probably higher)
Lets buy the equivalent number of lumens in a 10000 hour LED I donno 8 watts or something for $50.
8 watts / 1000 * 0.10 * 10000 = $8 of highly subsidized electricity
Old fashioned total cost is $105. LED total cost is $58.
There's some cultural socioeconomic stuff going on too. I wouldn't be caught dead buying filament bulbs because that's poor people budgeting prioritizing up front cost over long term cost (look, its only $1 upfront instead of $50, that means you could buy $49 of malt liquor today, that kind of brilliant budgeting helps poor people stay poor).
I've been fooling around with LED lightbulbs (sometimes, unfortunately at great cost) for a decade or so. AKA I've been one of those early adopters with arrows in my back so you cheap bastards can now pay $25 for something better than I paid $150 for as a novelty a decade ago. They really do last 10000 hours when not abused. Two great ways to destroy a LED bulb : 1) Never dust it, because it never burns out so you ignore it, until its encrusted in a thick layer of dust, over heats, and poof. 2) Enclosed fixture, even worse outdoors in hot summer right after sunset, that's just not gonna live long Avoid those two scenarios and they really are a better, cheaper solution.
Its also weird as a lifestyle thing where in a big enough house you burn out a couple old fashioned bulbs every month, so you keep a stockpile and buy them at the food store as a regular purchase. Once you go LED they burn out so rarely that 1) Its a noteworthy event 2) you don't keep a stock on hand of replacements (well, you could I guess, but just like I don't keep spare major appliances around ... Although a RAID array of clothes washers would help when a backlog accumulates)
While the reprocessing plant Sellafield and La Hague had their issues, none of them have been converted to superfund sites.
Yeah, as far as you know. See below:
Also whenever you have "security" it inevitably devolves into "security... provided to coverup the environmental contamination". Combine that with a profit motive and you're got a recipe for disaster.
If you think basic human nature is magically different in Sellafield and La Hague, we'll send our stuff over for reprocessing... I'm thinking its more wishful thinking...
People sent email to the minister of immigration
The funny part is the attempt to cover up "real" data mining. Eh, data mining, don't worry about it, it just means collecting a mailing list.
Its all to cover up real data mining... mushing your private gmail emailing patterns against your amazon purchases combined with a detailed analysis of every other website you've ever visited and all your facebook friends.
I wouldn't worry about a guy creating or purchasing an email list. I'd worry about trivializing 1984 style surveillance by calling that action "data mining".
They are inherently breeder reactors and that raises concerns about nuclear proliferation. U-232 contamination makes it actually rather difficult to use a Thorium reactor to make bomb material
Close but wrong. All you need to make Pu is some U (no big deal) and some excess neutrons laying around for the U to soak up... like from a Th reactor.
A Th reactor can cook above delayed critical (obviously, otherwise how does it power up?, think about it). So you have a convenient controllable source of excess of neutrons laying around, and its no great technical achievement to shove a U target in there to soak up the excess neutrons thus making yummy Pu.
You have a really awkward situation of trying to prove they're not operating sloppily given the burnup vs claimed power output ratio. Its like using a town's Census and GDP figures to prove there's a meth cook in the town based on monetary flow rates or something... its just not gonna happen.
Or you can play around with making a design thats barely critical when you crank out all the stops, which is going to be an unholy PITA to operate and probably not terribly stable.
Hilariously, if you build a dual purpose reactor made to generate power and have a facility for neutron activation (research, hospital radiation therapy, etc) then all you need to do is stick a chunk of U in the neutron activation pig (usually pneumatic like a bank drive thru window) and pop that dude in the reactor and you'll get SOME Pu. Now you'll need more than a research pig to make a big Pu powered boom anytime this century, but this can be scaled up and this gives you an idea whats up.
It'll be slow and non-productive, but some big booms are worth waiting for.