Not officially. There is a name picked out, but it's being kept extremely until the official renaming. Which for most space observatories would have been by now, but apparently the family of the person in question (they're always named after famous dead astronomers) doesn't want it named until it's proven to work... science verification should take place in November, so it'll probably be named in late November.
Here's a little piece of javascript you can save as a bookmark that automatically fills out the registration form with random junk (modified by me based on code by Jason Day found on www.majcher.com:
Sure, but they point they're making is that it's not intuitively obvious to most people that there could be text in a Word document other than what appears.
So a relatively security-conscious person who just doesn't know anything about Word file formats could easily publish something online on purpose without knowing that there is (invisible) sensitive information in it, even if they'd never put that information in a public place on purpose.
I wonder how they detected it. I assume (because it is so massive and in a binary system) they detected it by the normal "wobble" method. Does anyone know?
Yes, kind of. There are actually two different "wobble" methods, one for pulsars and one for normal stars. The first extrasolar planet was found around a pulsar, but most of the others have been found around normal stars.
While in both cases you are detecting the Doppler shift due to the primary moving toward/away from you under the influence of the planet's gravity, the way you measure that is different. For normal stars, you look at a spectrum, find an absorption line, and very very very carefully measure its wavelength over a few years hoping to see it drift back and forth.
Pulsar spectra don't have narrow absorption lines you can use, but they do emit very sharp radio pulses every second (or in some cases, every millisecond... but this particular one isn't a millisecond pulsar). You can treat the time between pulses like the frequency of the light - it's affected in exactly the same way by the Doppler effect. So you measure the time between pulses very carefully and see it oscillate over a period of a few years.
How dense are these things, say, compared to a black hole? If something w/ 15 Km diameter can be detected from so far away, I would think that it would have to have a great deal of mass in that small volume, correct?
A typical neutron star has a mass of about 1.4 times the mass of the Sun. The Schwarzschild radius (the radius you would need to contain that mass in for it to be a black hole) for 1.4 solar masses is 4.1 km (rough estimate: 3 km per solar mass). Neutron stars typically have radii of around 15 km, so they're only 3-4x larger than they would need to be to be a black hole (and therefore have an average density about 13x less than a black hole of the same mass).
This scares the shit out of me. I just submitted my paperwork to be registered for SEVIS, and I need to travel outside the US... in fact, I'm going to be out of the country when they're expecting it to be done. They're going to courier it to my hotel in Australia. I'd figured there was nothing to worry about, but if I can't get back into the US... I'm fucked.
Anyone have any first-hand experience with registering with SEVIS? Do the bugs screw over many students, or do they just make the lives of the people in charge of international students hell?
Thing is this. The DCMA basicaly says that it is against the law to break encryption. So if it is against the law to break encryption, then there is no need for strong encryption.
The DMCA does not make it illegal to break encryption. I wish people would stop saying this - the DMCA is evil enough without invoking boogeymen.
The DMCA does make it illegal to break encryption that is used by a copyright owner to prevent "unauthorized" access to their copyrighted work (or to "traffic in" a device designed break that encryption). Which is still utterly idiotic, but is not the blanket evil you make it sound.
Three female volunteers currently are testing prototypes in the field.
Am I the only one who burst out laughing at that line?:-) What a great euphemism for "go walking in the most dangerous areas they can possibly find trying to get people to assault them."
My understanding of the DMCA is that the anticircumvention provisions only apply to copyrighted works. Once the copyright expires, it becomes legal to circumvent the copy protection (or more generally, s/copy protection/access control mechanism/).
I may be wrong here, the quotes in the article certainly suggest otherwise. But I think a law that prohibits breaking ANY access control mechanism is completely ridiculous. It could be interpreted as making it illegal to remove the screws holding the cover on your toaster, for example.
Sure, but let's take some piece of software that circumvents DVD encryption. While the contents are protected by copyright, circumventing the protection is illegal. After they go public domain (REMEMBER: even though the copyright period is being perpetually extended, according to the current law they do run out), circumventing the protection is legal.
Now, the DMCA makes this software illegal. Period. Therefore, it effectively makes circumventing encryption on no-longer-copyrighted works illegal.
I've read that paper, and there's a major problem - they do the calculation in the direction of propogation, but then try to use the result in the transverse direction. You can't do that. No one's done the calculation in the transverse direction, so we still don't know what the theoretical prediction should be.
Now, if they had made up a bassline of their own, and someone found a song which played the same six notes, could they sue as well?
Depends whether the new artist heard or ought to have heard the old song.
So if your new song has the same riff as one by Joe's Garage Band, who've only ever played in Joe's garage, you're safe. But if you went to see Joe's Garage Band when they played at Joe's Corner Pub, or live in Joe's city where Joe's Garage Band gets regular play on KJRS (uh... apparently Joe lives in Iowa), whether or not you listen, you're liable.
These services just do not account for eccentric listening tastes... but neither does Amazon or Kazaa for that matter.
It's true that they don't, but as others have pointed out, why shouldn't they? Unlike for a physical CD, the cost to them of having low-demand "stock" is pretty minimal - hard drive space is virtually free, and the bandwidth only gets used if someone's making a purchase. The only real cost is that making the database bigger makes it harder to search... but that's not a huge cost.
Incidentally, although amazon and Kazaa may be lousy with esoteric music, Audio Galaxy was always great for it! I think it was a combination of being able to search collections of people who were offline, and the fact that your average AG user had more interesting musical taste (and I'm not just talking about industrial).
If you like Feindflug, check out Converter, Noisex, Imminent Starvation, Wumpscut, Accessory and Numb.:)
Cool, thanks for the suggestions.:-)= I know:Wumpscut: and Imminent Starvation... heard the other names but I don't think I've heard their music. I'll try to check out Noisex at WGT next month!
Well if you're buying obscure, (possibly) imported music, WTF do you expect? Of course it's going to cost more than an album that's shipping millions of units.
Right. Which is why, in my experience, CDs do regularly cost $20.
Do you really expect Apple's store to be stocking your esoteric music AT ALL?
That's something I'm hoping some Mac user who's used the store can tell me.:-)= Anyone?
Really, where do you guys do your CD shopping? The last time I paid $20 for a CD it was a double CD. Have you ever been to Best Buy? The new hit albums are $13.99, and the older stuff rarely is more than $15.99.
Great, but do they have the Proyecto Mirage CD I've been looking for? How about Synthetik's ADSR? The first Feindflug album? Weena Morloch's KadaverKomplex? Anything by Insurge?
Thanks to economies of scale, the price of CDs are inversely proportional to demand. Which is fine if other people happen to like the music you do, but sucks if they don't.
So, if we lack an understanding of what forces act on large scale distances to such a degree that...well, it isn't even orders of magnitude, its positive where we'd expect it to be negative...hell, we don't even *have* candidates for repulsive forces acting on something the size of a galaxy at that distance, then why do we think that our calculations of what a target galaxy's mass *should* be based solely on...yup, our imcomplete equations for gravity, would be correct? Seems to me like they're both wrong in the same direction...if there were a sustained repulsive force, say...the force or "geometry" behind einstien's cosmological constant, then we'd fill in both blanks: repulsions to make distant galaxies travel away from us faster, and a force which would explain the lack of mass in galaxies.
A few points:
They're wrong in opposite directions. Dark matter pulls things tighter, and dark energy repels.
We have a couple of candidates for repulsive sources of gravity, though they're unsatisfying. The vacuum ("cosmological constant") isn't all that ugly in and of itself - it's the size that's ugly. Quintessence is ugly, but it's a candidate.
There are theories that try to use the dark matter particles to power the cosmic acceleration, the so-called "Cardassian models" (no, I'm not kidding, that really is what they're called). Basically, you need something that has no pressure on "small scales" (small = tens of Mpc) so it predicts clustering and structure formation the same as the currently-favoured Cold Dark Matter models but negative pressure on very large scales so it can power acceleration. They usually try to do this by having the particles self-interact or decay on really long timescales.
So yes, people have thought about it, but no one's come up with a single theory to explain both that seems any less contrived than having two slightly-less-contrived independent explanations.
Slashdot Mirror
From the README...
No word on the latter... but it's ESR... so of course! ;-)
[TMB]
Not officially. There is a name picked out, but it's being kept extremely until the official renaming. Which for most space observatories would have been by now, but apparently the family of the person in question (they're always named after famous dead astronomers) doesn't want it named until it's proven to work... science verification should take place in November, so it'll probably be named in late November.
[TMB]
Here's a little piece of javascript you can save as a bookmark that automatically fills out the registration form with random junk (modified by me based on code by Jason Day found on www.majcher.com:
[TMB]
Darl is no moron... he's making a tidy wad of cash selling stock that's risen dramatically in price on the promise of tons of licensing revenue...
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#2 is interesting... isn't selling rights to something you don't have the authority to grant criminal, rather than merely civil?
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Sure, but they point they're making is that it's not intuitively obvious to most people that there could be text in a Word document other than what appears.
So a relatively security-conscious person who just doesn't know anything about Word file formats could easily publish something online on purpose without knowing that there is (invisible) sensitive information in it, even if they'd never put that information in a public place on purpose.
[TMB]
Interesting? Informative? Troll??!
:-)
How about "Funny"?
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(this post brought to you by the ASDRWDRTA... the Association for SlashDot Readers Who Don't Read The Article)
Ooops, sorry... this particular pulsar is a millisecond pulsar. Period of 11 ms.
[TMB]
Yes, kind of. There are actually two different "wobble" methods, one for pulsars and one for normal stars. The first extrasolar planet was found around a pulsar, but most of the others have been found around normal stars.
While in both cases you are detecting the Doppler shift due to the primary moving toward/away from you under the influence of the planet's gravity, the way you measure that is different. For normal stars, you look at a spectrum, find an absorption line, and very very very carefully measure its wavelength over a few years hoping to see it drift back and forth.
Pulsar spectra don't have narrow absorption lines you can use, but they do emit very sharp radio pulses every second (or in some cases, every millisecond... but this particular one isn't a millisecond pulsar). You can treat the time between pulses like the frequency of the light - it's affected in exactly the same way by the Doppler effect. So you measure the time between pulses very carefully and see it oscillate over a period of a few years.
[TMB]
(IAAAp)
A typical neutron star has a mass of about 1.4 times the mass of the Sun. The Schwarzschild radius (the radius you would need to contain that mass in for it to be a black hole) for 1.4 solar masses is 4.1 km (rough estimate: 3 km per solar mass). Neutron stars typically have radii of around 15 km, so they're only 3-4x larger than they would need to be to be a black hole (and therefore have an average density about 13x less than a black hole of the same mass).
[TMB]
This scares the shit out of me. I just submitted my paperwork to be registered for SEVIS, and I need to travel outside the US... in fact, I'm going to be out of the country when they're expecting it to be done. They're going to courier it to my hotel in Australia. I'd figured there was nothing to worry about, but if I can't get back into the US... I'm fucked.
Anyone have any first-hand experience with registering with SEVIS? Do the bugs screw over many students, or do they just make the lives of the people in charge of international students hell?
[TMB]
The DMCA does not make it illegal to break encryption. I wish people would stop saying this - the DMCA is evil enough without invoking boogeymen.
The DMCA does make it illegal to break encryption that is used by a copyright owner to prevent "unauthorized" access to their copyrighted work (or to "traffic in" a device designed break that encryption). Which is still utterly idiotic, but is not the blanket evil you make it sound.
[TMB]
3 days where you observe 1/3-1/2 the day is a very typical length of time for an observing run.
[TMB]
Am I the only one who burst out laughing at that line? :-) What a great euphemism for "go walking in the most dangerous areas they can possibly find trying to get people to assault them."
[TMB]
True, but but they wouldn't really trust him to run TIA either... :-)
[TMB]
Sure, but let's take some piece of software that circumvents DVD encryption. While the contents are protected by copyright, circumventing the protection is illegal. After they go public domain (REMEMBER: even though the copyright period is being perpetually extended, according to the current law they do run out), circumventing the protection is legal.
Now, the DMCA makes this software illegal. Period. Therefore, it effectively makes circumventing encryption on no-longer-copyrighted works illegal.
[TMB]
Nah, the coolest bills are the Australian ones. The damn things are waterproof and see-through... they look more like windsurfing sails than money! ;-)
[TMB]
I've read that paper, and there's a major problem - they do the calculation in the direction of propogation, but then try to use the result in the transverse direction. You can't do that. No one's done the calculation in the transverse direction, so we still don't know what the theoretical prediction should be.
[TMB]
Depends whether the new artist heard or ought to have heard the old song.
So if your new song has the same riff as one by Joe's Garage Band, who've only ever played in Joe's garage, you're safe. But if you went to see Joe's Garage Band when they played at Joe's Corner Pub, or live in Joe's city where Joe's Garage Band gets regular play on KJRS (uh... apparently Joe lives in Iowa), whether or not you listen, you're liable.
[TMB] (not Joe)
It's true that they don't, but as others have pointed out, why shouldn't they? Unlike for a physical CD, the cost to them of having low-demand "stock" is pretty minimal - hard drive space is virtually free, and the bandwidth only gets used if someone's making a purchase. The only real cost is that making the database bigger makes it harder to search... but that's not a huge cost.
Incidentally, although amazon and Kazaa may be lousy with esoteric music, Audio Galaxy was always great for it! I think it was a combination of being able to search collections of people who were offline, and the fact that your average AG user had more interesting musical taste (and I'm not just talking about industrial).
Cool, thanks for the suggestions. :-)= I know :Wumpscut: and Imminent Starvation... heard the other names but I don't think I've heard their music. I'll try to check out Noisex at WGT next month!
[TMB]
Right. Which is why, in my experience, CDs do regularly cost $20.
That's something I'm hoping some Mac user who's used the store can tell me. :-)= Anyone?
[TMB]
Great, but do they have the Proyecto Mirage CD I've been looking for? How about Synthetik's ADSR? The first Feindflug album? Weena Morloch's KadaverKomplex? Anything by Insurge?
Thanks to economies of scale, the price of CDs are inversely proportional to demand. Which is fine if other people happen to like the music you do, but sucks if they don't.
[TMB]
A few points:
So yes, people have thought about it, but no one's come up with a single theory to explain both that seems any less contrived than having two slightly-less-contrived independent explanations.
[TMB]
Always good to know where your priorities are.